I’ve long been an embarrassed fan of Book of Travels, the “tiny MMO” with heady artistic influences from Swedish indies Might & Delight. It’s a world of enchanted string, vast cutaway forests, tinkling tea sets, and sleepy quasi-Orientalist cities. Our former news writer Lauren Morton called it “the cure for my break-up with MMOs” back in 2021. But it’s never quite accomplished its ambitions, with the developers laying off around 25 staff following a difficult early access launch, and postponing the rollout of new areas and features.

Nothing they’ve done since appears to have shored up the game’s numbers, and I’ve been grimly awaiting the day when Might & Delight pull servers and render the project unplayable – as is sadly common for games with mandatory online components, despite vociferous consumer preservation efforts. They have, in fact, just announced that they’re pulling those servers on 31st July. But they’re also converting Book of Travels into an offline single-player experience, rebalanced for solo voyagers and with official mod support.

“We know that we have not communicated anything in a while and that this has, rightfully so, caused frustration,” Might & Delight write in a press release. “It has taken significant time to weigh all our options for the project in order to decide on the best way forward. With the track record this project has, we’ve been mindful to not once again promise anything that we cannot live up to. We are very sorry for the lack of communication along the way and for not being able to deliver on what we had set out to do from the beginning.

“Book of Travels is fantastic and wonderful in many ways, but as you know, there have been major obstacles and problems that we have encountered in trying to bring it to life,” they continue. “We took on more than we could handle. We could not deliver what we wanted to, and what we had promised. We realized along the way that we did not have the capacity required for this type of project.

“Even so, we believed we could make it work, and we wanted this project to succeed just as much as any of you. It was truly the project of a lifetime for us. However, the very foundation upon which the game was built proved unsustainable. No matter how many approaches we tried, workarounds we implemented, or patches we created we were never really able to solve the core issues.”

The devs have been exploring various ways of rescuing Book of Travels for a year, concluding that turning the MMO into a singleplayer RPG “is the only way for us as a studio to sustain it”. As of an update released today, the game can be played entirely offline. If you want your MMO character to outlive the bonfire of the servers, you’ll need to download them manually from the character select screen before 31st July.

A brief Steam changelog spells out a few of the balancing adjustments. The Trainmaster’s Stash now has unlimited space in Offline play mode, while requirements for Endeavours (skill checks, essentially) have been lowered, and base inventory volume has been increased. As for modding: “starting today we will completely allow any mods for Book of Travels, and will work as much as we can with the modding community and help where we can.” The devs are creating a Discord channel for such discussions.

Today’s update also marks the end of Book of Travels’ gruelling sojourn in early access. To compensate for the loss of an online community, which extends from a quirky set of emotes to various multiplayer-geared character abilities and quests, the devs are also dropping the price from $29.99 to $4.99. “We are truly sad that this project didn’t become all that we wanted it to be,” Might & Delight conclude. “We hope that with this last push, the game can be as good as it possibly could be given the circumstances, and that it can continue to be played for a long time.”

If I’m honest, this is how I’d have liked Book of Travels to be at launch. The “tiny MMO” promise of forming bonds with a fleeting handful of online strangers has never quite enraptured me. I enjoy the game far more as a long, slow walk through decadently huge landscapes that peel away luxuriantly as the camera moves in or out. I also like the mythology – there’s a magical vocabulary of knotted ropes, and skills are tethered to the dispositions of winds. I hope that Book of Travels will continue to draw an audience as a very cheap offline game – perhaps it’ll garner enough interest that Might & Delight can justify revisiting and reinventing some of the stuff they’d once planned for the MMO version.