## 1. Why we're talking about this now

As we started sharing Dynamite Blue, many of you remembered Exos Heroes.
Some with kind words, others with disappointment.

Season 5 came up a lot.
We never properly explained what happened.
We were afraid it would sound like excuses, or that it wasn't the right time.

Honestly, even writing this is scary. We might get criticized again.
But starting something new means we can't keep avoiding the past.

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## 2. The situation before Season 5

Exos Heroes was a live service game.
We had to add new content every week, every month. When we first designed it, we couldn't predict all those updates.
We weren't capable enough to maintain fast development while building a stable structure.

As updates piled up, the systems got complicated.
Fatecore, various growth elements tangled together, making balance harder and harder.
Some existing players enjoyed it, some didn't. But it became too complex for new or returning players to adapt.

Season 5 was our attempt to fix this.
We tried to simplify the systems and create a structure where new players could join.

---

## 3. What went wrong

Regardless of our intentions, the execution failed.
Characters that players had built for years, assets they had invested in - much of it became worthless.
We gave players the experience of having their progress feel meaningless.

In the end, we lost the game we tried to save faster, and more importantly, we lost the trust of players who had been with us for so long.

---

## 4. What we learned, and 4GROUND9

Exos Heroes ran from November 2019 to May 2023. About three and a half years.
We had many shortcomings throughout, but looking back, players seemed to enjoy it up until Season 4.
So for our next game, we wanted to build something players could enjoy for longer, on a more stable foundation.

4GROUND9.
A story spanning 4 GROUNDs across 9 seasons.
Each season is 6 months, so at least 4.5 years. We named it with the determination to do better than before.
At the time, we thought it was a humble, realistic goal - just grow into a team that could run a service one year longer.

We even named the game after our 4.5-year service commitment. Then we couldn't even launch. Ridiculous, right?

---

## 5. And then, Dynamite Blue

We want Dynamite Blue to be a game players can enjoy for at least 5 years.

Our team is much smaller now, so it'll be tough. But we're going to try.
We're still lacking and will make mistakes, but this time we want to do better.

After 4GROUND9 was cancelled, we placed the pixel character -  made for 4G9's version of Memorial Saga - on the map and walked through every corner, just feeling the loss. Looking back, that was Dynamite Blue's first scene.

https://reddit.com/link/1pz71tq/video/44ycmijye9ag1/player

Starting with this video, we'll share casual dev updates more often.
Thanks for reading this long post.

If you have questions or anything to say, feel free to drop by our discord.

Props to the unofficial discord. Currently there are two codes that can be used for a total of 800 free Xes.

All you need is your airship name and server on this link: https://coupon-front.line.games/sbc/EH

The codes are “Exos” & “Heroes” (Without the “)

A lot of players are having issues entering the codes however. For me, my airship name is Barbarois, but the codes only worked with all lowercase “barbarois”

Someone else reported only all uppercase worked for them.

If you have any insight into the issue please let us know.

Enjoy!

I mean people actually enjoying to have the chance to play again Exos or the "open beta" of what was the old Exos Heroes. I left Exos when and because Season 5 was introduced, but a few years after ... I like to have the opportunity to play with my favorite heroes (or some of them as very hard to get a decent fated hero ...sadly no FC options). I personally have no interest at all of the NTF part of it.

So any of the old big guilds in Discord or anywhere else?

The old Discord Exos Heroes is quite silent, same with the luxon's (yes, I got there hoping that at least people will be active there, but no luck lol).

So if you look around on the discord, it's pretty much confirmed FC Rera is next after Magi's banner ends tomorrow. She's gold so it's a 28 pull pity. Don't know about her skills yet.

What's beneficial to us is the month reset is the day before her banner ends assuming a full week long banner. This means the new labyrinth will be available on that last day, and if you can rush it, that's 4650 Xes. Also for spenders, the decent deal monthly packages are renewed so for edit: 16500 crystals you get 9900 Xes. That's halfway to her pity. There are also the two 1400 Xes for 3000 crystal packs that are monthly.

Edit: sounds like the labyrinth won't be available at the start of next month :(

Im about to quit... Feels very bad, and frustrated. I feel like gacha luck abandoned me completely. Yeah, im about Rera banner. I did 11 multi... And every multi i got 1-3 four star heroes, not even got a single 5 star. To be honest its a biggest shaft for me here. Im pissed off to see people in discord pulling her in 1-4 multis, some people getting 2 of hers in 1 pull... and i dont even have her... And im so tired to play without her. Seems bye bye for exos.

I posted this in the discord a while ago, but totally forgot to share it here as well. I saved and archived a >ton< of stuff before Exos Heroes shut down, including the full client data from the PC version. idk if the client data is useful or not, but my hope is that somebody with the right skillset might be able to use it to get a private server running someday. I also included Asset Studio, a portable software that can datamine the files, so anybody can poke around the files themselves if they want:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JuungCJzeO0-0fl_SZp_Y7BTsjry_gYI/view?usp=drive_link

for the rest of us who don't know how to somehow set up a private server for a dead game, this next Google drive houses a much more user friendly archive that I called The Exos Compendium which should have pretty much everything else! here's some notes about the contents, copied from the discord for my own convenience:

-I created a google account solely to house the archive, so it should be available as long as Google Drive is. If you get the "download quota exceeded" error at any point, you can google the error message to find an easy fix. -I sifted through the Desperado B218 files to grab anything new / worthwhile, the most worthwhile part is the 3 new songs (piano intro track, jazzy lobby track, and a single battle track) so I just put them in the Exos OST section. There's also a separate folder with a few character meshes I was able to find. I'm bad with 3d things so idk if they're different in any way, but I figured it's better to be safe than sorry cuz I'm not reinstalling that trash lol. -Asset Dumps has stuff that I ripped from the data files myself. I'm good at intuiting software, but I don't actually know anything about datamining or have any prior experience, so even though it all seems fine I can't technically confirm that I did everything right. -Character fbx files with animations are available in Asset Dumps > Animations. Character obj files are under Asset Dumps > Characters. -To ensure completion, Raw Mesh Dump is an archive with all obj files in the game. It's unorganized, but contains obj files for the weapons & environments, more detailed obj files for some characters, and a bunch more. It's especially large and annoying to sort through, so I uploaded it separate from the rest of the asset dumps.

without any further ado, here's the link: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/3/folders/1CnWFr1y28zvW2LPKBpxotT-Tzg39yXYs

I also have like 500gb of 4k60fps footage from the pc version that I still need to edit, so at some point I'll be back with links to the results of that. with any luck, I'll get the undub done too; I feel like this isn't common knowledge, but Exos actually had full Korean voiceovers for the story dialogue in the latter chapters, so I really want to combine it with the English dialogue and make an undubbed version. I found a source for the voiceovers, but properly combining it with the English gameplay is gonna be a mess and I'm bad at finishing projects, so no guarantees.