Face of Mankind was a MMORPG set around 300-400 years in the future. It was a low budget and low profile MMO trying to cash in on the World of Warcraft craze that was going on at the time. Graphically, it resembled near the era of the Playstation 2. The game had 8 factions, ranging from military, to police, to mercenaries, to space hippies. The game's entire economy and in game government was ran by the players. The developers only stepped in for minimal fixes, such as weapon balancing and such. At least, until the big change happened. We'll get to that later though.


Due to being so low profile and not well advertised, the game only received an extremely small following of 200-300 players. Even though they had a such low population by MMO standards, the developers still stuck by their game and so did the community. Because the game had such a small community, it was easy to organize and work together. The 8 factions eventually formed a unitary agreement, and in turn helped each other out. Certain factions would agree to treaties to make certain items. Wars would break out over said treaties if broken.


Overall, it was the small community that allowed this game to "thrive" and become something worth of note. I fully believe that if this game had even above 1,000 players, the government systems we had in place would come falling down and cause total anarchy in the game.

Even though the game only had around 100 people playing at peak times in it's last couple years, it is a very unique genre of game. What other game can you have fully functional working government, army, and police force 100% created and controlled by the players? A game where you're forced to work together with others, instead of running and gunning. And if you do end up running and gunning, you get hunted down by police forces, which then in turn makes you side with others who run and gun. Then it's suddenly a 3 faction war against the establish police and military forces.

Or where you can mine resources and create necessity items like health packs. And then eventually give your faction a monopoly on the health pack market and then make a treaty with another faction to get discounted prices, to then get discounts on their exports. Which then in turn sparks a war between the other faction that wanted the same deal.

It's just a type of game you can't really find anywhere else. That being said, it did have a lot of faults. The graphics are extremely dated. The combat system is unique, but entirely too skill based that the skill gap might as well be the size of the grand canyon.  But, there's just something about it that keeps you coming back.

As a personal experience of mine, a couple of friends and I decided to be the "run and gun" group of the game for while.  We all changed our names to have the last name "O'Brian". We would sync up with the police patrol schedule (we had an inside man), and commit mass murders. We would be fined out the ass, but never pay it. Eventually we entered on of the Union meetings (Basically the game's equivalent of the United Nations, but for the 8 factions) when security was lax. They'd confiscate weapons from  the faction leaders so no deaths happen. So we broke in and slaughtered them all.  We were basically the mob family of that game for a while, and it took them months to permanently kill all our characters and have us make new ones ( You get 10 lives in the form of clones, you can buy additional... but sometimes we just forgot).

Oh, what didn't happen? It all started with The Fall of the Dominion. For context, the Dominion was the name of the government in Face of Mankind. But, let me explain a little bit what led up to the Fall of the Dominion. I'll put it in a spoiler though, incase you wanna skip over it.


The developers launched a Kickstarter program called The Fall of the Dominion. This was to break up the power that the government had in the game over the other factions. Most players were for it. They were able to reach $60,000 with their Kickstarter campaign.

Unfortunately though, the developers had also completely dismantled all the other factions in the game, a detail the left out. Essentially destroying what all these players worked for the past six years.  Basically killing the game at it's heat, with what little community it had in the first place.

They then have the audacity to call that update a finished product for the game. As far as the community knows,  no money was spent on the game from the Kickstarter campaign. In fact, one of the developers had used part of the money to get himself a brand new car.

The game is dead now. The devs killed it. I logged on a round 6 months ago to find less than 15 people online. I wouldn't imagine there to have been a resurgence. Such a shame that poor development management destroyed such a unique experience of a game.