Tree of Savior

Tree of Savior's lifetime Steam score — a Mixed 63.9% — is the kind of number that invites a shrug: fine game, divisive audience, nothing unusual for a decade-old niche MMORPG. Read the last 100 English reviews instead, and a very different, much more urgent picture appears.

What built a decade of devotion

Made by former Ragnarok Online developers, Tree of Savior's reputation rests on one genuinely exceptional system: a class tree with dozens of specializations, each with distinct skills and playstyles, letting players build genuinely unique characters rather than choosing between a handful of predetermined roles. That depth produced an unusually committed playerbase — reviewers in this sample report 2,912, 2,215, 3,685 and even 4,015 hours logged, several explicitly comparing it to Ragnarok Online and preferring what Tree of Savior did with the formula. One long-term reviewer, writing after leaving the game, still credits the "vibe you get when you can just AFK and chill out with guild mates" as something worth remembering fondly. This is a game that earned real, sustained loyalty over its first decade, even through long-standing complaints about restrictive trading and heavy grinding that reviewers have raised since launch week in 2016.

What's happening right now

Here's the part that matters most for anyone considering the game today: recent English sentiment has collapsed to 37% positive, barely more than half the lifetime figure, and the current reviews are specific and consistent about why. Multiple 2026 reviews report that classes previously earned through play — some through long, tedious in-game quest chains reviewers already found excessive — have been moved behind gacha-style randomized paid unlocks. "Having the classes being Gacha is just some scumbag greedy behavior," writes one reviewer with 1,291 hours already invested, someone with every reason to want to keep recommending a game they clearly love. Another, with 373 hours, states flatly that the developer is "greedy as fk" and suggests the game isn't worth playing anymore. A third calls it simply "Full P2W."

Layered on top of the monetisation complaint is a basic technical one: several very recent reviews, including some from August 2026, report being unable to get past the server-selection screen at all — not a balance complaint or a design disagreement, but the game failing to let new or returning players in. That combination — a beloved system reportedly being monetised in a newly unpopular way, plus real access problems — explains the gap between this game's historical reputation and where its most current reviewers actually stand.

Reading the completion data

The achievement curve reinforces how difficult this game currently is to get into. Even its single most commonly earned achievement sits at just 12.7% of the player base — a strikingly low ceiling compared to most games in this library, where the most common milestone typically clears 50-90%. That's consistent with the onboarding friction described in current reviews, though it also reflects a genuinely hardcore, niche audience that this game has always drawn rather than a broad casual base.

5.5 out of 10. Tree of Savior's class system remains a genuine achievement in MMORPG design, and the depth of loyalty from its long-term players — thousands of hours, sustained affection for its social spaces — is real and well-earned by what the game got right for a decade. The score reflects where the game stands today rather than its history: a current, specific and well-documented sentiment collapse tied to a reported shift toward gacha-locked classes, compounded by basic technical access problems multiple recent reviewers describe independently. This is a game whose reputation and its current state have genuinely diverged — approach it expecting the latter.