Zenith Infinite Realms Feedback

[Tomtommer]

Hi, it's me again, again.

Let's speedrun this feedback session, shall we?

The Good:

It's... a game(?)

The Bad:

It's not fun.
Nothing that I did as a player felt impactful.
The game even auto-aimed as long as I was looking in the general direction of the enemy which is laughable.
Wiggle-combat is by far the easiest and most effective way to shoot your fingerblasts.
It's kind of ironic that you've re-implemented the fast-fly hand/ arm motion but made it a go-to combat movement after removing it from TLC.

Shooting the bow is pointless because it takes forever to reload.

The giant glowing hitbox isn't even a crit because hitting the head doesn't do anything special.

It's got many of the same bugs and glitches TLC has, which I'm genuinely not going to name because it would become a marathon session.

The AI of your enemies is beyond bonkers, had a boss lose complete track of me and other enemies teleporting all over the place.
Other enemies were shooting me through a giant bowl or whatever that's supposed to be.
Oh and that bowl? that's insta-death even though nothing about it indicates that it can do damage to the player in any way, shape or form.

You've made the respawn mechanic completely pointless because respawns are just a death-counter now.
If you make it obsolete, remove the revival gesture and just TP them to safety because jumping off the map is easier for players and does the same thing.

When you presented the new gamemode in your little newsletter teasers, it somehow implied there would be a whole bunch of islands of decent size to fight enemies on.
Instead, the islands players get are tiny and have maybe 5-10 enemies at best.


The Ugly:

You've spent maybe 6 months developing this game and it shows.
It is so overly simplified and gimmicky that it can't even be considered to have any semblance of polish.
This is a student project hail mary attempt at a 5.5/10 grade in an attempt to not fail the class.

You've just ripped some existing stuff from TLC, and hoped that whatever you threw at the wall would stick long enough for players not to notice the "game" they're playing isn't awfully designed and made.

It seems you've been hyping the game and your studio up for so long, you've started to believe in your own story instead of humbling yourself and listening to the criticism.

Infinite Realms cannot compete in the dungeon crawler market, against games like 'Until you Fall' and 'Dungeons of Eternity' because those games understand the genre better than you do, and care more about the product they put out than you do.

You told people to get ready for "Zenith 2.0" but failed to say the game people wanted to believe in will no longer be cared about by Ramen.
You've fed people a false narrative about what they should expect, and all those efforts have culminated in... this.

Infinite Realms seems like a quick cash grab where you weighed the lowest amount of effort you could get away with and the most amount of money that could generate before the company will go belly up.

Instead, you should have learned from history and used that knowledge to fix TLC, even if that meant pulling an Orbus, No Man's Sky and Final Fantasy XIV attempt at a redemption arc.
(Results may vary)

I'd love to be proven wrong about all of this, but I highly doubt that will happen.

This is not a good game.
This is a recipe for disaster.

[ReaperOne1Two2]

Seems about right, I haven't been on since release rush 40 and was like "Ehh, will give the open beta try".

It was such a wtf moment, that this is what they're releasing as a public test etc... The game didn't have particularly good combat and they deleted all weapons and put this in place of it. I would give more feedback but basically everything about it is :/

Honestly if the CEO didn't just pocket all the money or something, they should really have just put the MMO on indefinite hold then worked on a fully new game. Doesn't have to be original or anything, just done well. Like literally just:
* Copied DOE
* Slap some WoW classes on it and copy skills etc...
* Make sure infinite kiting isn't a thing.
* Make it f2p.
There you now just beat about every VR dungeon crawler and have micro-transactions.

[TideFury]

I have the same thoughts.

It's not even a game, but a set of assets with mechanics that barely work. It feels like the developers live in some kind of their own reality, where they really make a good game.

I can’t even imagine how THIS can survive in the market.
This is simply absurd.

[buttmunch]

Early April fools joke?

[Infinite Pudding]

Man I'm sure glad they killed the MMO to make this... :(

[KodaiRyu]

Originally posted by Infinite Pudding:

Man I'm sure glad they killed the MMO to make this... :(

Except MMO servers are still online :)

[Tomtommer]

Originally posted by KodaiRyu:

Originally posted by Infinite Pudding:

Man I'm sure glad they killed the MMO to make this... :(

Except MMO servers are still online :)

Killing an MMO is done through the lack of a playerbase, leaving it in an abandoned state, not fixing bugs and a lack of continuous updates.

It's not exclusively done through taking it offline entirely.
If you need a multiplayer experience (Raids for example), but there aren't other people to do multiplayer things with, then the game is basically dead.

It's kinda like a softlock in that regard.
"Technically" not dead, but in a state where players deem it as such.

[Eloderung]

Originally posted by KodaiRyu:

Originally posted by Infinite Pudding:

Man I'm sure glad they killed the MMO to make this... :(

Except MMO servers are still online :)

The Infinite Realms patch has caused significant issues in the MMO. Raids for example are now impossible to do on TLC.

That's of course ignoring the playerbase. The end-game playerbase has almost completely vanished since the IR announcement. Acolyte for the first time in the game's history no longer reaches High population during US primetime. TLC is dead, and IR killed it. Without IR, we would have had a new TLC content patch right about now.

[KodaiRyu]

Originally posted by Tomtommer:

Originally posted by KodaiRyu:

Except MMO servers are still online :)

Killing an MMO is done through the lack of a playerbase, leaving it in an abandoned state, not fixing bugs and a lack of continuous updates.

It's not exclusively done through taking it offline entirely.
If you need a multiplayer experience (Raids for example), but there aren't other people to do multiplayer things with, then the game is basically dead.

It's kinda like a softlock in that regard.
"Technically" not dead, but in a state where players deem it as such.

More server nodes MMO has more money get spent, it's impossible to keep servers online without cash shop, even WoW and FF14 has one and wouldn't be surprised if MTX incomes are majority of Activision Blizzards and Square Enix income.

[Tomtommer]

Originally posted by KodaiRyu:

Originally posted by Tomtommer:

Killing an MMO is done through the lack of a playerbase, leaving it in an abandoned state, not fixing bugs and a lack of continuous updates.

It's not exclusively done through taking it offline entirely.
If you need a multiplayer experience (Raids for example), but there aren't other people to do multiplayer things with, then the game is basically dead.

It's kinda like a softlock in that regard.
"Technically" not dead, but in a state where players deem it as such.

More server nodes MMO has more money get spent, it's impossible to keep servers online without cash shop, even WoW and FF14 has one and wouldn't be surprised if MTX incomes are majority of Activision Blizzards and Square Enix income.

I don't deny that MTX are essentially a requirement in any modern MMORPG to be financially sustainable.

They should have added them a long time ago, without making the game pay to win of course.
That being said, MTX aren't the reason the MMORPG is doing poorly.
The developers have spent the majority of development time trying to fight symptoms, not the underlying cause of what makes people stop playing (or never start in the first place)
They can't keep tweaking a broken game, expecting it to magically become amazing.
For Zenith TLC to thrive, it almost entirely needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, as far as the core gameplay loop goes.
Pretty much every system has some sort of major flaw etc leading to a part of the playerbase disliking it.

The developers need to take a lot more time for each feature they implement so it won't end up in a half-assed or halfbroken state.
Doing so makes the game more enjoyable.

[Infinite Pudding]

Originally posted by KodaiRyu:

Originally posted by Infinite Pudding:

Man I'm sure glad they killed the MMO to make this... :(

Except MMO servers are still online :)

Except that they said they won't be updating the MMO anymore... are you new to MMOs? You don't update them, they die.

[Nix]

I played a day and a bit back a few months ago on TLC. Didn't see a SINGLE other player in the starting areas, even on the most active shard at the time...realized that I was once again late to the party and decided to give it a rest. It was miserable to play on my old WMR set anyway. I'd come back later, maybe after the next big update...

Fast forward to the end of February 2024 and now I have a Quest 2, a beefier PC, and a much better living situation...and then I hear about this new Zenith update that's launching in a few days...Zenith 2.0! Sick! I don't know enough about the game to understand most of the updates and teasers, so I'll just wait for the update and get into it when it comes out...

I finally have time today and...

*deep breath*

It automagically put me into an Asian shard, the lag is awful, everyone is speaking languages I very minimally understand, and I can't play at all. I log out and back in and end up in Europe. Log out and back in and I end up back in Asia. Log out and back in and the game crashes. I have absolutely zero idea how to manually choose my shard like I KNOW you could do before with TLC. I relaunch the game, a pit forming in my stomach that this is already an even worse first impression than OrbusVR Reborn, and I finally load into a US shard...on the west coast.

The lag doesn't get any better.

And I suddenly kind of miss the language barrier from the Asian shards.

There are children screaming "CAN YOU HEAR ME???" Someone chuckles in my left ear "More like ♥♥♥♥♥ The Girl, right?" A woman is trying to explain how to get out of general chat to a young guy who just...doesn't understand. I mute all voice comms.

But things just keep getting worse.

The tutorials don't make sense, the single NPC I can find won't shut up (I'm going to shatter awake remembering "OvEr HeRe AgEnT" in that grating whing as I'm going to sleep tonight), the controls are sticky, the climbing is glitchy, the combat is unsatisfying, enemies teleport around, I fall through the map constantly, I take damage from enemies that are either inside walls, behind walls, or already dead, enemies slide around and move unnaturally so targeting them is already impossible, my bow is angled wrong so the string clips into my arm so my drawing hand hits my arm whenever I try to nock an arrow, moving my hands at all randomly fires off attacks in random directions, my MP doesn't drain consistently, the menus are unresponsive, and finally sweet mercy comes and kills my PC with a bluescreen error because the game has eaten every single bit of my 64 GB of memory.

I think "It's probably the lag. I just need to figure out how to get onto an east coast server, make sure it's low-population, and it'll all work out."

The last hour has been spent being told that it doesn't matter.

None of this matters.

This "update" is dead on arrival, the incredible potential steaming off its corpse just enough to entice people to come take a look. But the reaction is the same as finding a real corpse in the wild...

Bile-filled retching and the realization that you've stumbled across the work of a predator.

[Tomtommer]

Originally posted by Nix the Girl:

I played a day and a bit back a few months ago on TLC. Didn't see a SINGLE other player in the starting areas, even on the most active shard at the time...realized that I was once again late to the party and decided to give it a rest. It was miserable to play on my old WMR set anyway. I'd come back later, maybe after the next big update...

Fast forward to the end of February 2024 and now I have a Quest 2, a beefier PC, and a much better living situation...and then I hear about this new Zenith update that's launching in a few days...Zenith 2.0! Sick! I don't know enough about the game to understand most of the updates and teasers, so I'll just wait for the update and get into it when it comes out...

I finally have time today and...

*deep breath*

It automagically put me into an Asian shard, the lag is awful, everyone is speaking languages I very minimally understand, and I can't play at all. I log out and back in and end up in Europe. Log out and back in and I end up back in Asia. Log out and back in and the game crashes. I have absolutely zero idea how to manually choose my shard like I KNOW you could do before with TLC. I relaunch the game, a pit forming in my stomach that this is already an even worse first impression than OrbusVR Reborn, and I finally load into a US shard...on the west coast.

The lag doesn't get any better.

And I suddenly kind of miss the language barrier from the Asian shards.

There are children screaming "CAN YOU HEAR ME???" Someone chuckles in my left ear "More like ♥♥♥♥♥ The Girl, right?" A woman is trying to explain how to get out of general chat to a young guy who just...doesn't understand. I mute all voice comms.

But things just keep getting worse.

The tutorials don't make sense, the single NPC I can find won't shut up (I'm going to shatter awake remembering "OvEr HeRe AgEnT" in that grating whing as I'm going to sleep tonight), the controls are sticky, the climbing is glitchy, the combat is unsatisfying, enemies teleport around, I fall through the map constantly, I take damage from enemies that are either inside walls, behind walls, or already dead, enemies slide around and move unnaturally so targeting them is already impossible, my bow is angled wrong so the string clips into my arm so my drawing hand hits my arm whenever I try to nock an arrow, moving my hands at all randomly fires off attacks in random directions, my MP doesn't drain consistently, the menus are unresponsive, and finally sweet mercy comes and kills my PC with a bluescreen error because the game has eaten every single bit of my 64 GB of memory.

I think "It's probably the lag. I just need to figure out how to get onto an east coast server, make sure it's low-population, and it'll all work out."

The last hour has been spent being told that it doesn't matter.

None of this matters.

This "update" is dead on arrival, the incredible potential steaming off its corpse just enough to entice people to come take a look. But the reaction is the same as finding a real corpse in the wild...

Bile-filled retching and the realization that you've stumbled across the work of a predator.

Excellent addition to this post.
It's great to have people who are able to articulate their thoughts well.

I'm in the process of writing up some final thoughts and feedback, and I'll be updating my review to take Infinite Realms into consideration as well.
Obviously, my review is not going to change from negative to positive, but I think it's impportant for people to understand the current state as well