Where & Why Vindictus(MMO) Died and what Vindictus:DF needs to avoid

[Ven]

Writing this from the perspective of someone who really enjoyed the Pre-Alpha, I played the original Vindictus almost from its launch up until mid-season 3, and I sunk a lot of time into that game.

This is gonna be a stupid long post based on my thoughts about this game I used to like, mostly as a way to get it off my chest, I don't know if anyone will bother to read this, But I do genuinely want this game to do well. I want to stress the fact that I like this game, I like what I saw in DF and I used to love the original Vindictus back in the day.

The game still honestly is the mmo with the best combat system to me, nothing I've played since really scratches that itch the way Vindictus can.

Because of this I decided to check out what the Live game is currently like, and damn it was pretty bleak. Almost no active boats or parties for just about anything, you'd be lucky to even find 1 party up for any of the new higher end content, and the game felt like it was just 99% a solo player game until the plot dumps you off and expects you to grind gear to finish the story, and this is where my nostalgic revisit went to ♥♥♥♥.

I want to break down why I think Vindictus ultimately ended up an extremely niche title that bled players to the point where it can barely fill out parties for its content anymore. This is going to go off of both my recent experiences with the game as a returning player, and old experiences I had when the game was in its Prime. And in its defense, the live game has improved a lot of these features from back then, but its either not enough for too little too late.

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The Gearing System is too much
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The gear system in VindictusMMO is so unbelievably frustrating to deal with, and there are frankly too many ways you have to gear your character now that its just a chore to keep track of. Armor,Weapons,Accessories ect. All of those needing their own Enchants, Enhancements (up to +20 now), with their own item Qualities, that basically can only be artificially boosted via event items. Then you get into stranger equipment like Bracelets, which do not need enchants but do need you to farm out gem stones to put in them, of which the bracelet's slots can be randomized, as well as the gem stone's stats, and you need two of these all with their own rarity qualities. Then you gotta get an Artifact, which DOES need its own Enchantments which needs to be farmed out.

Then you get weirder systems like Skill Awakenings, Power Infusions, then you find out the gear system changes later on and you have to collect the individual materials to make the gear, each with their own qualities and rarities and not through the game's in-game crafting system but instead through Item Compositing.

Thats not even mentioning all the temporary buffs you need to keep track of like Bath Salts, Campfires, Events, Consumables, and probably even more I haven't even discovered in my revisit. But beyond that, all of these are all heavily RNG gated. Making the game very complex and overwhelming to keep up with with all these avenues of gearing.

I think the game would have been in a much better state overall if they scrapped the gear system entirely in favor of something way more simplistic and easier to attain. Not saying Gear progression needs to be gone entirely from VindictusDF, but I'd love if it was something more reasonable that kept you in the game playing it rather than trying to decipher all these systems at once to know what stats you'd even want.

And to be entirely honest, the only stat that had impact to me in Vindictus was Attack Speed, everything else was just a damage multiplier of some form. Despite all of the forms of gearing in Vindictus, it wasn't all that engaging. At least with Attack speed it felt like I was actually changing how my character played somewhat.

But this all wouldn't be so bad, but it leads us to the next problem

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Vindictus is way too Gear dependent.
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This gear grind in Vindictus was incredibly brutal, but it was also mandatory. Not only to meet high stat expectations to even make it into parties, but even then, fully geared players are going to run circles around those who haven't done the grind yet, and after a while those players are only going to want to play with other players who did the gear grind for the most optimal runs of the game.

I remember being a player with +10 whatever gear trying my hardest and still getting out damaged by the people who either paid or grinded it out for max +15 gear. Obviously a fully geared player should do more damage, but it was such a significant difference that it felt like I honestly shouldn't even be in the party, like doing 5% to the Geared players 45% bad. I know I'm not alone in feeling that way about the game, and I remember many times where this lead to undergeared players trying to even go for +11 and blowing up their only gear, leading to them being set back so far that they quit the game.

So now you have this mandatory obnoxious and frustrating part of the game between your player and actually just playing the game. The core audience of this game is people who want fast paced Action combat right? I doubt there's a lot of overlap between those people and people who enjoy meticulously following guides and spreadsheets in order to understand what they need to do for their character to hit endgame stats, A lot of people just want to pick the game up and play it.

The gearing System of vindictus served as a huge barrier for players who just wanted to do some cool boss fights with Vindictus's excellent combat system.

This made it extremely difficult to keep up with the endgame, it made it difficult to play casually with friends, it only really served to drive a wedge between endgame players and players still working to that.

I've noticed that the 2024 version of the VindictusMMO decided the move was to just hand out raid gear for free up til the current content, which kinda felt like more of a bandaid than anything else. It sorta just drops you off and expects you to understand all these complex gearing systems. I would bet a lot of players end up quitting at this point because they honestly do not know what to do next.

I'm glad theres more system in the game for forgiving failed enchants and enhancements now, but honestly I wonder if these hurdles being here at all are even good for the game's health. Probably not.

Gear is a good carrot on a stick to keep players going, but keep in mind that gear also can serve as a "Ticket to Ride" for content. If its too hard or obscure to obtain, you're going to bleed your player base dry once they stop having fun with the game.

Let high damage and speed of clearing content come from mastery of the character rather than who can bash their head against the wall the longest.

Speaking of Characters....

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New Characters were very difficult to interact with
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One issue that plagued Vindictus from the start was any time you wanted to play a new character, you were sent right back to the start, you had to experience the same missions and plot beats over and over again for every character you just wanted to try, and you wouldn't get a full feel for the character until around lv 50 to know if you even liked them.

This compounded really badly with the gear issues too, as you had to start that gear treadmill again from scratch on this new character as well, It was a lot to deal with as a player and I remember being less and less interested in new characters as they came out.


New characters could have easily been the big content updates the game got, yet due to how hard it was to actually level and gear them, they ended up feeling very difficult to interact with.

In an MMO format, I think the characters desperately needed a free way to skip them to cap content, or at least up to the episode your highest level character was on. I've noticed the approach that the Vindictus MMO took here was cannibalizing the early game to try and rush players as fast as possible to the end game to try and bolster a dwindling player base, I don't think this is ideal, and I think this alienated a lot of players and caused the game to fall as hard as it did.

For VindictusDF, Either characters need to experience completely unique content just for them, or characters should be way easy to switch to and from.

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Conclusion:


I'm really hoping the single player focus stays and this doesn't evolve into a Vindictus 2 as an MMO sort of thing. Inherently I think the MMO aspect of Vindictus is what held it back and caused all this. Which is why the announcement of Vindictus DF is so interesting to me, it feels like a chance to finally capture the original potential Vindictus failed to all those years back, and I truly hope it can realize that.

Thanks to anyone who read up to this point, and you don't have to explain to me why the systems in the game were as they were. A lot of it was because Nexon was chasing short term profits. and its sad to see what the game became because of it. I just hope that whatever comes next with VindictusDF can Rise above it.

[Consoomer#911420]

It died because of excessive p2w and grind. That's literally it. Everything else wrong with vindictus stems from that 2 problem.

[Sweets]

Og vindictus still has a small dedicated community but nearly all the base content is solo and the end game is just a big grind.

The big issue of old vindictus was a lack of content and a lot poor choices to add to that, the game had and to some extent still has some the worse microtransactions I ever seen.

Calling it pay to win is a lesser insult to what the game actually gates with its microtransactions. Its pay to do anything but win.


With all that said i still think its fun to play and makes a good little f2p game for a solo trip. The gameplay was good and so was the story

[Ven]

Originally posted by Sweeks:

Og vindictus still has a small dedicated community but nearly all the base content is solo and the end game is just a big grind.

The big issue of old vindictus was a lack of content and a lot poor choices to add to that, the game had and to some extent still has some the worse microtransactions I ever seen.

Calling it pay to win is a lesser insult to what the game actually gates with its microtransactions. Its pay to do anything but win.


With all that said i still think its fun to play and makes a good little f2p game for a solo trip. The gameplay was good and so was the story

I'd actually say the endgame content of Vindictus now is the worst its ever been.

You just kinda go through the first 105 levels on easy mode being spoonfed armor, then get dropped off a cliff with anything after that, and have to rapidly learn all 400 ways to gear your character at once, and you'll start having to host boats that wont fill, all in an attempt to run on the gear treadmill for no reason.

Like I enjoy the combat, but my extent of the mmo is just logging in and doing some random Solo Boss fights in Ein Lacher then log out. Anything beyond that feels pretty miserable.

[Sweets]

Originally posted by Ven:

Originally posted by Sweeks:

Og vindictus still has a small dedicated community but nearly all the base content is solo and the end game is just a big grind.

The big issue of old vindictus was a lack of content and a lot poor choices to add to that, the game had and to some extent still has some the worse microtransactions I ever seen.

Calling it pay to win is a lesser insult to what the game actually gates with its microtransactions. Its pay to do anything but win.


With all that said i still think its fun to play and makes a good little f2p game for a solo trip. The gameplay was good and so was the story

I'd actually say the endgame content of Vindictus now is the worst its ever been.

You just kinda go through the first 105 levels on easy mode being spoonfed armor, then get dropped off a cliff with anything after that, and have to rapidly learn all 400 ways to gear your character at once, and you'll start having to host boats that wont fill, all in an attempt to run on the gear treadmill for no reason.

Like I enjoy the combat, but my extent of the mmo is just logging in and doing some random Solo Boss fights in Ein Lacher then log out. Anything beyond that feels pretty miserable.

Its definitely not perfect and there so much they could do but I agree.

[Chuckawookie]

Originally posted by Sweeks:

Og vindictus still has a small dedicated community but nearly all the base content is solo and the end game is just a big grind.

The big issue of old vindictus was a lack of content and a lot poor choices to add to that, the game had and to some extent still has some the worse microtransactions I ever seen.

Calling it pay to win is a lesser insult to what the game actually gates with its microtransactions. Its pay to do anything but win.


With all that said i still think its fun to play and makes a good little f2p game for a solo trip. The gameplay was good and so was the story

Yep. Even when I played it back in the day I said this. Vindictus wasn't pay to win, it was pay to keep up. You literally couldn't do any new content that came out if you didn't pay because they had increased boss defense so high that you would do 1 dmg with your gear.

[Inferius]

Overall game loot system is designed for mmorpg, but game doesn't have MASSIVE amount of players at MMO tag says... so drop rate is abysmal. I have played it few years. There were drops I never got despire farming same boss every day.
When you have 100 players on server instead of 10000, drop rate should also be increased x100.

Game was just fine before nexon america took care of eu server.
Maybe korea have that massive amount of players, but that doesn't mean we have to have same rates as them.

[AzureVizor]

Remember when you were given silver tokens to play missions and if you wanted to play more after running out, you had to buy premium gold tokens?
I remember those days.
In newer days, the grind was such a chore that I never ONCE got Elchulus's teardrop, even after years of grinding.

[Strega]

The original vindi started going downhill when they swapped directors multiple times, had to remove jumping, and had a extreme content drought before Season 3. ArcheAge and Black Desert Online came out during the no content times and everything went downhill fast after that

[Ven]

Originally posted by AzureVizor:

Remember when you were given silver tokens to play missions and if you wanted to play more after running out, you had to buy premium gold tokens?
I remember those days.
In newer days, the grind was such a chore that I never ONCE got Elchulus's teardrop, even after years of grinding.

The fatigue system was actually brought back for whatever reason, going to assume they couldn't justify the dev time for the versions of the game without it with the dwindling player counts.

[Mushe]

Also the game had a major region lock, you cannot make a game grown if you don't allow your players to play.

[Strega]

Originally posted by Mushe:

Also the game had a major region lock, you cannot make a game grown if you don't allow your players to play.

not exactly true but it depends. things like BDO have NA/EU/JP/TW/KR/RU/SEA servers and its doing really well

[FugNugt]

Originally posted by Consoomer#911420:

It died because of excessive p2w and grind. That's literally it. Everything else wrong with vindictus stems from that 2 problem.

Yep, just avoid anything Nexon basically because it's always like that.

[Wrayday]

Originally posted by Consoomer#911420:

It died because of excessive p2w and grind. That's literally it. Everything else wrong with vindictus stems from that 2 problem.

Yeah.... Sadly after Season 1 they got away from the fun physics attacks on bosses and missions took too long. Then raid bosses became immunity frame dodge only..... all the fun left.

I missed whacking bosses with giant logs... there was something awesome about upping your char strength so you could pick up heavy items.

[Juandiqsuc]

the OG vindictus is dead because of the power creep and the micro transaction period. They don't want you on a Vindictus game unless you spend money.

[Thine Very Own, Nemesis~]

Originally posted by Consoomer#911420:

It died because of excessive p2w and grind. That's literally it. Everything else wrong with vindictus stems from that 2 problem.

I disagree P2W in Vindictus is one of the least effective P2Ws
I've ever interacted with in my history of playing Video Games
(Atleast up to the time I stopped playing it - It may have gotten
worse but I argue it was already in a pretty bad doomspiral when I stopped)

The Grind I do partially agree with
it's a pretty messed up in multiple ways

Things are simultaneously too easy but too plentiful
but there's no real reward other than story progression

however the way the story is presented is in a Visual Novel Style
this is fine for some people but it's still a Niche story telling medium
so most people will opt to skip it in order to get to the meat of the game

So if the early fights are not even fit to be appetizers and the
game forces story to progress into later content

Most people will view both the story as well as the gameplay to be barriers
they have to overcome to *Actually play the game*
and that's if they DO know how things are

Actual newcomers will play early content realize "it's too easy" thus boring
and quit playing probably around Blood Lord if we're being generous

If Veterans of the game want to try a new character they also had to do all that
PER CHARACTER it's kind of insane thinking about it the grind gets mind numbing
VERY EARLY

Late game it's a different kind of mind numbing grind hoping for RNG for progression
and if you stop playing the game for half a year you'll come back and they'll just give
away everything you worked about 4 months of strait grinding for

It actually kind of makes me sick to my stomach remembering XD
really became a situation of "Well I progress more by not playing the game"

Also whoever is responsible for the Counterforce stat and stat requirement boats
I wish them a bunch of extremely awkward situations very pettily