The last VR game you’ll ever play

a vr game's release has been taking the virtual world by storm top selling on the quest store top selling on all of steam my entire friends list is playing it i think it's safe to say that zenith velocity is something that a lot of people have been waiting for and in case you don't know zenith is a vr mmorpg or massively multiplayer online role-playing game similar to world of warcraft or final fantasy 14 except it's all within virtual reality taking one of my favorite genres of games ever and bringing it into my favorite medium ever and of course it's been one of my dreams to have a big vr mmo to sink my teeth into for a while but is zenith actually good is it worth all of that hype today i'm going to be full diving into my thoughts on zenith what it does really well and a few things that it can improve on as well as some thoughts on what should an mmo nvr really even feel like should the mmo formula that's worked for a couple decades now just be copy pasted into a headset or is there something that vr can do for the genre that can't be done anywhere else i think a good place to start with the video of vr mmo is to give some background on mmos in general including my own background within them it's hard to say exactly but i'm pretty sure that my most played genre of games are mmorpgs the idea of them is fascinating and they're extremely addictive at their core an mmorpg takes some of the best elements of a role-playing game the user assuming the likeness and traits and abilities of an in-game character that they made and thrust the user into a server with thousands of other players in a persistent game world that changes and evolves around the actions of the players a good mmo world should feel like a living breathing real place one of the first games that i was really hooked into as a kid was runescape staying up for hours as a low-poly hat-wearing avatar intrigued by cutting wood and fishing which soon evolved into an obsession with world of warcraft and over the years i've tried out dozens of mmos from star trek online to lord of the rings online final fantasy xiv swotor bdo but to be honest almost every mmo out there feels like the same base game re-skinned for a different franchise as much as i loved final fantasy 14 when you boil it down it's still just the same hotkey mash remembering ability rotations cueing for a dungeon finder to hopefully get the loot drop rinse and repeat over and over and this is basically the same story for all other mmos that i just talked about and i'm only even bringing this up in a zenith video because i have two massive points here about mmos in general that are important in relation to zenith one the whole mmo genre is stale like very stale and that's due to a huge problem with this type of game or rather the developments of this type of game which i'll expound on in just a moment but my other points is mmos are just not really about the gameplay i don't think anybody launches world of warcraft for its cutting-edge combat it's about the online identity and community and feeling really present within an immersive virtual world and turns out those two points are something that vr and zenith hits pretty directly even if the game doesn't quite live up to its full potential and it also turns out while looking at all of this making an mmo is just really hard so we can cut them some slack because reviewing zenith is kind of weird if you compare zenith apples to apples with other mmorpgs let's say world of warcraft or final fantasy xiv i honestly could not say with a straight face that zenith is even a good mmo the game world is small the end game content is seriously lacking there are only a couple of dungeons to run through there are measly two classes with three jobs for each class character customization is well i'm not even sure if this classifies as true customization and to give you some reference final fantasy 14 has 20 jobs 80 plus dungeons and not even including raids with entire continents to explore but that is not fair and it doesn't do zenith any justice because you can't compare vr mmos to standard mmos it isn't apple's apples at that point it's more like comparing a jpeg of an apple to a real life one and this point is further pushed by the fact that almost all of the existing popular mmo rpgs right now have been released for 10 years plus for pete's sake world of warcraft is of legal age at this point releasing 18 years ago with hundreds of millions of dollars poured into it and hundreds of millions of dollars made off of subscription money and expansions to be fair i am surprised that zenith exists at all back on the issue of mmos being stale there's a very good reason for that and it's been talked about endlessly mmos are historically the most difficult kind of game to make for a variety of reasons for a good mmo game world you need thousands of assets a huge team to make those assets people to write hundreds of thousands of quests servers to house thousands or even millions of players marketing to pull in new players what i'm trying to say is mmos are the most expensive type of game to make and are also the riskiest it's the nature of the beast very few mmos make it past a few years because if you lose some of your player base which is inevitable you lose subscription money which means you can't afford a ton of new content to bring new players in or old players back so you have this game that was super expensive to make super expensive to maintain that is constantly draining players unless more money is spent to maintain them they are a drain but the interesting thing about mmos is it's not even so much about the content or setting or franchise of the game how good an mmo is unless you're rating it directly against world of warcraft is kind of based on how much the community agrees it's good if the community agrees and mmo is good then they play it like nostalgia aside runescape isn't good pretty objectively but people play it and they make runescape good so just to put it simply zenith isn't a good mmo if you base it against the genre but it's a potentially good mmo because people are playing it and it's the community that have made my time within the game really memorable not the actual game so for the rest of this video i'm going to be raiding zenith and sort of reviewing zenith upon itself against what an mmo and vr could be rather than comparing it to what is already established in other mediums and i'll start off where zenith went right it's available on just about all relevant vr platforms psvr pcvr quest standalone and it's cross play and cross by between all of them if you have a pc and a quest you can be playing zenith on steam level up at your computer then take your quest and play with the same account on the quest version it's wonderful the vr player base is already fragmented as hell so this is about as good as it gets bringing people together across any vr headset plus it just means more people playing which the most important part of an mmo is the player base and mmo isn't much of a massively multiplayer online game if only 20 people are online and launching an mmo for vr is incredibly risky and zenith did a really good job with the amount of players that are allowed to be on each shard or world instance you can jump between shards with no consequence or lost progress and even a shard that's full doesn't feel overcrowded just populated and lively now in terms of the gameplay and story well if you're playing zenith for the rpg part of an mmorpg and expecting a good fleshed out storyline you're just not gonna get that a loosely tied together main quest line shows you around the world basically but it's all text-based and there's really not that much in terms of meaningful or impactful lore here which is a massive shame considering the world of zenith itself is stylized and in some ways beautiful and really cool and is asking for lore to explain that world but we don't really get that although i'm leaving that to expansions in the future and gameplay well it's no blade and sorcery or boneworks or saints and sinners in terms of combat the two main classes right now blademaster and essence mage allow for two main gameplay styles ranged and close range melee and you can be a healer tank or dps within those two classes although a third class cyber ninja is on its way which promises a combination of the two and i will say the combat is as long as you accept and know that this isn't some blade and sorcery level stuff the combat's pretty fun and it's rewarding instead of the typical mmo mashing of hotkeys you have a few abilities controlled through gestures for a mage a bunch of spells tied to flicks of the wrists in different directions and for blademaster you have a pair of swords with similarly corresponding abilities that are gesture based it's a decent translation of typical ability based combat with cooldowns stuns and rotations and it's easy enough to pick up but rewards mastery and mid maxing specs as long as you make it that far through progressing your character but this has all been done before with orbus a pre-existing mmorpg that existed on all platforms years before zenith the point here is in terms of zenith as it stands now it does the expected servers work most of the time there's a lively player base and even if the combat and story aren't anything special it's definitely well worth the 30 dollars ramen vr is asking for it but to be honest it just does the essentials which to be fair is all it needed to do zenith is a smash hit already it didn't need to do anything more here but it's bare bones and kind of a minimum viable product in terms of what is possible within a vr mmo rpg and that's okay maybe zenith is a stepping stone for itself to become better or another studio to see the success and run with the idea but here's an alternative idea of what an mmorpg in vr could be rewrite the entire mmo formula no more ability mashing or rotations instead focusing heavily on the bodily mastery of skills and discovery of skills make something like spellcrafting and sword wielding a profession and this is where my idea of a perfect mmo in vr really takes shape in player economy structured around building of things and getting good or moving up within your jobs in a game and jobs or professions within the game would be massively plentiful but the most interesting part about a job or class system within a game like this is it's a game where you use your actual body to carry out the things that you're doing some people will just be better at some things than others and that should be rewarded everybody would have something that they're good at and rather than brainlessly grinding out levels if you have a good memory and mastery of using magic abilities and you practice not even necessarily against mobs but just physically practice the motions maybe even creating your own or discovering spells as you go you will physically get better at casting a spell you'll just actually become more accurate with casting it just like you'd get better with drawing or cooking over time as you build that muscle memory in physical reality you aren't given a skill level for drawing the more that you grind out drawings so why in virtual reality games with skills are things locked to grinding for unlocks let practice and muscle memory handle that and let people design armor and housing and farms and the people that are especially creative or want to really learn how to create things will be rewarded and commissioned to create individual places or venues or armor that could be your entire job or purpose within a persistent vr mmo and it's all brought together by the community your services would be heavily in demand and this isn't to say that the typical fetch quests don't exist in this ideal mmo but it would all be player economy driven new players need to work their keep and that may be through a gathering job first time logging in you're greeted with a warm welcome by recruiters from gathering guilds from multiple factions and you have to gather materials and items that more skillful or prestige players need to do their job and until you find your place within this new virtual world as a crafter or builder or guard or you get really really good at spell casting sword fighting by physically working out your character while in vr both bettering your physical shape and also your avatar shape to go fight off some of the biggest baddies in the land now i understand this idea has quite a few flaws and we can talk about that at a later time but this is more of a thought experiment and this sort of game wouldn't be for everyone and some people do prefer grinding and ability mashing to each their own but seeing the first vr mmorpg zenith or first one that's really taken off be so good but also so plain really got me thinking about what could be and i don't think it's too ambitious of an idea it just requires complete rethinking of how an mmo would work but there's kind of no better time than virtual reality and vr headsets to rethink a 20 year old genre and regarding xena i don't think this is necessarily the game that will do what i just said zenith is fine on its own and it's doing a great job and i hope that lots more content comes for zenith and it's inspired me to think about what could be but zenith at the end of the day is an mmorpg and it acts like that but i'll probably keep playing zenith not like i have many other choices it's enjoyable but there's so much more that can be done with this formula and idea and maybe we just kind of got our very first smidgen of a taste of what a sword art online may feel like i hope you guys enjoyed this weird analysis of zenith and kind of mmos and gaming in general i don't know it was just fun to make so i'll see you guys next time hope you guys are having a great reality and virtual reality much love thrill out you

Channel: ThrillSeeker

Views: 1,366,538

Keywords: VR, virtual reality, Sword Art Online, SAO, Zenith, Kirito, Thrillseeker, zenith VR, Quest, quest 2, Index, vr headset

Id: IVcNkznLZsg

Length: 13min 49sec (829 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 19 2022