Problems Zenith: The Last City Has Going Forward

It’s not easy to be a pioneer. Zenith: The Last City definitely is, and that means that they have to cross a lot of hurdles that are known and also unknown. It is likely a common occurrence both from a design and technical perspective that Zenith has problems or is forced to innovate in a way that nobody has before. Such is the purview of VR games that break into new territory. There’s great opportunity to bring new ideas to Virtual Reality, but also a lot of potential pitfalls. As far as Zenith is concerned… well here’s some places they may have some trouble.

Bugs

Look, every game is going to have some bugs. Every piece of software ever in existence is going to have bugs. The problem with games is that the bugs in them can lead to exploits. Any game ever with a sufficient number of them will definitely have exploitable bugs. Even in my first day of playing Zenith I noticed quite a few.

Zenith has a lot of bugs, some more minor, some more major. If you’ve read our previous article then you’ll know about the broken player skeleton that I had the first time I launched the game.

Also, when I misclicked the background of a guild invite, and somehow broke guild invitations sent to me. Both of these were fixed with a restart, but the bugs get worse. In the first proper levelling zone, the Galain Planes, which goes up to level 6, there are some underground mines that have a few quests associated with them. In those mines you can just climb up through the walls and on top of the ceiling if you know the right place to try. A very easy geometry glitch.

That’s not even all of the bugs that I ran into, but you can see how they can get worse from here. Remember AQ40 from World of Warcraft? There was a geometry bug there that allowed players to skip the whole raid and go straight to the final boss. If there are glitches in one zone or in one portion of the game there will be in others where they could affect player balance and gameplay. Infinite money glitches, item duplication, they all arise in games that have such simple problems.

Just look at what happened to Fallout 76. At launch it was buggy to the point that some considered it unplayable purely from a stability perspective. Textures which turned into dark voids, T-posed enemies, falling through the world, and character models contorting into insane positions. To others with a smaller mind for aesthetics they seemed pretty innocuous, but any game that has such obvious bugs always has such poor Quality Assurance in the more important backend aspects.

Item duplication glitches tanked Fallout 76’s economy shortly after it launched, and players found a secret way to access the developer’s room, which was basically a room with every item in the game. Players could just take items out of the room, and Bethesda had no idea how. This as well as the amount of bugs which broke immersion and made the game frustrating or impossible to play at points drove a large portion of the userbase away.

The same happened to New World which released earlier this year to a lot of hype. Item duplication glitches and mass reporting of enemy war leaders has resulted in a poisoned PvP scene and unusable player economy. New World also had another problem, players reached the maximum level very quickly, and soon found that there was very little to do but farm crafting levels and slightly better equipment. In response Amazon Games patched certain aspects of the game to require a lot more time and effort in order to achieve a max level and max geared character. These ended up making the endgame much grindier, and were not received well by players, resulting in more players leaving. Rather than making more content, Amazon Games tried to stretch what it had.

Lack of End Game Content

Leave it up to gamers to quickly master a new experience. Just a few days after Zenith’s release the first players started to hit level 40. Even in a game that requires some movement and possibly a good deal of standing, though a lot of grinding could supposedly have been done while sitting down, this is a bit of a shocker. It seems that there are no physical limitations to a gamer determined enough. I had hoped that possibly due to the more physical nature of Zenith as a VR title, this level of speedrunning to the top, which is seen in all multiplayer games in the age of the internet, would be a little slower.

The thing is, those who have now made it to the top have found that there is little to do. Zenith is still in active development despite it’s release, and is not really a completed game yet. Sure a player can get to the highest level, but there is no difficult end game content that most MMORPG players demand. Some even see levelling in MMORPGs to be just a stepping stone to that greater end game content. Acquiring the best equipment, defeating the hardest dungeons and bosses, and getting a lot of kills in PvP. Zenith doesn’t have any of that, and there’s really nothing for these new level 40s to do except for twiddle their thumbs and level each subclass to 40 as well.

The developers will no doubt take care of this in due time with content updates but… what if the community has moved on by then? Developing a game like Zenith is not easy and Ramen VR is a small indie studio. It will probably take them a long time to add significant end game content. What if another similar game has come out by then and splits the community? What if players simply get bored and no longer want to come back?

Right now more endgame content is one of the roadmap goals for the devs. Not to mention a new class, new crafting options, player housing, and “much much more.” These all sound like additions which will certainly help to retain an active playerbase, or at least cause some to come back for a short time to level a new class or check out a new crafting system.

These promises are all well and good but it remains to be seen if the developers at Ramen VR will be able to add features in a timely manner. The roadmap doesn’t even include specific timetables for when certain features are planned to be implemented, or in which order. All it states is that they are planned for 2022. We already know Ramen VR is a small company, and maybe they’ll hire more with the success of their game at launch, but right now Zenith is in an ocean of bugs. It will take some time to iron those out, and who knows how that will impact the timeline for new features.

Update: Short after this article came out Ramen VR released a patch with some new endgame content! While some elements of this patch seem to be focused more on adding more grind to the game (Godstones now need to be levelled after 40). This is a great step in the right direction.

So how long will it be until these new features come out? Weeks? Months? It would be understandable if it was a long time, but that doesn’t mean players are necessarily going to stick around. Maybe Zenith’s playerbase will survive for a time by surging upwards with every content update. It is, after all, one of only two existing VRMMORPGs, and in our opinion the greatest.

Despite these problems Zenith: The Last City is well worth the money on Steam for 29.99$ or on the Oculus Store for the same amount.