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.

Zenith: The Last City VR - Day One as a Brand New Player

The VR MMORPG Zenith: The Last City finally released on January 27, 2022 to much hype. It has been compared to a real life equivalent to the anime Sword Art: Online and that comparison is not entirely without merit. The experience of interacting with other adventurers and flying around Zenith’s beautiful world in Virtual Reality is unparalleled. Now it’s your turn to get a look into what could be the future of the MMO genre. Here’s Reality Remake’s first day in Zenith: The Last City.

The Undercity

As with traditional MMOs a character must be made in order to play the game, and a class selected. I make myself a Blade Master Tank. In Zenith there are two classes, Blade Masters for up close fighting and Essence Mages for ranged attacks. Each class comes in DPS, Tank, and Support varieties. To me, a sword fighting tank makes a lot of sense. If I have to get close to enemies I like to be the sort of class that can take a lot of damage and keep swinging.

The starting spawn is somewhere underground. A techno-futuristic façade of holographic billboards, storage containers, and metal walkways greets me. A robot companion of sorts, the tutorial explainer character, pops up and says something uninteresting about Aether Fushion before instructing me to walk over to a quest-giver. I oblige.

At the first quest giver, a woman dressed in a military uniform of an extremely bright greenish blue color, the robot tells me to wave at her to get a quest. This is interesting, a fun use of VR hands to interact with an NPC in a slightly lifelike manner. OrbusVR: Reborn, the only other game that could be considered a VRMMORPG, does the same thing. Remembering that OrbusVR plays like Everquest 1 in Virtual Reality with just as much confusion and jank as that ancient game, I definitely hoped that would be the extent of inspiration used in Zenith from that older title.

It is when I’m waving for the first time that I realize that something is wrong. I’m moving my hand… but there is no hand in front of me. I look down, confused, to see…

Seems my virtual body isn’t catching up with my physical movements. Pretty early to run into a bug, but this is not only the launch day of an MMO, but an MMO in Virtual Reality. Both genres tend to attract bugs, and together… well let’s just say I don’t envy the QA team on this one. I log out, log back in, and my body is restored. An easy fix.

The questgiver tells me to destroy some Chimerats, or whatever they are called. I am in no hurry, and wander around, taking in the sight of the black steel surroundings and wave at the crowds of other new players. After realizing that I should probably start doing some quests, I realize that I don’t know which direction that quest is in. Nearby a pink portal of sorts leading into a spire I see a level 6 player. Wow! Such a high level, the game had just launched hours before. I asked him for directions. He is very friendly, and leads me past the quest giver to the first enemies of the game.

The robot buzzes some lore in my ear and tries to give me some pointers on combat, but his advice is nothing compared to what my new friend is saying. He explains the combat to me. It’s a straightforward system. Swing and hit an enemy with my sword to do damage. Hold down trigger for a little while before swinging to do a more damaging attack, or to block. Damage is done on impact, but I have to wait to swing again before the impact will do significant damage. No Fallout 4 VR or The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim - VR jiggle waving of weapons to deal full attack damage 20 times in the span of a second.

The combat is fun and fast. I join in with other players wandering around and fighting the chimera rat dog things. I slay quite a few in a haze of glee as my companion inundates me with knowledge. His passion for the game is infectious and so he is extremely happy to tell me everything he knows. He’s waiting for some friends to party up with, but happily explains the game better than the tutorial can as I go through the first quests. So we go on to the next one, given by another NPC in a very cool gas mask, time for the climbing tutorial. They didn’t even give this poor guy a name.

I tune out the robot as my companion tells me a thing or two about flying. I climb and jump off the nearby ledges and obstacles. The experience of flying in Zenith is… liberating. It’s better than flying, or more technically gliding, in any other game. The reason why? A thing called sensitive gliding.

Basically, sensitive gliding is a simulation of air gliding over your arms like an airfoil on a plane. Tilt your wrists forward and you will go faster and downwards. Tilt your wrists back and you’ll go slower and glide upwards. It sounds simple, but it makes the basic gliding system found in Population: One look like it was invented in the stone age. Gliding in Zenith is easy to learn and hard to master, but most of all it is fun. Oh, but sensitive gliding isn’t on by default. You’ll need to go to your settings and change it.

I continue to forget that I am standing on my living room carpet with a big piece of silicon and plastic over my face as I glide through the air like a bird. There is a big crowd of people all laughing and flying around enjoying themselves. I wonder what this place will seem like when Zenith is a little older and most players aren’t new. For now I just enjoy it.

All of my quests under the ground are completed. Time to go up in the big pink portal and see what is in store in the city proper. My friend and I say our goodbyes. He is busy assembling his group and I am thankful for his advice. I hope everyone runs into someone like him when starting this game.

Out of the Tutorial and Into the World

The sun is bright on the futuristic billboards and clean steel high rises of the capital city of Zenith. It is a very vibrant place. The more modern architecture gives way to green trees and grass, Japanese torii gates, and a big crystal of unknown purpose.

Of course the brightly colored quest giver is back again. She tells us to walk out of the beautiful city I just found myself in. I oblige while giving my surroundings forlorn glances. I had hoped I could spend more time in the city itself, but it seems I am destined to just walk through it briefly. It seems like a waste for such a nice place. I cheer myself up by messing around with and standing inside one of the uninteractable NPCs that litter the place.

Outside the main gate of the big city is a beautiful bridge, and in the distance verdant green fields, tall mountains, and floating rocks. The very smell of adventure and opportunity permeates my living room, which I still have not remembered I am standing in.

Across the river is the smartly dressed questgiver once again, and a whole crowd of people. I get a quest to defeat some Sylphids. Unlike previous opponents they are humanoid and carry actual weapons. A more interesting enemy. There are huge crowds of people around fighting them. I spend some time just swinging at the new enemies and mingling with other players. It’s a good bit of fun.

There’s even a quest to glide off of a local tower and onto some scaffolding nearby. The open world finally starts to open up at this point, and the freedom of movement in Zenith: The Last City becomes apparent. Dashing around and gliding from place to place beats just holding a thumbstick down to travel any day. I try out the DPS version of Blade Master class on for size as well. The only permanent choice for each character is whether they are a Blade Master or Essence Mage. Otherwise anyone can switch between roles as they please. Though each role must be levelled separately starting from one. Oh, and somewhere along the way I gain a level as a DPS.

With that level comes a godstone. Godstones represent special abilities in Zenith. Activating one isn’t as simple as pressing a button for a Blade Master. Instead they need to be activated by striking in a certain way with normal or heavy attacks. For instance the Horizontal Cadence Godstones, like Vorpal Strike, are activated from hitting an enemy with three horizontal attacks in a row. It’s an interesting system that makes use of Virtual Reality’s interactivity and encourages striking consciously and precisely. This all adds an element of artistry to the combat and keeps it from devolving into random arm flailing. There aren’t many buttons to use on a VR controller anyhow.

I wander around for a while, smacking open chests, waving at passerby, and fighting enemies. I even find a couple of tear shaped crystals. I honestly thought they were scenery until I saw another player pick them up. A passing stranger told me that they can be used to upgrade your stamina for sprinting and flying.

Eventually I find a patch of farmland with a few very angry looking Sylphids and a bunch of Basil on the ground. Vegetation such as Oranges and Basil which can be used in cooking grow on the ground and in trees for anyone to collect. They’re all over the place. Like any good hoarder I grab as much as possible, even when it means running through a crowd of enemies. Fortunately a fellow Blade Master appears and fights through them with me.

We talk for a little while. Mostly about the game and how everyone is the same height, even if they are clearly different ages. Some others come by and join us. Next thing we know there’s a whole group of us demolishing every enemy that spawns and chatting away. The true MMO experience. It’s so much different from any other MMORPG I’ve played. Normally chatting amicably while playing involves a Discord server or a LOT of typing. Hanging out with other players feels so much more… natural in VR. It’s like running into someone on the street. Once or twice I’ve been caught staring at somebody, and they’ll give an awkward wave back, as though I was staring at them for real. The social etiquette of video games and real life are starting to merge together.

Our group is decently sized, and we notice that we’re getting pretty good drops from the big red Sylphids we’re farming. A lot of gear and upgrade items. So we keep farming for a while, having a blast and talking about the drops we got, or anything else that comes to mind. Then a big block of text appears floating in the air. “Waiting for Event to Start”. Events are group activities that spawn a lot of enemies in a short period of time, requiring players to defeat them before a timer runs out for an increased reward of experience and in game money based on their level of participation. Also maybe an upgrade item or two. While there may be other types of events I’ve never found one. They all seem to be centered around killing hordes of enemies.

Regardless our group is pretty confident. There are quite a few of us and we’ve been constantly obtaining better equipment for the last fifteen or so minutes. We can take a few extra spawns. The count down finishes. Enemies start popping up and I start swinging. One goes down, another. Then my health bar starts to get low. More enemies are attacking me, and they’re tough. In seconds my health drops to zero and my screen goes gray. I look around and see the grey pillars of smoke that designate where a player has fallen littering the battlefield.

Any player can revive another in Zenith, unfortunately here there is noone left to revive us. So we all bring our hands together as though in prayer, and respawn.

Back at the end of the bridge leading out of the city our whole crew is there, and even more people. Someone is cooking, a feature that I haven’t tried yet, and I am force fed several cookies. Someone even shows me how cooking is done. I plan on doing some of that later.

We all chat a bunch. I point out the oranges spawning in a tree nearby and a whole horde of players jump up it trying to get their hands on those sweet fruits. Eventually someone comes up with the idea to raid a dungeon nearby. We’ve got about seven people, probably plenty. We all agree, but first someone wants to invite all of us to their guild. He goes around inviting people one by one, when my turn comes I see the invite on my screen but… mis-click the “Agree” button. I was pointing at the background to the alert when I pulled the trigger on my controller, and it disappeared. I’m not in a guild, and wow do I want to be in a guild with all of these nice people.

“No big deal,” I think. “Let’s just try that again.” My new friend invites me again, but nothing happens. No alert appears asking me to confirm. I check my menus, and I’m not in a guild. So I decide to try and get rid of the bug by logging out and logging back in. All of the others say they’ll wait for me. So I log out and try to log back in… to be confronted by the shard list.

Uhhhhh, which one was I on again? I don’t remember. I make a guess, hoping to find the right random word and number combination. Whatever shard I was on was not the one I guessed. My group is nowhere to be seen. I have no idea how to find them.

I hope they had fun in that dungeon. It’s frustrating to think that I missed out on such a spontaneous group experience because of a bug like that. I could have just kept going and ignored the guild, maybe I should have, but I didn’t think logging out and back in would force me to remember the shard name I picked earlier. Either way it ended as it did, and there will be other people to group up with another time.

I remember the carpet under my toes, the walls of the room around me, and the clock. Reality comes back in all at once. I need to be up early tomorrow. It’s late, time to get to sleep. I remove the headset and get ready for bed.

This story comes from my experience playing Zenith: The Last City on the Oculus Quest 2, or Meta Quest 2 as they’re calling it now. Zenith can be found on the Oculus Store for 29.99, and on Steam for the same (unless it’s on sale). It’s a really fun game, and also a good social space as well. As of writing it’s actually Steam’s top selling game period, not just in VR, but all categories.