This game makes me geniunely sad. I grew up playing the Adventure Quest flash game, although I wasn’t ever really good at it. It was a part of my childhood that I fondly remember. Me, my brother and some friends hopping online after school trying to get our hands on some cool, corny sword. Life was untouched by corruption – but then this perverse illusion of a game came along…
I found AQ3D on Steam after browsing the free section for a bit. I was bored, and I downloaded it as a gag, knowing full well that adult me probably wouldn’t enjoy the franchise as much as kid me. Tempted by the sweet honey of nostalgia, I booted the game up – and I kid you not, I spent 10 hours my first session. All wordly “musts” and duties flew out the window, I was addicted without even knowing it.
In total I think I’ve spent about 200 hours on the game in total. A fair amount to be able to judge it. You might think “but why play so long if you don’t like it?”, and that’s a valid question. I think nostalgia plays a huge role, but AQ3D also does some things really good too. I’ve played my share of MMO’s before, and AQ3D scratched an itch that the others didn’t quite reach. It’s small, has a cozy and tight community, and a lot of secrets. A lot of times MMO’s are fairly streamlined. The amount of resources developers need to pour into the game motivates them to make sure that you experience most of it. AQ3D felt different. As I was exploring I found stuff that others hadn’t, I got items no one knew about and it felt like there were so many stones to turn that every patch had me scouring every corner of the maps like a little sewer rat. It felt unique, and since I was so tired of the formulaic systems of the other MMO’s I decided to stay.
This is where the cracks started showing…
When you first start playing the game, you’ll explore a fairly open ended world with multiple interconnected zones, secrets and quests. It’s very similar to any other MMO in the sense that you run around and do quests and dungeons, with the main goal being to level up and get better gear. There is no automatic group finder, so if you wanted to do dungeons or fight bosses, you had to socialize and find people to group up with. An aspect of MMO’s that were fairly new to me, but I loved it. The world was cartoony, but looked good in its own way. The combat was super simple, but there was an emphasize on finding more classes and leveling them like Pokémon. Gear was unique and some pieces were super rare. The game even had cool events and jumping puzzles to find (I love jumping puzzles). At first, the big issue for me came in the form of quality of life improvements, but I just looked past them thinking they were going to get fixed later – spoilers: I was fucking wrong!
Dungeons typically had a purple outline to differentiate them from zone switches, they ignored this and all of a sudden they could be either color. When adding new zones, instead of connecting them to the world, you instead reached them by talking to an NPC who teleported you there or by clicking on a portal in the hub area. They reworked the HUB from a cozy village to an ugly castle with a shitty layout. You couldn’t manually sort you bank and add categories, so the whole “collecting” aspect of the game became annoying. You also couldn’t get more bank slots without buying them, so if you got a cool and rare item, you might have to discard another item you had to make space (keep in mind, some items have a 0.01% drop). New content were poorly introduced, and everything started feeling “thrown together”. New zones and content had no secrets, and instead they focused on adding fetch quests and a streamlined experience, WHICH EVERY OTHER MMO ALREADY DOES BETTER!
Instead of leaning into what made the game unique and fun – a collectathon MMO with secrets that could make you stand out – they instead tried to become like every other MMO, but without the quality and content. They butchered what made them into them.
Adventure Quest has always been a “meme MMO”, and it’s almost a breath of fresh air with an MMO that doesn’t take itself too seriously. But it became too messy, too clunky and too “barren”. Now it’s just a boring grindfest.
It was a while ago that I played the game. Maybe I’m delusional and they’ve fixed everything, but I doubt it. If I was allowed to become the AQ3D dictator I would make the game great again. Make consistent UI for the game, connect the world and zones, make bank spaces free or cost in game currency, allow free organizing in the bank, more secrets in the zones, more world bosses and dungeons that require a group, duels, open world PvP zones with warnings, auctions and trading for absurd sums of money, clan wars in the streets, demolishing of the castle, shooting line for all the boring NPC’s, reinstate communism in the eastern zones, boats, crafting and gathering, weekly zone wars with dragons and make all NPC’s stop working until the players gang together and defeat their adversaries!
That’s what I’d do.
But I can’t, so I just bitch and moan about a game that could’ve been so much more.
From an 8/10, into a 5/10. Generic, and boring… 🙁