MMORPG Tycoon 2

If you read this, know that I support this game and I’d like for you too. MMORPG tycoon is an enjoyable albeit still early in development experience. It lacks a lot of polish, and with this review I hope to warn you, the potential buyer, of what unpolished elements you might run into, and similarly, I hope that the development team behind MMORPG Tycoon 2 will read it as well. If you could, leave a like on this review so that they might and they might become aware of these issues. Just know that this review is largely critiques, but the game itself I've found quite enjoyable, albeit a very slow grind of an experience. If that's for you, get it! Just beware that this game is a rough little gem right now, and it wil llikely be for the next couple of years at the current pace of development. Bugs - Multiple Monitors: Right now there’s a persistent bug that causes you to occasionally lose control over your game, as the game cannot differentiate itself between different monitors. I’ve tried every screen setting, haven’t found a solution. Very annoying. If you have this, click outside on your other monitor then click back in the game. This fixes it. World Design The idea of this game is that you get to make your own MMO. This includes the ability to make your world look like you want it to. If that’s the intention, then why are worlds preset to how they're generated during world generation? If there would be a way, by let’s say you selecting the Grid tool, to be able to drag the corners of each of the vectors of a zone's generated land mass, and reshape them, this would not be an issue. Right now, it is, and you'll just have to suck it up that you will not be able to make your MMO world look exactly like you want it to. Player Classes - No race/class sytem. - Abilities for classes are limited. There's only a small pool of parts that you can let players or monsters do ability wise. There's also no advanced logic here, only simple Target > Effect structures. Similarly, there's only three resource pools: Health, Mana and Rage. You cannot create your own resource structures, or alter the way that these resources work. You cannot create a rage system that doesn't generate rage when damaged as to create a combo resource system for example. - AI does not use its moves effectively, letting abilities that are off cooldown remain off cooldown. What this causes is that abilities with larger effects and longer cooldowns are generally better in the hands of the AI than abilities with only 1 second cooldowns, since that 1 second cooldown might as well be at least 2 seconds in their hands. - AI cannot contextually understand for example that if their mana is low, and they have an ability that they should replenish their mana, that they should use that ability. Gameplay – Developments, Staff & Arbitrary Waiting Time - You cannot queue developments. - Developments takes linearly more time to finish the more times you do it. How does that make any sense? You’d think that once your game has developed a framework for how a monster should work, that the amount of animations, model work and coding for it would remain roughly the same right? Right now it only punishes those who want to make a world full of varied monster designs, NPCs, or various classes. As now it takes over four days in my current game to create any new monster, simply because I like thematic variety. I feel punished for desiring creative variety. - You cannot put more developers on your developments, even to counteract the above. - Having to wait to design more monsters for your game, without being able to design them in advance insentivises hoarding class, NPC and monster “slots”, to be able to design them at your pace, rather than have to wait at the game to allow you to. - Once your art team has designed an asset, why does it cost money to then also place the asset? Is it to abstract the pay of your nonexistent design team? Is it to abstract the pay of your coders for active buildings, that you now have to pay over a thousand bucks or more up front to place an active building? Oh wait, but you have coding staff, and you already pay them a wage. This does not make any sense. Gameplay – Network Grid To manage world instances in this game, you have to lay out a power grid for everything in the map. This is a matter of taste, but I really do not like the network grid as an idea. It’s meant to be an abstraction of elements that aren’t part of the game put into the game world. Each area an instanced shard, and your cable is the “power” fed to your active elements. Cool. But dungeons don’t’ follow this rule, now do they? This is an incongruency in design philosophy. Similarly, despite it being an abstraction, you cannot draw cables through water. I'm asking myself, what does this particular game system add to the game? It's more frustrating than fun to interact with, and just wastes time. It could have just been a menu option. I’m glad it’s generally a do it once and forget about it affair, but until there’s an option to turn decorations transparent, be sure to do your cables BEFORE you cover an entire region of your map in a massive stone tunnel network. I did this, and now there’s still parts of my map which I can’t seem to get the power to flow to because I’m effectively doing the process almost entirely blind. Oh yeah, that's also a suggestion. The ability to turn decorations transparent. That would be nice. Dungeons Great in concept but.. I have several issues with dungeons that actively make me not want to use them. Dungeon Design Designing dungeons suffers from the same design restrictions are worlds do, but much worse. As in, you don’t really get to choose the general outline of how your dungeon looks. You have to work within a pregenerated skewed grid that makes for decent looking natural caves, but horribly weirdly angled and uncanny artificial rooms. This is not as much of an issue for the overworld, though I’d also like to see that changed, dungeons instead suffer from the fact that they’re all enclosed spaces, meaning you are constantly reminded of the skewed grid in the way the rooms are always just slightly wrong. Though I respect the designer’s choice, this design decision both baffles and frustrates me, and since suggestion thread in the steam discussions got ignored, I’ll post it in here again. I hope it’ll get seen. If each point of each square of the pregenerated grid could be dragged and squeezed into the shape the player desires, you could use this system to make rooms have any possible shape. This would in fact be amazing. Dungeon Bugs There’s a horribly frustrating bug with dungeons right now that causes players to enter, kill one mob, and then leave. If this happens the only way to fix it is to delete the dungeon and recreate it from scratch. Dungeon Pricing Dungeon take a party of 4. You pay 100 per day for each instance. That is a maximum of four players inside of a dungeon per time you pay for it. For ten instances, that’s 1000 dollars, per day, to service 40 people. Or you could just get an uplink and two more servers for the same price and service 800 more people on the same map. Dungeons are a financial death trap, unless you use them as a one room boss fight type setup, where you have only one or two instances available to fight so you can keep your achievers happy. This also makes the above bug not something you need to worry about, as they’ll just enter, fight the boss and then leave. Of course as you can imagine, this is not the intended way you should make dungeons. Boss Designs Dungeon boss designs are not saved between dungeons. Not an issue, just save them as a prefab, but worth noting. Game Assets: Sliders There's some model parts I wish I could make a lot bigger, or smaller than the current sliders allow. This in the same way goes for decoration pieces. If the sliders could just be unlocked, rather than limited to x4, that'd be great.