The Looking Stone

Played for 0.4 hrs and server crashed, but the little bit that I did play was horribly average and nothing new or worth while to start this time sink of a game just play some other MMO there are plenty of better games out there.

[quote][b]Warning: Third Party Account[/b] This game requires you to create a third party "Magework Account" account... there's no valid reason for this in a PC game when SteamWorks is available. This is often done to harvest private data and profile you, with potential sale and transmission of your private data to third parties. The developers will probably argue that you can trust them, but if they were trustworthy they wouldn't demand you create a third party account. This represents a considerable risk to gamers due to the privacy and security implications of developers that wish to bypass Steam and harvest user data. Remember, sometimes if the product is free, YOU are the product.[/quote] [quote][b]Note: Dead multiplayer game[/b] This game contains no meaningful single player content. There's no players, no populated servers. This multiplayer-only game cannot be played as intended.[/quote] This was a clunky disaster of an attempt to make a weak ripoff of Ultima Online, a barebones, basic, and painfully generic 2D retro pixelcrap "RPG" with no players... the players all left because nobody likes toxic P2W cash shops. Making this a dead game. Well, there's other reasons this died, too. It's got a lot of huge bugs that kill the game, too, but it seems the developers only thoughts were to gouge nostalgiac zoomers for cash. So, "The Looking Stone" is a dead multiplayer game. Why did it fail? It's video game autopsy time! The chief cause of failure is the developer thinking that their game will "go viral" without actually creating any reason for it do so. Competition amongst multiplayer centric games is extreme, and there's only a finite player base to appeal to. This game failed to reach any kind of critical mass and died as a result. Let's go into some of the reasons this particular game failed to appeal to gamers, despite the zero up front cost. The ugly pixelcrap here is dishonestly presented as a "deliberate artistic choice", but we all know it's because the developer wasn't capable of anything better. The result is an ugly looking game, especially when compared to thousands of professionally developed games here. Whether the developer lacked the talent for modern visuals or the money to hire an artist is irrelevant. Their choice significantly detracts from the game... gaming is a visual medium. Games like Undertale and Stardew Valley are incredibly rare exceptions that made it [i]in spite[/i] of the pixelcrap holding them back (imagine how much better they would be if the graphics didn't suck). Pixelcrap is never okay. You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality product, this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me. This game is fairly dated at 5 years old... and even back then it looked old and busted compared to contemporary, professionally made 3D games of the same period. It looked bad then, it looks worse now. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. This game is infested with mobile app store like microtransactions. This is a consumer hostile model that we don't need to see on PC. It's deceptively priced to gouge gamers, and that's a reason in itself to avoid this. All other issues aside (any of which would disqualify this from being worth your time), this is a game that relies on other players for it to be viable, and because there's not enough players, it's not viable. I can't recommend anyone downloads this, it's basically dead.