Month: June 2023

Treasure And Truth – A Dota 2 Mod

Diablo 4 is out! So long as you’re willing to pay $20 plus the $70 price tag to Blizzard. Blizzard, a company that’s been notable for an unending parade of scandals related to sexual assault and employee mistreatment.

Unfun Fact! Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick threatened over voicemail to kill his personal assistant! But don’t worry, it was settled out of court. I’m sure it was a fair and reasonable settlement, as there’s never been a power imbalance between an employee and their multi-millionaire boss.

Any, where was I? Oh, yes. You could buy Diablo 4, a game that despite costing $70 on release already has a cash shop, and season battle pass.

Or instead of supporting the shambling corpse of a once-loved company whose external face might have always been a lie, you could join me in Treasure and Truth.

Treasure and Truth is a mod for Dota 2. Like Diablo 4, it’s an ARPG, and unfortunately also like Diablo 4, it also has a cash shop, but I’ll get to that part in a bit. Unlike Diablo 4, it’s free!

This is a mod.

Also, I’m going to say some rude things about Treasure and Truth in this review, but I am 100% using the game as Diablo withdrawal methadone at the moment. Ultimately, I do recommend playing. If nothing else, it’s an incredible demonstration of both the potential, and some of the drawbacks of a Dota 2 mod.

Core Gameplay

Treasure and Truth is an action role playing game, which is to say it has no roleplaying, and some action. And since it’s a mod for Dota 2, the standard Dota 2 mechanics and controls mostly apply. It’s top down and semi-isometric.

It’s also Chinese. This is relevant for a number of reasons, but most importantly because of the translation. Or lack of thereof.

I’m not sure what “White Character” means here. I’m almost positive it’s not a buff that only applies if you’re Caucasian.

The game is translated into English, but not all of it, and not always correctly. Some parts are fully translated and make sense. Some parts are translated but not localized. And as a result you end up fighting “Pliers of the Hole,” which is probably supposed to be something like “Jaws of the Abyss.”

Not exactly the most intimidating enemy.

And sometimes, it’s very important when it turns out that #wings2_start_system is supposed to be text telling you how to unlock an entire alternate end-game power system for heavily scaling certain stats.

But anyway: on to core gameplay! There are kinda three modes in Treasure and Truth, but two are the same, so we’re going to cover them as one thing.

The two modes are story and key mode. All this really boils down to is that you go into a big non-changing map, kill monsters until a boss portal opens up, and kill that boss. Rinse and repeat three times, and you’ve cleared the level.

In story mode, enemies give you loot. In the key mode, there’s a timer, and the quality and amount of loot scales with how fast you can finish. There are five base levels, and in classic ARPG style, once you finish a set of them, you unlock the next difficulty.

The other mode is raids.

Raids are a test of your patience, and your ability to find 2-4 other human beings who are capable of understanding concepts like what a circle is, and that sometimes in order to win, you need to stop doing damage for a bit.

Sarcasm and my sanity aside, raids are the most interesting mode, as they actively require paying attention, and knowing certain mechanics. They are also kind of janky, and unlike the other modes, don’t scale stats with player count, so you really need other people to work with.

Heart of the Game

At its core, Treasure and Truth is a gear chase game about making number go up. There are a bunch of systems for doing this, but they all contribute to the same end result. Collecting sets of gear will activate passives, that make numbers go up. Upgrading and collecting pets will make your numbers go up. Clearing the raid will drop unique gear, which as long as another party member who isn’t even of the right class doesn’t fucking “need” it, will make numbers go up.

Look at these numbers.

And collecting the artifacts from the Gacha will make numbers go up. So let’s go back to that monetization for a moment.

Money, Money, Money*

Treasure and Truth has a cash shop. It also has a set of resource systems that I’ll save a lot time by summarizing, “You can’t directly pay to win, but you can buy upgrade materials and items that you would otherwise have to farm, in order to skip grinding.” In addition, you can also buy certain in-game market currency with a system that works the same way as a WoW token.

There are also paid supporter roles that grant in-game buffs, a Gacha for rolling artifacts, and yes, and a paid Battlepass.

You might be wondering why I’m giving Treasure and Truth less shit for this when I opened by ripping Diablo 4 for doing it. Well, for starters, Treasure and Truth isn’t $70.

I might have a bit of a double standard here, but implementing an entire cash shop is something I find impressive when done as part of a mod, and scummy when done as part of full priced retail game. The shitty monetization also isn’t relevant until late game, which I’d imagine most people might not even reach.

In Conclusion

If nothing else, I find Treasure and Truth fascinating as a project. It feels incredibly high effort for a mod on top of someone else’s game, and it’s also incredibly amusing to me as a sort of proto-MMO. As an example of this, one of the current raids has an entire set of mechanics that the community has discovered a way to skip, and this hasn’t been patched.

It’s not a lifestyle game, or even something I can see playing long term, but it’s what I wanted in terms of something I can just turn off my brain and play. And I have had some really entertaining experiences guiding people through raids, and talking with other players trying to understand how the hell certain systems work because they’re not translated properly.

Oh, and writing a set of AHK macros to farm points in the AFK mode.

If you want to play Truth and Treasure, you’ll have to start by downloading Dota 2, then you’ll want to go install this mod from the community.

Ultimately what I’ve really gotten out of Truth and Treasure is a sense of wonder and discovery that I enjoy. There are no guides to the raids. There aren’t any perfect builds. There is no checklist, or speed run of someone who got the game 4 days early reaching level cap before people who pre-ordered could play it.

There is a poorly moderated Discord, untranslated patch notes, and esoteric systems that make no sense, and occasionally might break. And frankly, I love that sort of shit.

Also, the cash shop. Which I don’t love.

Postscript Ramblings

I’ve seen a bunch of discussions on Reddit about pay-to-win MMOs are more common in Korea and China due to cultural differences. There does seem to be a pattern of pay-to-win in games that get ported from those regions. Lost Ark, Black Desert, and MapleStory are all great examples of this. But my only source for this is people saying shit on Reddit, so it’s entirely possible this is just some gamer orientalism. If it is true, Treasure and Truth definitely falls into this pattern with its monetization tactics.

Also, while we’re on the subject of crackpot theories involving China, I really wonder if Treasure and Truth was developed as a mod (as opposed to a standalone game) in order to get around the video game licensing/distribution/censorship issues in China. After all, if you can’t release your own game, co-opting someone else’s game into providing your infrastructure and underlying matchmaking and everything is really clever, and might explain why Treasure and Truth exists as a mod in the first place.

Limbus Company: Corrections

A few weeks ago I did a writeup on Limbus Company. You can read it here.

After playing more, I’ve realized there are a few factual things I got wrong in my writeup, and also a few more things I wanted to talk about. So I’ve decided to put those here.

Some Corrections

I had complained about Limbus Company’s energy system, Enkephalin. I thought that if I lost while playing, and had spent energy or modules to attempt a level, I would just lose that energy.

As it turns out, in many cases, the whole amount of energy is refunded if you lose. And in others, even though there is some loss of energy, it’s 5%. So if you spend 20 energy to enter a stage and lose, you get 19 back.

I still don’t like energy systems in games. Energy systems are in my mind, a gaming dark pattern. But Limbus Company’s energy system isn’t as bad as I thought in my initial writeup.

Glorified slot machines, and some other F2P bullshit

I never really mentioned that Limbus Company does have a Gacha system. In abstract, it’s very similar to most Gacha systems. You spend premium currency, which you can buy with real money, or earn small amounts of per day. In exchange, you get random characters.

Mechanically, though, it’s actually somewhat unusual. For starters, the game starts the players with 13 characters, and each extra “character” you get is just an alternate personality for one of those 13. There haven’t been any times when I’ve gone, “Wow, I need a character who can do X, I guess I need to spend the Gacha.”

The game also has a system for upgrading characters that boils down to: the default free characters get stronger easier, while premium characters are resource sinks.

Again, I don’t like Gacha systems. But there was never a point playing Limbus Company that made me think “I could beat this if I just spent money.” It’s a better system. Admittedly, it’s better in the same way that being stung by one wasp is better than being stung by five.

Going back to actual gameplay: Limbus Company does have a solid combat system, but it’s incredibly poorly explained and displayed, and the more I play, the more convinced I am that the tutorial was some sort of joke.

So yeah, Limbus Company. An interesting F2P game with generally reasonable systems by F2P standards, and absolutely stunning lack of meaningful tutorials.