Category: Video Games

Super Raft Boat Together

I had hopes for Super Raft Boat Together. Not high hopes; if the game wasn’t good, my year wasn’t going to be ruined. And likewise, Super Raft Boat Together didn’t pop my hopes like a balloon. It just sort of deflated them, like a bouncy house at the end of a birthday party. It was still fun to climb around, at least for a bit. But eventually it’s just a bunch of sad plastic, and you have to leave.

Super Raft Boat Together is a multiplayer top-down roguelite. The game’s twist on the genre is that instead of going through multiple rooms and challenges, the staging area is a raft. Said raft is apparently made of cake given the speed and ferocity with which it’s devoured by sharks and other denizens of the ocean if they aren’t shot before they reach it.

Mechanics

The structure on the whole is simple. Start a run, enter a zone. Fight off two waves of enemies, then fight a boss. After each boss, visit a shop and buy upgrades. After the final boss, start over.

Before I sink Super Raft Boat Together, I do want to say some nice things. The music is fantastic, and I love it. One of my favorite songs is used in this trailer. The actual gunplay and movement is pretty decent. I don’t love it as much as I love the music, but it’s not where my primary problem with the game comes from.

I have two zones of issue with Super Raft Boat Together, and how they intersect. Those zones are the roguelite mechanics, and the boss design.

Issues

Let’s start with the roguelite mechanics. I have a bunch of minor complaints here, so I’ll start with those. The game is pretty vague about what exactly its upgrades do, and to what extent. For example, one upgrade is “Chance to shoot fire bullets.” This is incredibly unhelpful. What’s my chance to shoot a fire bullet? If I get multiple stacks of that upgrade, is the chance to set them on fire additive or multiplicative? Or is it non-existent? Do fire bullets set enemies on fire, and if so, does that fire damage stack? Or do they just do extra damage?

How close? How much damage? I don’t know.

Compare this to something like Hades, or Risk of Rain 2, both games where items have explicit and defined properties, with delicious numbers included. (In Risk of Rain’s case, those numbers are on an inventory screen, but they’re still in the game!) Those numbers are important, because there’s a big difference between “+1% chance to deal critical damage” and “+25% chance to deal critical damage.” But Super Raft Boat Together doesn’t make this distinction, and this makes trying to create a build incredibly difficult, because very few items are explicit in their function.

It’s also not helped by what I’d describe as inconsistent or undefined terminology. A large portion of the game is building out the raft to provide space to maneuver during a run, but Super Raft Boat Together uses both the phrases “build speed” and “build rate” when talking about the rate at which the character generates raft pieces to place. Are they interchangeable? Are they different stats, and if so, which is which? I can’t tell from playing.

Both of these design choices make it much harder for me to engage with what I’ve always found to be a large portion of what makes roguelites fun: creating builds with synergies between various items.

The other thing that makes this difficult is that many of the items in Super Raft Boat Together don’t feel designed to be synergistic. There are very few items that scale off of other stats that can be influenced. My favorite example of this would be an item called Spectral Hammer. It’s only active when the player has died in a multiplayer run. In that case, it doubles their ability to place temporary ghost planks.

It has zero synergy with anything else in the game. I’m not even sure there are other items that buff being a ghost, and frankly, being a ghost is pretty useless. Better then nothing! But mostly useless.

So now, bosses, and boss design. I have several different categories of problems with the bosses in the game. Let’s start with the simplest ones: they’re pretty boring, there aren’t many variants, and several bosses share almost identical patterns (looking at you Giant Jellyfish, Giant Fish, and Giant Pufferfish). In addition, several of the boss fights aren’t boss fights. They’re just an extra wave of enemies. Shark Swarm, Ghost Swarm, and Fish Swarm aren’t bosses. They’re just an extra third wave fight.

The biggest problem I have, though, is with the game’s final boss, the Super Kraken. The Super Kraken is not incredibly difficult. However, it does something most of the other bosses don’t: it absolutely shreds every inch of your raft.

This would be mostly just annoying if it wasn’t for one mechanic I haven’t talked about yet: mercenaries and pets.

Mercenaries are hired with coins. Coins are added to a total between runs, but not kept between runs. Pets are bought with cash. Both mercs and pets are valuable sources of DPS, but like the player, they can’t shoot if they’re not on a raft. They also can’t build rafts, and pets will just float away if they get knocked off somehow.

Pre-Super Kraken
Post-Super Kraken, on the best fight I’ve ever gotten.

Unlike most other bosses, the Kraken will absolutely kill your raft, and kill mercs because it attacks a lot more of the screen (many other bosses will just actively target human players). This means that by the time the game loops, most of the raft is destroyed, all the mercs and pets are usually dead, and everyone is hanging on by a thread.

Which brings up another problem: there’s no shop after killing the Super Kraken. Instead, each player gets three free items, one of the highest rarity, and two more of variable rarities. Except many of those items won’t be damage items, and the second round vastly increases the number of foes, while also vastly buffing their health.

End result: It’s incredibly difficult to come out of the Super Kraken fight in a good position to continue the run, even if every player has full health.

It’s also hard to think of a reason to want to continue the run. The enemies are re-used, just with more of them. The bosses are actually now easier than the base waves.

Conclusion

Super Raft Boat Together isn’t awful, but none of its pieces click together. It falls flat on key parts of what makes a roguelike compelling for me, lacking both interesting boss variation, and meaningful and compelling build synergy. If you need a one time thing for game night, it’s fine, but I wouldn’t recommend it in many other situations.

If you’re still interested, you can find Super Raft Boat Together here on Steam. And you can yell at me for my bad opinions here, on the Site Formerly Known As Twitter.

Idleon – The Idle MMO

This writeup is technically about Idleon. But it’s also about Universal Paperclips, Spaceplan, and Cookie Clicker.

These are all incremental or clicker games. It’s a somewhat nebulous genre primarily defined by clicking, and ‘number go up,’ but much like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said, “I’ll know it when I see it.”

Admittedly he was not talking about video games.

And you might have noted that I didn’t put in links to any of those games.

Mechanics

Since we’re talking about Idleon, I’ll give it the minimum amount of respect I feel obligated to give anything I write about: a discussion of its mechanics at least a bit.

Idleon is an idle game. You make a character and kill monsters to complete quests and open new maps. You also get loot to craft new equipment. You’ve got your traditional MMO skills. Get ore to smelt into bars to craft equipment. Cut tree to get wood to get more equipment.

Get better equipment, go to a new area to get better equipment to go to a new area repeat until the heat death of the universe.

Idleon’s unique mechanic that separates it from some other idle games or clicking crafting games coughRunescapecough is that the player unlocks the ability to make multiple characters. So one character can be tasked on cutting wood, while another mines, and another farms monsters. Of course, these alts also need their own gear, and sometimes quest progression, and crafting items and carry upgrades and….

On Idle Games

Okay, so mechanics explained. Time for opinions. I am annoyed by these types of games. It isn’t because they’re bad, or poorly made, or uninteresting. It’s because they consume my time like a black hole.

If I met someone who sold drugs to kids “ironically” to make a statement about art, I don’t think we would get along. I feel a similar way about idle games.

Again, I’m not calling them bad. Spaceplan is really neat. Universal Paperclips might be the best doomsday AI simulator ever. Idleon is interesting.

But I don’t think there are any other genres of games that are so blatantly disrespectful of the players’ time, even within the current live service trend. While those games limit player progression with weeklies, and dailies, and time gates, and check-in events, they aren’t doing what clickers do. Live service games try to demand your attention, and parcel out progression. But they don’t demand that you actively do nothing.

And I resent that. I opened Universal Paperclips yesterday to remind myself how it worked, and then I “played” the game for two hours. Two hours in which I clicked and waited, and clicked and waited, and that was it. Then I turned on the cheats menu, and pushed to the end of the game that way.

Idle games are artificial progression incarnate. You can have the most effective build, set up an auto-clicker, but you always have to wait. Idleon doesn’t require the auto-clicker part, but it does give reduced gains for having the application closed, so in theory the best way to play the game is to turn the game on, and then go do something else.

If I wanted to run my computer idle for 8 hours a day with no real benefit, I would mine crypto-currency.

I “played” a fair amount of Idleon. I didn’t get incredibly far, but when I saw that the number of players with the achievement for unlocking World 2 was about 14%, I realized I was ready to be done.

Hold Up, I’m Not Done Ranting Yet

I resent idle games because for whatever reason, they work on me. I am entirely capable of looking at them, understanding how the mechanics work, and what they are going to make me do, why they are exploitive, and then I play them anyway.

One of my long term life struggles has been dealing with what I call the Oreo Problem. If I have a pack of Oreos, I will eat all of them. Usually in one sitting! The same is true for a variety of junky food.

I know I’ll do this. I don’t want to do this. I like Oreos, but I would like to like them in moderation. I cannot eat a reasonable number of Oreos. Instead, I don’t buy Oreos. I don’t buy cookies. I don’t buy chips.

I have the understanding to recognize my behavior, but not the capacity to change it in the moment. So instead my solution is to just not engage.

Back to Idleon.

I can look at Idleon, and understand why the structure is exploitive, but I can’t stop myself from playing it.

Why does the game give better rewards for having the game open and running? My guess is because having the game running boosts hours played stats, and bumps the game in the ratings and Steam suggestions.

Why are shops limited in stock, and restock once a day? Well, because it slows down progression for quests reliant on buying large numbers of those items, meaning players have to log in over multiple days and build a habit.

Why are stack slots limited? Well, it means that players want to log in every 12 hours or so, so that they don’t lose items that they can’t carry with them.

Why can I only have one item in active production at a time, even if I’ve unlocked more? Well, because now I want to buy the gold hammer in the cash shop so I can do two instead.

I recognize all of this, and guess what? I still want to play. I still want to boot up my computer for that increased progression.

I’m not going to. After this writeup, I’m going to uninstall the game. I’m not even going to boot in one more time, because if I do, I might get dragged back in.

Conclusion

I don’t recommend Idleon, even though I want to play more. I don’t recommend Universal Paperclips, even though it’s a brilliant exploration of AI misalignment and a whole other bunch of fun sci-fi concepts like von Neumann probes.

I just can’t.

I honestly can’t quite decide what my ultimate opinion on these sorts of games is. I think it might be something like this: There are certain design patterns that, regardless of their implementation, can just short circuit certain types of brains. At their best, they’re something like nerd sniping. At their worst, they’re games that actively encourage their players to run their computers for no reason.

I think that if you use those sorts of patterns as the base of your game, even if it’s being done ironically, you’re being a bit of an asshole, and I’d like you to stop.

I can’t stop myself from eating Oreos, but I can choose to not buy them. I can’t stop playing clickers, but I can choose not start.

BattleBit Remastered

I’m not sure I have anything new to say about BattleBit Remastered. On one hand, I’ve played close to 60 hours of it, bought copies for friends, and generally had a really good time with it. On the other hand, the game already has thousands of positive reviews, and hundreds of thousands of players. So my writeup feels like tossing a single match into a volcano.

BattleBit Remastered is falls into the genre of the “Massive” FPS. That is to say, the smallest maps and game sizes available are 32 players vs. 32 players. The largest games are 127 vs. 127.

BattleBit doesn’t have any features that feel outwardly revolutionary or genre defining. The thing is, this doesn’t really matter because it does everything correctly. Perhaps the biggest thing for me is that the game is incredibly well performing even at the highest player counts and game modes.

A Quick Story

Because of the high player count, it’s easy to assume that BattleBit is a game where a single player or group of players can’t have any impact. I don’t think that’s true.

One of my favorite moments was when I was playing on a winter map with only a single set of roads. Working with my friends, we managed to sneak around back, and seize control of a small outpost area. We then built a spawn point near the area, and set of barricades blocking only road to the other 75% of the map. This meant that vehicles couldn’t get past, and led to at least a dozen enemy vehicles including APC’s and tanks just slamming full stop into the hastily erected barriers, and letting us shred them with rockets.

It’s moments like this that make BattleBit feel great for me. Working with other folks to flank or block areas can feel really fun and meaningful!

Just Very Good

It’s hard to figure out the best way to praise a game for just doing almost everything very well. Maps are interesting and balanced, offering spots for both sniping and close range combat. The guns feel pretty good, with comparable stats and time to kill. No single class feels overpowered.

The game also has an effective party and squad system that just works really well. Players can just create a party when they log into the game, and then invite friends later. There’s no having to back out, no MMR, and the high player count means I’ve never run into the “Oops, we already have a full party” issue.

That’s not to say that I consider BattleBit to be perfect. There are some small things that are frustrating around loadouts and stats. It’s not possible to have more than one loadout saved for any class, which means that swapping weapons based on the map is a bit aggravating. I also find the body armor/helmet/backpack system incredibly confusing, as cosmetic variations of various items are intermingled with the stat changing ones.

But none of these issues actually impact the core gameplay: running, gunning, and getting shot by a sniper halfway across the map.

In Conclusion

BattleBit is also blessedly free of all the other bullshit I usually feel obligated to point out or excuse. There is no battlepass, no microtransactions, no in-game cosmetic store. The game is $20. You can buy it once and then play it with your friends for as long as you want.

If you like first-person shooters like Call of Duty or Battlefield, you can buy this game right now safe in the knowledge you’ll get your money’s worth.

Grim Dawn

Grim Dawn is an ARPG that is probably intended to be in the vein of Diablo 2. I honestly don’t know. I never played Diablo 2.

What I do know is that after 11 hours, 17 deaths, and one kill on the final boss, I do not recommend it. In fact, I actively loathe Grim Dawn. I have a lot of problems with the game, but upon reflection, I think they break down to two large gripes.

The Good Bits

Before I devote a large amount of time to eviscerating every other aspect of this game, I’d like to take a moment to say some nice things about Grim Dawn. Don’t worry, it won’t be long, because there aren’t very many.

I like how the game can run without an internet connection. If the apocalypse happens and I happen to have Grim Dawn installed, I’d have a reason to kidnap people to run in a giant hamster wheel and charge my computer.

I like that the game has auto-pickup for certain types of loot, like currency and certain crafting items. Not having to click every time I want to grab something is nice.

Fundamental Problems

Grim Dawn has two fundamental problems as an ARPG. Every other issue I have with the game is either the result of these problems, or caused by them, and they are as follows:

  1. Movement is slow.
  2. Skills are fundamentally uninteresting.

Movement speed in Grim Dawn is really slow. Like, incredibly slow. One of the few really interesting items I found in my 11 hours was a pair of boots that gave 17% movement speed. They also had the downside that if you got hit, you lost 20% movement speed. I ended the game with a pair of drawback free 11% movement speed boots, and 6% buff. The end result is that the game feels incredibly slow.

This matters because of all the problems that spiral out of it. Every quest is a fetch or kill quest that requires you to go out, find something, and then teleport back home to turn it in, so you’re going to spend a lot of time walking around.

Also, in terms of finding things, the maps are large, confusing, and generally janky messes. Sometimes if you click somewhere, you will be autopathed to where you need to go! Sometimes, you will not.

A fully zoomed out view of Blood Groves.

Maps cannot be overlaid on top of the game screen unlike in many other ARPG’s, adding to the difficultly of exploration. Instead, you’ll have to constantly open the map and check your location, or leave it open the middle of screen.

Finally, the GUI isn’t modifiable. Meaning that if you play on an Ultrawide, some HUD elements like pet health will be the in VERY far corner of the screen, but the map can’t be moved around and will always sit dead center.

None of this would be as big a problem, though, if you could move faster than molasses.

There’s also one other thing that prevents fast movement. Unlike Path of Exile or Diablo 3, there are no skills that offer mobility or movement in the base game.

This brings us to the other big thing that Grim Dawn doesn’t have: fun skills.

I wanted to try to make a summoner build, as I usually play Necromancers in ARPG’s. I do this so I can live out my deepest, darkest fantasy: being in upper management. I come up with high level strategic objectives (murder people for loot) and delegate responsibilities to my HMZ (highly mobile zombies) to fulfill them.

So how did that work in Grim Dawn? Pretty unimpressively.

I got through Grim Dawn on Veteran Normal difficulty using a total of 7 skills. Skills 1-3 summoned pets, but only one pet each, so I would just cast them each time my other pets died. Skill 4 was an aura, so I would toggle it on and forget about it. Skill 5 was a temporary buff, that I would just activate every 30 seconds or so, and skill 6 was a small orb that did poison in an AOE. Skill 7 was a swarming dot/right click skill.

But for those who are counting, there are only 2 skills I would use actively: the poison orb, and the buff. And only one of those had to be aimed.

By the end of the game, my character was less entertaining and satisfying to play than pretty much any Dota 2 hero or any build I’ve done in PoE. The skills just felt bad.

This led to a bunch of my other problems. Trying to find specific key locations or waypoints when you have to slog through tons of bad combat is annoying. Every boss fight being the same “poke, walk away, poke” for 3 minutes is annoying and boring. Speaking of which: what’s up with every boss fight (except 2) just being a dude in armor?

Also, this is the first ARPG I’ve ever played where I was enviously looking at the NPC’s and going “Wow, that skill seems fun, or at least more useful. Wish I could use that!”

Some Other Nitpicks

These are all minor, and frankly, they’re all the sorts of things that I would overlook if I had fun with the game. But I didn’t, so let’s complain!

Nobody has ever enjoyed back tracking to turn in quests. Lost Ark solved this for ARPG’s, and the solution very simple. I pickup the quest in Area A, Go to Area B, and when I finish, I turn in at Area C, the area I’m going to next. Stop making me backtrack.

Also, the quests!

These were all the quests I had unfinished by the end of the game.

I think that Grim Dawn is trying to do a thing where you have to really read the dialogue of each quest, and then carefully do it. This would be interesting if quests were ever anything more than “Kill the Dude” or “Find The Obtusely Hidden Thing.” But it means that if you don’t remember exactly what that quest giver said, good luck. Also the rewards are pretty shit, and you can’t hide individual quests on the UI.

By the final 75% of the game, I just stopped picking them up all together, mostly because I didn’t care about these people or the story.

Which brings us to the story. I think the story of Grim Dawn is trying to be all spooky and grimdark. It mostly fails. There’s only so many times a poor survivor can be all “Please, find my family/pet/Jays” and then you get there and they’re killed/eaten/creased before I stop caring.

Also, there’s some sort of “Actions have consequences” system, but I want to stress something: I don’t know who gives a shit about actions/morality in an ARPG. Presumably the same person who thought I’d read all that quest text. Most ARPG players I know would kill every NPC in the starting zone for a 5% item quantity boost. 5% exp boost? You bet your ass I’m decking Deckard Cain.

The story is also unsatisfying! You start out fighting monster group A, and then it turns out that monster group B is also here, and you have to stop their evil plans. And then you fail, and have to kill their resurrected god instead. So you do, but then the world is still shit. PoE didn’t have the greatest story in the world, but at least after you completed the story mode, there was a single map where everyone throws a great big party. (Also, Kitava’s head goes in the middle of table like a gorey centerpiece, which I’ve always enjoyed.)

Also, the enemies are boring. There are like 5 of them, and most of the bosses are just dude in armor, or a tentacle thing. There’s a whole section near the end of the game where you find a bunch of ruined pre-industrial tank things that have been tipped over and destroyed. For a moment you’ll be like “Oh, are we gonna have to fight one of those? Are we gonna ride one of those?” No, no we’re not. They’re just there to build ambiance.

In Conclusion

Back when I played PoE, sometimes after grinding for several hours, or trying to power through the game’s campaign to get to the rest of the game, I would reach a sort of fugue state. I would get tired, drained, lose interest, and feel like my brain was melting out of my ears.

Grim Dawn managed to make feel like this before the first boss.

There were moments of amusement, or interest, but they were few and far between. And they were massively outweighed by the thoughts of “I could be playing PoE/D3/Don’t Die, Collect Loot instead of this.”

I am $12 poorer, and have 12 hours less life, but you dear reader need not make my mistake.

Grim Dawn is 50% off on Steam at time of writing, but you can save even more money by not buying it.

PS: It’s possible that some of the DLC solves the issues I have with this game. To which I say, if it makes the game not garbage, maybe just include it in the actual game.

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.