Worst MMO Ever? - Vindictus

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My best guess is, many years ago, Guild Wars 1 and TERA had a secret child, which they forgot about.

Vindictus is a hub-based online action combat RPG with some MMO elements, it's a fantasy Warframe with none of the polish.

It's not a bad game, it's just not a fantastic one either, it's a relationship good enough to stay in, but bad enough to never quite be as happy as you know you could be.

Thanks to the Patreon supporters and Twitch subs who keep the channel alive.

[jptata]

Despite the flaws it remains the only game to ever let me kick a gnoll in the junk, then grab it by throat and used it to beat other gnolls. It gets a special place in my memories for that.

[reviewbear]

I'm a veteran from the early days of Vindictus. The game was much harder in the beginning and was actually quite challenging for the time. Armor and weapons had more meaning and you had to really know how to use your skills and iFrames. Nexon just made it all easy-mode but it wasn't originally intended for that.

[shadic]

Fun fact about the changes made to the game: There used to be a jumping mechanic! Complete with jump attacks too! The reason it's not in the game anymore is because the devs were so incompetent with balancing one character's jump attack damage that they totally scrapped the mechanic and no longer allow your character to jump

[svetlinsvilenov]

"Vindictus isn't a world, it's a vehicle" - it used to be completely different 10 years ago when I started and there were only 3 chapters in total in the west release. You'd need to walk between the buildings to talk to the NPCs, and also the docks were a separate zone. Back then the power creep didn't exist yet, so avoiding damage was required. And then we saw the enhancement system, and that you could buy lootboxes that had a chance of containing maxed out gear pieces. And then the cosmetic shop hit, and it wasn't cleavage-oriented. It went past that and straight into bikinis :D

[Self-replicating_whatnot]

I love the idea of escort quest where you can carry an NPC instead of dealing with their (usually broken) pathfinding.

[TheNeoVid]

I keep intending to come back to Vindictus, since it's the only game to let me grab raid bosses out of their attack animations and impale them with their own weapons. When I did fire it back up after years away, it handed me a Returning Player Bundle containing a full set of armor and weapons that was far better than anything I'd been able to grind out during the couple of years I did play seriously. I've never had a gift that good feel so depressing before.

[shanegrayson]

Man, I yearn for the day Josh does Maplestory.

[Katzenwolf]

Ugh. It infuriates me watching this and experiencing the game now since I know what the game used to be. Crafting was introduced early on because you didn't get quest gear, you had to make it as you went and farm for it. The enemies and bosses were so hard that I saw a lot of people needing to group up to fight Decisive Battle's gnoll boss. Traps and falls used to break armor really quick lowering your defenses. Secondary weapons like the grappling hook and flash bombs were necessary to trip and stop bosses, holding them down for your party to beat on. The end of the ruins levels were a 'wall' that tested your abilities. That 'drop-down' in the ice caverns taught you to push those heavy blocks through the wood bars, but they removed them for some reason? They changed it all so you could progress faster and 'catch up' to the new story parts. Even Glas Ghillean's a joke now.

[_Ease]

As someone who has played this game for over 7, 000 hours and had a rank 3 character I can honestly say that everything in this video is pretty accurate. The only thing that changes as you progress is that the combat becomes more engaging, though the gameplay loop remains the same. It becomes incredibly repetitive, tedious and unrewarding, even for a multiplayer RPG. The combat is the only thing that holds this game together. Barely.

[nicholaschan]

Couple things that might not have been clear just from playing the game:

1. The game used to be way, way harder, like regular enemies would hit you for 10-20% of your hp or so and traps hurt, and exactly like dark souls you needed to play well to make it to the boss in good enough shape to take it down. However they decided to make every player on each character play through the entire main story to get to end game, which means they streamlined the hell out of the game, and now it's super easy. In a party it's even easier. If you're playing solo, I'd say the 75% mark of season 1 is where new players will get their wakeup call against Ingkells.

2. The tone and gameplay used to match the harsh difficulty. Using improvised weapons was actually good, you'd kick enemies while they were down to finish them off, it was great.

3. Kael is probably the most simple, unga bunga character in the game. Almost everyone else uses both left click and right click in a sort of combo tree, which seriously carries the combat by itself. Despite playing the game on and off for years on many characters, and seeing the same goddamn levels and enemies hundreds of times, this simple system keeps the combat fun for me. When I tried Kael, I quit him pretty quick because of this. I would strongly recommend giving another character a shot to experience this, because I unironically believe Vindictus has the best combat of any MMO. My personal favorites are Lynn Lann Fiona and Lethor.

4. The game gives you full sets of enchanted armor all the way to level 100, and you get more than enough AP to max level everything that actually matters on your character. The game is pay to win, but only starting at endgame, and even then, if you suck at combat no amount of money will carry you. Skill > all in vindictus.

Overall, despite the years me and this game have been through, I've never taken it seriously as an mmo. I just hop on, mess around for a bit, hop off, without ever grinding the raids or other content, then leave for months or years. But somehow that combat always pulls me back in eventually.

[ShippuuSomeNumbers]

Thanks for covering this game, I've played for a long time but its basically invisible to the wider world of games due to Nexon's decisions both historically and presently. I wanted to just reply to a few bits, in a probably disjointed manner. Length warning, but I will try to keep these as brief as I can. Omega tl;dr: This explains some history of Vindictus, that it wasn't always this way.

A few of the things stated in the shown reviews are outdated, and aren't issues anymore. To tl;dr and oversimplify, some of those reviews are from before a big and controversial update in 2017 that Nexon called RISE. It is to blame for most of your complaints in the video actually. But what it did bring is forms of guaranteed progression without need to spend. Instead of items being permanently destroyed from enhancement, you could restore them for a bit of AP and then reforge them with materials. This lets you enhance the same item infinitely until you reach the maximum (+15). 15 looks like a big number, but 0 to 8 is trivial and 10 is not a big deal to do. Only 12, 13, 14, and 15 are a struggle. It also builds in a max amount of times you are allowed to fail, so that you can only be so unlucky. Enchantment also has alternatives, where failing an enchant gives you a tradable scrap of the scroll you tried. You can either amass or buy four scraps, and create a copy of the scroll that cannot fail. This provides a route to enchant without runes. There's also a rune you can buy off people on the ingame marketplace from the lootbox that guarantees enchant success once, but that is a whole other topic.

Early game (Levels 1 to 99) was *massively* dumbed down in the RISE update. It actually had a difficulty curve and everything, but they turned it all into wet noodles to get people through early game faster. These changes are very contentious among the playerbase, with most not liking it but not agreeing on what should be done instead. A lot don't like doing the same story/the same battles over and over on 10+ chars, but don't want it completely cut either.

In Hoarfrost Hollow (the icy cave) you encountered a set of weights and a wood floor bit with a hole in it. Before RISE, that hole was not there. You had to push a weight onto the wood floor to break it and drop through. The original Perilous Ruins (the first area) also did not have that pointless ledge climb or the tower, but those came a little after RISE. RISE also deleted very nearly the entire basic crafting system in the game for everything before Lv.90, which is why you never got any info about what to do with your drops. You'd have to learn an Expertise (a skill to personally make gear), which isn't part of the main story and is extremely out of the way.

The level up gifts, progressing story chat from anywhere, and other things are also from RISE and post-RISE "early game QoL". All of it basically wants to bullet train you to Level 100, where the game actually starts. It's unfortunate. Many longtime players have fond memories of the bosses in the first region just absolutely decimating them and their entire team.

Being specific would be major spoilers for the story, but you do engage in combat with several characters that you know well from previous story events.

There are some legitimate issues with their monetization strategies. As you mentioned, in the last few years they've gone all in on cleavage. Then once that wasn't enough, they added outfits that increase your chest size to unrealistic proportions. Recently, they've gone even further beyond than that. Regarding VVIP, which you mentioned as "on sale". It looks like that, but it is not on sale. It is always that price. Nothing is on sale at a discount right now. The 1000 AP Capsule you mention being in the shop is an issue of a different kind though. At one time 1k AP might have been a lot, but nowadays it would take about 3-5 minutes to earn. It is terrible yes, but mostly because it is a total ripoff. It wasn't for sale back when it would have been notable, fortunately.

The pay2win is the lootboxes. Outfits from the lootboxes can be worth dramatically more than any drop you can get ingame, and can be sold. A rare drop might be 5-90m, but a Legendary female outfit is ~500m.

Regarding left click to win, each character plays differently. They all snooze through the first 99 levels, but Kael is unique in that his combos aren't split between left clicks and right clicks. Where the newest character (Dan-Ah) might have combo sequences of (left click L, right click R) that look like LR, LLR, LLRR, LLLRR, LLLRR Tab, Kael has his normals and smashes as a single series, and his right click is instead Parry. If early game wasn't nerfed, you'd have had more reliance on Parrying and countering (once unlocked), and it would have felt less one dimensional.

Vindictus had amazing combat for its first 5 years or so, but the gigantic nerfs (and power creep) have made it vastly easier than it used to be. It has lost its way over the years, and rather than improving its combat it is doing literally anything else. A bad dating sim knockoff, a bad MOBA-like PVP mode, a bad copy of RS3's Player Owned Ports (I don't know what this game type is called).

I still play, but I can easily understand why new players would be turned away by the frankly horrific impression that early game gives. The turbo cleavage mode is also becoming a sour point for some players of late, at least in the NA/EU region.

[Nuvizzle]

This is another MMO that was actually incredible on release (and honestly all the way through the first act of the story - in fact it even dramatically improved in the second half of season 1) but then sadly greatly outlasted its lifespan. By season 2 they'd swapped development directors and the game pretty much immediately started to go off the rails. A lot of the difficult combat encounters of the past were gradually replaced with gimmick bosses that barely take advantage of the game's combat system at all, lots of big sandbag bosses that really only serve as DPS checks, longer and more tedious missions for grindier rewards. They introduced an entirely new town and area, but decided for whatever reason not to continue the season 1 storyline and instead do something entirely different and almost completely unrelated. They realized this was a mistake later and tried to correct it by returning to the previous storyline and sort-of trying to connect the two, but.... it really doesn't work, the story just becomes increasingly incomprehensible and I was entirely divested from it by the middle of season 3. The combat, bosses, loot, crafting, and everything else also continued to degrade all this time, new systems are never really reconciled with old ones which is what leads to so much incoherence when you're playing the older parts of the game, which they've dumbed down into an extremely long glorified tutorial. Except, honestly, because there's NO CHALLENGE in any of the older content, you don't actually learn anything during that long pointless tutorial - so you reach the part of the game where enemies suddenly have 10x more health and do 20x more damage and you just get your ass kicked forever because the game never taught you how to fight anything the intended way. Oh, and now you need to do daily raid grinds for .01% drop rate items to improve your character, and buy cash shop items to upgrade them to the point where they're actually strong enough for content of your level unless you want to risk an extremely high chance that your equipment will fail to upgrade and break.

[JonathanXLindqviust]

Vindictus was amazing for its time, me and my makes laughed hysterically at "No time to explain, grab a kobold." and throwing them at eachother. I tried it again this year, but they had deleted my character (which had paid cosmetics), everything was much more ugly than I remember, the town- and missions were completely empty. Vindictus is a ship that has long since left harbour.

[lucasd]

I remember playing this back in beta. Had so many fun memories with the break system, when secondary weapons actually did something, and when raids actually posed a challenge (Hidden solo Season of Macha, anyone?). But now when I log in it's just an empty shell of what once was. I'd gladly play a Vindictus 2 or some other spiritual successor should it ever come to be as long as it's not handled this poorly.

[ToysForTheGods]

When this game was released way back in the day my friends and I started in Beta and played it for years. It was easily the greatest game we had ever played and still to this day no game has come even close to the epic boss fights that require your whole team to be on point and work together. The greatness this game once was needs to be recreated today.

[mawnkey]

Circa 2010 this game was actually pretty damn amazing. Bosses were tough, combat was fluid, cash shop was a little obnoxious but tolerable. In fact I can remember the friends I played with being blown away at my work to hit the skill ceiling on tanking many of the harder bosses as a Fiona never dodging while taking 0 damage. It was incredibly fun and rewarding. By 2012 it was headed downhill and I quit. Looks like now they've entirely destroyed low level balance to get everybody to the upper levels quickly, entirely destroying the game's original appeal of always being fun to play no matter how far along you were. Disappointing, but unsurprising because Nexon. I'd recommend people stay well the hell away. This game's star burned out almost a decade ago.

[MrBat]

Everyone has said it but still this game used to be sooo hard. The gnoll boss would tear you apart, hero mode of missions was super difficult. They had a hero mission of all the regular missions to make them hard and you could farm them for scrolls to enchant your weapons. I remember when they first introduced the dragons my goodness!!!! That was hard! Was in there almost the full hour before we beat it. secondary weapons also held a huge impact to give your team an opening to attack. Spearing a boss enough times to knock them down, blinding them for more openings, chaining them down to hold them from attacking to again give an opening or using a spear to stop glas from destroying your teammate after he grabs them. Now I come back and they try to rlly fast track everyone to the endgame but I hear it's super easy now. It's still rlly fun to play but not as hard as before. Kinda disappointing there, but still a real fun game to hop on and play

[mosu]

15:40 as a Vindictus veteran i can tell you that it was a difficult game some years back. They made the game so easy nowadays that to me is not worth playing anymore.. i think they did that in order to appeal to larger crowd. But it is ridiculous.. you could go solo to huge raid bosses and win if you knew the bosses's moves and have good reactions and tactics.. but you could also die in 1 to 3 hits depending on stats and mistakes made. kinda like dark souls. You couldn't get into tougher dungeons if your stats weren't great. People won't let you join parties and not for bad reason mostly because you couldn't win. But now it's really easy to do so as there is a solo mode now that underpowers the boss. 19:57 that is a change i did not understand at all because you had to travel to every different city for every set of dungeons. It has only 4 cities and now they made it such that there's no need to see them at all. They added some dungeons and whatever but i always hoped that they added some more towns and different activities within the dungeons other than killing a boss... they tried.. they did some here and there but it was pointless by the end. Vindictus used to be a great game at times.. but the developers killed it instead of improving it.. they added and changed stuff that wasn't needed instead of provind a more interesting world. Note: they changed the starting dungeons where you fight the wolf men.. they looked different and had different layouts.. i have no idea why.

[mattakudesu]

I've played Vindictus almost since it's inception. It was one of those games that absolutely blew me away with the gameplay trailer. After several years of playing Vindictus off and on, I can say the combat is delectable, especially for the time it came out. However, as much as they have tried to add to the story over the years, this is just a basic dungeon crawler. Pick your archetype character and run through corridors of enemies and bosses repeatedly nigh endlessly is basically the tldr of this game. It can certainly be fun, the combat is like 90% of the fun, but over time this game just kind of fades into the background because they haven't done much with it.

[Lawrencerussell]

This game used to feel really responsive and me and a friend had a great time with it. Overtime more concepts were added, some were forgotten, cute cat girls and cosmetics were introduced, and eventually the game just started to feel like a shell of its former self. I feel this way with a lot of games these days. A quick climb to the top and forgetting everything left behind.