Unfinished: The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot 02/02/2014

Oh boyo!

Doesn't Unfinished get uploaded on YT? This videoplayer is such wretched shit.

I remember this getting announced. Looks kinda neat.

EDIT: @trafalgarlaw It loaded up as the YouTube player by default when I hit play, so I'm guessing it perhaps just hadn't finished embedding that version or something like that when you clicked on it?

I agree!

@trafalgarlaw: Apparently the new video player will be rolled out next week.

this game is pretty much the definition of pay to win

gameplay-wise i think i prefer this over the castle doctrine

HAHA GG LOL.

Pretty sure you can watch other people running your castle (after the fact), and that it's one of the best things about the game. Vinny somehow just couldn't be bothered to click the clearly marked "Defend" plate at the top of the screen, with it's "1 update for you" marker. Or go to the battle log when it alerted, while he was saying "I don't think there's a way to w..."

<sigh>

@onarum: I could see this game getting really nasty with its cash shop, one can assume the required build time on these upgrades and cost to complete them will reach far beyond the 30 minutes Vinny was seeing initially. On top of that I wouldn't make any investment in this game now, if these rewards are tied to closed beta only they will all be gone as soon as open beta rolls out. If they aren't wiping servers and letting all of this carry over the game is going to be heavily skewed for players who paid out for these packs early. This game could be amazing, but its got all the free to play traps that gamers are rapidly despising.

That 'heal me' option turned me off the game immediately

Thats an awful abuse of the free to play model

Sunday content, I'll take it!

I love this whole genre of building shit for other players to run through, but I hate hate the f2p bullshit. It's designed to make it as hard as possible to make informed purchase decisions, and thus the only way to win is to not play.

Jeff's pirate voice is almost as on point as his Brad imitation.

Feel the same way but the F2P aspects really turn me off on this. I love the building a castle idea ala Dungeon Keeper and if they had released something like this for say... $40 and it's balanced with no microtransactions I would be ALL over it.

oh man Jeff's pirate is pretty soild

I played this for a while, and it was really fun until a lot later, when it became REALLY abusive about the Time to wait / free 2 play mode.

Particularly when all of your character growth is tied to your castle building and you have to wait 30 HOURS for your castle heart to upgrade... or hire more workers for a few hundred green gems...

NOTE: 30 hours in which your castle can be raided dozens of times, each time losing a pretty noticeable % of your earnings...

The dirtyness of the gating becomes really evident later on.

Contrary to what people might think however , the "heal me" button isn't really a money grab, since all bonuses are locked if you heal yourself in a castle, you win nothing from completing it after respawning, and the currency required to do so is the easily obtainable "gold", not the pay to play gems.

The crowns are simply a "player l33tness" value. You can get them either for killing people in your castle or raiding other people's castles.

There is a lot of issues of people min-maxing defences though, and in later levels, a lot of castles have the exact same combination of enemies/trap placements that simply work better ( as it happens with online pseudo competitive games like this ).

In many situations you just knew you were dead, no matter how much planning or strategy or over levelling you apply.

The concept of the game however, is quite cool, I just wish it was less f2p.

I also too may had bought this, twere it not for the business model :(

To answer the question raised at the end of the Quick Look, the 23000 gems which Vinny starts out with would cost approximately around $160 if he actually paid for them through the store.

So yeah that $20 beta pack seems to give them an insane amount of gems out of the gate, which makes it extremely unlikely that beta players would get to keep their money and stats when the game exits the beta, if they do the game would be extremely unbalanced out of the gate.

Torchligt Construction Kit?

Kinda sleazy.

Vinadingding?

Looks pretty cool. The art style kinda reminds me of Orcs Must Die. Which was also awesome.

@trafalgarlaw: There seems to have been a bug where neither videos uploaded this weekend has been uploaded to YT. The earlier Unfinished videos were uploaded, so it'll probably be fixed on monday.

Also, I haven't had any problems with the player in a few months, actually. But they're updating to the Gamespot player this week, so we'll see if that will work better for folks like you.

Also, this looks F2P as shit. A cool game hiding under there, but my God...

I've been dabbling in a few PC F2P, and this one just completely turned me off the F2P model altogether. The useless progression is so raw and exposed it sucked any desire for me to keep playing, which is a shame because the game could be fun.

Vinny and Jeff FTW ! LOL GG !

VinadingDING baby, yeah!

Its exactly the same as clash of clans

So, uhm, after people were all like “This is just like The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot!” after hearing about The Castle Doctrine I’m honestly confused about the worldview of those people.

This is bland, generic, boring. And that’s even ignoring the free to play crap. Nothing like that could be said about The Castle Doctrine. Its political message is a bit problematic since it doesn’t make much sense as satire and there are gameplay issues, but all of that makes it the exact opposite of bland, generic and boring.

The Castle Doctrine’s gameplay mechanic is intensely interesting (I think everyone could agree with that, even if they think that it fails at actually pulling it off and turning it into a good game), this is just a homeopathic version of that.

I can’t imagine someone who would like The Castle Doctrine also liking this. It’s so different. It feels like they put the underlying and awesome idea (rob other people / stop other people from robbing you) into a blender and turned it into something extremely bland. Bah! (Again, to say nothing about the free to play crap.)

This game looks fun. I will be interested to try it out, and see how long it takes before I feel the need to either pay into it, or uninstall it.

Mage-ical!

Guys, Uplay gave that pronunciation away years ago. It's definitely not pronounced "uw-play". That's how I always keep it straight.

Edit: So, that "most popular" tag on the marketplace was just a fucking lie then, huh? Classy.

Yup. Would have bought this if it wasn't for the shitty pay-to-heal shit.

This game disgusts me

RIGHT IN THE VINADINGDING

@1101101: Outside of the superficial similarity of building a base with traps to defend your treasure, and invading other people's base to steal their treasure, I agree that there is not much else in common from a game play standpoint.

So it's castle doctrine in concept but everything else ranges from meh to gross

I'm not saying this is a great game, but maybe someone wants to play something without a "political message". That might be why they go play this instead.

Same here. The game looks actually really fun, but I hate, hate, hate hetting pestered for money every few minutes. Let me give you 40$ and let's say we're even okay? Stop shoving the store in my face. Could have been a really fun game, too bad.

@1101101 said:

I'm not at all interested in playing either game, but if you made me choose one, I'd play Mighty Quest in a heartbeat. The Castle Doctrine looked ugly, tedious, and actively unfun. This one at least looks like a competent action RPG with some decent art and nice animation. Don't assume that everyone's the same as you.

The "Youtube" option in the video player is working fine for me!

@1101101:

Hmmm, to be honest I don't like this game.. and particularly not it's free to play aspects, but I feel that the castle doctrine is an extremely basic game with a "political message" which I feel is a bit shoehorned into the game. The fact that the concept may be higher and more "significant" doesn't really make the gameplay better. You are confusing concepts there.

I honestly felt that as interesting as the ideas behind the Castle Doctrine were, the game was too slow eventually becoming and exercise in frustration and boredom. Some might call that intensely interesting I guess, but I just felt it was almost broken.

On the other hand, this game has very approachable and dare I say engaging and light hearted gameplay that grows nuisances later... of course it has little to no ideological aspirations, and it is obviously brought down by the f2p design decision. but it's design is still sound.

I don't know which one is a better game, I stopped playing TMQFEL out of f2p disgust, I stopped playing Castle doctrine out of boredom. But I'm sure both will have their audience. So I guess in this particular case it is very much a matter of opinion.

However, wether you like it or not, the mechanics are basically the same, you create your dungeon, upload it, and other people online try to beat it. Denying the similarities is just unreasonable, and any other abstract appreciation is simply that.

Castle Doctrine was boring as a game, "deep" message and symbolism aside. Mighty Quest is actually fun. I didn't notice the F2P stuff being too gross in this game, but I didn't get super far. Healing in the middle of a dungeon doesn't really help you, at least back when I played. You could heal, but not get the prize for completion. It's just to survive and keep any drops you got. And yes, you can watch people run your dungeon. Clicking the battle log and/or the notification at the top shows a replay. I could see the wait times getting ridiculous later for building stuff, but that's how F2P games are. Wait or pay.

That being said, I wish it was just a $30 game so I didn't have to be bothered with all of that stuff. I say that about all F2P games though. Even if they do it clean, I'd rather buy a whole experience up front. They've been good with changing things about the store based on complaints (you used to be able to straight up buy everything with real cash). Hopefully it gets better. There's an incredibly fun game there that's being overshadowed by micro transactions.

You used to have to kill everything to open the door. I'm not sure why they dumbed that down. I had a good layout that forced people to go the opposite direction of the door to clear everything. Changing that made a lot of the castles super boring.

"The Vinny Doctrine" makes me think of a sequel to the Stanley Parable that features Vinny and the narrator from Stanley Parable verbally sniping at each other over the entire game.

I'd play that.

Weekend content is great!

UBIbucks will be the currency of the future.

Maybe it really is a fun game, but I am totally 100% burned out on F2P games.

The Grindy Task for Boring Icons

The Pay-to-Win Chore for Ubi's Profit

The Transfer of Real Money for Virtual Goods

So, bland, generic, boring. I mean, sure, there are people who like this kind of stuff, but the problem I have with this is that it is just completely different from The Castle Doctrine (just for the record, I don’t really care about its political message, mostly because I don’t get it; it’s muddied, pointless, doesn’t work as satire and is, indeed, shoehorned, so I would agree with everyone here that it fails in that regard, but that’s not really what I’m talking about here) and no one who would like the gameplay in The Castle Doctrine would ever like this for the same reasons. It’s not the same. The similarities are entirely superficial.

It takes this awesome idea and dilutes it. Result: Ok looking action RPG. Boring. Maybe you like it if you like action RPGs – but it’s not in any way interesting, not in the same way The Castle Doctrine is.

The Castle Doctrine has razor sharp mechanics. It’s ruthless. That’s what makes it so interesting (and flawed, all at the same time). This is fluffy and boring. Accessible, sure, but for something that has only its mechanics going for it that strikes me as incredibly boring.