casE sensiTive
kiwifarms.net
I've been playing their games since 2005 and I still play and keep up with them fairly regularly.
I was really into Adventure Quest classic early last decade when they were rolling out massive balance changes (known as the sweep back then). However they lost 2 major staff members at the end of 2014 and ever since then things just haven't been the same. One of the staff (Lord Barrius) was in charge of several storylines and played a big role in the item design. You can tell the staff were struggling for some time after. Story progress has been slow since and they've switched to smaller yearly stories. There has been several massive overhauls of old items (even recently with the paladin update) but overall the meta has shifted in a way I can't keep up with nor do I enjoy. I still go on every now and then but I don't find as much enjoyment.
Dragonfable has been the most consistent game out of all of them. The story still gets updated twice a month and is easy to follow along. It doesn't AQ's issue where a large part of the early story was lost to time, or became very convoluted. The staff also adds challenge fights at the start of each month for endgame players. Only problem I have is that the updates are very small, sometimes being a short cutscene, which is understandable because I think there's less than 5 people working on the game. I give huge props to both AQ and DF's team for keeping up with weekly releases with such limited resources.
AQW on the other hand is a shitshow. It's a dress up game with extremely simplistic combat. There is a huge focus on microtransactions and rare items. I'd hate to be the artist who has to constantly churn out art that will only be in the game for a month. In general art quality has dipped in the past 2 years. The story haven't been good since the Chaos Lords saga ended in 2014. Gameplay is still the same as when the game launched a decade ago. There's also several items, some of which do affect gameplay, that require long monotonous grinds. This has lead to botting, which lead to future items having even bigger grinds. I don't think the game was ever good, but after doing the same shit for so long the polish has worn off.
Epic Duel seemed cool when I first tried it, but had too much microtransactions for me to get into. I never touched AQ3D. The rest of the games are kind of dead sadly. From what I've seen the company is horribly mismanaged. Artix is a manchild suited for a creative role not managing a company. That NES game really sealed the deal for me.
Also AQW's community figurehead Vesper got fired last year and became an instathot.
I was really into Adventure Quest classic early last decade when they were rolling out massive balance changes (known as the sweep back then). However they lost 2 major staff members at the end of 2014 and ever since then things just haven't been the same. One of the staff (Lord Barrius) was in charge of several storylines and played a big role in the item design. You can tell the staff were struggling for some time after. Story progress has been slow since and they've switched to smaller yearly stories. There has been several massive overhauls of old items (even recently with the paladin update) but overall the meta has shifted in a way I can't keep up with nor do I enjoy. I still go on every now and then but I don't find as much enjoyment.
Dragonfable has been the most consistent game out of all of them. The story still gets updated twice a month and is easy to follow along. It doesn't AQ's issue where a large part of the early story was lost to time, or became very convoluted. The staff also adds challenge fights at the start of each month for endgame players. Only problem I have is that the updates are very small, sometimes being a short cutscene, which is understandable because I think there's less than 5 people working on the game. I give huge props to both AQ and DF's team for keeping up with weekly releases with such limited resources.
AQW on the other hand is a shitshow. It's a dress up game with extremely simplistic combat. There is a huge focus on microtransactions and rare items. I'd hate to be the artist who has to constantly churn out art that will only be in the game for a month. In general art quality has dipped in the past 2 years. The story haven't been good since the Chaos Lords saga ended in 2014. Gameplay is still the same as when the game launched a decade ago. There's also several items, some of which do affect gameplay, that require long monotonous grinds. This has lead to botting, which lead to future items having even bigger grinds. I don't think the game was ever good, but after doing the same shit for so long the polish has worn off.
Epic Duel seemed cool when I first tried it, but had too much microtransactions for me to get into. I never touched AQ3D. The rest of the games are kind of dead sadly. From what I've seen the company is horribly mismanaged. Artix is a manchild suited for a creative role not managing a company. That NES game really sealed the deal for me.
Also AQW's community figurehead Vesper got fired last year and became an instathot.
