Vawraek Technology Inc. launched its second closed beta test for The Quinfall to hundreds of players worldwide from July 9th until July 16th, 2024. From the time I began playing The Quinfall, I felt the nagging sensation of, “This could be so good if…” in the back of my brain. There are several great things about The Quinfall that are completely torn down by the wonky mechanics and features that don’t make sense.
What the title lacks in current features, it makes up for with a development team that listens to every type of feedback. The developers at Vawraek Technology Inc. have a long way to go in terms of developing a cohesive game, but they do seem to be very responsive and take what everyone says about The Quinfall very seriously. The title has great bones per se, as all of the features of a great MMORPG are there, they just haven’t been implemented properly as of yet. With that said, what are the good things about The Quinfall, and which elements were enough to make my blood boil throughout my few days of the beta test?
The Storyline and Questing
Realistically speaking, it doesn't seem to have a story to follow at all, as the first quest is just to simply kill a whopping 50 enemies that are 100 miles away from the base camp I started off in. The first thing I noticed after finishing the tutorial was that there was a severe lack of direction. Yes, the quest tells you to kill a massive amount of orc-like creatures that are, for some reason, on the other side of the world, but after that, the direction of what to do and what to explore becomes nonexistent.
The quests all seem to be “fetch” or “kill” quests, which is par for the course in most MMORPGs; the major difference here is that the quests are basically all in the same areas and tasking you do to the same things without any iota of meaning. Was I slaying these orcs with my sword and shield to thwart their efforts to destroy the town? I have no idea, as there was no inkling of backstory as to why we were at war or why we felt the need to take down an army of creatures for one quest.
Gear and Inventory
This topic is a hot one for me, as I am a master collector of gear for some reason in any title I play. My bank becomes filled with a stockpile of things I most likely will never use, but I can’t seem to help it. That is until The Quinfall humbled me with gender-specific gear that I will never be able to use since I chose a female character. This was not something I noticed until I saw a massive amount of armor and weapons dropping off of mobs, and when I say there was a lot of gear being thrown around, I mean it.
Some creatures and humanoids could drop four to five items at a time, loading your inventory in an hour. This was actually one of the major complaints others in the beta had as well, as they mentioned the gear not only is almost always gray and holds no real value to the player but that it fills up your inventory so quickly and sells for basically nothing to the vendor.
Now, gender-specific gear would be fine if they dropped at least a somewhat similar amount per gender, but my inventory was teeming with Male gear that was such an upgrade to the rags I was sporting for most of my playthrough, yet due to my choice prior to even entering the world of The Quinfall, I could not utilize such upgrades. This was a bit discouraging, as I really wanted to get a feel for my character and what kind of power I could wield with a good build, and sadly that day never came due to the lack of Female-specific gear drops.
Combat and Player Movement
I have said a lot of negative things thus far, but let me be fair here and say that this is a very early work in progress, according to the developers. On that note, I am going to go into one of the worst mechanics featured in The Quinfall that I have, in my 20 years of playing video games, have ever encountered before.
When you want to open your inventory in combat, let’s say for example sake, you have to hit the “Control” button on your keyboard to pause character movement and gain access to your mouse on the UI, do whatever you need in your inventory like put a health potion on your action bar, then hit “Control” again after closing out all tabs to be able to move again. Mind you, you are not seemingly able to hit “Escape” on the keyboard to close all tabs out either, which means if you accidentally open a few wrong tabs that now litter your screen during battle, you have to close each one individually before hitting “Control” again to get back to the action.
This became not only a major learning curve, as I was not mentally prepared for it when it first happened and I was not used to this feature from other titles, but it made things extremely tedious to do the most simple task. With that said, the development team listened to every single complaint about this feature, and attempted to fix it during the beta, but due to time constraints did not fix the feature entirely. The developers do say that now that the beta is over they will be deliberately looking for a better UI pause and resume, which I appreciate very much.
As for player movement, it just felt a bit clunky, to say the least. Abilities and animations seemed to be a little bit off and did not match up very well. Walking and running was like night and day; You would be walking at a normal pace, hold shift, and my character took off like Blade from Bladerunner. What I will say is even though the animations appeared a bit off, I thoroughly enjoyed the look of all of the spells I tried out. The Mage-like class had awesome animations with the frost and fire spells, the Warrior class had whooshes and winds flying around that brought me a feeling of nostalgia from my Classic WoW days, and the healing spells I tried blanketed my character with bright gold and green rays of light just as I had hoped they would.
Are Scam Allegations Warranted?
There have been rumblings around social media and the internet that state The Quinfall is just another The Day Before scam and a money grab. While this could in fact be true, that the developers of The Quinfall are indeed attempting to bamboozle players into spending hard-earned cash on a barely finished and not very fun title, I can’t say I currently agree or feel that way.
Though The Quinfall was riddled with login errors, bugs, wonky mechanics, and felt a bit unpolished, the development team was there every single step of the way to soak up all the feedback like a sponge. The amount of patches and bug fixes that occurred during the beta was something I had never seen before. Every single day of the beta the developers were announcing “quick bug fixes” or larger patches that did create a few hours of downtime every day, but this felt to me as though they really were listening to us as players and doing their best to take note of what we thought fell short.
The Quinfall is still very early in its development journey, so these types of bugs and issues that I had with the title will almost definitely be fixed before the next beta or at least before the alpha tests. Though the game feels very unfinished and a bit on the lackluster side right now, I truly believe that these issues will be solved due to the devs' dedication and love for the testers and fans of the title, and I cannot wait to get into the next tests and see how the Quinfall progresses.
