Reaching Zenith at Level 8

About a year ago I decided to try my hand at a VR MMO known as Zenith. Why not, right?! I like MMOs! I like VR! It sounds like a perfect fit! So I bought the game and jumped in!

A screenshot of the loading screen from 2023

The first thing out the gate that broke my immersion was listening to a 10-year-old kid mumbling to himself everything he was doing. sigh. I both love and hate integrated voice chat, but really how else are you going to communicate in a VR MMO?

A screenshot of the new 2024 loading screen!

I ended up getting to level 8 in the game before losing interest and moving on to something else.

Leveling up in the tutorial of the old Zenith

Fast forward to a few days ago and once again I jumped into Zenith. It was front and center in my VR library on my Quest 2, so why not?! Come to find out, a lot of things have changed with the game that I was completely unaware of.  The whole front section of the game has had a revamp and now it's split into two different game modes. I didn't even recognize the game when I played.

Behold the mighty paywall between free-to-play and DLC!

Everything that I had played a year ago is now put into something called DLC 1, the Last City, and everything that is new and free-to-play is called the Infinite Realms.

I got wrecked by the Avatar of Telos in the Infinite Realms

So I went to my friends in the Ruff Talk VR Discord channel and asked around about what the situation was and as it turns out, there was an announcement made that the free-to-play experiment had failed with Zenith and that the game would now be put in maintenance mode while the company focused on making other games. Here's the announcement on that if you're like me and completely missed the memo.

Ooph. You know it wasn't well received when the comments for the video are turned off. 

Unfortunately getting that message kind of killed my motivation to log in and level my character like I had originally planned. I don't know why though, it's not like I haven't played tons of dead MMOs before . . . remember my whole Runes of Magic stint?

Anyway, there are some things in this game that are legitimately cool like Physically chopping down trees and mining ore, the crazy skill tree system, and jumping all over the place.

LOL, you know it's a bad sign when you have 5 UIs overlapping each other

There are also things that I never will probably get to experience like an 80-person raid or instanced dungeons.  It's ok though, really. I'm not sure if what I get from a VR MMO is more than what I'd get from a non-VR MMO other than a real-world workout while I play the game and, of course, some unwelcome voice chat from a rambling 10-year-old talking to himself like he was a YouTuber.

Now, if I had a static group of people who still wanted to play Zenith together, and I was along for the ride, I'd probably jump at the chance! I did that when I discovered a group of older people from the Ruff Talk VR Channel who wanted to play A Township Tale together.  Now, THAT, was fun.

Gotta give it up to the town hub in the Infinite Realms, that's some pretty cool stuff.

I suppose if I really wanted to I could join the Zenith Discord channel (which seems impressive btw) and find said static group, but I really don't feel like my drive is there right now.  Maybe in the future?  Anyone want to play Zenith with me?

Happy Dueling!