Tomorrow will be a week since I quit this game. I very seldom play live service games, but every once in a while I do give one a shot. And while I sometimes enjoy myself, especially with great games during their heyday like WoW or FFXIV, there always comes a moment when I am done. With game like those I often carry a nostalgia for my time with them, knowing I can never really return. But with ZZZ comes only relief. I enjoyed its combat, but the rest of the game is so hollow and clearly designed to exploit people who will suffer the urge to pay real money to unlock and level up characters. So I’m glad to be free. It feels great.

I’m done with this. The sheer number of unenjoyable elements they’ve layered into the game since the last major update has stripped away what fun I was having. It’s a shame because the combat really is a lot of fun, but it’s buried in tedium dictated by F2P systems. And as the game evolves it is clear MiHoYo will continue to layer additional tedium on top of these already tedious systems to force whales to spend money. It feels incredibly hard to justify continuing to play ZZZ with its declining appeal when that decline coincides with better experiences like Metaphor: ReFantasio, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, or anything else I have left to play before the end of the year.

Something feels off in combat, as if MiHoYo rebalanced combat in 1.3. I’m also not loving the new event. The major events seem to be getting worse and worse with each numbers game revision. And if they start retooling the combat to make it feel worse, I might not have a reason to keep coming back.

Ugh, they put Vampire Survivors inside ZZZ. Not only is that shameless, I don't want to play Vampire Survivors.

Some of the translations added in 1.2 are quite poor. Quite a lot of spelling mistakes (skared for scared, businis for business, etc.) and a number of sloppy or poorly constructed sentences (Caesar, have you come into the city these days?). I don’t think this is because the localization team isn’t good at what they do, because launch and 1.1 both have very polished localization. Perhaps the turnaround between 1.1 and 1.2 was too quick and the team was rushed, missing typos and sloppy grammar because there wasn’t enough time for QA. I’m speculating, but the localization does feel like it was rushed this time around.

So 1.2 introduced a backup battery, but it charges at almost half the speed of the main battery. This means you still need to log in daily and make the most of your charges or you’ll still be losing out, rendering the backup battery not quite useless, but pretty close. It’s such a half effort that I almost think it’s more insulting than it is an improvement.