With “early bird” alpha set to arrive next month for the VR MMORPG Zenith, there’s plenty for Ramen VR CEO Andy Tsen to talk about, and talk he does in a VR-powered interview with UploadVR.
The beginning of the interview talks about how Zenith is a standout title thanks to its active combat model and its sense that players have a physical presence in the game world, as well as some words about social features like partying, guilds, friend lists, and public events. Tsen also alluded to the fact that Zenith’s endgame content will require players to manually form groups.
“For us, it’s always about striking that right balance of, yes it’s easy for newbies to get in and party up, but also there’s enough challenging endgame content there where you still need to organize. You can’t just do PUGs; you basically need to know people and form alliances.”
As far as content, Tsen mentioned that Zenith will feature main story quests, world boss events, group dungeons, crafting and gathering (which is more involved thanks to VR), and some exploration rewards like treasure chests hiding in the world. Tsen also discussed how the moment-to-moment gameplay works, where he referenced the 30 minute-long gameplay video and talking about the enemy’s stagger meter, which builds as attacks land to a point where they become vulnerable. As far as scale, Zenith will have a large world with thousands of people per shard while the devs will do their best to ensure that server load and character rendering is managed per platform.
Tsen also recognized the potential that Zenith could bring to the MMORPG genre, particularly in the VR space, stating, “We are in a period of time where people want this but AAA studios haven’t exactly committed to building an MMO yet […] If we can deliver an experience now, we can help set a tone and define a lot of mechanics that become known in this next wave of MMOs to come out.”
