Choose My Adventure: AdventureQuest 3D kicks off with a bit of interest and a lot of likely grind

I’m no stranger to the penchant of overt grinding in AdventureQuest 3D. That was kind of my experience the last time I played this game for this column, and my first impressions would suggest that design choice has not changed one iota. One could even argue that’s been Artix Entertainment’s whole bag back in the days when its MMOs were Flash games.

Even so, I will also have to admit that the opening steps present a bit of intriguing potential, and some of that is on the structural side of things as the opening beats in Saga Mode provided at least the vaguest whiff of something different happening in this game.

The last time I started afresh in AQ3D, I recall the opening basically involving my character being literally kicked into the horizon by some dark armored big bad for reasons that seemed to extend no further than comedy value. This time around, my character, an extremely pig-tailed Mage, starts off hopping out of a time portal with an elven Sorcerer of some power and presumed repute to investigate the cause of calamity.

This introduction did the usual tutorial steps, but it also demonstrated a little bit of more interesting narrative beats as well as a surprising amount of visual panache. I know what AQ3D looks like and have never been a hater of its visual style, but for some reason, the introductory forest and mine area that Saga Mode starts in looked somehow better than I remember this MMORPG looking. New textures? Better area design? Either way, it was certainly nice to look at.

Combat held no shock value for me, which I guess shouldn’t be a surprise for a game that has a grand total of five action keys with literally no options or divergence whatsoever. That means that fighting as a Mage was incredibly rotational, involving my casting fireballs in succession with greater damage efficacy, letting off a lightning channel to stun, and using ice abilities to replenish mana in a very obvious routine of button presses. Humdrum but effective.

As I continued along the tutorial region, there were little hints of that usual Artix charm (and really awful comedy) sprinkled through it all, but what really took me by surprise was the attempts at making more interesting cutscenes and the promise of higher stakes. I never really felt like I was threatened, but this plucky little game was really trying to convince me that there was a major plot just below its surface.

So imagine my surprise when my character leaped through a portal to escape and was tossed into the central hub city with no signposting whatsoever.

In fact, the opening beats were violently handheld to the point that arrows were pointing at the objectives I was meant to go for, but when I landed in Battleon (ugh), the arrows and quest log immediately disappeared, leaving me to flip through the UI to determine where to go next. I didn’t necessarily mind this, but the abruptness did kind of take me by surprise for a moment; the training wheels weren’t removed so much as blown off with a rocket-propelled grenade while the person who fired it at me told me to keep pedaling.

That said, it’s not like the UI is hard to navigate, or at least isn’t overdesigned like so many other mobile MMO titles. There were clearly outlined places to find daily bosses, side missions, story missions, or dungeons, all with handy-dandy quick teleports to get me into the action ASAP. I elected to prod those at a later time.

The next time I logged in, I happened to have arrived at a point when one of AQ3D’s mods was spawning a villainous Christmas tree boss for players to whale on in order to hoover up seasonal currency. I joined in a few times if for nothing else to see if my DPS was useful to this open group effort, and as far as I could tell it was. But then cold water was dashed on this whole thing when I saw the currency costs for getting anything out of this event; I was going to have to beat this tree down at least a few hundred times to get anything of actual interest like a mount. Eff that noise.

I decided to join in on the daily boss hunt shortly after that, which tossed me into a forest to beat down what I can only describe as various flavors of forest yeti. Again, this wasn’t particularly hard, and I would even call it kind of fun, but more or less it was just blasé. The only reason I ran into any challenge or died was that enemies were literally spawning on top of my squishy self. Even so, I completed my objectives, traveled back to Battleon (blech), and sought what this was all about.

Much like a vast majority of the rewards in AQ3D, doing anything appears to be in service of gathering as many cosmetic items as humanly possible. During the opening quests I got chests with cosmetics and cosmetic item drops. The Christmas event rewards were all effectively cosmetics. The daily boss quest gives currency for specific cosmetics. Many of them had… a style. We’ll call it a style. I probably should lean into the cartoonish nonsense, I guess.

I admit that much of this sounds like I’m down on the game, but I’m really not. I’m at the least willing to push forward to see what’s out there, but I also have to admit to a little bit of letdown here too. I was sort of hoping Saga Mode would herald a bit of a paradigm shift, but all it appears to have done thus far is change the tutorial. But I digress. It is time to move forward, and that means it’s time to determine what direction that is.

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The next poll is about classes once again, only this time we’re going to consider some entirely new ones. As it turns out, I’ve got a pretty pile of cash shop currency – don’t ask me how it got there because I’m not really sure – which opens up a few more unique class choices beyond being a Rotation Mage. I don’t expect any of these other picks to not be heavily rotational, but perhaps the flavor will be distinct enough. Or maybe I just should stick it out with the Mage?

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Polls close at the standard 1:00 p.m. EST time on Friday, December 12th. In the meanwhile, I’m probably just going to poke a daily or two just to have something to do and maybe unlock some more looks. I might as well, right?

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.