The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot Beta Preview

After spending about eleven hours playing the closed beta of The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, I can safely say that I don't recommend jumping in. At this stage, players are getting access to what is supposedly an unfinished product, but it's still a product that Ubisoft is asking you to pay for on Steam and one that seems to have issues built right into its design philosophy.

The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot - How Does the Beta Hold Up? 

The one good thing I can say about Mighty Quest is that I'm running into very few bugs or issues. I've had annoyances where alt-tabbing crashes the game (which is particularly annoying, seeing as accessing the in-game store actually takes you to an out-of-game website... And crashes the game) and where the sound just disappears, but these have been infrequent. The content has worked as advertised, I've been able to log on and play every time I wanted to (or didn't), and multiplayer functionality seems to be working as intended.

So what is the Mighty Quest for Epic Loot? Well, first of all, the name is entirely misleading. This is a game where you go on hundreds of mini-quests in order to gain sub-par loot. Obviously, Mini Quests for Sub Par Loot isn't the most appealing of titles, but there is something to say for truth in advertising. Of course, it is still early days, the game is in pre-release, and things could change. It's foreseeable that loot could be improved (though problems with the system go quite deep), however, the micro quests are inherent to the design.

The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot Beta - Dungeon Crawlin' 

The premise of the game is a mix of Diablo-Esque dungeon crawling and a pseudo-tower defense game. It's a game of two halves where you build a personal castle and storm the castles of other players. The idea is that the super-rich fled into the sky and have hidden their riches away in trap-ridden forts. You are given a castle of your own to defend and the ability to attempt to siege the castles of others.

It's an interesting setup, but it leads to a lot of issues that seem flawed on a design level. The most egregious of these is that the game is built in such a way as to encourage irritating level design. You want to protect your castle, and if people manage to storm it, they can steal your riches; therefore, your aim is to design something people can't complete. The end result of this is a community of user-generated content built around irritation and frustration rather than fun. Imagine a LittleBigPlanet game where everybody was trying to make levels you can't complete rather than fun levels. It doesn't make for the best player experience.

The game's campaign is built up of a number of worlds, each with a different level range. Each world has a number of developer-made levels (the first world is all developer-made, and later worlds have only a few) and a whole bunch of user-created dungeons. Hover your mouse over a castle, and you can find out its level, defense rating, number of traps, reward, how many heroes have failed, and a bit more. It's useful information that's well presented. The castles themselves suffer from a lack of variety, though, and from being purposefully annoying. Storming a castle is rarely fun, as the creator usually just puts enemy types together in the most irritating way in order to try and stop you. After all, why wouldn't they? There's not enough incentive to put together a well-made dungeon or to make it fun to play. You have the ability to rate the creation afterward, but a castle is a way of protecting your stash so getting good reviews has no impact.

The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot Beta - Assets and Repetition 

At this stage, the assets are very limited. Every castle is basically the same. You fight the same enemies in the same environment over and over again. Each siege only lasts about five minutes, and no siege feels at all distinct. You can slightly change how your castle looks, but you can still only choose from a limited amount of pieces. There aren't that many options, and it's not really possible to do anything interesting or inventive (or even distinct). This is something that will hopefully be improved on before release, but drastic changes are needed. At this stage, playing through the game is incredibly annoying and soul-crushingly repetitive.

The repetition is further increased by the loot.

Here is my knight at level 1:

Here he is at level 9:

And level 14:

Visual variety is something they will hopefully improve - as loot is incredibly unexciting - but there are further problems. The simplicity of the mechanics also really gets in the way. You have no choices when you level up. You just unlock skills at certain levels. This means there is no stat picking or any real choice in terms of progression. This isn't inherently problematic, but there are knock-on effects. Loot is super boring; For example, there are pretty much no unique elements to loot as there are too few variables in play. Armour has magic resists and physical resist and can occasionally boost health, boost health pick-up effectiveness, or reflect some damage back. Weapons have limited criteria also, which means you get loot that is an improvement but no loot that is particularly exciting. It's just a random upgrade every now and then, and due to loot drops progressing pretty well, you just feel the same throughout. You get better gear, but the gear never shines; it's just a necessary upgrade.

The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot Beta - Free-to-Play Structure

The free-to-play structure also gets in the way of things. It means that everything just takes too long and that the game is constantly road-blocking you. This would be OK, but even if you put a decent amount of money in, you are still stuck in this situation. The annoying thing is that this isn't just affecting the competitive element, the structure gets in the way of your single-player experience too much, and it's something you can't really get around. Putting in money gets you some in-game currency which allows you to speed up upgrades and building, but this doesn't help with some of the systems.

Leveling up is handled in an annoying way. You max out your XP for a level and then pay to level up. Until you do this, you get no more XP, and the building you level up through has to be upgraded every few levels, which is more costly. On top of this, some of the upgrades for this building rely on you upgrading your castle heart, and to do that, you have to keep upgrading your chests so you can store enough currency. The sheer amount of interdependent systems just get in the way and makes things arduous at every point. Yes, you can pay to speed them up, but you still have to grind out materials to afford these upgrades, and the frequency of upgrades means there are more things wanting your money (otherwise, the waits are ridiculous).

Should You Play it?

At this stage, you just shouldn't play The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot. Unless things drastically change before release, the game is a frustrating mess that isn't worth your time, never mind your money. I recognize that it's still in beta, but to access this beta on Steam, you need to pay $20 (you can even pay $99!). The game is simply not worth this amount of money at this stage. In fact, even if you get in for free, I would not recommend playing this game. I will be revisiting the game after release to give a proper review. Until then... Avoid it.