Tower of Fantasy in 2023: The Critical State and Massive Decline | Asmongold Reacts 

Oh no who couldve predicted this

the appeal to gacha games was never the gacha itself, it's the massive rate of updates which is a side effect of them needing to pump out new characters. There's an update and new banner every week to 2 weeks which usually contains a decent amount of content, compared to say mmos or other online games that update maybe once a month if you're lucky and have fairly light content patches

A lot of Genshin players played ToF on the first month because it was a time when Genshin didn't have new content. Once Genshin released a new area, all the players went back to Genshin and just left ToF.

The game world was fun at first, I even explored it to 100%, but once that was done, there was nothing interesting that kept me playing. It didn't help that I didn't feel any power level progression as all the mobs kept their levels with me, so it took about the same amount of time to kill them at lv1 as at lv50. Character levelling is an artificial thing in that game, it's just increasing a number, but I never felt any more powerful than i was before.

The game had many fun activities to do, but the world being empty killed the game. I really like finding random secrets in the game

The reason Tower of Fantasy was such a big deal on RU-vid on release was because a lot of youtubers were payed to promote it. I can't even count the number of videos by anime, games and meme focused youtubers who promoted the game in the first few weeks. A lot of the anime and game side creators were even making videos and streaming it but it was pretty transparent it was not out of genuine interest for the game as most only played once on a set date with other payed creators and then never mentioned it again.

Honestly, I quit ToF right after seeing the collectibles with a cooldown

Gacha systems are strange. They are designed to make you wanna spend money yes, but you gotta realize that they are only fun with minimal to no spending. If you just spend money you get all the things sure. But if you get it something cool with very limited resources, then it actually feels pretty good. That gets ruined ofc if you are in a PvP environment. Also Asmon, most people don't have thoudands of bucks to spend every week, so no, your chart of "didn't get character -> spend more" doesn't apply for like 95% of the players

I wanted to say this. ToF to me feels like a game in which during its conception, a bunch of dev sitting together and discussing after being told by their corporate overlord to make something similar to Genshin to capitalize on its hype. One of them proposes that they should just read players' complaint about Genshin and cater to their needs by adding missing features that players "think they need". - Genshin co-op is lackluster => Make the future game MMO so players can hang out together. - Genshin doesn't have character customization => Let's add that. - Genshin stamina is very restricting => Give them unlimited sprinting stamina. Oh, and give them mount as well. - Genshin combat isn't flashy => Give them button mashing combat and aerial combat because that shit is flashy af. - Genshin enemies and especially bosses are easy to kill => Let's create abomination of bosses with unpredictable attack that drain half of players' HP or even insta-kill them like Sobek and Robarg's spike attack. - Genshin is stingy and not giving players' enough gacha pulls => Let's give them a lot of gacha pulls at the beginning of the game, and lower the pity so that people think we are more generous. While at it, gotta put Genshin's equivalent of Artifacts (Matrices) behind gacha and give players the illusion that they can farm for those things from bosses and joint ops and raid and shit. - Genshin doesn't have scythe wielding character => Let's give them a Diluc lookalike scythe wielder whom you will meet for about 5 minutes in the story and never again. Also get him voiced by Kirito for extra edginess. - Genshin doesn't have enough female characters wearing thigh highs => Let's design almost every female outfits and characters featuring thigh highs (I swear it feels like the whole dev have that fetish for thigh highs but they could not even design a good pair). All of these missing features should have given them an edge over Genshin, but they mishandled it at the design level. - Like how they implemented the mount so poorly, it is almost useless because it couldn't get over a tiny bump on the road. As the result, most people would rather walk than using mount while exploring, cuz sprinting stamina is unlimited and character can walk over a goddamn bump. - They add aerial combat, but that thing is clunky and drain a lot of stamina while also leaving you vulnerable on air. - The suppressor was supposedly to progress along with and reflect your power level. But it was bound by that shitty CS prerequisite, forcing people to cheese it with their SR weapons so they can upgrade it. - Their gacha, while outward looking very generous. But in late game, anything other than SSR is useless. They also never add new SR characters, either. So at some point, when you get all the SR characters, you stopped getting excited for anything other than the red light in your gacha animation. - Their PvP, while claimed to be "balanced stats" to ensure a fair fight, but those SSR and their abilities is a huge deciding factor on your win (I still dread Frigg and her spam katana slash). Worse, their corporate overlord is greedy and does not have a vision for future and urged them to rush the game and monetize the crap out of it. This is why you get a broken game and outfit gachapon events, or a two-person mount that cost $900 to get.

1:30 just me or does the background look like Arc City from honkai impact? i'm not trying to say that tof copied honkai (thats old news) just that i recently finished the arc city quests and this seems so familiar

Tower Of Fantasy was fun while it lasted which was all of 3 months lol Tencent kills everything they touch

ToF killed themselves by releasing right before Genshin Sumeru region release

For me, I do enjoy tower of fantasy, I really do….but it’s so so difficult to farm for decent materials given the fact that you level up so fast, meaning enemies and bosses level up fast too. you end up needing to rely on whales or higher levelled people to carry you through farming, and if you’re far behind or a new player might as well forget it because active players don’t really need to farm the same things as you anymore and the servers are so dead not many people are willing to help out :’)

I agree 100% on your take about playing a game because it is fun, not because it is gacha based or subscription based

I had a huge problem with one of the early events, which was timed to run every full hour or so because if it‘d run on demand there would never be enough people for it. This extreme splitting of the community into however many servers per region without being able to play with other servers or switching, then split again into 75 different channels just kills the whole mood of an mmo, just felt like another single player game, but with bosses you can‘t beat on your own. Like, there‘s mmos out there that are pretty old, but you can play with anyone from the NA servers as long as you play on any NA server. Can‘t be that hard…

Asmongold 2023. "I've never gambled my money ever." Bruh, I remember you and Diablo Immortal.

Nikke's story and music were actually surprisingly good. Tried it out for the fanservice but that's the kind of thing that keeps me with a game rather than just jumping to the next shiny thing that comes out.

That flowchart is only applicable to whales and whales aren't the mayority of the playerbase in gacha. Most people I think try to save up the currency they get for free, try to pull for the character they want with what they have and if they don't get it, start saving for the next one. Some might spend 100 dollars and then stop after that even if they don't get the character but not most. I play like 5 gacha games, I couldn't even afford to try and get every character. So I save up for the characters I want. Sometimes I spend money when it's not enough, sometime it's more than 100 dollars sometimes less.

The closest thing I can think of about what make gacha interesting, is it a bit like roguelike kind of stuffs where not everyone will get all the same things for each save/playthrough, and you get to work around with what you're given, grab your favorite playstyle or waifu/husbando you get attached to, and then stick to it. I don't think gacha pulling montage is the main thing they aim for, it's the reason why I'm not necessary attach to a gacha that give more free pulls than the one I'm playing, there need to have at least another reason to grab my interest. That just my thought on it, I may can tolerate the powercreep as long as the game still enjoyable without it and the powercreep not being too straightforward or just direct upgrade like copy-paste with more stats and different sprite. Also, as long as it didn't block too much of the content.

The reason I stopped playing tower of fantasy was that the monetization system was worse than what my dog left in the yard this morning. Having limited currency on a limited banner is a bad idea. Its abhorrently worse than the monetization of other games I've seen. Maybe besides Diablo mobile

You cant have a p2w gacha game with MMO elements. There are reasons people hate p2w in mmorpg's. It feels awfull when someone in your group does 80% of the teams total damage because he hit the enemy with his credit card.

Most bosses worst mechanics occur or get worse because you failed to break the shield in time, which is a completely different mechanic than dealing damage. So it sounds dumb when people don't understand the mechanics and just complain about dying to a boss they couldn't solo. Git gud or at least mid.

They say no other gacha game in recent memory. But pretty sure Nahida's banner on genshin made over 34 million ONLY counting the iOS market in china alone. Not taking global, PC, android or playstation into account. SO ya know. Iiit iiiis what it iiiiis lol

installed for booba saw booba uninstalled

Good gachas don't force you to spend money or rely on luck. It's like oldschool MMOs where you were able to work toward getting cool mounts or gear. The good ones have pity systems so if you get stuff early that's great but if not you didn't waste your time. MMO mount farming is basically gacha but without the pity system.

The game reached critical state for me when I downloaded it and wanted to play it. Then it declined when it proceeded to crash to desktop every time I tried to log in so I had to uninstall it.

The thing I liked about ToF is that on PC they implemented options that Genshin Impact does not have like support for 120 fps and more character customization. Another thing that heavily impacted the game is that it was released globally when Genshin was about to release their most ambitious update: Sumeru.

In genshin, you can totally f2p and go explore the whole open world and stories and questswithout any problems , you might have enough free primos to pull 2 or 3 five stars, once you enjoyed enough you can just quit with no regrets, btw genshin is a single player game.

Ah Christ, I was also so pissed off at the whole time gated chests and level cap right away. More importantly, not even finding a team of people to kill a boss was ridiculous. Everyone wasn't on the server I was on too. It really annoyed me because I really wanted to play it and just sink my time into it.

ToF is fun, my only issue is that how humiliating it is to be carried by whales with 10 times damage of ToF's monthly revenue. You could spend some money on it but some is not much so you really had to go full whale mode to feel like you actually made progress building your account 😂

The appeal of gacha reminds me of rogue-like games, you just need to work with what you get from the run/pulls (before spending) and that's fun to me. Good gachas tend to stand out whenever the free units can clear most/all content a game has to offer If playing well. I don't see this as too different from stuff like vampire survivors but in a different format. The ability to spend money is secondary to that but immensely helps to pump out new content faster than other games.

Nikke and ToF are examples of why 10cent is hated but they know what they're doing. Despite the mixed opinions of both the game state. They still have a fanbase who are loyally playing the game. There is some effort there but it's no where near the potential that it should be.

Asmon's take on gacha games is a whale's take. F2Ps play a resource management game. I don't really get it why people read "gacha game", they instantly think, "Oh, how much would I swipe my card in this game?". You don't have to spend a single cent, and if you can't control yourself, why are you playing gacha games?

as genshin player, i did give it a try at launch, played through main story and side quest, close 100% map and tried abit pvp and pve but realised playing two of those game is just exausting and i choose the more fun one..

honestly it is improving and getting better its just people are not willing to give it a chance

One thing that graph forgets is the side part for if you got the character, you need to spend even more on the gacha to get the same character so that the character can get stronger. 😂

The biggest problem I see is that premium is too expensive, and customization is too restrictive. CAD is 150 bucks for a coin flip that sure as hell doesn't feel like coin flip odds.

As someone who's been playing games like Ragnarok Online, the idea of companies doing monthly lootboxes was built into my mind set at a early. As well as the thrill of pulling rares from Magic the gathering or opening kinder surprise eggs even as a kid. The enjoyment of pulling in games has been rooted in my life for ages.

the game was bad because when you leveled up you felt weaker not more powerful. leveling up was a downgrade that you had to ether grind or spend money to get back the player power you lost from leveling up. the mobs always scaled badly when you leveled up.

20:57 to be fair there are a lot of gotcha games that give plenty of game currency to pull for things without spending any money. Not all are totally predatory, now you can spend if you want but it’s not always necessary. I play a lot of games and don’t spend a dime I can do all the content and have my “fix” for gambling without spending money. It’s just about how good are you at balancing resources and how much control do you have. Simple as that.

Listening to Stix talking about TOF, is like a flat-earther trying to debate science

I'll gamble asmongold's last remaining hair for how many more doompost this game game is going to get until it comes true.

lmao already knew this game was gonna go down especially when they were advertising themselves as the genshin killer

For me it was the first ever event being locked behind a paywall and the f2p portion being world boss farming that was so laggy you couldn't play

Asmon is correct, there's simply no point about the gacha. I played gacha games too, but I only played them because the game itself had something else that attracts me, never because of the gacha aspect. As soon as the game made me hit a wall on the gacha part, I instantly lose all interest with that game. The only gacha I'm still playing non-stop is Azur Lane, the only one that I could really just play for free, and only spend money on skins which have fixed prices. If the game forces you to gambling and you fell for it, I can only feel sorry for you.

Massive decline? It was never populare to begin with (a one week spike in which players test out the new game doesn´t count)

The real reason ToF is bad is because you can't have a cooperative game that incentivises spending through p2w and still have an intact community of players. You end up with players that spend a lot of money grouping together and then everyone else. The community gets filtered by how much the spend (or don't spend), and guess what? People leave. But tbh, if the game was actually good, people would stay despite that. The game is just one long daily quest simulator. If you ain't doing dailies, you ain't playing. That's bad game design.

I went back in to try the game when Vera released. Was very disappointed with Vera's city Mirroria. Love that kind of designs, but it was just way smaller and simpler map than I expected.

Oh no, a trend chaser who started late failed to chase the trend. Who could've predicted that? See: The "Zombie Game" boom, The MMORPG boom, the MOBA boom and the Battle Royale boom.

Best thing to hear about this, Asmond watches Fist of the North Star. A man of Culture.

The ungodly amount of glitches and glitchy mechanics is mostly what made me quit.

watching him struggle with paint wasnt what i expected

It being a really bad game aside, I kinda wanna see if a part of its decline aligns with genshins updates. Most big streamers of tof all just said they played the game because they are waiting for content in genshin and I believe a lot of people did that.

When they introduced personal island and it became apparent what the weekly grind looks like there, i was like *nope* Artificial island update was a bigL

for me, it was a combination of the morbidly banal story, the very repetitive and uninspired landscape and the combat. People really don't credit Genshin's combat enough, sure there's other stuff namely the characters that carry it, but the combat is really what hooks you and keeps you bothering to come back, it's just so versatile and ever evolving, and maintains a semblant sense of realism outside of Zhongli summoning a meteor and Venti a blackhole. Final note, I wanted to like the futuristic, cyberpunk aesthetic they tried in ToF, but the graphical bandwidth and half assed nature of it ended up being a turn off. Many of the new characters gimmicks or weapons were just goofy or just frankly poorly drawn.

Played Tower of Fantasy some day ago and yeah even finding a matchmaking group was pretty rough.

When the foundation is a cash grab, it always going back to cash grab.

The problem is no matter how much time u put in you will never even be close to the guy who just swipes his credit card. MMOs with P2W suck

on launch day i clicked on the na servers and somehow i ended up on Asia and i dolphined for a character then i find out im not in na. was sad that day

It feels so good that genshin doesn’t follow that GGG. I still see people who mains characters from 1.1 and they are still good in Gamr

ToF in 2022: I'm the Genshin Impact killer. Genshin in 2023: Who?

man i hate that mmobyte guy lmao

Every day I wake up and am grateful I wasn't born with the gamba gene

For me, in comparison with Genshin, the updates of ToF are very heavy and so fast that it forces current players to grind. The updates are hard to digest. Unlike Genshin's updates where you can just relax completing the new map and content, probably due to it having a mix of MMORPG Just my opinion. I quit during Cobalt B's banner and returned during Saki Fuwa's banner. After returning, it is difficult to find anybody to join you in completing portals in Artificial Island and almost all players are already done with the miniboss in Vera. After that I quit again. It's too overwhelming for me.

It was the time gating that killed it for me initially

I felt bamboozled when they called this game an MMO when I was playing. I goy two of my friends to play this game and both of em were in different servers not knowing that we couldn't switch em, I had to scrap my character and restart in a different server, which is just utterly ridiculous. They called this game an MMO and yet I didn't come across a single player while I wandered around for two fucking hours. Yes, it's the channel system but then why call it an MMO?? It fell right between single player arpg and mmorpg. Tower of Fantasy was neither of them.

TOF is not in a critical state and a massive decline is expected with every game nowadays I'm still playing and enjoying it, there's a lot of new content coming out and they're fixing all the bugs it looks fine to me '-' every now and then there is a doom post on reddit saying the game is dead and youtubers complaining about everything, but that happens since the first week xD just play it and get your own conclusions

Mostly f2p here and just from saving and 5 bucks a month, I have frost comp, volt, comp, and have lots of weapons with constellations

This only reason this popped off was cause it came out during a huge Genshin drought right before 3.0 Sumeru.

The problem with gacha(not all) is the amount of player power you get by getting multiple copies of characters, gear, pets, etc. It gets worse trying to obtain x with the game adding more characters, gear, pets, etc. Banners(time gated) and having to do x amount of 10x pulls to either get the character or just a chance is stupid.

Anything dubbed as "Game Name"-killer before it is released surely is cursed to fail huh.

About Sobek: you could completely avoid that entire mechanic with just your wing boost but it was still a shitty mechanic either way

I stopped playing when I realized how hard it was to max a character, the gotcha is horrid

I spent a little on ToF but really can't push myself to play it anymore.

im addicted to gachas lately, but i still play my regular pc games everyday with a lot of my friends i made since middle school and highschool that I consider family. that being said i used to play just genshin and arkinghts. now i play about 7 gachas everyday. this sounds absurd but hear me out. i work a night shift at a desk and do nothing all night as a concierge, not a doorman so its very chill. For me the addiction of gachas is the progress of work or dailys that slowly add up and see my progress getting stronger and better and more knowledge of how to properly use units in combo of other and general understanding of the game. Another thing for me is the fact the gachas get so much content and updates as appose to regular games now a days, every 3-5weeks theres anew update. i play Destiny 2 with over 1000Hrs and i do not sign in every day or even fathom it (unless new update with new raid drops). its hard to explain entirely and hard to describe. Character design, yes we have nikke with booba character and jiggles but have you seen character design of Arknights, Punishing Grey Raven, Genshin, Path to nowhere? Characters regardless of their sexual appeal to whatever person are just so well designed from their appearance, story and/or personality its hard to not want to pull for them sometimes. How many games do we play where there is so much love and attention to so many characters? it makes you more connected to the game and world because you genuinely like these characters. sometimes i dont want a character and run into one of those aspect and my perspective changes. For me it may be ima special case with very accommodating job for it, but at the same time i often come home from work in front of my pc, open up youtube, discord, chill and play some more gacha for a few more hours.

I find its kinda ironic that this video has way more realistic views than tower of fantasy character trailer videos.

6:18 exactly, the bosses of this game are just pain in the ass because of how badly designed they are, it's just not fun, it's fucking frustrating.

Why is it so hard for devs to do those simple things. Communicate with your customers, have server transfers within a month, and deal with any fucking cheaters and hackers ASAP.

Tencent has a new favorite child in Nikke now and their own IP Honor of Kings: World is in full development swing. If revenues keeps going in a downward spiral, Tencent may pull the plug on the global version soon after milking it for what it’s worth since they’re all about the ez $$$

the gacha graph at the end is exactly correct, and that is exactly the reason I love gacha games, I enjoy that loop, and as a low spender is even more exciting ebcause you don't always have the $100 to spend lmao

ToF had potential... i still logon and play like once a month despite my server being dead af and queues already taking a couple of minutes each... but a LOT of exploits and bugs on a PvP game is basically a death sentence 😅

I lol when you said who wants too play 1/2 cooked game with not all the features in the game right at the start

I think the only reason ToF was popular during launch was that there is no competition as new MMO release slow down and not long before that, Genshin was a surprisingly well-made game that break the ice to casual audience and introduce them to Gacha mechanic so most people are not as wary or against it as few years prior and maybe they were hoping for a more multiplayer focused Genshin-like experience but it was just nowhere near as polished nor well managed so people left as quickly as they came I play ToF for a week and it was a lot of fun but yea, it was just not that good. There are plenty of better Gacha game out there and the same is true for MMO

I think he could add another string or path in his gacha guide with: Do you have the character? Yes --> Do I want a dupe for upgrade? Yes or no

It was pretty obvious this would happen from day one. Exactly like all the long dead WoW clones, Why would you switch from the already established game and characters you have for a new game that has no guarantee to live long?

Who would have thought? I played the game for a few weeks on release (non-stop, mind you). Cleared 100% on every available map, level capped every day it was available and got decent gear. It was really fun for a few weeks until it wasn't, which happen much sooner than i expected. Also, what made me instantly quit was the too fast paced SSR releases with very limited amount/sources to get pulls other than exploration. I realized it would be impossible to keep up as f2p with the bare minimum pulls provided by events/activities after hitting 100% exploration.

Played gacha since Brave Frontier era, still haven't met one that can match up to Honkai Impact 3rd. The story, gameplay and graphics are hard to beat (Its by Hoyoverse afterall). You can play it casually, as the story gives you trial characters or competitively. The outfits are plentiful and gorgeous and I enjoy the endgame a lot. Tried Genshin till AR60 and ToF till lv80, got bored of both. Punishing Gray Raven delivers in terms of gameplay. Looking forward to Wuthering Waves.

Played ToF for a while... and the thing that really disappointed me was the fact the gacha was all glorified weapon banners. There are characters, yes, but they barely have anything you can emotionally invest in.

i want a Soulsbourne MMO right now.

Biggest flaw of tower of fantasy: Tencent

I can imagine people checking out gacha games because that might be the cheapest sustainable monetarization scheme for the player, provided there is enough free stuff to get. Another reason is that because of the gacha monetization, the game has to get frequent and high-quality updates, even changing mechanics; with subscription games often lack and cash fist games almost never get. Of course, yet another reason might be that the player is a collector or gambler, but those have other avenues to spend their money more efficiently (TCGs, comics, books, casinos, online poker, etc.)

I'll fall on this sword and make a case for the fun value of Gacha. In some Gacha games, you don't need to get your wallet out. You can play through the game, do events, achievements, bosses, and so on to obtain the currency needed to participate in the Gacha. Some games are more generous than others in this regard. So the currency is essentially the same as any other in-game currency at that point. Then you save up for a weapon or character you're interested in, and then you roll the dice - and sometimes you'll get a weapon or character you're after sooner rather than later. This might seem crazy to some people, but many people enjoy this. It is what it is.

The difficulty of getting a decent equipment is what killed the game. They thought they could stand on equal footing with genshin but the truth is, their fame only lasted for a month. 🤣

At this point I feel like ToF tried to pull off a No man Sky. The difference is that No man Sky was a indie game with a triple A price tag, so Hello Games had enough money to fix the game after the horrible release. ToF however is a F2P game which lives by the gacha sales, if they don't make enough money the game just dies, so unless they fix the game with the resources they have left the game is dead. In other words the game is dead, there's no way that they recover from this.

i like the fact that he put lost ark instead of tower of fantasy itself in the description lmao

I still have fun playing it and i'm looking forward to the underwater city and chinese themed map on 3.0.

the game causing blue screen or literally freezing pc unless you turn it off manually happen to a lot of people just by launching the game unless you tweak processor stuff with regedit and it lasted months, i dont even know if they even fix it i stop playing it, i had so much problems with that crap and at least 2 more friends, when i finally figure how to fix it they didnt wanna tweak any of their systems just to play this one game, the first week of launch so many people got locked out by the bugs crashes or the problem i just mention that didnt even let me get past the login screen when it open it.

idk what he said at the start is enough for me lmao, hackers and exploits from other servers are just a death sentence

I guess the fantasy is over

I didn't even know this game came out this year