Worst MMO Ever? - Cave to Kingdom 

If the game gave you a team of like 60 guys to start with this could actually be pretty interesting

We reached a point where we should ask ourselves if full immersive realism really is the way to go...

Hey, this actually got me to download and play the game just to see if it gets any better. It does not. I'm at mission 11 a couple of days in and I am tasked to make soldiers and each soldier takes 10 hours to train, which sounds like a big issue until you realize that the bigger issue lies in the fact that they do not give you more people to train. You have to wait until 5 citizens spawn first which takes days to do. I'm going to keep at it until I either get a castle or witness the heat death of the universe, whichever comes first. 10/10 Should updated sooner. I tried my best to get a castle but the servers got shut down before i could. Wish you all the best.

Theory: this game is actually using your PC to mine crypto and the real-time building mechanic is just so you keep the program open for hours so they can keep hogging your GPU.

Mountains, a tropical beach, palm trees and a sunny day. That's London alright.

Dreamworld devs - asset-flip everything. Cave to Kingdom dev: "I'm gonna model my custom buildings molecule by molecule!"

Hear me out: change the beginning. The game starts with a battle where the Prince attempts to take the crown from a tyranical father, you get to control the soldiers and stuff and a tutorial there. Then the Battle goes south and you end Up with your remaining forces and followers leaving the kingdom. You arrive to an abandoned town in the mountains or something and decide to dig in there for now. You have a couple dozen builders, carriers, resources etc. There are some basic buildngs in town and some that need repairs. There you go, a nice start

It's kind of poetic that the coolest/most complete part of the game is what makes it bad

You know, they would've made a killing with this in the CRT days by selling it as a screensaver.

Honestly, Josh's audio glitches are far more interesting than the game itself.

He lost his sanity so fast with the building he couldn’t stop talking about how good the animations are

It's a real shame because I unironically love the "realistic" building aspect. It seems like an RTS where your decisions have an extreme weight, as your settlement isn't governed by stats, but actual stuff happening in real time. You'd be a lot less willing to draft and throw away a bunch of units if it takes each of them 15 years to grow up. Great concept with a time acceleration feature. I really wish it was taken on by an experienced team with a massive budget.

This realistic building in real time would actually be pretty cool as something in a game like oblivion or skyrim... Like... Save kvatch and every time you walk by you see them building shit up in real time...

I don't want to play this game, but it honestly warms my heart to know it exists

for the record, it's definitely not using different models for each stage of building; they probably built a system to dynamically generate them as they're built. still very impressive though.

See, I absolutely LOVE the building animations in this game. They could fix the issue of it taking forever by either starting you off with more units, or by making your units move faster. The graphics are kinda one thing I could get over for a while, but they definitely need a voice actor, or just text. Having it be TTS makes watching anything extremely painful. The ability to place buildings wherever you want is really cool too.

"There is no perfect time to start, no perfect place to start something." *5 seconds later* "They looked for the perfect place to start their kingdom"

Something tells me this is the type of game you play while actually playing another game.

You are giving the game way more credit than it deserves, rather than one model for each state, I believe it goes the much easier route of each piece is a separate object during the whole building process and it gets replaced by a finished model once it is done.

I'm not going to lie, I am REALLY enjoying this game. It's meant to be something in the background that grows over time with you rather than a play through in a week. Here's a couple things I have found to speed up construction: 1) I would HIGHLY recommend buying a WOODEN CART in the Market > Goods> Vehicles section. This will allow your carrier to transport multiple items at a time rather than just one. 2) Your carrier will almost always enter the stockpile from the opening side with the food items. Keep this space open and place any buildings you need to construct next to that opening. This provides the shortest path for the carrier to pickup and drop-off items so the builder isn't waiting. Once the building is complete, you can move the building to the spot you would like for it to be at. This then opens up the spot next to the stockpile for another construction!

I decided to download this game myself to poke around in it, and I discovered the secret to the carriers! Apparently, you can spend gold to buy them a wagon that means they will load up several logs per trip instead of carrying just one log at a time. They still do it log by log, but it limits the amount of walking. It's under Goods -> Vehicles. Of course, the game does not tell you this.

Okay, nobody tell this developer that Microsoft Edge has one of the best text to speech programs available for free.

That building animation system is seriously impressive. Also, is the fact the prince just stands around doing nothing some sort of commentary on how useless royalty actually is? Because that would be amazing if it was. 🤣

I like how his commentary with the carrier sounded like he was commentating a golf match

Cant wait for the game devs to come here and show the '1000x' speed option and say 'oh did you miss that option?"

You know, usually when I see your videos about this I'm just like "that looks awful" and never consider it again but for some reason this game has triggered my "morbid curiousity" sense. I kind of want to know where this goes.

Evidently, from a quick search on the game, its meant for you to login in, set some commands and leave... the building continues even if you turn off the computer.

"You must understand that as games developers that when a player downloads a game and starts playing, they are excited! They are looking forward to the game! That is the moment they want the game to be good, they want the game to be fun. And the first hour or two of gameplay is vital to grabbing them." So true about game development, and yet seemingly misunderstood.

Call me crazy but I'd like to watch a town built like this. No gameplay required, just watch the little guys building my town.

That opening cut-scene... I don't know what is worst, the text to speach or the sound mixing.

Hello. This is the CaveToKingdom team and we want to thank you for your feedback! The feedback on this video and from the comments are very helpful for us to improve the game for the future. This project was started with the enthusiasm of our team to make a 3D massive online strategy game that stands out and that is unique. The intent was to make the first online strategy game with a medieval feel that is really detailed when it comes to the construction of buildings, the life of the characters, the economy, and the military aspects, with the main gameplay being similar to grand strategy games made by Paradox, but we also tried to make it the first massive multiplayer online experience that would bring elements from the grand strategy genre. When it comes to the slow pace gameplay, the thing is that you don’t have to wait for the building to complete, because the game also works in offline mode and this is part of our initial concept, that you only need to enter about half an hour maximum every day in the game, do the things that are left to do and then return the next day to check the progress. If you still want to be online for more time, the game allows you to switch to a third-person view and watch your workers, as their work process is highly detailed and the graphics can make it relaxing to watch. If not, you can return the next day and see what happened while you were offline. Allowing players to speed up the pace would destabilize the balance of the game, but we may look for a solution to make the first part of the game more enjoyable and more motivational for future play. CaveToKingdom is not the classical single player RTS game, but an online experience that changes according to the actions of the other players, in what concerns the economy and the military strategy and tactics. The economy works according to supply and demand, and you can conquer new territories and gain Gold by taking taxes from the active players having cities on those territories. The actual main focus of the game is the military side, which is still in development in the sense that there are more missions and more tutorials needed, and probably some hints to guide players in the beginning, which we plan for future updates. But, you can focus on the economical side and watch your city develop in every detail, and never participate in wars on the world map. There are many economical aspects that you can check while you develop your city, such as the taxation system, the production system, the workers doing all these different jobs, and so on. In time, it is not as boring as it can be when you build your first building. If you want to make more Gold faster, you can conquer territories, sell materials in the game or invite other people with your referral link, which you can find in your account from the website. You get 100 gold daily for the first 50 days, with the condition for both you and your referral to be active. If you have any more suggestions, we will take them into consideration. We thank you all for your interest in the game! Like us on Facebook facebook.com/cavetokingdom

I actually like the idea. I think Cave to Kingdom would benefit from either a time accelerate mechanic or (Better yet, AND) more builders/carriers at the beginning. Like, say, five of each, so things can move along a bit faster.

So... they just multiply the number of starting workers by like 30 and you've got an interesting early access mmo?

i swear that text to speech is about to call Josh a stinky goblin boy shat if he doesn't understand the game mechanics.

It almost feels like they expect me to have a computer dedicated to this game. Like sitting on my mantle as some sort of strange new age decoration. Like an aquarium that I check ever couple of days.

This game is the perfect example of how some people really want to have that one mechanic in a game because it would be so immersive, so realistic, so bloody amazing - and then you get it and realize that it was not such a grand idea after all and actually grows incredibly tedious fast.

As a game dev who often struggles with animations I'm really impressed by the building animation

"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe" WOW, this brings back memories of 15 year old me discovering Cosmos by Carl Sagan. Such a damn legend of a guy. R.I.P

5:09 got a little too excited from the worker putting that wooden beam in the ground.

ngl this could be really cool if executed well, i'd pay money to see this concept done justice elsewhere

"There is no perfect time or place to start something" I am actually impressed by this quote.

We were so busy asking for realism that we never stopped to wonder just how realistic is too realistic

Here would be good opening to the game: You are prince or whatever of very small village, you are in the middle of battle, people are fighting building are burning. You lose a lot but you have to rebuild your village and make it better than ever. With this you start with how fighting works, you have much more than 2 people and better way of learning how to build stuff because you were engaged, you had village and you want it back

The text to speech intro narrative sounding like a twitch dono made me roll in laughter 😂

Something that could help with the time you sit doing nothing would be to give the player some form of 'outskirts exploration' with the prince, perhaps to find new places for resources or to find some kind of enemy. That combined with a slightly larger starting population would really give the first hours a boost.

18:00-18:05 weird audio glitch where Josh Strife Hayes transcends into an artificial intelligence and reality breaks down. Thought it was my headphones at first.

I've run into snags playing this for several days and have had to get creative to get past them, namely by selling things to raise cash to get what was needed. The game eventually has you build a structure for fishing and you assign a random citizen to it to do the fishing, and that brings in more fish than you consume. Ditto a vegetable farm (I went for beetroot). Selling fish can actually bring in a fair bit of gold, but it will take days to gather a significant amount. Then there are reeds. The game is supposed to have a way to gather them, but that does not seem to be implemented yet. This means you have to get them for free when you get a build mission or buy them, and they are pricey. I actually used that to my advantage, though, as I was able to sell extras for enough gold to buy equipment to replace my lost soldiers from the failed first tutorial battle. I'll see if I can fight an easier battle. It is interesting as the sort of thing you can check in on periodically. I'm interested to see how much of a kingdom I can actually build and what else the tutorial will have me do. I've never played this type of game before and this one is kind of fun to figure out in spite of its obvious flaws, and there certainly are many.

I actually like the concept of this game. They just need to start you off with more manpower. Maybe your prince was able to cleave away more supporters for his faction. You should start with a functioning village, and you should be able to assign roles to people and change said roles if necessary.

"YoU cAn Do AnyThInG !" "can I have fun ?" "No"

This is amazing. It is not even a bad idea to have a nice idle city builder, I would probably be interested. The game does not even look like it was made with bad intentions

I played several mobile waiting strategy games. You usually start with short building times, under a minute, during the first hour when you learn the main gameplay loop, before it ramps up to hours-long constructions, because people who develop those understand the importance of good beginning

you don't understand the game gets so good after 28 months of gameplay

I think more MMOs should narrate their cinematics using the Twitch donation TTS voice.

i Genuinely Wouldn't be surprised if that "Voice acting" Was Recorded Via a Twitch Stream and just 2 devs donating to eachother with the dialogue as messages

As a kid my dream game was an Age of Empires 'esque hyperrealistic RTS MMO with a to-scale real world map, that starts you from scratch and has slow, in-depth mechanics for every stage and every aspect of your nation's development. Many years have passed and it seems like the closest things we got to my childhood's dream game is either this boring mess, or those awful "real time strategy" mobile games.

Maybe they wanted to make something for you to have on your second monitor that you watch while you do other stuff. Edit: Actually, they could seriously improve this if they just made it so the Prince could recruit some additional "starter" people to help speed things along.

Honestly i want you to build a kingdom in this game. It would be amazing

I do love the progression of the patreon columns. There were like 3 of them a few months ago and now we are working on the 5th.

If there was a big game to play besides the real-time building and you came occasionally back to check on its progress and see the builder still working on it, it would be pretty cool.

This reminds me of some space mobile game, an there was a room that needed to be next to another room. The problem was that I placed that room in a corner that was the perfect size for it that was probably intended for another room of the exact same size that I placed a little earlier, in a different spot. So I couldn’t place the necessary room, and softlocked myself in the third step of the second section of the tutorial. (First part was combat)

Let's gooo!! @Josh Strife Hayes just started GW2 for the first time because I was watching your old content on it. Thanks, it's super fun so far.

Put a couple hundred hours into this, then imagine if the server gets wiped for full release.

I started playing this after watching, and I actually enjoy it way more than I have any reason to. It definitely needs work, and the moderator on steam even admits that it's slow to get cave coins by farming gold. But personally I'm looking forward to seeing how this game develops, if it lasts

3 people start a society from nothing: "OK, so I'll be the king, you guys build me a kingdom, and when you're done, I'll come and rule over you."

Haha, this is EXACTLY why I laugh everytime I hear someone say "we need more realism in games".

'Are you taking the piss?!' sums up this game pretty well, me thinks.

>Streaming a real time building simulator on Twitch. Styx: I got too much time on my hands, its ticking away at my sanity!

I love how the birds are louder than the music which is louder than the voice acting in the intro

This looked interesting to me so I decided to download the game. So far the carrier pigeon has brought two thumb drives containing one bite each which the downloader downloaded immediately, I haven't seen the installer anywhere, I'm hoping to see him sometime next month so that I can start playing some time soon. but hey, at least the developers let me start with a built PC.

Btw the "thousands of build stage animations" is procedural : the game makes it with some code. Every plank is a different mesh, and the location in 3d space for each plank is not set manually by the developer. In unreal engine (I'm using this as an example since it's the one I use, it's possible in other engines too) there is a thing called static mesh instancing. As a developer, you can set the location for a mesh and then go "It should instance this many times in this direction, this much distance apart" So if I wanted to remake this, I could put a plank at the bottom of the wall in each section of the wall and make it "instanced 0 times" then when the builder arrives near, make him play the animation and set the instanced times to one (so the wall section would be 1 plank tall) so on and so forth. This would take about 5-10 minutes to set up and could be copy-pasted for every wall (albeit needing to change the coordinates of the original plank the code is attached to). Same for pillars as long as they're in a straight line, same for the floor. Basically, the only thing you praise about this game is 1% as impressive as you think it is.

That building system is "Amazing" and I actually really love it being true real time brick by brick. But the mistake the developers made was not having anything else to do while it happens. Letting you actively control the prince and go hunting deer, or visit other kingdoms in person, or anything that you could actively participate in that at least slightly aided progress would have made this vastly better.

I can't get over it, there just MUST be a way to make this game good.

I don't understand why these devs use text to speech. Why not have no voice acting at that point, and just have the player read it for themselves?

I feel like the game would work much better if you had a significantly bigger starting crew. This way, you could have a few of your folks build the sawmill but in the meantime also establish a simple base of operations, even if it starts off just as a bunch of tents, maybe scout the surroundings, look for a food source, etc. It just doesn't give you enough to do early on.

The first few minutes make it feel like a 3D browser game that you just check in on a few times a day : D

If anyone is interested, They likely are not using individual build stage animations as the video creator says but a dynamic animation system that puts down each individual piece of the building down one at a time. The building is make up of tons of tiny pieces and the character just walks to the next position and shows that next piece of the building.

Its like they made the building systems and thought "oh crap we need a game"

Merge builders and carriers into one Worker unit which you're able to decide whether they carry, build or *both.*, change the prince into a worker until after a certain number of pops or a certain building has been constructed, and make the first few buildings significantly smaller, and I could see the early game being much better. Although I think later on it could still drag.

"Only the Prince can stand there doing nothing." *Shows the builder standing around doing nothing on the left side of the screen.*

The building reminds me of a game I played where you you literally build a house by hand. Like cutting down the trees and making planks you have to put down plank by plank.

18:35 "you want to open your game with something Memorable" well Josh...be careful what you wish for, it might come true. Say what you will, but that game-start definitely kinda burned itself into your memory, right?:D

How to make a cave to Kingdom mmo. A) Host a Valheim server with no password B) Profit

I've played settlers. Those games have a similar building mechanic. You select the building from the menu, place the plot, then the population starts building. A house usually needs wooden planks and stones. Stones need to come from a mine, the miners need food. So do the the lumberjacks that cut down trees and the guy at the sawmill that turns the trees into planks. For the food you need a farm for crops, a mill to turn the crops into flour and a bakery to make bread. And they also need water. Oh, and carriers will carry all those things around from the source to where it's needed. But the games are focused on that stuff, the building and resource management in the biggest part of gameplay. *And it doesn't take 15 hrs to build something* They do it in a few minutes. And your starting resources are enough to get everything running, including multiple limbers.

This game should have started out with you as a rebel prince or lord with a vast city and castle/fort that comes under attack...where you actually play the battle, offering near end game mechanics, but have no chance of winning. You lose, almost all of your citizens and military are wiped, and you have to demolish the burning charred remains of your settlement and rebuild from scratch. This would have captivated many people.

This looks like the perfect game to paint a Warhammer army to. 👍

you already showed how to fix the game, just put a 30 times speed boost in, or 60 times, and fix the ressource display so you can see what you need etc. and i swear, if me and my best friend ever finish our game, we do whatever you want josh to get you as a beta tester, even if i have to teach you the whole german language.

3:16 ahhh, don't we all love the good old british palm trees on the sandy beaches around London?

i feel like this building system integrated into an actual game would be sick. like say you have an mmo where instead of generic player housing you have a plot of land and workers who perform tasks like this in real time and you can see them progress realistically and then once you get bored you go back to questing or start a pvp match. in a context along those lines i would love this mechanic a lot!

and so it begins! '*grabs popcorn*'

I think you’re my new favorite channel on youtube 😘 handsome, great voice and better than those you have great perspective and insight into games

This whole game is basically the Rebuild Norende subplot from Bravely Default, except in Bravely Default, you had the entire rest of the game to keep you occupied while you waited for things to be built.

This is the type of game that should have had more to it. The first thing that the game devs should do is increase the amount of workers, with at least 5 builders and 5 gatherers. The second thing they should do is make it so that builders and gathers can work different jobs, like gathers being able to work at farms or lumber mills, and builders being able to work at the smith, carpenters and even a cookhouse. The prince should be given more purpose than just being a unit that does nothing, like maybe you can have the prince increase the speed of the workers assigned to work when you assign him to watch over a project. As for the bought currency, I think letting the player buy more citizens would be an indirect way to speed up production without simply letting the player pay to to bypass a mechanic that would be so much better if you simply had the resources to build faster to begin with would make it feel less pay to win. I know that you could simply buy resources to make up for the increase in food requirements. However, that would be a temporary fix, requiring the player to actually plan out their city effectively to meet the increased food requirements. This game could be so much better with simple quality of life improvements, and that is what makes it so hard to even watch.

It also could be that they didn't create each individual building model stages but rather one plank model and placing hundreds of them around individually and the finished building is just one big model. That would be my take on the building process of this game if I had to do it.

That comment about awarding the score in person! lol. Congrats on 65 Josh! Im glad the numbers are matching the production values, crazy how u had like 10k a year back.

Tried searching for this game in 2024 and its no longer listen on steam. Not sure if it can be played anywhere else. This video should now be archived and considered a sacred text of a bygone era.

Actually a lot of the issues could be easilly solved in this game and it may then be enjoyable. Really need to see what the later gameplay is like. It doesn't seem to hard from a dev point of view to change the amount of starting characters and add some different starting location graphics for different locations. Even if these are just snow, desert, and the one there now. With a couple of back drop changes to have mountains, snow covered mountains and no mountains. For starting characters you should have a starting team of 15 that you assign skills to choosing how many of them are carriers and how many are builders. Maybe also requiring at least 1 soldier. The reason i would add the need for a soldier starting off is because you could then add random animal attacks that you need to fight off during the building phase to give you something to do. Really depends if it is worth it as the later gameplay is unknown to me right now.

you are a genius, it was the best way possible to integrate "like and subscribe" in a video.

I discovered this channel a couple weeks or so ago. I semi-binged the "Worst MMO ever?" Over a course of a few days. Watched most of the other vids too. But honestly it surprised me at first how bad some MMOs actually are. Now I'm just curious and amused. At this point I'm starting to think that with a decent engine and enough time I could do better.

Just stumbled upon your channel and you do a great job! Can you consider doing next games like Deicide online, Knight online and Mu online?

This could do a nice topic for junior school essay about how I spent my summer.