Let's talk about Quinfall (upcoming MMORPG)

The Game Room
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If you haven’t heard, Quinfall is an MMORPG being produced by Turkish developer Vawraek. And it’s… controversial.

So a bit of history. Vawraek previously developed a game called Kayra Online, which was being developed for a Turkish audience (no translations to other languages). Development started in 2019, it got to a beta, and then was abruptly canceled in 2021.

On the heels of that, Vawraek began developing Quinfall, which is targeted toward a larger audience. It is now supposedly entering beta already after only a couple of years.

How is it doing this? First of all, pretty much every asset in the game that has been displayed is premade. They buy assets from the Unity store and stick them in the game. We’re not just talking about things like trees, barrels, and armor sets, but something as large as a medieval city or a full dungeon is being purchased (or snatched up for free) and put into the game unchanged. They are also using AI to code and write for the game. It’s questionable how much they’re actually “developing” as they cut every corner they can.

The game’s biggest claim to fame is that it promises to be the “biggest MMORPG universe in the world”.

You probably see a number of red flags already about this project, but here are a couple of others.

For one, they used an edited stock photo to represent the interior of their studio on their company website.

After they got caught with the fake image, it was removed from their page, but if you look at the Wayback Machine from a few days ago you can see it:

Another bit of deception is with their previous canceled game. They had pledged that Kayla Online would have no “pay to win” aspects, then in the beta they allowed you to buy packages to boost XP gain for up to 50% as you played (which is the pretty much the purest kind of pay to win I can think of). They also partnered with a web site called “ByNoGame. com” (I inserted the space to break the link, people probably shouldn’t visit it). The web site offers real money transactions for online games. This was advertised within the beta itself officially as part of the game’s cash store.

In an interview, Quinfall developers promise to combat real money transactions.

You have already confirmed that the game will implement player-to-player trading. Will there be any restrictions on buying and selling certain types of items? Is there an item binding system (after binding an item to a character, it cannot be sold)? If not, are you afraid that the game will be overwhelmed by a wave of RMT trading?

Of course, we are working on these issues. There will be no loopholes for players to use the system to their advantage. We cannot give too many details about this content, but we are working on a system that will satisfy users.

Paint me as slightly skeptical.

That partnership seems less unusual when I did some poking around and found a Türkiye “game market report” from 2022 which was included among its top sponsors Coca-Cola, GameOn, and ByNoGame. Maybe RMTs don’t have a stigma in that country.

So what the studio is doing now is that they are gearing up for a closed beta. There will be NDAs. Nobody can post footage from it. They’re being very secretive about actual gameplay. They are also offering an open beta, but you have to pay to be in it. Of course, you’ll be buying a pig in a poke since you have to pay up front to get in, and you aren’t allowed to see what it is actually like beforehand. And remember that their last project was canceled in beta.

It looks to me like a big cash grab before they jump ship, but that’s just my opinion.

Has anyone else heard of this game? Is anyone actually looking forward to it? I thought this would be an interesting game to discuss. Closed beta is happening very soon, and I don’t know if more will be leaked at that time.

The open beta is supposed to come out soon afterward, and assuming the NDA holds to keep things secretive before then, that might be when the lid comes off the box and people can actually see what this thing is.

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Never heard of it but I would never pay money for something sight unseen.

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This one has been under my radar (I don’t play MMOs these days) but certainly looks and sounds like a hot mess. I’ll be interested in the post-mortem tales of failure anyway.

A good rule of measure is that, unless a game studio has hundreds of millions in backing funding, they’re probably not going to create the biggest world ever. And Star Citizen would make one doubt even the power of hundreds of millions of dollars.

4

I can’t tell if this is going to be the MMORPG equivalent of direct-to-video movies that were popular in the late 80s/early 90s (where they were put out quickly and with low budgets and show it), or if it’s more like a Potemkin village of a game where they do just enough to make it look legit to grab money from folks before saying, “Oh no, didn’t work, sorry guys.” (Which seems to be what they did with their previous project.)

Either way there are no signs it’s going to be any good.

I worry if this turns out to be an actual game, and it becomes profitable despite the laziness (or even worse, because of it). That might start a trend like we have seen with the free-to-play with microtransaction model that has become the standard in the gaming industry (because it ends up making more money in the end).

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Since this is a day and age where English speaking MMOs are hugely struggling (other than World of Warcraft) in terms of new content (plenty of Asian options but they’re normally more casual in nature and even they have been struggling) I find it a huge ask.

Sure, every few years companies with a LOT of history and or money keep saying they’ll release a new MMO but they tend to end up F2P or otherwise mostly dead after a few years. Doesn’t mean there aren’t some supported by die hard fans and or private servers (Cheering for City of Heros here) - but to claim you’re going to be “the biggest” and with the prior history included in the OP I’d put the odds at more than 10-1 that it’s a pump and dump scam, either by intent of by effect.

Especially the NDA - most companies want a LOT of pre-release publicity, to drum up early numbers. Keeping people from talking about it, when as an MMO, it’s not nearly so vulnerable to story beats, well, screams scam at me.

6

I never heard of it until last night when YouTube offered up a video that claims it is the next The Day Before, which was just released a few weeks ago and the company folded four days later. I didn’t actually watch the video though.

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Looking up “The Day Before” (which I had never heard of until now) introduced me to the term “asset-flipping”.

That’s absolutely what Quinfall is doing, and they even admit it.

8

For what it’s worth, I’ve played closed betas of Division 2 and Division: Homelands and both were still under NDAs and put obnoxious watermarks on the screen so they could track people sharing screenshots. It’s not all that unusual for a closed beta to be under NDA.

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True, I’ve done beta testing for many games (and a couple of alpha tests) for games that had NDAs.

The only thing about this that seems unusual to me is that the pay-to-play beta comes at a time when previous play will be under NDA. So you won’t know what you’re paying for exactly.

I’ve read that it should be possible to request refunds through Steam if it’s a bomb, so that blunts its potential as a cash grab scam. Here is a quote from the first article I linked in the OP:

It probably does not need to be said that by definition, a paid beta is not an open beta but a different sort of closed beta, effectively an early access, but just in case it does need to be said, there it is. In any case, since what is launching at the end of January is basically a paid early access on Steam like any other, players can always hold on to the refund option at that point – if they aren’t already turned off by the red flags we’ve been chronicling since the game’s announcement a year ago.

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Sounds like some Turks have been taking lessons from Chris Roberts.

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Bigger than the entire galaxy?