Age of Z Origins, Revisited

I had written a post about this mobile game that I’ve been playing, but never posted it. I wasn’t too impressed at first, especially the P2W (pay to win) aspects of the game. One of the goals is to level up your city and troops but each level becomes much harder to achieve, unless you spend money (a lot of money). I’ve been at it for a week and just got to level 16, yet there are players that should have been playing for about the same length of time (the game creates a new world as each one fills up with players) at level 30+. That would take months or years if you don’t pay with real money to buy stuff in-game. In fact, the developers (in Beijing China) evidently focused so much on getting more money, have added gambling features where you spend money for in game prizes. It’s like the worst example of micro-transactions I’ve seen in an app.

In the beginning, I installed the game on several iPhones/iPads to get different accounts and played mainly by myself. Now, I’ve been recruited by larger “alliances” or groups and the gameplay has changed a lot. You can group together into large fleets or armies and attack other cities. Since the game allows for a lot of languages, the groups seem to be organized by nationality or ethnicity. I’m in a group called Brazil but most of the group members are not Brazilian. In another instance of the game, I’m in a group call THC (yup!). I’ll admit, it’s been a lot more fun playing in groups, and since most people are stuck at home, there is a lot of participation. The THC group seems fun since there’s no ugly nationalism involved, and the member seem older than your typical immature 15-year old. There’s also a lot of social medial aspects with chats and messages for communications. Real life does intrude into the game however. One of the group members had to sign off for a few days because his sister just passed away. Another member mentioned he needs to go out into hurricane Laura tomorrow for work. I’ll probably never see these people in real life nor even know their real names but you find out about stuff about their lives anyway.

I still get irritated by the intrusive and obvious game features inserted for money but as long as you are patient, I think you can have a good time for free. The problem is that higher level players will always beat lower level players. There is some strategy involved, especially with group play, but I think the whales (those that spend a lot of money on in-game transactions) will always win in the end by outspending you.

There are literally a hundred different packs you can buy from $1 to $100. The $100 package above actually doesn’t give you that much. You can collect the equivalent resources in a few days, and at most it saves you two days of waiting. Also, what is QiXi Festival? I’m Chinese and I don’t know. I’ve seen instances where the developers forgot to put in English text so a bunch of Chinese characters (simplified) comes up. When the text is in English, some longer passages are pretty odd. You can tell the game was developed overseas.