For a few days I have tried the game Age of Wushu.
Artistically the game has some interesting art direction and depicts ancient Chinese housing style and the lifestyle in general. The training phases were detailed with step by step instructions of what to do in order to proceed on to the next phase. Eventually the player ends up choosing a school at which point the first awkward things show up.
The first awkward thing for school choices were that there was talk of eight schools, but there were only three representatives. The other school options were only given later with the warning that the choice cannot be changed after that point in time. I was wondering why three had preference over the remaining five.
After deciding on scholars, the quest system left me hanging a bit about what I was supposed to do or where to go due to several dead ends. After running around in circles, I picked up some loose ends to continue.
From this point onwards the annoyances started becoming rather obvious. Some Chi quest right from the beginning was still cryptic and a related item was taking up a slot of the little bit of bag space that I had. Having to keep items for crafts and life crafts as well did not help.
While doing some quest near the Scholars school, I noticed my health suddenly going down which turned out to be starvation. Very conveniently the health was going down pretty fast and I had to use HP improvement herbs as soon as their cooldown ended to stay alive which was a major annoyance.
The next biggest annoyance turned out to be getting back to a market just to find out that I cannot buy food even though I had Liang and Wen currency. It turned out that I needed unbound silver of which I had none.
Where was the tutorial about this particular detail?
The documentation about money said something about having to kidnap some player for which I first had to buy something somewhere. There is also a cooldown on kidnapping to avoid abuse. Having health going down constantly while having to figure out where and what is not what I consider fun. It also turned out that none of the NPCs sell food and that only one of the 50+ players at the market sold one food item which was overpriced. At this point in time I started getting really annoyed.
Searching for the word "food" in the help section came up with zero results, so I checked on various forums where they say it is so easy to quickly buy food from players which I have tried just to find there are currency issues and availability issues.
My next attempt at getting food was to go to the chef to learn cooking while my health was still running down and I had to restock HP herbs a few times already since the stacks can only take 30 per bag slot. The chef mumbled something about training and wanted to give me some items. Then I got a message about not enough bag space. I got rid of some medicine and tried again just to find there was still not enough. In the end having five free slots was still not enough. I had two slots free in one of my other bags that can only take clothing items or only other specific items. The clothing bag had plenty of space at the time. Conveniently the system did never tell me how many slots were needed. Health was still going down and cooking could not be learned to start doing basic cooking tasks.
The next attempt to get food was hunting since I had already acquired that skill from an earlier quest. I got hold of some meat from a wolf, but could not cook it. For the basic cooking tasks I needed rice. There was a farm right next door to the hunting place. Ploughing did not work, the tool tip text said right click which did nothing, I tried to left click as well a few times and even drag the skill to my button bar which just opens the window. Health was still busy going down. This now came down to having to try and figure out where I can get seeds and maybe plant something, but I running dangerously low of health replenishing herbs and headed back to town. At this point in time I was really highly annoyed about the entire mess and not a single mention in the tutorial and help system about what to properly do to at least get started to fix the mess. The tutorial basically just leaves players hanging over a huge chasm.
In town I ended up back again at the chef to try my luck again with the cooking since farming would have taken too long to figure out and wasn't working for me sine no additional messages popped up either. The chef was not really helping much this time either. I even exited the game to watch a video about farming just to find that the farming interface was shown full of stuff and quests were involved to get there for which I did not have time or bag space. All of this was going on while health was going down and none of the forums were useful.
After talking to the chef yet again to maybe buy some stuff, I was told that my money was not enough when something was listed as 100 Liang and I had 236 Liang. At that point in time, I just really had enough and uninstalled the game. Whoever built that tutorial section ended up becoming lazy and basically ruined the game for many new players. I also read about a case where there is no way to remove credit card details.
If I see any titles from Snail Games USA in future, I will seriously avoid them just because of this stupid food issue. The error messages are often too cryptic and basically wrong, the help section basically leaves out some of the most important parts required for daily use of the game, the tutorial started out really well and then just died a horrible death without a hint of the really important stuff, VIP stuff gets pushed with too much which basically means paying real money.
Age of Wushu was for me basically like leading the player up a gentle slope and then dropping the player down a vertical cliff into a bottomless pit.
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