Ramen VR, the studio behind Zenith: The Last City, announced it’s ceasing development on the VR MMORPG, citing a struggle to retain players.
The studio announced the news in a video, linked below, which describes some of the reasons behind the decision:
“Zenith has struggled with retaining players since very early on. Even though we’ve had hundreds of thousands of players, the vast majority of them stopped playing Zenith after about a month,” the company says in an FAQ.
Initially the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2019, the Steam Early Access title went on to secure $10 million Series A funding round, later landing a $35 million Series B in March 2022. Just two months before securing its Series B, the studio released Zenith on PSVR and Quest 2, putting it in the best possible position to capitalize on its ability to play cross-platform.
In early 2024, Ramen VR revealed Zenith was running at a loss on a month-to-month basis “for the better part of a year,” which prompted the studio to release Infinite Realms, a free-to-play model, in hopes of attracting paid users.
“Despite our best efforts over the 5.5 years of development (and well before Infinite Realms launched), we weren’t able to improve retaining players. Zenith started losing money and it isn’t feasible to continue running it at a loss,” the FAQ continues.
While the studio is shutting down development, it’s not killing off the game entirely. Shards for both its paid Zenith: The Last City game and free-to-play Zenith: Infinite Realms version will be running “for the foreseeable future,” Ramen VR says. “The community will be the first to know far in advance if that changes.”
Zenith: The Last City receives a new PvP mode in the upcoming Skyward Summit update, introducing 1v1 fights and team duels.
Announcing this Zenith: The Last City addition through PlayStation Blog, developer Ramen VR offered a first look at this new mode for its MMORPG. It confirms Skyward Summit’s PvP will “primarily focus on the implementation of one-on-one and team duels,” but states the team’s exploring additional options for PvP in future patches. Ramen also reveals this next update will introduce the Cyber Ninja class, alongside player housing, resource harvesting and crafting.
Introducing PvP in Zenith: The Last City A thrilling new way to put your skills to the test in #PSVR2.
It’s not all good news for Zenith fans lately, however. Last month, Ramen VR announced it’s dropping support for the original Quest and PSVR headsets later this year. While Quest owners will have full access removed after September 15, 2023, original PSVR owners can still play in their own isolated shard running version 1.2.2 of Zenith. In a separate post, Ramen cites PlayStation Move as a factor, stating support for these controllers is “just not possible” despite the team’s efforts.
Zenith: The Last City is available now on the Meta Quest platform, PSVR, PSVR 2, and PC VR, while Skyward Summit is currently targeting a Q2 2023 release window.
Zenith: The Last City is arguably the most successful MMORPG in VR right now, and developers Ramen VR announced its next major content patch will finally bring player versus player (PvP) combat to the game.
Called Skyward Summit, the update is said to focus on one-on-one and team duels, and will also include the long-teased Cyber Ninja class.
Projected for release in Q2 2023, Skyward Summit is also slated to introduce other new features such as player housing, resource harvesting, and crafting.
Late last month the studio released a preview video that shows off some of the upcoming features:
As the result of a fairly successful Kickstarter campaign in 2019, Ramen VR released Zenith in late 2020 on all major VR headsets at the time, which included the original Quest, PSVR, and SteamVR headsets.
With the launch of its 1.3 Skyward Summit patch, the game will end support for both the original PSVR and Quest 1 headsets.
“We are committed to delivering the best possible experience to all of our players and we are confident that this decision will ultimately lead to a more stable, seamless, and enjoyable experience for all users moving forward,” the studio says in a blog post.
The second round of alpha tests are set to launch on April 18th, although PSVR 2 users won’t be able to access test channels, which the studio is only making available for Quest 2 and SteamVR users.
If you’re interested in testing out the Skyward Summit update, click here (Discord invite).
Zenith is getting its first major update next week with the launch of ‘The Celestial Throne’, a v1.1 patch that’s slated to bring a massive slice of content to the MMO.
Update (June 16th, 2022): In addition to the new instanced dungeons rolling out today, Zenith studio Ramen VR additionally says players can expect headgear such as masks, helmets, and crowns. This comes in addition to a new item infusion mechanic to level up gear, amid more daily and weekly quests, 50 pieces of armor and godstones, 10 brand-new full-size quests, and what the studio says are “lots of new interactive puzzles and objects across the game world.”
The update will be live today on all supported headsets. The original article follows below:
Original Article (June 10th, 2022): On June 16th, the Celestial Throne Update is set to introduce what developers Ramen VR say will be “dozens of hours” of new content, including three new four-person dungeons and three eight-person raids.
The studio says we should expect:
Explore an awe inspiring giant castle and giant obstacle course you must scale to reach
Delve 6 meticulously crafted instanced dungeons including a ton of new interactive puzzles
8 new armor sets + helmets
20 new quests
Matchmaking, Daily Quests, New Armor Sets, New Enemy Types, and much more
Of course, there’s also a brand new story element too—The Celestial Throne itself. Here’s how Ramen VR describes it:
Emerging from the violent storm essence that kept it hidden for the last 60 years, a flying castle hovers down near the surface once more. Within the suspended castle and scattered around the world, adventurers will find six new instanced dungeons filled with interactive puzzles, traps, adversaries, and an abundance of treasure. Assemble parties of 4-8 players through instance matchmaking, then get ready to test every skill you have, both as individuals and as a team.
The studio shows off a few of the challenges that await in the new release trailer, including the previously revealed ‘Furnace’ dungeon, which is at the heart of the castle.
“The Furnace keeps the enormous fortress afloat with the power of superheated flames and lava. You and your party must feed fire-starters to the forges to generate updrafts from the heat vents. Well-timed updrafts will then carry you across scorching lava pits, and deeper within the Furnace to where a beast awaits,” Ramen VR says.
There looks to be some really interesting environmental hazards along the way too (skipping a laser rope?!).
VR MMO Zenith’s first major content update could provide “dozens to hundreds” of hours of additional content.
That is according to Ramen VR CEO Andy Tsen, who caught up with the Beyond Realities team reporting on the ground at GDC 2022 for UploadVR. “We’ve talked about some of the technologies we’re excited about,” Tsen said of what’s next for the MMO. “We have instance dungeons, instance raids, group content. The stuff that people really have come to look for in a virtual reality game we’re now looking to incorporate. And what we’re trying to do is make the environment a big part of the dungeon itself.”
Ramen has already spoken about expanding on the game’s dungeons in the future, but Tsen explained that this would mean more of the open exploration that players have come to expect from Zenith’s core areas.
So you can expect “more environmental puzzles, more parkour-like things,” Tsen said. “And we want it to feel different from what you might get in a traditional MMO, so we’re really excited to have that out soon. But it should provide dozens to hundreds of additional hours of endgame content depending on whether you’re a casual or hardcore player.”
There’s no word yet on when exactly Zenith’s first major content update will launch, though the developer hopes to release one big update every quarter. We also know that Ramen VR is working on a third major class for the game in the Cyber Ninja, and that the studio recently raised another $35 million to help grow the game.
We thought Zenith had a rock-solid launch earlier this year but definitely wanted to see more content and a lot more polish added into the game. Fingers crossed all of that isn’t too far out.
Ramen VR, the creators behind crowd-funded VR MMORPG Zenith: The Last City, announced it’s closed a Series B round of $35 million, something the studio says will allow it to significantly expand in size as it aims to develop Zenith into a metaverse platform that goes far beyond its current scope.
The studio’s latest financing round was led by Anthos Capital and Dune Ventures. Additional investments come from Makers Fund and personal investments from Andreessen Horowitz partners Andrew Chen and James Gwertzman.
The studio’s Series B brings its outside investment to over $45 million; Ramen VR’s penultimate round of $10 million was led by Makers Fund in September 2021.
Ramen VR says the funding will be used to “double the size of the studio as it transforms Zenith into a gaming super-app containing multiple worlds and gameplay experiences across VR, desktop, and mobile.”
“The reception for Zenith has been amazing. We’re already profitable but now we want to take the game to the next level, building massive interconnected gaming worlds for all to explore,” said Andy Tsen, co-founder and CEO of Ramen VR. “Closing this important round of funding will help us grow our team so we can continue to build out our vision. We are fortunate to collaborate with these exceptional investment partners who believe in us as we continue to support Zenith throughout the game’s lifecycle.”
Ramen VR gained quick success on Kickstarter in a 2019 campaign that raised $280,000 to create the VR-native MMORPG for PC VR headsets, Meta Quest and PSVR. Since its January 2022 launch, Zenith: The Last City has been a resounding success: the game currently sits at the top-5 most popular games on the Quest platform.
The dream of the VRMMO has been captured in countless movies and shows, but to date the genre really hasn’t seen its breakout hit in the VR gaming space. Zenith: The Last City is the latest shot at making a great VRMMO a reality, but does it deliver?
Zenith: The Last City Details:
Available On: Steam, Rift, Quest, PSVR Release Date: January 27th, 2022 Price: $30 Developer: Ramen VR Reviewed On: Valve Index, Quest 2
Editor’s Note: This is a Review in Progress. Zenith is a large game with a long progression. We’re publishing some initial impressions here because we want to share what we’ve seen so far, but still have more to explore before we’re ready to give the game a final score.
Gameplay
At its core, Zenith: The Last City isn’t doing anything new with the MMO genre. In fact, its foundation takes strongly after MMOs of yesteryear like World of Warcraft. It’s the formula you already know: NPCs with question marks over their head are waiting to give you quests, replete with text boxes and short snippets of benign flavor text; enemies stand around aimlessly in open fields waiting for players to come kill them; when you return to the quest giver you’ll be rewarded with XP which increases your level and grant you the ability to use new items and gear.
If it was a single player game this formula would probably bore us to tears. And yet, there’s an undeniable bit of magic that comes with feeling like you’re doing all of this in a persistent world with other players, a sense which is only enhanced by the immersive nature of VR.
And to that end, Zenith is making it happen. Playing since day one, it’s clear that the game is… well… it’s fully functional. It works… like technically speaking. That might not be saying much—were this ambitious game coming from a veteran studio—but considering that this is a brand new IP from a green studio on a relatively small budget, it’s at least worth recognizing that all the gears are in place and seem to be turning just fine.
Image courtesy Ramen VR
Zenith doesn’t stray far from the MMO formula of yore and attempts to graft VR onto it in ways that are mostly successful, if not particularly well polished.
There’s two major classes in the game, the Blade Master and Essence Mage; the former being a sword-wielder and the latter being a ranged caster. Each class also has three sub-classes—damage, tank, and support—which come have their own abilities and intended roles.
Both classes wield their main weapons in fairly intuitive ways. As a Blade Master you swing your swords to slice enemies, and as an Essence Mage you use gauntlet-looking weapons to shoot at enemies from a distance.
Image courtesy Ramen VR
Both classes can also make use of various abilities which are cast through a coarse gesture system which involves holding down a button and then swinging your arm up, down, left, or right (with different abilities depending upon which direction you choose). Compared to the use of primary weapons, these gestures are less intuitive and not terribly fun. The direction you gesture doesn’t really relate to the ability you’re using, and generally they just cause something to happen at your feet or give you a large circle to place on the ground where your spell will be cast.
While their primary weapons are pretty much point and shoot, Essence Mages have some spells which are actually thrown from the hand (like a baseball), which is a fun way to make casting more ‘realistic’ and dependent on player skill (there seems to be no auto-aim so you need to have decent aim).
The Blade Master class may have you swinging your swords with your arms, but the overall feeling of the melee combat is lacking compared to melee-focused games you may have played in VR elsewhere.
So far, the two other parts of the game that feel most specifically designed with VR in mind are climbing and flying.
Every surface I’ve found in the game up to this point is climbable, including huge mountains that you’d assume would be out of bounds. A stamina bar limits how far you can climb at any one time, but I found it was easy to scale an entire mountain because the game let me stay in place even when I had to let go to let my stamina recharge. It was clear I wasn’t actually supposed to bother climbing the mountain (as there were some holes in the terrain), but on the other side I could indeed see a brand new zone I had never been to, and I would have flown down to it if the game hadn’t warned me that my player level was far too low to bother.
Flying is done by simply holding your arms out to the side like you’re pretending to be a bird (no flapping required, fortunately). After just a bit of practice it feels very natural and quite freeing to fly in Zenith; even for short distances just by using the jump button and then gliding for a bit. Like climbing, flying is also limited by stamina, but you can cross significant distances (hundreds of yards) if you start from a high point. For the most part you can only descend from the point that you start, but in some cases the game encourages you to gain altitude by placing gusts of wind that lift you up and refresh your stamina.
From what I’ve seen so far, quests in the game have been pretty rudimentary in scope. There’s ‘kill this many of that thing’, ‘find this many of that thing’, and ‘go to these places’, or ‘kill this one specific enemy’. On their own they’ve felt mostly like a list of chores without much meaning behind them, but they at least create a framework for adventuring with others and maybe even finding a new friend or two along the way—thanks to this being a world full of other players.
Immersion
Image courtesy Ramen VR
In an MMO you’d have to say that immersion starts with the world that everyone inhabits. And on that front I’d say the look is passable. The detail is a little coarse throughout, but so far the art direction at least looks consistent.
Graphically, the game seems to suffer from the problem of trying to straddle the line between PC and Quest. On PC it doesn’t look quite as good as you might hope (and there aren’t many dials you can crank to make it look better). And on Quest it looks like things have been clamped down a good bit to make it run smoothly, including what looks like some auto-decimated assets that were chopped down too much. Had the game been designed for PC or Quest (and not both), the result probably could have been better, but there’s an argument to be made that less optimized graphics were a fair trade for game being cross-play so you’re more likely to be able to play with your friends.
Beyond climbing and flying—which work fairly well in the game to make you feel like you’re part of a solid world and also have some freedom within it—Zenith is otherwise lacking many immersive details.
NPC and enemy animations and behaviors are rough around the edges, giving them a sense of being puppets more than creatures. Items dropped from enemies or found in chests spawn as floating cubes with a name and an icon instead of looking like the actual item they represent. And once you pick them up they go into a classic flat-screen inventory that you control with a laser pointer.
Image courtesy Ramen VR
The UI is almost entirely based on flat-screen paradigms, including your health, stamina, and mana which float in front of you in a flat plane alongside ability icons that show cooldowns with a text-based timer. There’s been many examples across the VR landscape of presenting this info in an immersive way, but unfortunately Zenith does little on that front. Haptics and audio in the game could also use a significant overhaul to better communicate to players when they’ve done something correctly.
Comfort
Locomotion in Zenith is entirely based around thumbstick movement (save for the aforementioned climbing and gliding), and it expects you to do a lot of it.
Luckily the game has a wide range of comfort options and I appreciate that the game allows you to not only fully customize the vignette (AKA peripheral blinder) strength from 1–100%, but even allows you to do it on a case by case basis. For instance, you can set a 25% vignette for walking and a 50% vignette for flying.
While there’s no traditional teleport option, Zenith includes a fairly novel ‘third-person’ comfort mode which starts in first person and then (when you begin walking) shows you walking ‘out of your body’. Once you stop moving, your first-person view teleports back into your body at the new location. It’s an interesting idea and maybe a bit more immersive than a traditional teleport, but it seems disruptive to the overall flow of the gameplay so I doubt many will make use of it (it might ultimately be better suited for a different kind of game).
Generally speaking, and considering the comfort options at hand, I’ve found Zenith quite comfortable. I’ve yet to run into any instances of the player’s camera being overtly controlled by the game (ie: shakes or knockbacks by enemies), nor any environmental issues relating to comfort (ie: stairs that cause your head to bob up and down). The biggest risk in the game for those sensitive to artificial movement is likely flying and climbing, but fortunately you can choose to dial your vignette up for those things specifically if you find they are causing discomfort.
Summary
At its most basic level, Zenith ‘works’. The essential pieces of an MMO are in place and they’re working as expected and you can play it all using a VR headset. And that’s a great start considering how ambitious this project is for the small studio behind the game.
Were Zenith a single player game, I’d give it a pass pretty quickly. But there’s no denying the unique feeling of being in an interesting world with other players (and possibilities therein) which Zenith has so far managed to capture. While there’s much more the game could do to feel like it really belongs in VR, the ability to climb and fly helps make the world uniquely explorable in a way that MMOs typically don’t.
There’s more I want to see and explore in Zenith before I feel ready to give it a final score. Check back soon!
Zenith is an inarguably rough but undeniably massive achievement for the VR industry, and already the best VR MMO. Read on for our Zenith review!
Note: Though we’re finally publishing our full review of Zenith today, take note that the game is still very much in early access (though it isn’t labeled as such on PSVR and Quest). We’ll be revisiting Zenith to update this review when necessary.
If you were to ask me what the most important element of Zenith is at launch, I’d tell you it’s the cooking. Not because of the expected stat buffs, but because of how well it works in VR. It’s a wonderfully cathartic process; flipping dough and timing temperatures requires attention and precision in a way a normal crafting menu simply couldn’t. It’s a small but significant indication of what VR can do to shake up one of gaming’s most important categories.
And that’s clearly what Zenith wants to do, not just routinely transplant a popular genre into headsets, but fully dissect, study and then re-piece the MMO to fit the medium much more suitably. It wants to take meaningful steps towards an experience like a Sword Art Online, not just name-drop such inspirations in hopes of a quick cash grab. At launch, it does at least some of that very well, but there’s a long way to go before Zenith really achieves those lofty ambitions.
Crucially, though, it’s already a step ahead of the competition. Make no mistake, Zenith is the first actual, proper native VR MMO that doesn’t exaggerate the extent of its online elements or structure. It’s already home to multiple expansive zones where players run wild, beating down enemies in search of experience points and loot, with limited time events pushing them into certain areas, quest lines that last for hours and a gear and progression system that rewards constant incremental improvement. That alone makes the game something of a landmark achievement for the industry, and multiple consistently full servers suggest it won’t be falling victim to the curse of empty VR lobbies anytime soon.
Zenith Review – The Facts
What is it?: A VR MMO in which players hop online, meet up with friends and go questing to improve their characters. Platforms: Quest 2, PSVR, PC VR Release Date: January 27th Price: $29.99/£24.99
Most of this structure plays out as you’d expect. You pick between six classes (two main types with three interchangeable roles each and more on the way), whilst the vast majority of quests are your bog-standard items hunts, enemy encounters or scouting expeditions. Leveling up, meanwhile, increases your core stats and grants you new abilities known as Godstones, which in turn raise your chances of surviving in tougher zones.
This familiarity make Zenith a surprisingly undaunting undertaking. There’s a feather-light tutorial to kick things off and, while the game could certainly do a better job of explaining some elements, you’ll have mastered its core mechanics within your first hour of play.
What Zenith isn’t, though, is particularly original. If the game strives to build out something new for the MMO scene, then it’s certainly not within the core structure. The XP grind is alive and well here, and you can trace the design all the way back to the origins of the genre. If it reminded me of any MMO I’ve played it’d be the original version of Runescape, with its straightforward set of fetch quests easily seeing away hours with friends. While MMO devotees will no doubt enjoy how strictly it adheres to the rulebook, there’s definitely untapped potential to play more to VR’s strengths as the game evolves.
Combat, for example, makes attempts to diversify. Numbers still fly from foes as you deliver blows and a quest tracker keeps a tally of your objective progress toward the left of your vision, but developer Ramen VR tries to ensure you’re not just waggling your wrists away with your eyes glazed over the majority of the time.
Swordmasters wield two katanas, but there’s a small cooldown every time you land a blow, meaning you’ll do minimal damage if you furiously swipe back and forth. Mages, meanwhile, have two wrist-mounted gauntlets that fire projectiles operating on a similar cooldown (though laser sights do mean you never need to give too much thought to aim). Central to both roles are the Godstones, gesture-based abilities that can summon more powerful attacks, inflict status changes or aid you and your friends.
In my time as a damage-per-second class mage, I’ve summoned lighting, conjured fireballs that I can pluck from the air, shot gusts that knock enemies back or ignited walls of flame, and I’ve always had a great sense of just how quickly my character build is progressing. Godstones give the game much of its strategic depth and help emphasize teamwork between a range of classes, but the accurate gesture recognition system is what fuels the superpowered flow that combat achieves.
Appreciated as these tweaks to the formula are, more could be done to make Zenith’s battles more unique to VR, like sword combat that relies more heavily on your reflexes, with enemies telegraphing attacks to block or dodge in certain directions, or spells that require you to be much more precise to maximize damage. I’d happily tackle quests with fewer, more memorable enemy encounters that required me to react differently to a variety of attacks than I would champion the current rinse and repeat formula.
In fact, Zenith’s best elements pretty much all stem from VR-first design. On top of the fantastic cooking minigame, there’s unusually agile locomotion thanks to a gliding system borrowed from Population: One and the ability to climb pretty much any surface in the game. It’s liberating to be able to move around what is traditionally such a sluggish genre with such freedom, and Zenith’s best quests thus far also recognize this, getting you to clamber over floating platforms in search of levers before your stamina runs out.
They make for a madcap and often quite stressful dash unlike anything else you’ll find in the MMO scene, as do the races around zones in search of landmarks and statues. That said, they also make it incredibly easy to get around combat and essentially cheat your way to victory in some scenarios, which will no doubt need to be addressed in the future.
Then there’s easily the game’s central and best aspect, which is social. This is where Zenith rightly soars, with full cross-play between platforms (and cross-progression if you happen to own multiple copies), extensive friend, squad and guild systems as well as privacy options for those that want them. More importantly, though, there’s a sense of being together on an adventure in Zenith that you simply can’t get from other MMOs.
Part of that is that presence you get from VR, as fleeting as it may be with current headsets. A bigger aspect, though, is introducing body language and action into the experience in small but meaningful ways. Pointing other players in the direction of hidden chests, waving them over to areas of interest or urging friends to stop messing with you by throwing up your hands in protest – this all enhances the personality of the relationships you can build in the game. Sometimes I’d drop into a battle with random people and they’d high five me for the help, sometimes I knew I was interfering with someone else’s quest and they’d shoo me away. It’s a remarkably dynamic experience.
As Ramen maps out the months and years ahead, it’s these elements I want to see honed in on. Zenith does more than I expected to differentiate itself from flatscreen MMOs at launch, and that’s hugely encouraging. But it won’t, in its current state, bring around many MMO skeptics thanks to its focus on repetitive objective types and gameplay, not to mention the enormous amount of polish that still needs to be applied to it.
Zenith Review – Comfort
Zenith supports both smooth locomotion and teleportation options, with a number of different settings to tweak to get the experience right for you. It’s not really a fast-paced game and you can very much acclimiatize to it as you go, though features like the gliding may cause a bit of a stir for those more sensitive to VR.
Zenith’s presentation, in other words, isn’t rough around the edges so much as it is rough around the everything. From text spilling out of menu formatting to environmental textures clipping into each other, not to mention chests floating in mid-air and unsightly areas of blurred textures (many of which I suspect I wasn’t meant to be able to reach), it’s clear that many of the game’s core aspects are unfinished or just flat out missing.
Currently what you see with the game is pretty much what you get; a good number of large zones that you’ll clear through in a few hours before moving onto the next. Mission design doesn’t always make the most of these environments though and, once you’ve left an area, there’s little reason to return save for a particularly good XP farming spot or event.
The first area, Fractured Plains, includes one dungeon-like mine to delve into, but other environments don’t have any other sorts of offshoots. The framework is there for Ramen VR to simply add to these existing levels, as they’re all very well realized from the humble towns through to enormous fortresses and inviting beaches, and capitalize on the vertical traversal.
The same can be said for many more areas. Zenith needs more classes, new features like crafting, filling out empty city environments with more NPCs, a cohesive story (which I’m sure is in there somewhere I just can’t find it) and a whole host of aspects that are missing in action at this point in time. The entire game has an air of the unfinished about it which is to be expected in early access but also equally important not to forget given the game’s meteoric rise in popularity at launch.
Even with those features missing, though, the game has eaten up the hours for me. Most systems have extra offshoots to encourage experimentation for stat completists, be that upgrading Godstones by acquiring rare drops out in the field or enhancing the already-expansive amount of gear by breaking down your old loot, and you can even change your sub-class at an time and re-level them at twice the speed until you reach your current highest rank.
Those complexities aside, though, the core 30 – 40 hour campaign already warrants a look if you’re into MMOs and have friends to play with. Without the social element, Zenith’s combat and dog-eared look wouldn’t compare favorably to other single-player games (though solo grinding is entirely possible past a few bottlenecks). It’s a game for casually ticking off checklists as you glide alongside a friend, or jumping in to save a stranger from a battle a bit past their level, sharing secrets about hidden loot or racing each other to an objective marker. Simply put, it’s been a pure joy to get lost in its world with others, warts and all.
Zenith Review – Final Impressions
It would feel wrong to label Zenith as an essential VR experience right now, not necessarily because of its current flaws so much as how much ground it has to cover before you could definitively call it a complete product. There are many tens of hours of questing in its current form, but they’re largely identical objectives playing out in the game’s overworlds. A lack of unique dungeons and events — not to mention the small number of classes available at launch –holds the game back, and some of the many bugs you’ll find are a clear indicator of its early status. This really is just a starting point for the VR MMO.
But, crucially, it’s a solid foundation that already comfortably establishes Zenith as VR’s best stab at the genre yet. There’s hours to spend here exploring with friends and maxing out character stats, and even the current straightforward quest structure makes the game hard to put down. Most importantly you can get a glimpse of the aspects that are really going to make a difference in the long run, from the added expression you get from playing an MMO in VR to the way Ramen VR uses motion controls to deliver some more instant and enjoyable gameplay ideas than we’ve previously seen with the genre. If it can hone in on those elements and bring out the best of VR in a social setting, then this will be an unmissable VR experience.
We’re not at Sword Art Online just yet, then. Zenith has a ways to go before it even hopes to compare to some of its inspirations, but the journey’s already been more than worthwhile.
For more on how we arrived at this rating, read our review guidelines. What did you make of our Zenith review? Let us know in the comments below!
Virtual reality (VR) platforms have some big titles you can spend hours and hours in, experiences like A Township Tale and OrbusVR two of the most well known. The next to join this group will be Zenith: The Last City, a VR MMORPG by Ramen VR scheduled to launch towards the end of January.
Zenith: The Last City is the brainchild of Lauren Frazier and Andy Tsen, the co-founders of Ramen VR. Work on the project began back in 2019, garnering massive interest from VR players thanks to the scale of the project and its gorgeous aesthetic. Since the initial Kickstarter campaign, the studio has grown to ramp up production, helped by a $10 million Series A investment round.
The title promises to be an action-packed experience set in the sprawling world of Zenith. In this fantasy realm, you’ll be able to go on quests with countless other players, fighting monsters with physical and magical attacks. As a community-driven videogame, Zenith: The Last City will encourage players to forge alliances and join guilds before taking on raids and epic world events.
With such a big expanse to explore there will of course be a variety of unique locations to discover. From the titular city of Zenith to the Fractured Plains, home to rural towns or the Emerald Desert filled with ruins, in total Ramen VR has created five biomes.
This wouldn’t be a VR videogame without some physicality to the proceedings and Zenith: The Last City shouldn’t disappoint on that front. Whether you’re blocking and parrying opponents attacks with a couple of swords or getting a better look at the environment by climbing up a rock face, you’ve got the freedom to do so. The developers have ensured that every surface can be scaled and once you’re up to the top you can then glide to your next destination.
Currently, Ramen VR has stencilled in 27th January as the launch date for Zenith: The Last City across Meta Quest, PlayStation VR and PC VR platforms for $29.99 USD but with a caveat that it could change depending on final approval from the relative VR stores. Check out the new trailer below and for further updates keep reading VRFocus.
Virtual reality (VR) platforms have some big titles you can spend hours and hours in, experiences like A Township Tale and OrbusVR two of the most well known. The next to join this group will be Zenith: The Last City, a VR MMORPG by Ramen VR scheduled to launch towards the end of January.
Zenith: The Last City is the brainchild of Lauren Frazier and Andy Tsen, the co-founders of Ramen VR. Work on the project began back in 2019, garnering massive interest from VR players thanks to the scale of the project and its gorgeous aesthetic. Since the initial Kickstarter campaign, the studio has grown to ramp up production, helped by a $10 million Series A investment round.
The title promises to be an action-packed experience set in the sprawling world of Zenith. In this fantasy realm, you’ll be able to go on quests with countless other players, fighting monsters with physical and magical attacks. As a community-driven videogame, Zenith: The Last City will encourage players to forge alliances and join guilds before taking on raids and epic world events.
With such a big expanse to explore there will of course be a variety of unique locations to discover. From the titular city of Zenith to the Fractured Plains, home to rural towns or the Emerald Desert filled with ruins, in total Ramen VR has created five biomes.
This wouldn’t be a VR videogame without some physicality to the proceedings and Zenith: The Last City shouldn’t disappoint on that front. Whether you’re blocking and parrying opponents attacks with a couple of swords or getting a better look at the environment by climbing up a rock face, you’ve got the freedom to do so. The developers have ensured that every surface can be scaled and once you’re up to the top you can then glide to your next destination.
Currently, Ramen VR has stencilled in 27th January as the launch date for Zenith: The Last City across Meta Quest, PlayStation VR and PC VR platforms for $29.99 USD but with a caveat that it could change depending on final approval from the relative VR stores. Check out the new trailer below and for further updates keep reading VRFocus.
A thrilling new way to put your skills to the test in 
