Land of Livia

Soooo...I read a blog post about why this guy couldn't give up working on his indie game. From the blog post, I found out that the app was called "Land of Livia" and it was supposed to be an RPG type mobile game that had a good story and had a free Prelude. This sounded like a pretty sweet deal, so I downloaded it.

I quickly realized that the description was a little...boasty.

They claimed that it had a good story, but more words doesn't necessarily equate to a good story. You start on your farm, a red dot on a green map, and there's a storm happening out in the ocean, which logically is the cause of your problems, right? So you're told about this red dot further down the road. Go there, you say. Cool. Wait 5 minutes for the travel time. You get there. What's available? An MMO style quest. There's wolves and they're prowling. And for some reason you need to kill them. This will take you 10 minutes. Press button to wait 10 minutes.

Oh dear God...

So this is the way things are. You go places which takes time or you complete quests, which takes time, or you listen at an inn which takes a lot of time. I was super not into any of this almost immediately, but the perplexing thing to me was that there were leaderboards and active chats with people who were obviously super into this. They would talk about where each other were from, where/in what quest to find certain items, and what sections were bugged. By the time I had noticed the leaderboard stuff, I was like 12th on it in some of the categories. There are not a ton of people playing this game, but some of them are ridiculously into it. The highest quest completer has done new/repeat quests over 1800 times. And it was because of my confusion of their fervor that I persisted at least until I finished the Prelude.

This app is nothing but grinding with time. You can't complete different quests without good enough gear, so you grind until you get a decent random drop. But grinding is just waiting. When you give up on getting gear that will make it a sure thing. You wait grind, hoping you'll land on the right side of the percentage of chance to beat the quest.

I'm SO over this game and I won't be plopping down the $3.99 to continue. Good luck to those who found joy in the wait. I surely did not.