So, to sum up my experience with Zenith it would be like this. Starting out, the wave of just pure joy that came over me, and the feeling I got of just classic MMORPG vibes was super strong. Very much reminded me of early days playing an MMO like WoW or Wizard101. Lots of community, very bare bones but fun combat, it felt like I was a newb in a bigger world. But unlike in those previously mentioned games, there is not much increase in complexity.

With WoW you get more spells, abilities, buffs, etc, and you need to learn to balance them to your class and to what kind of character you want to be. With wizard you get more pips and begin to discover what your role is in a group based on your school. Basically as you get further into the game, the complexity slowly increases and keeps your engagement.

In Zenith, it was the opposite, there was no increase in complexity, just an increase in my stats. Most things about the game that were increases in complexity I discovered very early on at the lower levels.This wouldn't be too big of a deal, because the combat and gameplay loop was still entertaining enough as it was, and becoming more powerful was still satisfying... For the most part... Which is where the next big miss-step comes in...

Their power scaling. Now a huge selling point and big engagement point for those other larger MMO's is that true feeling of progressing in power. In WoW you can go back to the beginning areas and effectively one shot most all enemies you encounter, really show off to the lower levels how much more powerful you've become by leveling up. In wizard you show off your very powerful spells and you don't even break a sweat to the starting area enemies. In Zenith... I got showed up by level 3 players while at level 25. Going back to the starting areas would automatically scale you to that area, and often the scaling would take you massively too far down, to the point that you are worse off in the lower areas at a higher level than you were when you were the expected level for that area. I found myself going back to dungeons in the earlier areas of the game that at the time I had only minor struggles with, only to go and be completely incapable of navigating through the areas. I would die in 2 shots to an enemy in a lower level area while at a higher level, meanwhile when I first went through the area, I could tank up to 10 shots. It was awful.

After that, and following development, I could see time and time again that the devs fails to meet these kinds of concerns, and focused on pushing new features and content that was completely adjacent to the main game. Instead of working on adding new and more abilities, they added pets. Instead of reworking level scaling they added parkour areas. Instead of creating new and interesting abilities, they added more cosmetics. By the time they actually got around to adding the new class, I had already lost interest and hope that the devs would actually do anything to improve the core gameplay.

But I'll end this by giving my final caveat, and that's that I haven't played this game for years. After I saw the direction the dev team was going, I was pretty confident that the game wasn't going to get the improvements I really wanted to see, and kind of got the feeling they were just going to take the cash and run. But to be fair to them, they did continue to develop the game for years after. I do intend to try and get back on and see how the game is modern day for myself, but from what I've seen and heard recently, it looks like they've completely abandoned this game, so regardless of what I may find in my upcoming sessions, I cannot recommend this game in good conscience.

So, to sum up my experience with Zenith it would be like this. Starting out, the wave of just pure joy that came over me, and the feeling I got of just classic MMORPG vibes was super strong. Very much reminded me of early days playing an MMO like WoW or Wizard101. Lots of community, very bare bones but fun combat, it felt like I was a newb in a bigger world. But unlike in those previously mentioned games, there is not much increase in complexity. With WoW you get more spells, abilities, buffs, etc, and you need to learn to balance them to your class and to what kind of character you want to be. With wizard you get more pips and begin to discover what your role is in a group based on your school. Basically as you get further into the game, the complexity slowly increases and keeps your engagement. In Zenith, it was the opposite, there was no increase in complexity, just an increase in my stats. Most things about the game that were increases in complexity I discovered very early on at the lower levels.This wouldn't be too big of a deal, because the combat and gameplay loop was still entertaining enough as it was, and becoming more powerful was still satisfying... For the most part... Which is where the next big miss-step comes in... Their power scaling. Now a huge selling point and big engagement point for those other larger MMO's is that true feeling of progressing in power. In WoW you can go back to the beginning areas and effectively one shot most all enemies you encounter, really show off to the lower levels how much more powerful you've become by leveling up. In wizard you show off your very powerful spells and you don't even break a sweat to the starting area enemies. In Zenith... I got showed up by level 3 players while at level 25. Going back to the starting areas would automatically scale you to that area, and often the scaling would take you massively too far down, to the point that you are worse off in the lower areas at a higher level than you were when you were the expected level for that area. I found myself going back to dungeons in the earlier areas of the game that at the time I had only minor struggles with, only to go and be completely incapable of navigating through the areas. I would die in 2 shots to an enemy in a lower level area while at a higher level, meanwhile when I first went through the area, I could tank up to 10 shots. It was awful. After that, and following development, I could see time and time again that the devs fails to meet these kinds of concerns, and focused on pushing new features and content that was completely adjacent to the main game. Instead of working on adding new and more abilities, they added pets. Instead of reworking level scaling they added parkour areas. Instead of creating new and interesting abilities, they added more cosmetics. By the time they actually got around to adding the new class, I had already lost interest and hope that the devs would actually do anything to improve the core gameplay. But I'll end this by giving my final caveat, and that's that I haven't played this game for years. After I saw the direction the dev team was going, I was pretty confident that the game wasn't going to get the improvements I really wanted to see, and kind of got the feeling they were just going to take the cash and run. But to be fair to them, they did continue to develop the game for years after. I do intend to try and get back on and see how the game is modern day for myself, but from what I've seen and heard recently, it looks like they've completely abandoned this game, so regardless of what I may find in my upcoming sessions, I cannot recommend this game in good conscience.