Glais
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Felt timely given the forums are set to shut down soon, I wanted to write up my thoughts on the game as someone who was there from the very beginning, and remained very active for the game's lifetime. AQ Classic has a certain vastness and atmosphere to it, and Dragonfable is about as close to a perfect game as I can imagine, but for me MechQuest was always the most fun to just jump into and actually play, and there was really something special and unique in it despite the numerous setbacks and difficulties it faced in its development. I think this is what's kept me popping back into it, long after the game died, long after I had college, and children of my own, and other more serious responsibilities, it just refused to leave my mind.
The Good
There are two primary areas that MechQuest has always stood head and shoulders above, or at worst even, with the other AE games: the art and the atmosphere. Beyond the level of detail in the mecha and cityscapes themselves, the art direction of the game and the aesthetics within has always confused me, because it is so distinct from any other mecha series or game I've seen despite the fact that the MQ team was generally very outspoken about their influences, citing anime like Vision of Escaflowne in older design notes that apparently no longer exist. There was an almost organic look many of the mecha possessed that is, to this day, unlike anything I've seen anywhere else. In addition every mecha was painstakingly given a distinct personality in its face, movements, and animations. There was a tremendous amount of love poured in, even into creative reskins, that made every one feel unique. And the effort is something that only appears more confusing the older I get, as each Mecha was essentially equivalent to about half of a DragonFable class, and the MQ team was putting out multiple examples of these every month, sometimes every week, for years on end. It was quite simply a herculean feat, and one that I think we as a playerbase took for granted at the time.
The atmosphere, especially in the early game when things were less defined, amplified this. It gave you the impression of vastness as intended, but it was also incredibly vague which, for a child, motivates them to imagine and fill in the gaps. The ruins in the random battle are one of my favorite examples. Never explained, just a beautiful part of the worldbuilding that we are invited to define on our own terms. It was also a setting where you never knew what to expect from the character designs. They had a specificity to their stylization (Sys-Zero being maybe the best example), but the game would constantly surprise us in how it reimagined more familiar characters' appearances. This was also used to amplify the sillier aspects of other characters, and I think it was generally successful. You can find people who only played the game for a brief time that still fondly recall things like the Pizza missions.
Player expression was also operating at a level that even DragonFable would only reach in its later years, right from the very beginning. This might be MechQuest's greatest aspect in my mind, as it integrates both the roleplay aspect of the game and the gameplay seamlessly. The build variety is unmatched by any of the other games AE has made, due to the deceptively simple limb system. But this also makes the system very simple and straightforward, because you both control exactly what you're using and you are always limited to a combination of 6 options at any one time. I think this middle ground is what has made it more accessible to me in comparison to late stage DragonFable, which has grown far more complex than the game started out as (not that this is a bad thing necessarily, it just requires more effort from lapsed players to acclimate to the new meta) whereas MechQuest has tremendous depth that is kept in check by the more limited means with which you have to engage in it. The endless combinations give you freedom without overwhelming the player, which is an extremely difficult balance to strike and one that I think MQ nailed from very early into its lifespan.
While MechQuest always had issues with balance, this is a difficulty every game faces, and I think the amount of freedom and the continuously evolving metagame allowed for the playerbase to surpass challenges in inventive ways that rewarded ingenuity. An example very close to my heart is the Necryptos Vampire Lord storyline, which gradually becomes impossible if you don't use a Vampire Hunter mecha against them. In my stubbornness as a teenager, I refused to use one, and this forced me to engage with the mechanics in a far deeper way than I would have otherwise. I spent years learning how to exploit different weaknesses and workshop niche builds that I wouldn't have been motivated to do otherwise had this roadblock not been constructed in such a specific way. I wouldn't have gotten as interested in the game without this forcing me to workshop builds in a way I otherwise would not have.
The Bad
Hindsight is 20/20, so nothing I say here is meant to disrespect or otherwise reflect poorly on the MQ team and the amount of work they put in, rather this is just me ruminating on what I think contributed to the decline of the game in spite of all the positives listed above.
Aside from MQ gradually losing much of its staff in its later years, I think one issue harmed the game more than anything else, and that is the problem of retired content. "Rares" have been a staple of AE games for decades, and they have their place, but I think context is needed for why they harm MQ more than any other AE game. In other AE games, you gain power, health, etc. as you level up. MechQuest is the odd one out, you gain nothing but stat points, which means that to actually become more powerful you must constantly buy new mecha (before the early game was rebalanced, this made it particularly difficult). This necessitates a higher quantity of mecha being available in the game to facilitate balance and progression. In DragonFable, your base class can carry you quite far just by leveling up and having a solid build and a decent weapon. In MechQuest you can be viable one moment and non-viable the next because the mecha you relied on can no longer keep up with the enemies of a specific storyline. Adding to this, scaling mecha were a mid-series introduction, and even then many did not feature full scaling chains, and not all mecha released afterwards necessarily had this.
We also need to consider the amount of work that goes into creating a single mecha. Their unique animations and functions are roughly equal to half a class in DragonFable (6 "skills" to DF's 14 per class), but the MQ team would sometimes release several entirely new mecha, with fresh art and animations, in a single week. DragonFable sometimes spends years developing a single class, because the complexity demands this. Even in its early days, I don't recall DF releasing more than one every few months. This was simply never going to be a sustainable path for MQ, as it's just too much work for their team to perform and it's miraculous they kept it up as long as they did. Even basic weapons were fully animated, often uniquely. When a weapon from DF or AQ is retired, it's usually a static illustration that would have taken less time to create. Every weapon and mecha in MQ that went away represented a significant amount of manpower that was simply erased. And this in turn affects the final experience and the balance. There are over 700 keyword flags for the word "Rare" on the Mecha Base index. While many are duplicates due to variations existing at multiple levels, could you imagine if DragonFable had even 50 fully retired unique classes removed from the game and permanently inaccessible?
With the benefit of hindsight, I think it is fair to conclude that this harmed the ecosystem of the metagame. In many cases, mecha with unique specials would be locked behind a limited time window. As this is a single player game, this does not actually benefit or balance the player base, it only skews the meta of the game towards one off items that certain challenges can only be superceded with, meaning beating a challenge has less to do with the actual skill and inventiveness of the player and more to do with whether they had happened to log on at a particular date and time. I'm an old player with a massive amount of accrued rare items, and I still feel that this was nothing but harmful to MQ specifically due to the gameplay needs highlighted here and above. There is no competitive edge necessary when you aren't actually competing with anyone, and as this also applied to storyline items, it affected progression through the game itself.
This issue bleeds into the world and story experience, with the Arthuria vs Pirate saga being the worst example. The majority of Arthurian mecha are permanently retired. Several Pirate mecha also share this fate. This is in spite of the fact that you will encounter these as enemies constantly throughout the storyline, and its culminating war is a requirement to complete the arc. Nothing in this section of the game is by any meaningful definition "rare". From a worldbuilding perspective, why can I not access the Arthurian Ram or Eagle, when I am on friendly terms with Prince Robert, and his soldiers have these units en-masse? Why is the Pirate Admiral a limited time item when we fight these enemies constantly? There is no justification within the game for this, the decision existed as an incentive to increase or reward short-term play. In the current state of the game, because this war was so important, you can only complete it once, an anomaly in the game that illustrates just how little this ethos fits in with the function of the game itself.
This isn't an issue exclusive to Arthuria, or that even started there. The Moon mission is one of my favorite storylines, but it is probably the first case of this really becoming an issue. The SDF is Soluna's permanebt defense force. We ally with their leader at the end, and work extensively with them in multiple storylines. Yet the SDF Mecha were immediately retired, leaving no new mecha path of Progression for anyone who missed the window. This would be the equivalent of something as fundamental as the Paladin class being locked behind a limited time window in DragonFable. It doesn't serve a purpose in the game itself, and it actively harms the sense of player progression as they should be gearing up for the next, more difficult, story arc.
The other major issue, and the one I think contributed the most to a dwindling playerbase, was the overreliance on repetition. This is an area where I wish MQ had leaned on DragonFable's playbook a bit more, as due to the similarities in games, the same solutions could have been adopted. Nearly every storyline in MechQuest has a section where an identical quest must be repeated multiple times, and success is decided by an RNG dice roll. This has always been frustrating and not fun to the majority of players, and the devs themselves were aware as eventually a dice boost was implemented so that you would eventually succeed after a few attempts. But the fact that this was necessary at all shows how problematic this feature was. Even if the dice rolls were removed entirely, this still forced many storylines to boil down to doing the exact same quest over and over and over, which just isn't going to engage people or their imaginations. There is a place for this, the Soluna jobs I (mostly, I'll get to the Museum later) think warrant this, but for story progression to be locked behind a roll of the dice, it was only natural this would push people away. Conversely, DragonFable leaned harder into randomly generated dungeons as the early game content, and as filler for certain questions, and main story quests only required a single completion in order to get to the next segment.
For as much mechanical depth the game possessed, it also had some woefully underexplored areas, such as damage types not being standardized the way they were in AQ or DF, and enemies rarely making use of resistances at all as a result. I also found the Dodge mechanic to be a poor decision, as the gameplay is already RNG reliant, so to have your special roll correctly, and connect, just to have the effect nullified feels overly punishing without actually teaching anything to the player. It simply shows that you can do everything right with your build and still have it fail due to this mechanic. There are functionality improvements missing as well, such as PVP not showing character IDs or having level pools we can randomize from like DF does, things like the paint lacking many colors, glitches that persist such as the WolfBlade Elite's body not working for players etc.
While this is mostly a result of the troubled development, most storylines never quite got into the amount of character depth and worldbuilding even early DF storylines did, and I really wish this had not been the case. the MQ world had the most potential of any of them, but there just wasn't the time or manpower available to allow it to be fleshed out to the same degree. Nearly every DF arc has a fairly iconic villain, but it's hard for me to think of any antagonists that actually stood out in MechQuest. Valoth is simply a massive evil who appears to say something menacing, kill a minion, and move on. Kratos the Dragonoid may be the most fascinating by having the benefit of taking out another character we actually were attached to, but he was shunted to EpicDuel so we never get a character resolution for this. By the time we meet Drakath in the finale I was left more confused about why he was there at all, other than to play into DF easter eggs. But this is the finale of this game, so to rely so heavily on an entirely separate experience did not bode well.
How could things have been improved?
As mentioned previously, hindsight is 20/20, but I think most of these problems have very simple solutions, that could have actually lessened the pressure on staff in some cases.
The issue of retired content has a simple solution: More of this stuff should have been permanent. It's not feasible to retired material that required as much work as often as this game did. Permanently removed content should be reserved for special events like the anniversary, April/Maypril, temporary wars that don't impact or integrate into the main storyline, or other similar edge cases. No major storyline event should be retired content, nor should any of their rewards be, as these should be preparing players for the next, generally more challenging, storyline. The Star Captain Monthly/Ecxclusive mecha should have all been permanent. This gives upgraded players consistent options and diverse builds to use, and keeps unique mechanics from being locked behind a limited time window, as everyone should have access to specific archetypes.
Something I did not mention above because it's not a flaw per-se, is that I think Nova Gems could have been handled in a way that encouraged people to buy and use them much more, which would have benefited the game tremendously. A major problem with them is that they were often available to be used on a mecha or weapon that was only slightly worse than the Star Captain version, so there was simply no reason to spend real world money on them. If they were either always reserved for unique equipment, or a version of something with a very standout unique added ability, there would have been much more incentive to purchase them. This would also probably require a lot of redistribution of how mecha are allocated, but I think that's for the best as well as it could better prepare players of all kinds while incentivizing the upgrades better.
As an example for Lagos, currently for Arthurian mecha you have
-Bull (SC)
-Wolf (NG)
-Ram (NG) permanently removed
-Eagle (NSC/SC/NG) permanently removed
This offers NSC players nothing to move forward with both through the arc and to the next one. If I were to restructure it aligning with the principles above we arrive at something like this.
-Wolf (NSC), Reason: All players are already allowed to test drive this mecha, and it isn't particularly powerful to begin with. It has modest specials and its role in the story makes it logical that an NSC player could access it.
-Ram (SC, permanent), Reason: There is a Ram permanently stationed near Robert, and we fight many of them, it isn't a rarity in the story. It is also balanced with some decent specials but none so overpowering that warrant real money be paid for it.
-Bull (NG), Reason: The Bull's back arm is possibly the strongest unboosted weapon in the game in terms of damage. This alone can warrant real money to be spent on it, and other specials could be tweaked if needed. Not having an NSC or SC version encourages people who really like the aesthetics and attacks to spend actual money, contributing to the life of the game. Aesthetically it has a "cooler" look that can warrant people wanting it enough to do that.
-Eagle - Permanent War Reward, but as its Reflect Shield is now known to be one of the strongest techs in the game, that could be reserved for the NG variant. This is a significant enough gameplay difference that someone would seriously consider spending money on it, because it is such a staggering difference in comparison to how other versions play.
This is just an example lineup, but a similar methodology could be applied to most Planets (eg Moon, SDF Soldier NSC, SDF Delta SC, and make Odessa's commander mecha the NG) that better distributes and prepares players for future storylines.
Regarding the problem of repetition, MechQuest actually already has a solution to this that was never utilized much: open map grids. While the randomly generated dungeons might not mesh 100% with MQ's more single enemy focused play style, the map grids used in the Salvage and on Westion and Necryptos' forest and desert show it has potential as an alternative, and I think this would have been a far more immersive baseline for quests than the majority that boiled down to walking along a single path, fighting one or more enemies, and rolling. These maps use repeat tiles, backgrounds, and randomly distributed debris, and so are perfect for imitating the worldbuilding in a way that feels less dull and demands less work from the development team. Warlic's Zone was one of the earliest areas in DragonFable and most iconic that focused on just having a few mysterious dungeons to explore. MQ could have leveraged this for something similar. Instead of those mysterious ruins being reserved for random battle background, why not have some early game missions where we actually explore the ruins and learn about them? Why not have random maps on different Asteroids with a reward of some kind at the end? In DragonFable, repetition was only needed if you were farming for a specific weapon. If MQ had applied to Salvage Model to many more quests, and with different weapon pools, you could easily accomplish the same thing and increase immersion within the world.
Balance was never going to be perfect, but I do think some more tweaking about when and how you receive certain rewards could have been improved as well. One of the most disappointing examples if the Guardian Mecha, the long awaited statue mecha debuts after the Museum, the longest and most RNG dependent job, and completion of much of the Liath storyline. It requires far more actual effort than any other mecha in the game to obtain, and even disregarding the artistic differences from the original statue, the mecha itself is quite weak for the time period of the game in which you receive it. This is while many of the most overpowered mecha in the game are simply obtained from a shop immediately available with zero issue.
Conclusion
MechQuest was and still is, a beautiful game, but I really wish we could have seen it reach its fullest potential. The gameplay loop is addicting and has kept me coming back for nearly a decade after the game stopped being updated, it's quick to get into but provides depth and longevity for those willing to explore it. The art remains top notch, with some of the most unique designs I've seen in any form of media, in a setting that blends scifi in fantasy in a way I just haven't encountered elsewhere. It's always going to be something special to me, and as long as the servers keep it up I'm going to keep tinkering with builds and trying to recapture that feeling it gave me when I was a kid and it first dropped.
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