For a long time, I had been looking for a game to play with my girlfriend. After spending hundreds of hours in games like Albion Online, Guild Wars 2, Windrose, and Medieval Dynasty, we decided to buy The Quinfall and see if its world was worth investing our time in.
The concept is genuinely promising: a sandbox MMORPG where you can own land, build a base, craft, trade, and create your own story within a persistent world. On paper, it sounds exactly like the kind of game we were looking for.
For context, I work in video game development as a Technical Artist, so I tend to pay attention to both gameplay and technical execution.
Our first impression was actually positive. The character creator is one of the stronger aspects of the game. It offers a good amount of customization, and the character models look surprisingly decent. However, one feature became frustrating very quickly: the ability to select and move individual facial points. Because the character's idle animation constantly moves the head and face, accurately selecting those points can be unnecessarily difficult. It simply needs more polish.
Then we entered the world.
Unfortunately, this is where the experience took a sharp turn downward.
Visually, the game feels extremely outdated. It honestly looks like a game from 2010, and even many MMORPGs from that era felt more cohesive and polished. The biggest issue isn't necessarily the graphical fidelity itself, but the lack of visual consistency. Many assets feel like they don't belong in the same world, making the environment feel disconnected and unfinished.
Still, graphics aren't everything. We care much more about gameplay, so we adjusted the brightness, contrast, and other settings and kept going.
My girlfriend spawned in one city while I spawned in another. Since our starting quests were tied to our respective regions, we were forced to complete a series of introductory tasks before we could finally meet up and play together. This wasn't a deal-breaker, but it wasn't a great first multiplayer experience either.
As we continued playing, it became clear that the game contains many interesting systems and ideas. The problem is that almost all of them feel unfinished and in need of significant polishing. There is potential here, and I genuinely hope the developers continue improving these systems over time.
Another major issue is the animation quality. Both human and horse animations feel extremely outdated and unpolished. Character movement lacks weight and fluidity, making actions feel stiff and unnatural. Horse animations are especially rough, often looking awkward and disconnected from the terrain. Movement is one of the things players constantly see in an MMORPG, and unfortunately it significantly hurts immersion. The animations feel more like placeholders than the quality expected from a modern MMORPG.
The companion and pet system also needs significant work. Pets don't feel like living creatures that exist within the world; instead, they feel artificially attached to the player character. Their movement is extremely unnatural, often looking as if they're simply being dragged behind the player rather than navigating the environment themselves. The animations are rigid and robotic, and at times the pet moves more like a floating polygon than an actual creature. Instead of adding immersion, it constantly reminds you that you're looking at a game system that hasn't been fully developed or polished.
The inventory system feels like it was designed in the caveman era and never evolved. For a game that revolves around gathering resources, crafting, trading, and managing large amounts of items, the inventory offers very little quality-of-life functionality. There is no meaningful auto-sorting system, organization is cumbersome, and managing items quickly becomes frustrating rather than engaging.
The item icons don't help either. Many of them are difficult to distinguish at a glance, lacking the visual clarity and readability expected from a modern MMORPG. Instead of helping players quickly identify what they're carrying, the icons often blend together and create unnecessary friction when managing inventory. It may sound like a small issue, but in a game where players constantly interact with their inventory, poor UI and readability have a significant impact on the overall experience.
What finally became impossible to overlook, however, was the technical performance.
My PC is equipped with an RTX 5070 OC, 64GB of DDR5 RAM, and a Core Ultra 7 processor. Despite that, I regularly drop to around 13 FPS in major cities. The only way to make the game playable is by lowering settings to Very Low. I experience similar issues in base-building areas as well.
What's especially frustrating is that the visual quality doesn't justify the performance cost. Even on Ultra settings, the image often appears blurry and low quality. After a while, it literally became uncomfortable to look at. The lighting feels poor, shadows lack quality, vegetation looks outdated, trees look unfinished, and the overall presentation feels rough. Combined with the inconsistent art direction, weak animations, and technical issues, it creates a world that is difficult to become immersed in.
What makes all of this even more disappointing is that beneath the problems there is a genuinely interesting idea. I can see what the developers are trying to build. A large sandbox MMORPG with housing, crafting, trading, exploration, and player freedom is exactly the type of game many MMO fans have been waiting for.
But right now, The Quinfall feels less like a finished MMORPG and more like a collection of ambitious ideas scattered across an unfinished world. Almost every system feels like it needs another pass. Almost every feature feels like it's missing polish. The game constantly gives the impression that it was assembled from separate pieces that have yet to come together into a cohesive experience.
I genuinely hope the developers succeed because the foundation has potential. However, potential alone is not enough.
At its current state, I cannot recommend The Quinfall. The game needs major improvements in performance, visual consistency, animation quality, UI/UX design, inventory management, and overall polish before it can compete with modern MMORPGs. There may be a great game here one day, but unfortunately, today is not that day.
