Vindictus is what happens when a developer focuses more on titillation and selling expensive virtual lingerie than gameplay.
Massively Multiplayer.
While not everyone who plays Vindictus is a pervert, Vindictus is tailored to appeal to a sexually deviant audience, with female characters often displaying absurd amounts of flesh. At the same time, their oversized breasts and buttocks often have better animation than any other aspect of their bodies.
From massive breasts in barely existent bras to stripper dance emotes it feels as if Vindictus began life as a decent fantasy MMORPG and then pivoted to appeal to the worst part of the gaming community, with increasingly sexual and frequently disturbing cosmetics being released.
While this is bad enough when displayed on an adult female model, loli-like races make this obsession with sexual content nauseating. While the developers are careful never to cross the line into illegal content, the smaller character models come close enough to the line to make anyone with morals feel little else but disgust.
I seldom wish a game would cease to exist; however, Vindictus is the exception to the rule, and while I have a pretty high tolerance for mature content in video games, Vindictus pushes the envelope too far.
While this may not be the developer’s intention, in 2023, Vindictus has nothing to offer gamers beyond titillation and depravity.
While some would dismiss this as “boys being boys” or “harmless fun”, causing people to become addicted to sexual content is never a joke, and it is something that Jesus Christ himself addressed in The Gospels.
If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.
And if your right-hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell. - Matthew 5:28-30
Further, he addresses the issues of tempting children to sin (Matthew 18:6) by saying that it would be better to drown than to lead a child astray, a message that many in the church need to learn to fear, with the rampant documented (and even more undocumented) cases of abuse in both catholic and protestant churches.
The years have not been kind to Vindictus. It shows in every aspect of the game, from UI design and graphical fidelity to server performance, with more modern character models and cosmetics taking upwards of 30 seconds to appear when first loading into an area, resulting in all players appearing as a female character in a brown hooded robe until their more graphically intensive (and often way more revealing) outfit appears.
Graphical issues aside, Vindictus feels like a game designed with the early 2000s in mind, with most dungeons and raids having more in common with a 1990s corridor shooter than anything resembling a modern multiplayer game.
While more recent dungeons and raid content is much better visually and mechanically, due to source engine (2004) limitations, any visual improvements are mitigated by performance issues due to the nearly two-decade-old engine’s struggle to output the more modern, albeit still dated, visuals present in newer content updates.
While Vindictus may have started as something else in 2023, it is little more than a digital lingerie shop, with free players limited to overly modest and thematically mismatching undergarments that display awkwardly through paid and free armour.
As a result, it encourages players who already have displayed a weakness for sexual content to spend increasingly larger amounts of money on an ever-growing collector of under armour (underwear), including but not limited to panties, thongs, G-strings and small patches of stickers over private areas.
When combined with a massive selection of cosmetic and pay-for-convenience items, Vindictus feels more like a cash shop with a game bolted on than anything resembling a modern free-2-play MMORPG.
While almost every aspect of Vindictus frankly sucks, there is one area in which it was well ahead of its time, and that was combat; with over a dozen hero characters/classes, Vindictus offers some of the most diverse and enjoyable action combat to be found in any game from the era, which is unfortunate as the rest of the game is awful.
Such a good system deserves to be enjoyed, which isn’t possible due to Vindictus opting to cater to neckbeards and perverts over the wider gaming community.
Vindictus is a massively multiplayer online role playing game video game developed by devCAT and published by Nexon, it was released on 21 January 2010 and it is Free-2-Play.
Vindictus is available exclusively on PC.
Vindictus remains in active development, and new content and even playable classes are at fairly regular intervals for a game of this size and age.
While we do not know how many people play Vindictus on the standalone launcher, the Steam community peaks at around 250 players daily.
Vindictus remains active; however, the community is (thankfully) much smaller than it used to be, which may indicate that gamers in 2023 are less willing to support the rampant sexualisation of women in video games than when Vindictus first released in 2010.
On average Vindictus takes between 20 and 400 hours to complete.
Estimated completion times are derived from various sources and may vary based on the skill level of each player.
Vindictus offers the following matchmaking options:
The Vindictus in-game store sells:
The following peripherals are officially supported:
Vindictus is unrated and contains:
While Vindictus is showing its age and suffers from a multistable of age-related performance issues, this could be overlooked if the developers did not dedicate an almost comical amount of development resources towards the creation and distribution of sexualised cosmetic items; as a result, I find Vindictus has nothing of substance to offer games in 2023 and do not recommend it.
