Toontown (2023)

"It's time to START AGAIN!"

- Steam ad

Toontown (2023), also known as Toontown Reboot is a re-release and reboot of Toontown Online, handled by Toony Software and published on the Steam platform in June 2, 2023, on the 20th anniversary of Toontown Online. It first appeared on a Steam ad dated back to April 1, 2023 and a mysterious new Twitter account called Toontown_Online which dates back to October 2022. The game was built on a free-to-play model with cash shop and micro-transactions, as opposed to the original's subscription model.

Overall Changes

 * Various aspects of the menu, HUD, etc are redesigned. Most notably, the drawing/raster images have all been redesigned in HD. Chat buttons were modernized and battle menus were changed;
 * In the game, there is a minimap on the bottom right with a compass.
 * In the Gag Shop, you are now stated how many Gags of the specific rank that you can hold at a time. You even have the option to buy maximum level gags in bulk.
 * You can now buy Level 7 gags for 50 jellybeans, instead of having to go through the "500 to Go!" mechanic. In addition, you can hold up to 5 Level 7 gags and 10 level 6 Gags in the endgame. Every time you unlock a Gag, you immediately can hold up to 10 of that level.
 * Level 7 Gags now do varying amount of damage, depending on the difficulty on its grind to level 7;
 * Railroad: 120 damage (pre-Lure damage bonus)
 * Presentation: 100% damage/EXP bonus
 * Wedding Cake: 100 damage
 * Geyser: 75 damage
 * Toontanic: 130 damage
 * Opera Singer: 200 damage
 * Cog Suit promotions are gone, and you can get Cashbot, Lawbot, and Bossbot suits in any order as you can obtain them from the Mints, Offices, and Golf Courses. Additionally, upon defeating the VP, CFO, CJ, and CEO, you each gain a 10 Laff boost to replace promotions.
 * Lure has been reworked, cogs are stunned for a fixed two turns, but Lure gags instead provide a damage bonus/EXP bonus the higher level of the Lure gag. Only one Toon can use Lure at a time because it cannot chain-attack unlike the original for higher accuracy as the Accuracy mechanic has been removed (see WIS#5.2). You also cannot use Lure again if all of the Cogs are lured.
 * Boarding Groups are revamped where it has matchmaking where you can invite players.
 * Bossbot Golf Courses have been removed and replaced with Conference Zones.
 * The Cog Waves on the Cog boss fights have been decreased. Each Cog boss has 3 waves of Cogs on each side for a maximum of 24 cogs with 4 cogs each wave.
 * The CEO boss fight has been nerfed, as his health has been decreased.
 * In terms of Jellybeans, the game's currency, the banking feature has been removed and you can hold up to 9999 Jellybeans maximum. Cogs can also drop Jellybeans upon defeating them.
 * The in-game font has been changed to Noto Sans.
 * The game has support for various languages, not just English.
 * Animations are all in 60FPS, as the game has support for up to 120FPS.
 * There is an addition of a chatbox for when Toons are coming. Each Toon has a Toon ID consisting of letters and numbers, so players can know which Toon is which incase they end-up getting the same name from the name-picker and to add on their friends list.
 * The name approval system is gone, as you can now name your own Toon freely up to 25 characters. Names with NPC names and inappropriate names are blacklisted.
 * It is now possible to get all seven types of Gags on one Toon, as while you start with Squirt & Throw, you can unlock a Gag by buying them from Gag Merchant toons;
 * Donald's Dock: Drop for 500 Jellybeans
 * Daisy Gardens: Lure for 1000 Jellybeans
 * Minnie's Melodyland: Toon-Up for 1500 Jellybeans
 * The Brrrgh: Trap for 2500 Jellybeans
 * Donald's Dreamland: Sound for 5000 Jellybeans
 * Soundtrack has been remastered to replace MIDIs.
 * Trolley Games have been reworked where you can select (and players could vote) which game to play. Additionally, Memory Game and Photo Fun have been removed.
 * Your starting Laff is increased to 25. To make up with the increased Laff gain, Cog damage is increased early on. A Level 3 Tightwad's Bounce Check can do up to 8 damage, while at level 7, it can do up to 25. AoE Cog attacks are unaffected damage-wise. In addition, Cog's HP scaling has been increased.
 * The going sad animation has been changed, where it actually knocks your Toon unconscious similar to a death animation.
 * If you actually lose to the CJ's court battle (the only non-standard way to go sad) or go sad from getting hit by the trains, you now lose all of your Gags.

Why It’s Sad

 * 1) Like Grand Chase Classic, rebooting an outdated MMO that has already shut down (in an official manner, not a private server) is a very questionable decision (from a non-nostalgic perspective), especially when the devs have already shut down to begin with. It should be noted that Toontown private servers such as Rewritten have been shut down to make way for this reboot. Videos were taken down via copyright takedowns from an account known as “Disney Interactive”.
 * 2) * Also, like the reboot mentioned above, the game combines a modern-style UI (flat-style Laff meter, redesigned book menu, modern Gag selection) but clashes it with the same outdated 3D models from the original. While trying to modernize the game is okay, like how Toontown: Corporate Clash did with the graphics, this feels like it was trying to be a sequel/remake while trying to be a re-release. It cannot be both.
 * 3) Various aspects including Gardens, Doodles, and the house system were removed. The reason from Toontown_Online, the Twitter account? “Nobody liked it.”, according to a question asked by a Twitter user. In fact, Organic gags were removed to make way for the pay-to-win aspects below.
 * 4) Launch disaster: The game launched with only Toontown Central, Donald's Dock, and Daisy Gardens available to explore. According to the Twitter account, they said that they needed more time to balance the game, which sounds suspiciously similar to how Grand Chase Classic launched with only four characters and a lot of missing content.
 * 5) Most infamously of them all, the monetization. As the game switched over to a free-to-play model, the devs decided to take a step further via including Gold Jellybeans which are paid currency. According to calculations, 2000 Gold Jellybeans are equal to $20 USD, and the items cost 1000-6000 Gold Jellybeans. The most expensive transaction, 10000+1500 Gold Jellybeans, cost a whopping 100$ ignoring tax. Some examples include;
 * 6) For 3000 Gold Jellybeans, you can get a 14-day triple Gag XP buff, which becomes necessary as the difficulty spikes they put in below. Said triple XP buff also negates EXP loss upon going sad as seen below.
 * 7) For 6000 Gold Jellybeans, you can get a 30 day damage reduction buff. That’s sixty dollars for a pay-to-progress buff, especially when Cogs can deal more damage with the addition of a new mechanic that ends up making the game frustrating early game and even midway into the game.
 * 8) For 1000 Gold Jellybeans, you can get a Gag inventory expansion (10 per purchase up to 5). This is necessary to hold up to 10 of each level 7/6 Gag in the endgame. Accumulating all this, is fifty dollars just for one Toon.
 * 9) Unnecessary increase of difficulty; going sad (the equivalent of dying) now punishes you via decreasing your Gag XP by 10%, the “Run” option has been removed (which means if you run out of Gags you have no choice but to die). It should be noted that it takes five minutes (without Unites) to recover one laff/HP once you go sad. FlyFF, which had the infamous de-leveling mechanic for example proved that this system is no longer needed in MMORPGs as it demonstrated that all it does is frustrate players, and even MapleStory had already ditched this system in favor of a timed EXP gain penalty debuff to make deaths less punishing. The game relies too much on the outdated "EXP loss on death" mechanic that most MMORPGs have already ditched.
 * 10) Gags now require more jellybeans to buy, and level seven Gags require 50 (though you no longer need XP to buy them as the “500 to Go!” mechanic was removed). The game paywalls Gag inventory expansion behind Gold Jellybeans. One QoL they locked behind a paywall was the ability to buy and restock Gags anywhere you go, not just in Gag Shops.
 * 11) Your gags (especially drop) no longer miss. However, what replaces this is a “critical hit” rate, where Gags and Cog attacks have a 10% chance of doing “CRITICAL!" damage which doubles their damage, or the opposite, a “Glancing Hit" (can only happen with Cog attacks) which reduces their damage by half. One Level 3 Flunky in Toontown Central was seen in a viral TikTok video (called "Flunky's revenge") doing 12 (CRITICAL!) damage to one Toon (who had 11 Laff out of 26 with only level 2 Squirt) and causing him to go sad. A Level 12 Mr. Hollywood can deal up to 50 damage to all Toons if Power Trip crits. There is the addition of the infamous chain-attack, where Cogs can attack at the same time; if for example, Mr. Hollywood uses Power Trip, then other Mr. Hollywoods will use their Power Trip alongside the first one, which, if all of them crit, can do a wiping 200 damage, basically one-shotting even maxed out Toons. The max HP/Laff without paying is 175 (250 if with the paid Laff upgrades alongside the paid damage reduction buff), which is increased as some Toontasks have been changed to give you more Laff upgrades, likely to compensate for the critical damage mechanic, and instead of starting with 15 Laff, you start with an increased 25. Gags have varying crit rates, Sound has the inability to crit and Trap has a very high chance of criting. Note however that critical hits increase your EXP gain by 2.5x, where if you were using a Fruit Pie Slice and it crits, you will receive 5 EXP for that Gag instead of 2 after battle, while a Birthday Cake yields 15 EXP if it crits.
 * 12) * The removal of attack accuracy in favor of the critical damage mechanic makes it so that the battles are mostly luck-based given that Cog attacks can do a varying amount of damage. For example, a level 12 Cog's Tee Off can do up to 35 damage (70 if it crits) to one Toon, which translates to only three hits if all 3 Tee Offs crit in a row.
 * 13) The EXP requirements to level up Gags are increased very severely. While Toontown: Corporate Clash was grindy on its leveling system, the fact that Reboot punishes you if you die in battle via losing EXP makes this much worse. It should be noted that the EXP is only gained if you used the highest level Gag against a Cog in its street (to get to level 7, you must use level 6 Gags against Cogs in Donald's Dreamland/Cog HQs).
 * 14) The Throw gag for example, indicated on how many EXP you need and how much of a percentage that each Gag use in a Cog battle gives you;
 * 15) Fruit Pie Slice: 25 EXP (unlike the previous game the bars aren’t additive to the previous as they instead start over from zero)
 * 16) Cream Pie Slice: 200 EXP (1%)
 * 17) Whole Fruit Pie: 600 EXP (0.5%)
 * 18) Whole Cream Pie: 2000 EXP (0.2%)
 * 19) Birthday Cake: 5000 EXP (0.1%)
 * 20) Wedding Cake: 12000 EXP (0.05%). After that, instead of saying “500 to Go!”, it will say “Maxed’.
 * 21) Taking in mind Drop;
 * 22) Sandbag: 30 (3.33%)
 * 23) Anvil: 150 (1.33%)
 * 24) Big Weight: 420 (0.714%)
 * 25) Safe: 1200 EXP (0.33%)
 * 26) Piano: 5000 EXP (0.1%)
 * 27) Toontanic: 15000 EXP (0.04%)
 * 28) Squirt is the easiest to level-up because it has the lowest EXP requirements to make up for being the weakest Gag;
 * 29) Glass of Water: 25 EXP (4%)
 * 30) Squirt Gun: 100 EXP (2%)
 * 31) Seltzer Bottle: 300 EXP (1%)
 * 32) Fire Hose: 1000 EXP (0.4%)
 * 33) Storm Cloud: 2000 EXP (0.2%)
 * 34) Geyser: 6000 EXP (0.1%).
 * 35) Lure's EXP requirements are much lower because it is used much less frequently;
 * 36) Small Magnet: 10 EXP (10%)
 * 37) $5 Bill: 40 EXP (5%)
 * 38) Big Magnet: 150 EXP (2%)
 * 39) $10 Bill: 400 EXP (1%)
 * 40) Hypno-Goggles: 1000 EXP (0.5%)
 * 41) Presentation: 3000 EXP (0.2%)
 * 42) But looking at the Sound Gag, it’s even worse. Aside from the balancing where they made the Sound Gag low damage but gains more powerful as more Toons use it unlike with the other Gags, its likely that the devs behind this looked how broken Sound was and decided to increase its EXP cost to make it harder to grind out;
 * 43) Whistle: 50 EXP (2%)
 * 44) Trumpet: 200 EXP (1%)
 * 45) Aoogah: 1500 EXP (0.2%)
 * 46) Elephant Trunk: 4000 EXP (0.1%)
 * 47) Foghorn: 15000 EXP (0.033%)
 * 48) Opera Singer: 30000 EXP (0.02%)
 * 49) Combining the data below, it takes 5000 Foghorns to unlock the Opera Singer, not counting any deaths (or as this game calls it; going sad), and it takes 2000 Birthday Cakes to unlock the Wedding Cake. As noticed, instead of telling you how many points, it’s indicated in a percentage. If you die (go sad) during any of these; you can lose 200 Birthday Cakes worth of EXP and that also applies to all gag tracks. Lastly, the EXP loss is based on how much EXP you need, not how much you currently have, where you can lose up to 500 Foghorns worth (if you were at 18.8%, you lose 10% which becomes 8.8% as it scales depending on how much you need to level up).
 * 50) In terms of the bosses, they have gotten heavy reworks that ended up being massive nerfs to them;
 * 51) * The VP only does like 5-12 damage per attack and is easily knocked back.
 * 52) * The CFO requires 5-7 goons launched via crane to defeat him.
 * 53) * The CJ's scale is too easily beaten by your evidence.
 * 54) * Lastly, the seltzer bottles on the CEO boss fight have gotten so fast, that all you have to do is hold down the fire button for 30 seconds and you win because they have been changed to be fully automatic.
 * 55) The outdated code of the game left very easy room for hackers. During the first week of the game, it was reported that hackers were taking over the game, with things like invincibility hacks, injectors, and even other exploits including the one where they could bypass the chat filter and send messages to everyone. A massive ban wave occurred which targeted dozens of players as well during the first week of the game, including many normal players as well. One was even banned permanently (“hacking & illegal exploits”) a minute after he logged into the game. When the servers/districts were filled up, the game was laggy where it caused framerate drops. This is a scenario that kids' MMOs must be able to deal with hackers, which the original Toontown Online had to deal with back in 2010/2011 and even FusionFall as well.
 * 56) * In fact, a month later its launch, the game's playerbase was artificially padded out by bots that spammed malicious links everywhere in Toontown Central. In fact, the game didn't even have an anti-cheat system implemented like Battleye or any pre-cautions against botting at all. It was even worse that the devs hardly focused on fixing these issues, where the bots persisted for months.
 * 57) False Advertising: One of the gameplay trailers and even the Steam cover showed Flippy throwing two birthday cakes towards a Mr. Hollywood, while in the game, you can't throw more than one Birthday Cake at once.
 * 58) To try and get the players back, the Twitter account announced that they will be opening up a VIP tier-benefits on Toontown Reboot, which rewards whales for spending more. Most notably, paying $150 yields you Tier 3, which includes triple XP, the ability to buy Gags and heal from anywhere outside of battle. In combat, you get the immunity to critical hits, the 50% damage reduction buff, 50% crit rate and 35% resistance, which in-game is the chance for Cogs to land a “Glancing Hit” on you. For example, a Tee Off that deals 35 damage becomes 9 damage after the 50% damage reduction and the "Glancing Hit" effect.
 * 59) Even worse; during that time, the Twitter account had already disabled replies. They at once protected their Twitter the next day after the VIP backlash and only unlocked it upon its shutdown announcement.

Reception
Initially, people were hyped for Toontown (2023), seeing that it was an official return of Toontown Online. The Twitter account announced that there will be no subscription required to play the game, but the game will be free-to-play with micro-transactions. Players however were still hyped as it was finally the return of Toontown officially. However, once they played the game, their expectations were bombed as the game had pay-to-win time-based items in the Cash Shop, increased grind, and a massive spike of difficulty compared to the original (none of these were actually featured on the Steam page's trailers). One player stated that he went sad on Toontown Central five times because of the new "critical damage" mechanic, as all five of the Cogs that had killed his Toon (or caused to go sad) had did 12 damage from critical hits (which, starting at 25 Laff, translates to only three hits if all of them crit). What almost made him break his keyboard was that after reaching level 2 Throw, he had found out that they implemented an "EXP loss upon death" system where after the message saying "The Cogs have taken your Gags!", it followed up with a EXP loss message stating that he had lost a percentage of Throw EXP, and that the game recommended he buy the EXP buff to avoid the EXP loss, where he suddenly realized why the game was F2P; they were putting pay-to-win schemes on top of it. Said player said it was the worst game of 2023 because of how they ruined the game's 20th anniversary with this. A YouTuber, with 1.2 million subs who hasn't played the original Toontown Online, said in his video "Toontown (2023): A Non-Fan's Perspective" that this was only made just to beat a dead horse over and over by milking it one more time, and ranked it as number one of Worst Games of 2023. Darry08 even said that the game reminded him of Paper Mario: Sticker Star in the sense where "every attack is expendable and once you use one, it's gone."

On launch, the game peaked with 15,000 players on Steam, but a month later, it had dropped to 5,000 players with the players snowballing in a few months, to the point where there was zero players according to SteamCharts. Reportedly, only one whale (who had spent $120 on the pay-to-win buffs), with 1.3 million subs managed to solo the CEO, where he even proclaimed that the CJ boss fight was just a joke, as he, while soloing, could one shot him with the evidence thrown, the VP barely did any damage and the CFO was glitchy. He even stated that the endgame is basically atrocious with frustrating enemies and having bosses that are just trash.

Most of the players that had played the game never got past Daisy Gardens, and most of them gave up on Toontown Central due to the frustrating difficulty. Many people even said that this was even worse than Club Penguin Island, Disney's failed attempt to reboot Club Penguin. They even went forth to blame Toony Software (which was their first and only game), the developer, for pitching the idea of re-releasing Toontown Online in a F2P model ten years too late. Jesse Schell of Schell Games even stated that this re-release was made entirely without their involvement.

Prior to the shutdown, Toontown Reboot (known as just Toontown on Steam) received an “Overwhelmingly Negative” (17%) reception from Steam players, as well as scoring a 28 (generally unfavorable reviews) on Metacritic out of 7 reviews on Metacritic. IGN gave it a 2/10 (Painful), saying that it butchers what made the original so great, GameSpot gave it a 3/10, saying that making reboots of MMORPGs that had already shut down is a terrible idea. On Metacritic, it has a 1.1 (Overwhelming dislike) user score, with 90% of the user reviews being zeros. On Google, Toontown Online's percentage dropped to 27% liked. One review even said it a reboot of a MMORPG that no one but their fans asked for, and it was only made to pander to them.

Sometime within in the second month, Toontown announced a Steam event where everyone will receive Gold Jellybeans depending on the rating of the game. It said;
 * "If the Steam rating is "Very Positive", everyone will get 6000 Gold Jellybeans and a month long EXP boost!"
 * "If the Steam rating is "Overwhelmingly Positive", everyone will get 10000 Gold Jellybeans, a month long damage reduction plus the previous rewards!"

This was heavily criticized, but the devs didn't budge. With the rating staying below "Very Negative", another Steam announcement was followed stating that nobody is going to get any rewards following the unsuccessful event.

After 8 months after its launch and nearly four months of radio silence according to users that had followed prior to the Twitter account turning on Protected Tweets on October 15, 2023, on February 12, 2024, the Toontown Reboot Twitter account and the Steam page announced that the game would be shutting down in two weeks on February 26, 2024 with the Gold Jellybean transactions being disabled, thus ending the franchise. At the time, the playerbase was "0" according to SteamCharts. In the online gaming community, radio silence/unannounced maintenance mode was seen as a huge warning sign for when an online game (usually gacha mobile games) is bound to get shutdown; if an online games goes without updates/events/changes for 45 days in a row; that's a huge sign that the devs could be preparing for its EoS/shutdown. The game only lasted 270 days from day one to its shutdown. The shutdown announcement meant that no more new players could join the game, as new player registrations were turned off on that day, and then on its shutdown, the Steam page disappeared, redirecting the user to the "Welcome to Steam" front page.

The game was then listed on the Horrible TVTropes, with the page stating that it “takes everything good about the original and turns the Allegedly Free Game scale Up To Eleven".

"When it comes to re-releases of MMORPGs, Toontown (2023) is a case example on how not to officially re-release a MMORPG that has already shut down, which in this case, basically serves to beat a dead horse. You can tell that the project was only made to cash-in on the game's 20th anniversary by turning the game to an Allegedly Free Game (Note: Originally, the game was subscription-based, but this re-release is free-to-play with a cash shop.), featuring things like paid buffs, and top it all off, the combat has been made extremely unforgiving with the infamous "EXP loss on death" mechanic where if you were grinding on Gags, whenever you die (or in this game, go sad), you end up losing 10% of EXP required to get to the next Gag. While the new QoL changes did at least improve the game somewhat, it wasn't enough to save the playerbase and ended up killing the beloved Toontown franchise for good, as it shut down in only eight months, less than a year. The game received very little marketing and relied on nostalgia to market itself. Not to mention, the playerbase started out with only ten thousand, only to drop off real quick due to the frustrating difficulty spikes they implemented. To add insult to injury, the people who ran this game decided it would be a great idea to run an event where the higher the rating is; the more rewards the player will get."

- "So Bad, It's Horrible" TVTropes

A month later, on April 3, 2024. the Toontown_Online Twitter account suddenly got deleted, where the /Toontown_Online link would just show a "This account doesn't exist - Try searching for another." message, and searching for any Toontown (2023) posts do not yield any posts, also confirming that the account has since been deleted.

Trivia

 * Prior to the shutdown of Toontown Online back in 2013, it was stated that Disney considered the idea of switching to a free-to-play model, but it was turned down, as the executive who was interviewed stated that going free-to-play wouldn't help the game at all and would require a heavy rework of the game itself. The executive also said that even Toontown Online did choose to stay up, it would've just been in maintenance mode for too long, and that they didn't see the reason why keep a game up if its not going to receive any more updates. In terms of all of the Grand Chase Classic similarities, this also alludes to when a Level Up Games representative (Brazil Grand Chase) said that keeping a free-to-play MMORPG up with no updates/maintenance mode for years is a bad idea. NerdSlayer even stated in Death of a Game: FusionFall that when a subscription-based game goes free-to-play that's a huge sign that the game isn't even doing well and is seen as a last ditch effort for the game to stay alive by trying to bring back players.
 * A datamine of this game suggests that there was a battle pass system planned, called Toon Pass. Additionally, the earliest the files date to from is April 3rd, 2021, which is probably when development of Toontown (2023) started.
 * Originally, the devs were going to call going sad death, as according to the code in the Toon book, the parameter for going sad was called "DEATHS", which explains the reworked sad animation where you get knocked down unconscious.