And have we come full circle to god damn horse armor.
It’s crazy how far micro-transactions and monetizing games have come since Bethesda charged $2.50 for cosmetic armor to put on your horse. If you’d told someone back then that one day an in-game mount would cost more than the game itself they would have laughed you out of the room.
I’m so sick of this revisionist bs. Plenty of us were outraged then and warned of EXACTLY this. Y’all reaped what you sowed. Now micro transactions and paid early access are the norm. We screamed and yelled to “vote with your wallets”, and by god, you did. “It’s just a few bucks” is the most common one I hear. Well, now EVERYTHING is “just a few bucks”.
You won.
Stop 👏 playing 👏 games 👏 that 👏 rip 👏 you 👏 off 👏
Or just stop playing games that exist as shitty GACHA vending machines.
It isn’t even the cost per-say. Its the fact that mounts were implemented in D4 as a practical afterthought. They barely affect gameplay, you can’t take them into dungeons, they don’t have any kind of skill progression or character synergy on their own right. Barely more than a TF2 fancy hat.
I got D4 at base price on release, played the main act, and shelved it months ago. I can’t imagine still playing a game that’s been nothing but bloody runs since that initial release. Nevermind paying $60 for a fucking cosmetics improvement while I grind mobs for incremental stat increases at the level cap.
What happened to the micro part of microtransactions? This is why I only bought one skin in Genshin Impact since they give you extra funny money for your first time to get it, but a second skin will double than the first so I’m never buying one ever again.
At least Genshin Impact had a fucking plot, too. I can stomach dropping an extra $30 on a game after the first 100 hours. But D4 just stopped being a story after release. I was having fun exploring the world and plot in Genshin for the better part of two years (thanks, COVID!) I cleared D4 in a month. Cleared it again with another class. Got bored and shelved it.
Genshin is good in some aspects, but it shows how desensitized we are that we accept the egregious gambling and the endless grind that only exists for the sake of retention. Can Genshin players really talk shit about this when in average it takes around $200 to get one single 5* character? Even if you are not paying that yourself, the game is built that way to exploit those who do.
we accept the egregious gambling and the endless grind that only exists for the sake of retention
The world was big enough and rich enough that I could mostly ignore the dungeons and never really feel like grinding. I just kinda wandered around chasing quest-lines and having fun. I didn’t sweat the 5* heroes and never really had a problem with the PvE aspect of the game. Admittedly, I wasn’t doing end-game content or playing anything remotely competitively.
Even if you are not paying that yourself, the game is built that way to exploit those who do.
Sure. Its a game full of psychological landmines. And if you’re in your 30s and you’ve learned how to dance through the bullshit, then its easy. But if you’re playing this game as a twelve year old and constantly getting spammed by the Wallet Inspector to give up another $20, less so.
But… I can’t do anything about that. What really gets me is that the country where this game is produced (China) has better and more comprehensive regulations to limit exploitation of end-users than the countries where the majority of players come from (Japan, Korea, USA). I believe there was even some amount of controversy in how hard the western-oriented interfaces sold in-game purchases, relative to the domestic versions.
You can avoid the grind at first since the game is PvE, but the further you go the more the game demands you to increase the World Level, and the more grind you need to do to get each character playable at that level.
I didn’t max out my World Level because at some point it felt like undoing my work of powering up the characters, but the game definitely pushes you that way. Not only story quests, but doiing Abyss levels for more free currency requires high level characters.
That’s not even mentioning Artifacts which have so many layers of randomized stats that you could be basically grinding forever to get one which has exactly the stats you want.
I can never shake off the feeling that if Genshin wasn’t gacha, if you could get characters from quests and weapons and artifacts from exploration, it would be a much, much better game, even if it was smaller and shorter. But more and more, this seems to be the kind of game that companies want to make.
China seems to be showing a bit more pulse than many countries as far as reining in lootbox games goes, but it’s still not enough, and it doesn’t seem the benefits of these efforts can be seen worldwide.
I mean, enough would be loading these senior executives and marketing directors into a cannon and firing them into the ocean. But I agree, even the most stringent rules always seem to be attacking the edges of the problem.
