this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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My brother plays a lot of D4 himself and even though he does spend money on the game for the battle passes (I think), he never bought skins because he feels the same way you do: your characters look less like they're your own because the armour you equip is not visible. Then again, I'm wondering what else they could sell that isn't cosmetics. Change the way spells look maybe?
From a developer perspective, tonnes of stuff. Shortcuts, power (edit: see Diablo Immortal for some live examples). From a gamer perspective, it's really the ideal scenario in this day and age, but Blizzard'll cop hate all the same.
Other similar games like Last Epoch are doing paid alt animations for skills, but Diablo team just aren't that creative, and the game wasn't designed well enough to accommodate something like that.
Shortcuts in the way that WoW handles it, ie. instant leveling, or literal shortcuts like waypoints on map? Afaik, both exist, right? At least you can skip the campaign.
And would including power in some way not lead to P2W?
I guess it depends how aggressive your monetisation is. I feel like Blizzard was super greedy already, looking at Overwatch's 20€ skins, but studios like Riot sure don't make it more realistic for mtx to become cheaper in the future. People seem to be fine paying 20€ for a single equipment transmog for some reason.
D4 has shortcuts for battle pass tiers, i.e. cosmetics. There aren't any level skips like there is in WoW.
You can skip the campaign at the time you create a new toon, if you have already completed it. It is faster to level that way, because you can stick to activities that reward more XP and don't have to turn in quests/listen to dialogue. You still start at level 1 though, so it's not really a shortcut. Rather there are certain things in the game that you're only required to earn once, given it's intended to play multiple characters/builds. It'd be a slog to have to continuously go around the game world collecting the minor stat boosts for finding altars, for example. Instead the ones you've found will carry over between characters and seasons.
Yeah, P2W is what I mean by paying for power and it's a good thing for players that it isn't in D4 (like it is in Immortal for example). I edited my earlier comment to include that other games have come up with more creative ways to monetise cosmetics like you mentioned, but that they aren't really possible in Diablo for technical reasons. It is very poorly optimised for online play by design - when you load an instance, your client loads the full loadout of every player character in that instance. Their full inventory, stash, everything. That's part of what I mean - it's an opportunity to monetise which many players would be amenable to, totally missing from the game.
Personally though, I think that there being minimal compulsion to buy MTX post-game purchase is exactly the way it should be. I wouldn't expect them to continue a live service with no ongoing revenue, so if MTX is how they do that it should be relegated to rich fuckers with nothing better to spend their fortunes on, so I can point and laugh at them while they fund additional content for me. It's just weird that a dev would subsequently use "hey 150m big number" to try and claim the situation as some sort of business success, as much as it's weird players (like some in this thread) would consider this revelation as additional points against D4. Are they completely oblivious to the absolute hellscape in which we exist?!