this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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Alright I'll die on this hill.
Absolutely nothing being sold can't be acquired in game for a pittance.
The character edit costs 20k gold. I earned this before I even reached the capital city. For reference on how much that costs a night in the inn costs 2k gold and you're essentially forced to do that every single day.
You earn this so damn easily.
Equipment is all stuff you can easily acquire too.
Nothing feels like it has affected gameplay. None of these prices feel like they increased the in-game cost in order to force you to pay money. They feel like they're just there for the sake of the chance some shmucks might buy them for no reason. I genuinely don't know why "pay to win" is even being mentioned, it's a singleplayer game who gives a fuck? It's not multiplayer, it's not an mmo, it's not pvp, it's not multiplayer pve, it's a singleplayer game. "P2W" is literally irrelevant. Rift Crystals are currency for purchasing pawns (companions) and only applies to ones that are 5+ levels above your character, it's a limitation to prevent people ruining the game for themselves by getting overlevelled companions that trivialise the content. If people pay money for the Rift Crystals they're literally ruining the game for themselves. The last part about not being able to delete cloud saves to make a new character just seems like a lie.
The review bombing over this is unwarranted.
The game is good. The optimisation is bad, that criticism is warranted, it's a cpu issue related to physics people think, graphics settings do nothing to change it, Denuvo is probably making it much worse.
I recommend the game if you want real time combat that makes you feel like a DnD party. The game is somewhere in between Fable's goofyness and DnD with a hint of influence from the Lord of the Rings battle in the Moria mines vs the goblin and cave troll.
I'll die charging the hill.
So you can "earn" the stuff in-game: so what? That doesn't excuse it at all and I don't know why people repeat this. They aren't mad the item can be earned, they are mad it is sold. These seem like the same issue but they are not. Conflating them as the same issue is a poor attempt to deflect the justified frustration of the people who paid for this game. Their frustration is a basic part of human psychology. It is why we do not allow steroids in sports. It is why we separate boxing matches by weight. There is a fundamental understanding of "fairness" that every leftist should understand and this encroaches on that understanding. As a leftist you should understand how this is indicative of a greater inequity between what is accessible to those with wealth and those without in our society and you should be upset that it has not only consumed our working lives but now consumes our leisure as well.
In so far as your comments on the Rift companions being gated; I'm afraid you've put the cart before the horse. They are selling the solution to a problem they designed. This is the exact kind of toxic gameplay elements that people criticize the very existence of cash shops for. We aren't talking about some cosmetics here. The fact that you are trying to pass that off as a good thing shows just how lost in the sauce you are.
All these systems that must be interacted with in this way are things that must be programmed and tested. It hurts to see a game get blasted for performance issues when those same programmers may have been working on this garbage instead. Would their time have been better spent making sure the game ran nicely? Absolutely. But hey, at least they got the rift crystals and character editor token working right in the cash shop and isn't that what really matters?
You mentioned that it's not a big deal to have pay-2-win in a single player game. "Who cares," you say? Well, uh, a load of people. Why attempt to invalidate their concerns? Very toxic behavior in service to the greedy corporation, comrade. Do better.
lmao this is funny imagery for a argument. i wonder what rhetorical stakes are? cannons? does your argument give you a horse?
my arguments have a saber. all the coolest charges in war involved sabers
Sports are irrelevant here. It is a singleplayer game. Enjoy it how you like.
All this amounts to is putting cheatcodes behind a paywall. And cheatcodes have been gone for decades. If we're really going to split hairs about this nobody ever complained about the Nintendo Hotline or the various other premium-cost official cheat hotlines in the back of the manuals back in the glory-days people imagine.
Sports are just games. Either way, it's an analogy about the psychology of fairness and equity so I feel it is relevant in that way. Perhaps that didn't occur to you in which case I apologize for not being clear enough. It being a singleplayer game is not relevant to this psychology as I explained. If your enjoyment of the game comes from the accomplishments in the game then those accomplishments being trivialized by a cash shop will diminish your enjoyment of the game. This, again, is part of this fundamental element of human psychology I was talking about which is why I mentioned it.
In regards to the Nintendo hotline and such, yeah, we did complain about it. I know, because I was a child during that era (I am old) and I was complaining about it along with my friends. We just didn't have the internet at the time to have a nice record of it. We did it the old fashioned way; face to face while trading pornographic magazines we stole from our fathers.
Games played against one another.
It's not fundamental because it's clearly not something that applies to everyone. It does not diminish my enjoyment of the game, I do not care because it does not affect me. If it doesn't apply to everyone it's not fundamental, it's social and/or environmental in some way.
If it does bother me, doesn't that make it fine to complain about it? If I don't like seeing microtransactions in a game I paid full price for (or even just the trend of this happening across the industry), or if I don't like knowing that some features in the game that used to be free were put into a cash shop, or if I don't like that executives are trying to monetize every aspect of my experience, even after they've already gotten money out of me, shouldn't it be well within my right to criticize the game and company for degrading my experience?
And if you truly aren't bothered by it but see that some people are, should you really be trying to defend the practice? You have every right to not be bothered by in-game monetization and not complain about it, but do you really need to try and convince other people that are bothered by it that it isn't really such a big deal?
"It doesn't bother me personally therefore it is not predatory or anti-consumer or pay-2-win."
You can't see the genius of this position.
It doesn't have to apply to every single person to be fundamental. Some people are not pressured by FOMO. Some people are not tricked by dark patterns. Yet these things play on fundamental psychological phenomena of the human mind.
Whether or not a game is played against another is not relevant as to whether or not it is pay-2-win. At all. Not even a little bit, as a treat.
You misunderstand.
This isn't your average pay2win situation where you can ~totally~ earn your way to the important stuff. This is as if the Publisher told the Development team to put the cheapest healing potions from the first shop in the village ALSO for sale on the RMT shop. It's in bad taste, it's exploitative, but it's also hilariously irrational all things considered.
The reason why this became a PR loss is because they also removed the Start New Game button after your begin the game. So that lead to a belief that you gotta buy Art of Metamorphosis for 1,99. All in all it leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouths in the pettiest, least lucrative way possible.
No, I understand just fine. Your reply confirms what I know. It's pay-2-win stuff. What you are saying is the usual pay-2-win scenario. Convenience items, usually trivial ones, and other currencies that are harder to obtain to get advantages in the cash shop. All earnable, albeit some rarer ones more slowly, in-game. It's your average mobile game microtransaction slop.
Not at all. The usual pay2win scenario involves two things. First you actually get something. Second, that something takes a wild amount of time to acquire through normal means. When I said 'what if the first, shittiest health potion was also on a cash shop for some reason' I was not exaggerating in any way.
Cash shops have been normalized in an infinite number of ways. There are entire games built around selling cosmetic skins or characters. Capcom has consistently chosen the worst of all worlds with every single one of their games, selling nigh useless things that (rightfully) draw people's ire.
I reject your second criteria outright. It is ridiculous. If you can pay to get something that gives you an advantage it is pay-2-win. Even if that thing is attainable fairly easily in the game. In the case of this game, there are items, that are rare that are sold. So even by your own criteria this is pay-2-win. By mine, it is pay-2-win. It is pay-2-win.
I think this definition is different from the usual definition of pay-2-win. The way I've always seen it described, "pay-2-win" refers to a micro/macro transaction that more or less renders the general content meaningless. So in an 80-hour long game, it would give you the items and gear that would allow you to skip the first 75 hours of it. Persona 5 is a decent example, allowing you to summon level 80+ personas from the very start of the game (well, as soon as you unlock above-level fusions).
The microtransactions in Dragon's Dogma 2 give you an advantage, certainly, and are a scummy practice by out of touch Capcom executives. But in my experience, your definition of pay-2-win is not the common one. That's why people here agree with your points but are confused about your conclusion
There's no albeit, there's no rare ones on that list
It is mentioned in the very first post. Rift Crystals. They are not super common.
But let's not digress. Their commonness or rareness is not particularly relevant. Either way selling items that give an advantage is pay-20win.
I'll die reinforcing the flank of this (ant)hill (or whatever).
First of all I'm not trying to defend Capcom here, these microtransactions are obviously stupid as fuck. But they are nothing but additions made by out-of-touch executives at the last possible minute. In comparison to the predatory design found in 90% of videogames made today it barely even registers on the scale of bullshit. It's so half-assed they don't even allow you to buy the packs that give you in-game currency more than one time. The game was clearly not designed with this in mind and at no point does it feel like any of its design was altered so you'd be inclined to spend money on the microtransactions.
Every single live-service game that works on the users FOMO is a hundred times more predatory than this. Cosmetics in multiplayer games are a hundred times more predatory than this (sure they don't "affect gameplay" but they are most often the only way to make your character be in any way unique compared to the other players and always function as displays of wealth to an audience of literal children). I'd even argue that shit games like the lauded "Vampire Survivors", which is five bucks and doesn't feature any microtransactions is more predatory since it's from the ground up designed to hit your dopamine receptors just the right amount with no other apparent goal in mind other than to lobotomize you for half an hour whenever you play it.
Every single fucking mobile game is literally eating peoples brains as they play them and this is the shit people get mad about? This is at least still a videogame designed and made by people who have some goals besides brainwashing its users into becoming whales. Yeah it fucking sucks that there's barely any devs left who are completely free from this bullshit, but I'd gladly take this bullshit over the other 99% of games that are designed to be microtransaction-machines first.
You are agreeing with me. You point out that this game is pay-2-win but just that others in the market are worse. Sure, I agree. This game is pay-2-win and others are worse. Welcome to my side. The march up the hill isn't so bad and there's a nice breeze.
Yeah I agree with you, except for the fact where I think it's important to actually look at the actual games, how they are designed and how things like microtransactions work within them and not just spout "pay-to-win" like it somehow means the same thing in battlefront 2, world of tanks, some mobile idle game, the resident evil 4 remake or this game.
You are paying for things that give an advantage in a game. In some that advantage is gainable in the game. In some it is not. In some that advantage is huge. In some it is trivial. But fundamentally it is all the same at it's core. It is the purchasing of that advantage that makes it pay-2-win even if the specific variations and severity differs from product to product.
I fully agree it's worse in other games. Sure, that's a gimme.
You're charging a hill that was erected in like 2010 lol. Look at every single game Capcom has released for the last two decades and you'll see the same thing
So? It was bad then and it is bad now. A bad thing doesn't stop being bad if enough time has passed that it has become normalized. Reject the settler mindset and be better.
Of course it's bad, but it's just so fucking weird to get up in arms about it now lmao. Like why is this the one
Also you get a ton of rift crystals what are you talking about in the other reply
Gaming has sucked for more than a decade. At a certain point, people need to either develop their own games/mods or find a better hobby. But malding about how games suck (after buying them no less) is just pathetic at this point. How much did malding about horse armor back in '06 amount to?
I do maintain that they refrained from placing a New Game button there for a reason and that that reason is very stupid, likely predatory.
That said, a lot of people are straight up lying about art of metamorphosis yes.
You know some fuckery is happening when developers strip you of basic functionality (like, literally, creating another character??) and then give you an option to restore that functionality for real money, irrespective of whether this can be achieved in game.
This makes it more acceptable to implement such practices in the future, and to either make it microtransaction-only or to enable insane levels of grind going forward to stimulate players to take an easy route...with cash.
That's not to mention that singleplayer/co-op games should never have microtransactions in the first place. You bought it, you are free to enjoy it whichever way you like. Yes, even "ruining your game with OP stuff" and cheating. Whatever strikes your fancy.
As far as i can tell it's not real money. You do it with an in-game item that you use in-game money to buy.
Yeah, Devil May Cry 5 (same devs) had the exact same thing. The mtx items could all be very easily earned just by playing the game normally, and nothing was locked behind real money. Capcom just loves the bad publicity for whatever reason
Thanks for the context!
I think the problem is that it's also being sold as a dlc of sorts.
Even if it can be obtained in-game without purchasing it separately, why is it available for purchase?
If I were to guess, developers keep trying to let capcom's execs understand normalized way to set up a cash shop but they won't pick up the fax.
"Absolutely nothing being sold can't be acquired in game for a pittance." so was the case in battlefront. no p2w shit should be allowed
I see it as a different scenario when that translates to competitive advantage though. I couldn't care less about this existing here, it does not affect me.
Not losing your shit over small encroachments is how we got from $2.50 horse armour to every single game locking costumes behind a paywall
You are familiar with the expression: give them an inch and they will take a mile? The slipppery slope? The thin end of the wedge?
They are experimenting until they find something that works.
and part of the reason why I think it is so difficult for people to articulate why they are offended, is it just is offensive, it offends sensibilities, it breaks up an enjoyable artistic experience into distinctively marketable chunks, it's disengaging, a lot of us just don't want to see a marketplace at all, we don't want to see price tags for extras, we want the UI, the menu, everything to feel like one complete, cohesive package
can you imagine if you were watching Netflix, and they introduced exclusive content you had to pay extra for? Maybe you could earn enough good boy points to watch it by watching enough ads, on the service you already pay for, so you can still earn the right to watch it for "free"
what if TV episodes were still inclusive, but cut content and behind the scenes footage was extra?
what if you are enjoying a nice piece of art, but now you have to purchase a unique URL which links to your own private copy of it?
can you imagine reading a book and every time you start a new chapter you get an advert to buy another book? what if some chapters were just paywalled behind a link online?
things are just made worse by monetisation, there's nothing more to it, you had something good, and someone made it slightly shitter in order to turn a profit - capitalism in its purest form
if microtransactions had any artistic merit of course they would be developed in a moneyless society as well
I'm not defending Capcom or microtransactions, but this argument seems kinda anti-materialist. No amount of "voting with our wallets" would have ever stopped capitalist executives from monetizing the hell out of anything they could to a more blatant extent. It's baked into the capitalist system of milking art for profit.
People did rightfully lose their shit over horse armor way back in the day, and it predictably did fuck all in the end. You even admit this yourself.
Who cares though? Who you winning against? Yourself?
Creating an unfavorable situation and then charging money for it isn't great, and warrants negative reviews.
Taking advantage of "schmucks" also isn't great.
They could've made different choices. They are being reviewed based on the choices they made.
You don't understand what level of schmuck you'd have to be to buy this stuff in this game. This is like, 2 or 3 hours in and you won't have to think about it ever again kind of investment into gameplay you're skipping with money.
Not that it's a 2 hour grind for each thing. Just that once your about that far into the game the actual rewards from the game make it so everything in that micro transaction list is trivial
I have no idea who it is for, because it appears to be for people who are not playing the video game
That is the kind of malicious thing being done, though. It sets the rhetoric that criticizing MTX is motivated by being a schmuck, you only would "genuinely" feel pressure if ypu were a schmuck.
But here's the thing, virtually no game, even the most predatory, has an undeniable "win for money" option. Having things be hazy creates the plausible deniability required for someone to consider a purchase (people tend to only pay for pay2win stuff if nobody will ever know) and to create this discourse. No matter the game, the communities that play it will at a minimum have a sizable contingent who will insist their game is not pay2win. It is never P2W. They always make a distinction, pay for an edge, pay to save time, and always couch it such that if only the critic were a better gamer then it would not matter. See Star Citizem videoa of people in Auroras beating much better ships - "skill wins" is the message that obscures the clear mechanical advantages that are on sale that are just as usable by a skilles players, or would provide wider tactical options and responses as flex picks.
I'm not saying the MTX here is especially egregiois, but this discourse we are havimg even on an explicitly left wing forum is the intended effect, to blunt criticism for when they take this further, which they always do. The losa in save data control is a further escalation.
I'm saying this is completely inconsequential to the game itself, and I mean that lol. It's just a button you can press if you feel like spending money for some reason and it literally won't help you, you just get a resource you already have a lot of.
I fully understand the argument lmao, I'm saying I'm this case it's just standard Capcom shit. It really does not matter, I fucking swear
I won't buy a denuvo game or a game that forces online to play.
I was about to re-buy (since I still have my ps1 discs) the original ff7. Like a 25 year old game, but they require you to be online to start playing. Fuck that. No damned reason for it. I was going to buy it for my steam deck. Now I'm just going to pirate it instead. I hear it runs better emulated than the PC port runs without modding it.
Pirate then when available
I'm not trying to convince people to pay, just that the review bombing over this bullshit is misrepresenting a game that I think is actually pretty good. Genuinely do not care if people pay for it or not, capcom aren't poor lmao. Shame it won't be cracked though with denuvo, i'm pretty sure no denuvo crackers are left.
Did Empress finally return to whatever bizarre dimension she travelled here from?
Who knows. As far as I understand the last known place she was at was her Telegram. She stopped posting abruptly in September when she was modding Starfield.
Unless the Harry Potter crack resulted in her getting caught? She could be sitting in a cell somewhere waiting trial.
lmao
The issues.are not neccesarily about the game being fun or not.
First, and most obviously, this is obviously about setting the discourse to then escalate at a later time. It is meant to create Gamers™ who will make pushing back on MTX exhausting, so that people will be less.willing to push back later as these MTX start paywalling more significant aspects of the game. This was done with lootboxes, battlepasses, horse armor, and most successfully MMO's - every online game's monetization is exploitative except mine, you wouldn't need the premium store if you got gud. Deliberately cultivated fandom toxicity.
Second, the shape of the game is being altered to accomodate this MTX. Save data being intentionally limited to make the MTX seem like it has a point has a negative impact on the game overall.
Third, felony contempt of business model. These kinds of MTX can be used to frame modding and cheats as circumvention of DRM with monetary damages. For now, I think Capcom knows better than to push this, but the DMCA is broad and modding amd cheats are a direct competitor to this monetization model; it is inevitable this will be persued at some point, after previous escalations like bans. It puts DMCA takedowns of mods that do the same thing as in their interest to make ppssible.