Heh. So that's why there is no 'new game' option (for the previous post about key, etc). ;)

Anyway, I don't know either where the decision about microtransactions was made, but I don't care much. Itsuno must have known it for a long time, Capcom knew it, and they didn't make a lot of effort to reveal that side of the game. His whole presentation, that he gave some time ago, suddenly feels very hypocritical. It's even strange, because they must have expected that sort of reaction.

I know it's possible to ignore it, like it's possible to ignore in-game respeccing in other game (and this one), but I find it hard to ignore the slyness of this move.
 
Now that is some micro-transaction garbage. Who sits in a room and decided this crap? Anyway from my experience certain asian developer's have lost their mind.
 
I think this should be moved to its own thread.

I've been a big fan of Capcom for a long time, but I'm disappointed by this debacle.
 
danutz_plusplus said:
Jesus, are people really this thick?
That you need to explain why introducing items into the game economy from a source outside of the ingame economy would be cheating?
Click to expand...
Cheating is meaningless in a one player game. Cheating is only something to be monitored and worried about when a game is competitive.

So much gnashing of teeth! So much whining!

Objecting to microtransactions on some existential level? Sure, whatever. Hate them all you want. But what the fuck do I care if some impatient gamer pays real money for fast travel items? It doesn't affect me AT ALL. This is not a multiplayer game. It might be "play to win", but it is not "play to beat me". If I want to play the game as designed (and I do), I just *do* that. No extra money anyone on Earth decides to pay changes my experience at all.

So why do you all care so much? None of this is new. This same debate has been happening for 20 years at this point. Hoping the studio "tanks"? Ridiculous. And short sighted.
 
JFarrell71 said:
Cheating is meaningless is a one player game. Cheating is only something to be monitored and worried about when a game is competitive.
Click to expand...
Nope. Cheating is breaking the rules of a game and ruining the experience for the player. Cheating will ruin even singleplayer games. But as long as I'm the one doing it, with no tie to the developer, it's fine. It's on me. I'm ruining it for myself.

But if the developer introduces cheating into the game, and monetizes it, they're directly in conflict of interest with balancing that game to push me to spend money on those cheats. They will make the game grindy-er, more annoying or whatever they can to get me to spend money.

I've had these same discussions with randos on twitter, and I'm just in awe how hard this is for people to get.
I thought this was obvious enough when Ubisoft did the very same thing, in their singleplayer games.
 
danutz_plusplus said:
I've had these same discussions with randos on twitter, and I'm just in awe how hard this is for people to get.
Click to expand...
Or perhaps it's that, like me, they don't share your assumption that developers are making the game worse/unbalanced in an effort to force people to pay money for those items. Maybe it's you who doesn't get that.

You mention Ubisoft. I've played all of those. Deus Ex (which is a game I specifically remember there being microtranaction arguments about). Assassin's Creed x10. Far Cry. Etc. And in exactly zero of those games have I spent any extra money on in-game items, nor have I ever felt that the game was overly punishing or restrictive because I didn't buy them.
 
Last edited:
JFarrell71 said:
Or perhaps it's that, like me, they don't share your assumption that developers are making the game worse/unbalanced in an effort to force people to pay money for those items. Maybe it's you who doesn't get that.

You mention Ubisoft. I've played all of those. Deus Ex (which is a game I specifically remember there being microtranaction arguments about). Assassin's Creed x10. Far Cry. Etc. And in exactly zero of those games have I spent any extra money on in-game items, nor have I ever felt that the game was overly punishing or restrictive because I didn't buy them.
Click to expand...
Yeah, in a hyper capitalist world, where maximizing profits is the main purpose for most every business, I'm gonna go and assume that these particular companies don't want to do that. And won't do it. Sure, they'll stuff a singleplayer game with microtransactions for basically cheating myself, but that's where they draw the line. They won't go so far as to adjust balancing numbers to push/nudge me towards actually buying them.

And as proof, I'll say I played those games and didn't feel overly punishing or restrictive.
Even ignoring the fact that what overly punishing or restrictive means is highly dependent on the patience and tolerance to abuse of each person, I personally don't like the idea of being fucked with like that. Even if they're not doing it, which I highly doubt, just the fact that there's the possibility of it will ruin the experience and poison the well.

And why do we have all of this? All because some head money person thought they could squeeze a little bit more blood out of that stone. And what's the reaction from the people who're getting squeezed? Either defending it, or saying they're not affected. Talk about myopic vision. And then we wonder why our games industry is in the state it is.
 
JFarrell71 said:
Or perhaps it's that, like me, they don't share your assumption that developers are making the game worse/unbalanced in an effort to force people to pay money for those items. Maybe it's you who doesn't get that.
Click to expand...
There are a couple of words to describe people like that "naive" or "stupid".

The intentional move of the gaming industry towards micro transactions has been very deliberate and heavy handed for the last ~15 years or so. Keynotes by execs have focused on it, articles, studies, analyses and so on ... and they all come back to one thing: game designs change when the execs demand you find a way to incentivize players to 'Pay to Win' ... the percentage who will earn these things are relatively small and meaningless - they just up the pain factor to weed people out.
 
Bought a month of Game Pass and started A Plague Tale Requiem, just played for an hour and holy fuck how this game looks in that first level, just drooling thinking that is how Witcher 4 will probably look, if not even better.
 
txa1265 said:
There are a couple of words to describe people like that "naive" or "stupid".

The intentional move of the gaming industry towards micro transactions has been very deliberate and heavy handed for the last ~15 years or so. Keynotes by execs have focused on it, articles, studies, analyses and so on ... and they all come back to one thing: game designs change when the execs demand you find a way to incentivize players to 'Pay to Win' ... the percentage who will earn these things are relatively small and meaningless - they just up the pain factor to weed people out.
Click to expand...
Woo boy.

Doesn't matter what I say, I'm sure, but whether you choose to take me at my word or not, I am not a patient person. When I play a game, if I felt that the devs had deliberately made important items hard to find so that I would be forced to pay extra money for them, it would piss me off and put me off the game. I don't like tedium and I don't like doing things over. I use fast travel in games (and don't complain about it).

I also like to earn, in game, the things that make up that game. I have no interest in being over-leveled, for example. So if there's a $5 "level up crystal", I have no interest in it. I want to actually play the game to level up, and I don't want the difficulty to be trivialized.

In MMOs, when they went away from subscription-only models, companies would often withhold key quality of life options (like a larger inventory or the ability to fast travel) unless you paid to play the games. As a consequence, I wasn't interested in the free-to-play versions of those games, and did not play those games.

I am not naive, nor am I stupid. Thanks for calling me those things, by the way! Very civil, and very encouraging to discussion. What I am is less cynical than you two, apparently, and also trusting in my own experience in playing dozens of games that have microtransactions in them. I've been wary of companies transitioning into making actual content gated by those microtransactions (I dislike making missions into pre-order bonuses, which is something that has been done for 20 years), but I do not care and will continue not to care about microtransactions that do not affect me as I play a game. I do not care about policing my neighbors.

One last thing: I saw some debate about whether the devs were responsible for microtransactions or not. I think the answer in 99.9% of cases is "no". A publisher makes that decision. But the publisher is a bunch of guys in suits doing conference calls and staring at spreadsheets, so obviously it's the developers who have to actually incorporate them into the game.
 
JFarrell71 said:
I do not care about policing my neighbors.
Click to expand...
I really don't care to do that. All of my arguing is for my own benefit. A gradual ruining of my most favorite passtime.
I'm afraid that all we're seeing is a constant sliding into monetization hell. It started years ago with horse armor, and look where we are.
JFarrell71 said:
One last thing: I saw some debate about whether the devs were responsible for microtransactions or not. I think the answer in 99.9% of cases is "no". A publisher makes that decision. But the publisher is a bunch of guys in suits doing conference calls and staring at spreadsheets, so obviously it's the developers who have to actually incorporate them into the game.
Click to expand...
I'm almost certain it wasn't the devs, or better said, the creatives, in case the publisher and the dev company is the very same. Dev probably have to fight this shit every day, but money people will keep pushing. Since that's who's in control.
 
danutz_plusplus said:
I really don't care to do that. All of my arguing is for my own benefit. A gradual ruining of my most favorite passtime.
I'm afraid that all we're seeing is a constant sliding into monetization hell. It started years ago with horse armor, and look where we are.
Click to expand...
I share your concerns, but from my perspective, things have stayed pretty much where they've been for the past couple of decades. Monetization continues to be mostly cosmetics and purchase of meta items (like buying yourself skill points) that is optional and easily avoided.

I concede that this might not apply to free-to-play games, but I avoid those and have little to no experience with them. I kinda decided a long time ago that if something is free-to-play that means it's being sold to me in pieces, and I have no interest in that. That, to me, gets predatory very fast. If the industry moved more and more in that direction and away from single player, one time purchase games, I would join you guys in being disgusted. As it stands now, while I see articles periodically about the "death" of single player games, I see no actual evidence of their imminent demise. A big chunk of the industry's most financially successful and critically lauded games continue to be single player games I buy, once, for $50-$70.
 
JFarrell71 said:
If the industry moved more and more in that direction and away from single player, one time purchase games, I would join you guys in being disgusted. As it stands now, while I see articles periodically about the "death" of single player games, I see no actual evidence of their imminent demise. A big chunk of the industry's most financially successful and critically lauded games continue to be single player games I buy, once, for $50-$70.
Click to expand...
I'm pretty sure that if we don't make a big stink for all of these little encroachments, that's definitely where we'd be headed, on the fast lane. Because of big stinks like this, with DD2 being review bombed on Steam, there's a chance to slow down that progress; even a little bit.

I'm pretty sure they will not stop at anything, and I'll sooner give up gaming (or at least the big AAA games) than they will stop these baby steps towards milking everything.
 
danutz_plusplus said:
I'm pretty sure that if we don't make a big stink for all of these little encroachments, that's definitely where we'd be headed, on the fast lane. Because of big stinks like this, with DD2 being review bombed on Steam, there's a chance to slow down that progress; even a little bit.
Click to expand...
I don't see it that way. I think review bombing good single player games that take chances creatively can only be a negative. The message that publishers get from poor sales for Dragon's Dogma 2 will be that they should be more conservative and stick more to familiar properties and avoid putting money into more niche projects and genres. They'll just make yet another military shooter or cheap to make battle royale game. Which, by the way, will still be monetized to the gills because they will never turn down money, and those practices make them money, no matter how loud the people who don't like them are.
 
JFarrell71 said:
I don't see it that way. I think review bombing good single player games that take chances creatively can only be a negative. The message that publishers get from poor sales for Dragon's Dogma 2 will be that they should be more conservative and stick more to familiar properties and avoid putting money into more niche projects and genres. They'll just make yet another military shooter or cheap to make battle royale game. Which, by the way, will still be monetized to the gills because they will never turn down money, and those practices make them money, no matter how loud the people who don't like them are.
Click to expand...
Possibly. I just hope the noise about the monetization also reaches their ears. But who's to know ...
I seem remember EA kind of changing their ways, as far as any non-fifa games, after plenty of major stinks But I'm not even sure anymore.
 
danutz_plusplus said:
But if the developer introduces cheating into the game, and monetizes it, they're directly in conflict of interest with balancing that game to push me to spend money on those cheats. They will make the game grindy-er, more annoying or whatever they can to get me to spend money.
Click to expand...
FWIW, I share your impression, though I haven't played the game. When I watched their presentation, I feared there was a lot of grind to move from point A to point B, without the normal fast travel and the capacity to carry the loot. It's still fine; it's their decision and it could work.

But when I look at the DLC, below, it's little about cosmetics and a lot about removing all those constraints:
1711134247818.png

Perhaps they did that because they felt that they made it too hard for everyone's taste, but it would be a strange way to fix it. They'd have added difficulty settings.

Fortunately, games with microtransactions / as a service seem to get more backslash now, as you said. Just reading a few reviews gives a clear message about the problems.
 
I don't think I've ever seen someone put so much effort into defending a game they haven't even played yet. ;)

I hope it's good. I'm a big fan of Capcom as I've mentioned before. That said, I'm glad Horizon Forbidden West released when it did so I can take the wait and see approach with DD2.
 
Tried a little bit of Dragon's Dogma 2. And indeed it seems to be surprisingly unstable in the framerate department.
I maxed out everything and had some big dips, from 80-90fps to 40, then back to 80. And I didn't even reach the big city I hear is the real fps killer.
And this on a ryzen9 5950x and 4090 rtx.

Also, they somehow managed to fuck with the camera and character movement. Took around 10 min to get used to. It even gave me a bit of motion sickness.
The moment you move your character, he moves but the camera has a delay of around 1 second, until it also moves. Weird how it's so hard to have a system in place and not fuck with it. I didn't notice any of this in DD1.
And again they like to take control of my camera, from my character to some NPC talking to me. Really annoying.

I'm hearing they're planning some dlc/expansion, so I think I'll shelve it until then. They'll hopefully also patch it. I'm in no hurry to play it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.