The most insane part to me still isn’t necessarily the money-grubbing shit, because capcom has been doing that in basically every game they’ve made for a while now. It’s sad to me that dragon’s dogma is kind of, the outlet for getting shit on, with this, basically because the other games they put out have built-in fanbases and engagement that are gonna ignore the monetization. But maybe they also have more easily ignored monetization, and it’s not as though dragon’s dogma doesn’t have a fanbase, even if the fanbase is much smaller than the others.
Anyways, the thing that really baffles me about this game is that it’s not multiplayer. That seems like an obvious sell. Is there like, some idea there that they’d be cutting in on monster hunter’s turf, or something? I dunno, the pawns just seem kinda annoying, and the game, overall, seems kind of mid. I haven’t seen a large amount of it, in any case, but maybe it’s just sort of, the monetization and denuvo is kind of the final and most prominent cherry on top of a dog shit sundae, and nobody’s talking about the actual game itself being maybe more mid because of that. I dunno, though, I legitimately haven’t seen much on this game outside of this.
The goal should be fast travel people don’t want to use because travel is fun.
The Spiderman games for the most part made moving around the city fun enough that I didn’t fast travel, but it was still there for the times I had to go really far away.
If you need a feature that lets players skip a part of your game, you should either make that part better or just remove it. But you should still make concessions to players who want to skip it anyway. Like the little “skip cutscene” buttons.
Travel is fun, Capcom are just a dumb company. You’ll get plenty of access to fast travel tokens throughout the game, but the act is still limited to only a handful of fast travel points. Cart travel has been my preferred method of going long distances, which does come with the risk of a griffon ambush, but griffon ambushes mean you get more combat.
IMO Morrowind did fast travel best: they integrated it into the world, kept it limited (fixed origins/destinations, plus mark/recall) and gave it an appropriate cost (time, gold, magicka, and/or effort needed to discover transit locations).
The key differences are that Morrowind does not have microtransactions/paid mods, and does have the Elder Scrolls Construction set – so I’m pretty sure you could mod in a less limited fast travel mechanism if you really wanted.
I’ll just wait until it gets the Dark Arisen treatment and all the MTX and pre-order content becomes freely available in the game and the limits on port stones and the random currencies that aren’t just gold for shops are removed.
The original game originally had limited fast travel, too. But it was eventually made non shitty and you can just buy the stones you drop as FT points at a shop in the main city.
Whales buy it. For every 1,000 fans upset by this decision there is 1 fan who is rich enough that spending $1,000 on the game is nothing. A lot of these aggressive monetization schemes aren’t meant to make money on the average player.
The sad part is, those preyed upon aren't always necessarily well off enough to afford it.
It's one of those situations where either the microtransactions are in fact small, so the low costs add up over time before the victims realize it, or they're set up to pressure people into multiple rapid transactions, and so they either exploit some people's poor impulse control or gambling addictions, or more often than not, both.
It’s not that this monetization isn’t meant to target the average player specifically, it’s made to entice singular one-time purchases in a similar fashion to how places like Walmart work. Yes, they have the data that shows a few whales will make those transactions worth it, at the same time they are counting on catching the occasional non-whale slacking. Trick enough minnows into a net and you have the same mass as a whale.
I know this is a small difference in context, to a business it can mean millions of additional dollars. So remember: They know whales will pay. At the same time they are expecting to catch more than a few smaller fish in the process.
Yes, they have the data that shows a few whales will make those transactions worth it, at the same time they are counting on catching the occasional non-whale slacking. Trick enough minnows into a net and you have the same mass as a whale.
You’re actually thinking much more intelligently than they do. I was in games for almost two decades, left a couple years ago. The vast, vast, vast, vast majority of money made is from whales, it’s not even close. I’ve worked on games where we had to speak to banks in both Canada and the UAE to allow a man to make six figure purchases per week. He and one other whale were over 75% of our revenue.
Now the intelligent thing to do to make money here would be, as you said, getting minnows to spend – but that takes too long and the people who run these things want it now.
So rather than selling each armour colour or whatever for 50 cents each, they’ll charge 20 bucks for all of it, pricing out 90% of users*, and barely making money on it, instead of a million people buying it making them a tonne of money. (*this is a personal experience tale, this did happen, these numbers are unaltered.)
I was under the assumption this was the case for the mobile market. I didn’t realize this extended to larger titles. I mean, I guessed everyone is whale hunting, just didn’t realize to what extent. I appreciate the perspective!
To be 100% fair here, that anecdote I used was a mobile game, but the same thing does happen in larger PC/Console game titles, it’s just not 75% of (player) paid revenue.
This is especially so in games that have battlepasses – far fewer people buy those every time thank you’d think, and the ones who do are a small percentage of total players, but make up a lions share of the total revenue earned from said battlepass. Those are also the people (the every pass ones) who buy everything in the shop. 50 dollar cape or whatever, they buy it on release.
Exactly. They also have to know the number of “whales” is rapidly shrinking as more and more money is moved to fewer and fewer hands. Eventually they’ll be left with like 4-5 whales and only a couple live minnows.
I think the concern some people have is that it’s a slippery slope. Sure, right now it might not be too egregious, but if this behaviour is just accepted, publishers will want SP games to be designed around mtx. There’s no limit to greedy peoples’ imaginations when it comes to squeezing people for their money, so god knows how they’ll limit your ability to play games without putting in either a lot of time, effort or money.
This has been happening for years. Shadow of war (2017) had orcs in loot boxes, every assassin’s creed since, and including, black flag (2013) has had microtransactions in some form, odyssey (the last one I’ve personally played) had a rotating cash shop in every city. I know it’s another Ubisoft game but farcry 5 had cosmetic microtransactions in a game that is permanently in first person. You could only see your outfit on the change outfit screen. This comment isn’t meant to come across as antagonistic but I do find it strange to be warning about a slippery slope when we’ve all been riding the toboggan for years.
In all honesty, this might be the end of Dragons Dogma if they don’t turn it around. The first game was a commercial flop even if it is a cult classic now, the MMO crashed and burned and now they ruined a good sequel for no reason.
I just don’t see how execs will greenlight another one if this isn’t a success.
The game will likely be a moderate success provided they can fix the performance problems.
Most players (unfortunately) do not care about having microtransactions in a full priced video games or about things like Denuvo. This is party the reason why the triple-a game industry is in such sorry state at the moment.
Also I find it funny that you’re already worrying about sequels when the newest game has not been out for even a day.
I know it’s weird to think about sequels already but this was a franchise that everyone thought was dead for years only to get a second chance and flush it down the toilet at the finish line.
This whole thing has blown up completely unnecessarily. Guys, it’s a SINGLE player game! Everyone one of these things can be easily unlocked in game. If you are against it, here is a crazy idea; Don’t buy them.
The game is awesome, for anyone not blindly joining in on the circlejerk.
i mean havent played 2 yet, but travel in dragons dogma 1 was not fun, especially the number of times you had to cross the stone canyon path between the Cassadarris and Gran Soren got very stale.
I love the first one, janky stuff but mostly great, so when i heard this game is being made, i was ecstatic about it until i learned the game is $70 with no localised price, at that moment i’m guessing the greedy capcom is really back, because their game used to be fairly priced up until MHW. And then this happened.
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