Great article. The entangling web of endless progression systems is one piece, but one thing they failed to mention is time gating and daily quests. It’s very important for these games to force you to play a little bit every day, instead of in large chunks all at once. This helps move the game subconsciously in your brain from “a game” to “a habit/a hobby”, and that makes your purchasing decisions very different.
China started drafting legislation cracking down on engagement bait daily tasks a few years ago and some games (like Genshin and other Hoyoverse titles) dropped daily check-in bonuses and made more things reset weekly in response. I think China later backtracked (IIRC the politician pushing the laws fell out of favor?), but not feeling forced to log in every day made those games so much less stressful.
I haven’t played anything in the genre in years, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that crap crept back in again.
I’ve played Genshin almost since the start (took a break for a while) and it’s had daily tasks the whole time. You earn gems and other in-game rewards every day for it. There’s also an additional web-based daily checkin as well.
I’m not sure what you mean. The in-game reward path still has a daily “check in” task for points. And the daily “do 4 tasks” thing is in there, though they’ve opened it up a lot, which I really appreciate. (You can now do quests, open chests, or anything that costs energy to complete them, as well as the standard 4 mini-quests.) And the web checkin is still daily, with only 3 days that you can reclaim by visiting certain pages.
It looks like the game that changed its dailies was Star Rail, not Genshin Impact. Which makes sense: I remember seeing the change in-game but I haven’t played Genshin since around the time of that event in Enk… whatever the underground area is called.
I’m trying to find good articles about it but internet search is abysmal these days, especially for news outside the anglosphere. I did find a forum thread about the Star Rail change as well as a Reddit comment translating and explaining the proposed law though.
The TL;DR of it all seems to be that some time around December 2023, new restrictions were proposed affecting gacha games to curb addicting behavior. The news caused stock prices for affected Chinese companies to plummet, and the person who proposed the law was quickly removed from his position and the proposal dropped.
Ah, yeah, I think I remember that. It was pretty obvious it would be brutal for a lot of gamedev companies there, and I wasn’t surprised at all that it didn’t end up going through.
Man I LOVED GW1. Never really had much chance to play the second, sadly. I still think about playing my Necro in PVP and doing crazy endgame runs. Long time ago…
Second had nice ideas too but very different, not a coorpg anymore and more an actually MMO. PvP was very disappointing, they didn’t keep anything from the 1, probably because it was too elitist. For me the massification made me feel like I was insignificant, I didn’t like it much, I did a bit of the campaign and that’s it.
Yeah it just seemed so different. I actually installed it recently and farted around for an hour or so (recently installed Linux on an old laptop and wanted to see how it’d do), I’m not really planning on going back. Think I already uninstalled. It seemed fun enough, I didn’t like hate it, but I’m not getting into an MMO right now.
Either way, I wanted GW1 and this was quite a departure. I really loved things like the low level cap that were out the window.
It’s definitely not Guild Wars 1, but it does still have a “low level cap” in the way that it’s extremely easy to get to max level doing a variety of content, then the vast majority of content is done at that level. You probably reach level 80 within completing not even 5%-10% of the total available content, so it’s just a number. The way you “advance” your character is through gear and cosmetics, and there’s an account leveling system called masteries you unlock at 80.
“Gaming journalism” did its best to not mention it every time something with kotick came up. Blizzard would release shit about games as a smokescreen. A scandal where Kotick groped a guy in front of an elevator? NEW OVERWATCH 2 DETAILS ANNOUNCED!
I would expect to see this kind of article in 2019 prior to the launch of WoW Classic, not now in October 2023. Classic has had the same mindset that’s pervasive in retail from the very beginning. Everyone rushed straight to 60 and promptly began raidlogging to preserve their precious world buffs. Parsing and speed running in raids was all anyone cared about.
You are right but classic WoW hardcore has really fixed most of those issues because if you rush things you will probably die. Anyway I really agree with this headline because I logged into retail WoW during a thunderstorm because if you DC while you are playing it's basically an automatic game over, anyway I was bored as hell immediately. Retail is all about doing raids and dungeons, which is fun if you like that but I actually enjoy simply leveling in classic hardcore way more, and the best part is I don't have to be logged in for hours at a time leveling unlike in raids.
I got the game and some small ship bundle a year or two ago for like $20. It was a pretty fun game for the cost, but I honestly wouldn’t pay more than $30 for it. It’s buggy, runs like hot garbage even on my 3080 ti, and it’s very much a mile wide inch deep content wise from what I remember
So they’ve been telling us it is done and just needs polish/finishing touches. If that’s the case it is odd they’d need sudden forced overtime for a simple demo…
Usually means almost ready for release not many years away.
Hell even in their own words it’s just around the corner.
As we move into the polishing phase, we’re fully focused on optimizing and fine-tuning all aspects of the gameplay experience to deliver an unprecedented cinematic adventure
no, no it does not, It means it is feature complete, that is all, feature complete meaning “we are about to release” is some radical redefinition shit you are doing to justify your feelings
Sometimes I wish No Man’s Sky and Elite Dangerous would combine their talents into one game just to get Star Citizen to shut up permanently.
Each one could use features from the other. Add in a dynamic user controlled economy, and suddenly everything SC has been promising after wasting hundreds millions of dollars would be right there.
As much crap Frontier gets, they made a killer custom game engine which perfectly makes it hugely immersive from day one, which shouldn’t be surprising considering the original Elite was the first proper wireframe 3D graphics game.
Hello Games got a proper roasting for releasing a shell game, but they actually bounced back. Their planet generation and surface gameplay is unmatched, and their updates outshine Frontier’s.
ED started out as a crowdfund too, and No Man’s Sky as essentially a startup. Both of these game’s received their fair share of criticism, but ultimately they produced a solid 4/5 game. Meanwhile Scam Citizen has been bankrolling for 12 years now, yet they hardly seem to receive the same level of criticism as ED ans NMS got for comparatively much much smaller issues.
It is noted for being one of the highest-funded crowdfunding projects, having raised over US$700 million as of May 2024
but that’s not how it works is it, you can’t just super Sayan fusion two games now can you?
PS: about the criticism, this is literally the annual “SC bad” post from these publications, generally complete with random ass unnamed sources and others (when the guy lying to you based off conformable fake shit like a “work ID” as proof of employment is the better source, eg. Derek Smart)
I haven’t bought the game and probably never will, since I don’t like the Dune-iverse at all. I have friends who play it and it’s a 100% online game. I’m sure you could pretend to play solo but you’re still connected to a remote server.
How would you have a multiplayer online game without forced online play? It’s a requirement of multiplayer (I guess barring LAN, but what is the likelihood of anything being “massive” multiplayer while on LAN) and online. That’s like 2/3 of the name
massivelyop.com
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