So, the article is about gacha MMOs, but then doesn’t list any? Of the games it references, Honkai Star Rail isn’t a MMO, and World of Warcraft isn’t a gacha game.
There’s almost no multiplayer in Honkai Star Rail, though, much less anything approaching what an MMO does. It has asynchronous character sharing and one-to-one chat. That’s literally all the player interaction there is in the core game. Every now and then there’s an event where you can go head-to-head in simple games like match 3.
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.
They would have over a hundred thousand players on a closed beta game? Goddamn that seems like a shit ton for a beta but I’ve also never looked at any game’s player count.
They didn’t get 100k players. The players they got counted multiple times. Someone got swallowed once but Bobby got swallowed 35 times because he’s a dumbass. That counts a 36 people getting swallowed.
It’s by the same folks that made that quasi-mmo Conan game. The bones were in it. It was just unpolished and sparse. If it’s the same core team and they’ve learned their lessons the Dune game should be pretty dope. I’m hoping it shows other MMOs that MMO isn’t a playstyle.
Oh shit did they make the Conan with the directional attacking and blocking? Age of Conan? I remember that game making my PC bleed, but I forced my way to play it at less than 30 fps.
I played the beta weekend, I liked it. I want to play it again once it’s out in June, although there were annoying parts. The sun gives you heat stroke or something as a status meter, and it makes you dehydrate faster until you get to shade. With how often you’re out doing stuff in the sun, it was kind of annoying, because I just had to keep going on blood harvesting trips through NPC camps, to proccess it at my base to keep my water stocked. But in the full game with better tech unlocked, I’m sure it ends up being fine.
A lot of people also got pissed at the sandworm because if you get eaten, all your stuff is destroyed with no way to recover it (unlike a normal death where you can loot your corpse), and sometimes it can feel abrupt when they breach. That said, I never got eaten ny the sandworm in my ~15 hours of play during the beta.
The games with death like that are much better, because they force players to care. From what I played, in Eve online you would really think before doing something stupid, because player killers would wreck your ship without caring that you grinded for 2 months to buy it.
Same was a thousand years ago in Ultima Online where you could get ganked and eaten by an ork bandit. That led to me taking a chance and run through a forest naked, because I had a house deed in my pocket, and I didn’t want to look like an interesting target. It ended up in a bandit chitchatting with me and letting me go with the words: “I wouldn’t walk around in these parts” - yeah, no shit.
Great experiences!
It’s just at some point gamedevs started catering to middle-school kids who would buy in-game stuff with their mom’s card and got upset when it wat taken from them.
Edit: typo (shop/ship)
Maybe some people just don’t like grinding for hours and hours to replace stuff they already acquired in a video game. I’m not sure why you have to present your opinion as if it’s the only valid option and everyone who disagrees is an immature child.
Maybe some people just don’t like grinding for hours and hours to replace stuff they already acquired in a video game.
Personally, I would rather that we have a variety of different game types and options. There aren’t very many MMOs that make death feel meaningful. If it’s not your type of game, then don’t play it.
I didn’t say you have to grind. This is exactly what I mean, tou would start thinking differently. You would take someone with you (hire a bodyguard? friends from yesterday’s pve stuff? guild/corporation friends?)
And for why I have to present my opinion - well, you do present yours. People present opinions all the time. Maybe you’re a child, I don’t know - you decided to read something “between the lines”, but were there anything like that, or are you just insecure?
You presented your opinion and then contrasted it with that of middle school children spending their parents money. If you don’t think that comes off as you saying anyone who disagrees with you has the perspective of a middle schooler then you aren’t a very good communicator.
The market did change in the end of 90s-start of 2000s - before, games were mostly done for “nerds with PCs”, because usually only well-off adults had something decent at home. Then, mass adoption of PCs, PS3and XBox, led to age of an average gamer drop to a teenager, for the first time in history. So many games were, in general, “dumbed down”. Now we see a great picture of market coming back, and there is a shitton of everything engineering/economics.. I’m not saying that middle schoolers don’t deserve to play games - they do, and I did. It’s just, for example, WoW’s “account bound” and “char bound” stuff wasn’t a good thing, but it then became a standard, and started an age of microtransactions (will you argue itcs a bad thing?)
I don’t mind very punishing death mechanics, but when pvp is involved I absolutely hate it. I play more than the average person, but when some sweaty ass pvp’er who plays 80 hours/week shows up, it’s just never going to be any kind of competitive fight. There is no way I will ever be able to do anything against that kind of player, and I’m also not in any way interested in trying. I like pve, not pvp.
Oh, of course in case of two examples I made, there are safe areas, stuff to do if you want to live in peace, etc. In Ultima, only you could unlock the door of your own house so hiding inside would work. And inside towns you could call npc quards (so everyone would have it as a shortcut).
In Eve there are many protected systems, it’s just getting stuff from nullsec (lawless/unowned) systems could be more lucrative, so you learn to take your risks.
I know it’s not always that way - as I see from Rust memes, everyone is just chaotically running around killing new players - but maybe it doesn’t show the real picture
The one thing a Dune game must have are scary sandworms, if it was like any other death nobody would care about them, so I agree they should destroy all your stuff. People need to fear the open sand
Absolutely - for me it’s not about making games “scary”, it’s about having “extreme reward/extreme punishment” mechanics which change players behaviors in interesting ways. But specifically, punishing unrealistic behaviours when you are afk and your character is in a scary forest, or when you are in a deadly desert choosing emojis in the chat
X4 is more game than Star Citizen. Elite Dangerous is more game than Star Citizen. Both these games are still getting updates that expand and build upon their mechanics. But the time Star Citizen becomes 1.0, these other games will have already surpassed it.
Hell, graphically Star Citizen used to be cutting edge… Like nearly 10 years ago. Now it just looks kinda “normal”.
I mean I paid $45 dollars for a ship a decade ago and have since made 100s of hours of wonderful memories with my friends. I wish I got scammed more ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I spend about 100 on the game. I paid like 45 or 50 for the base game then spend about 50 to upgrade my ship. Honestly, I don’t feel ‘scammed’ at that price point. I feel bad for the dudes who spent thousands on ships though.
Star Citizen looked so fucking cool when it was announced like 15 years ago. Since then it’s dipped lower and lower every single time new info comes out.
Like, the hopeful dumbasses that got burned initially like my dumb ass did with No Man’s Sky, I kinda get… but how the absolute fuck are they still getting sales?? Are there seriously still people that don’t know it’s a scam?
Worse. The die-hards may as well be cultists at this point. They delude themselves as hard as MAGAts. (I know a few guys who’ve been off-and-on players for years, and they still try to convince me to join them!)
As someone who has exactly one ship in the game, it’s not ‘bad’ if you just want to go ‘live a space life’ and do stuff like that.
It’s cool you can go do stuff in-world and not have loading screens, and just fly around ships doing trading, PVE missions, or doing space stuff, it’s enjoyable. There’s not much else to it, but if that’s what you expect it’s fun.
I don’t get the cultists thinking they’re playing the game in some future state where it’s anything more than that, though. I spent like… fuck, maybe 100 bucks? For the hours I put in, I enjoyed it but I’d never put in the 10s of thousands of dollars other people have dumped into this game.
Exactly. Your game is bad if I have to look up how to do something as simple as equip a weapon. Your game is bad if I have to run around like an idiot for 15+ minutes after every death before having the chance of doing something enjoyable again.
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