Souls games are nowhere near “yearly”, and there’s been massive changes throughout the games. How do you get anything close to “yearly FIFA slop” from that?!
What you say makes sense for a multiplayer-only game! But the game has a full single player campaign. There is no technical reason to remove access to that part. That part can be kept working without incurring recurring costs.
“Mile wide and inch deep” is a great way to put it.
I’m playing through the game right now, and there’s a bunch of small annoyances (like getting stuck on invisible terrain while walking/driving), but I can overlook those. But so many things are lifeless beyond the basic game mechanics.
As an example, I just bought an expensive apartment. I didn’t expect a crazy cutscene or anything, but at least the person I bought it from should have shown some kind of reaction, maybe a short dialogue. But no, nothing. I pressed the button, money was subtracted, and I can enter the elevator. The person I bought it from didn’t even look up.
Compare that to something like Baldurs Gate 3, where even small unlikely interactions have surprising amounts of interactivity. The game oozes life out of every pore.
It’s depressing that this is the final state after so many updates.
There’s always the option to buy a cheaper game in the genre first, or to wait for a sale. You don’t have to start with the newest biggest title.
I don’t think that there’s a realistic way to measure a fair amount of progression in every game, and it could be hard as a consumer to keep track of the limit. It could work if the minimum limit is 2 hours, and a maximum can be set by devs/publishers, but it seems unlikely many would go for that…
I bought the game and played for roughly 3 hours. If you’ve seen their stream from the technical test, I got roughly as far in the meta-game as they did, but run-wise I got somewhere ~the middle of the third act. Right now I can see at least ~3-5 hours of unlockables I need to get resources for (and more is revealed after more runs/unlocks), and I haven’t tried most new boons yet.
It’s really good. There are three things I’ve noticed are missing (animations for one interactable in the hub world, portraits for 2 characters further in). Aside from that it feels similar quality-wise to the first game, which I last played a week ago, so it’s still fresh in my mind.
I’m sure new content will get slower soon and halt in a couple of hours, but wow is it polished already. There’s also an indication of a lot of additional content coming in the future, but that will have to wait for further patches.
I think the refund would have been right to do from the company side once everything was prepared - it wouldn’t be right for them to keep any money from customers after the content has been integrated into the base game. But only once they are sure nothing will break due to the refund.