Wow. I can’t count how many sites I’ve blocked from my newsreader because I was flooded with “How to find Rupees in Zelda” articles that are so basic as to be ridiculous. At the rate of 50 per week, that’s all you’ll get.
I actually do like guides like “How to find the secret underground vault and its 3 keys”, but I don’t want them in my news feed. I want them to be there when I search the site or Google.
But I agree with others that are saying it’s just niche. It’s a pure puzzle game. There’s no exploration, crafting, combat, survival, etc. You have to really like puzzles to play a pure puzzle game.
I do, and I’ve still been struggling to make it all the way through. I’m just starting on the last of the first 12 sections, and some of them have kind of been a slog rather than a joy.
I can’t even give any particular complaint, though. Each puzzle really is different from the others, so they aren’t duplicated in any way that was obvious to me. It’s just a lot, I guess.
I “fled Reddit” because they started making really stupid managerial decisions and screwing over the user base. They changed how they do things, and I no longer agreed to it. The same thing happened to me on Lemmy. I initially joined a server that decided that majority vote was the way to run things, and I left. Then I joined a server that died. I finally found my current one and like it.
Though in reality, I now frequent both sites and enjoy them for different reasons.
Gacha games, though… They tell you up front what to expect, and they do that. (Except certain illegal cases that actually got in legal trouble for it.) Yes, they’re predatory and manipulative, and they ruin the lives of some people who have certain tendencies. That really sucks.
But they’re fun and satisfy an urge that many people have that isn’t getting satisfied otherwise.
I think spending hundreds of dollars on a game is stupid (I’ve done it, over a couple years on 1 game) and I think spending thousands is insane, even if you have more money than you can ever use. But I can and do play them for free (or close to it) now if they are fun and don’t waste my time.
I don’t think these positions are hypocritical. I’m not on Lemmy because I’m a zealot. I’m on here because I enjoy it.
Like Genshin Impact, Star Rail has a decent base game that does well with its characters and combat. Notice I didn’t say “great”.
However, after you get through the intro and the first world, they start adding on to the game. There’s a whole bunch of 1-off mini-games that are fun in their own right and have nothing to do with the Gacha.
The first one is a museum administration mini game where you’re responsible for “hiring” people that have 3 stats, and then balancing those stats to make money for the museum, then using the money to upgrade the museum, run mini-quests to restore the museum, and hire more staff. And expand the museum.
Each of these little mini-games is a few days of fun, and I think I’ve found 4 so far IIRC in Star Rail. Genshin Impact has had similar things, but tend to not be permanent, and to be less involved than Star Rail’s.
The gacha is generous enough that you can generally play without paying anything. I don’t think I’ve given any money to Star Rail, though I have paid the monthly $5 to Genshin Impact for a few months now. And I’ll admit, I started thinking about paying it to Star Rail, too. It’s definitely a gacha game, but on the actually-playable side if you’re playing free.
That said, if gacha games are something that just stick in your craw, it’s unlikely that any game will change that, and I’d argue that you’re better off never finding out.
In the end, I’d say you’re best just accepting that for what it is, it’s one of the best, and letting it go. There’s no point in being upset that people enjoy a game that you can’t. Let them have their fun, and go have your own instead.
If you aren’t sure, wait for a big sale. I quite enjoyed the game, but other than being a massively-popular IP, I’m not sure why it’s getting so much acclaim. It’s big, it’s Harry Potter (with all the attention to detail that usually gets), and it’s an RPG. If it wasn’t HP, it’d be another good indie game, and that’s it.
I’ve seen that they understand players are leaving in droves, but I’ve seen no indication that they know why. Every single thing they’ve said an done since the last DLC has been exactly the opposite of what makes the game fun for me. I went from spending way, way, way too much time each week to spending virtually none in a single season… And I haven’t even checked on the game since the second week of this season. It’s really sad.
I use Palm until my fingers ache and I remember that I need to not grip it like that any more (some of my fingers ache from it), and then I move to fingertip for a while.
I’m not defending Ubi here, they absolutely should have ripped this code out. They had to know the outrage that it would generate.
But it might not have been a management decision. It could have been a “20% time” project where a developer designed and implemented a system that they thought management would like, and then it never got ripped back out after it was rejected. Those projects are usually barebones and use existing assets as much as possible, so it wouldn’t even mean that they had to stand up other systems to support it… They could just link to an existing ad from something else.
I hate grind, but I used to enjoy just playing D2 weekly, way beyond the weekly content.
Then they decided that literally everything needed to be a slog, and that being overpowered was bad, and they ruined my fun. I went from 80 hr weeks (I know this isn’t healthy) to 1 hour weeks over the course of a couple seasons. I still spent a lot of time after the launch of the latest DLC, but after that was done, and they upped the base difficulty by removing the effect of levels on almost all base content, I struggled to stay engaged. This season, I just gave up. I’ve got like 15 levels, when I usually have 200-300 in the battle pass.
I’m not saying they don’t have a grind problem, too, but it wasn’t what killed it for me.