What trend? You basically just explained it yourself. 10 years of updates and 80 DLCs. In order to match this with their new game, they would have to stop supporting Payday 2 and sink 10+ years into Payday 3 before releasing it. That’s simply not possible. So it’s either a new game with less content or no new game at all for these types of games with lots of support.
Paid cosmetics being fine stems from a time where not every other game weaponized FOMO by basically hacking your brain. Yes, it is still easily avoidable by a lot of people, but we shouldn’t allow vulnerable people being preyed on.
Around the midpoint of a game, often while still enjoying it, I start asking myself how close to the end I am. Let’s Plays are great for this. I can just open a playlist and read episode titles until I’m around the same point I’m actually at. Let’s say e.g. 45/67 videos or 2/3. If I rarely do this, maybe even not at all, I’m really into the game.
For context, I mainly play quite linear JRPGs. For other games, I usually just look at howlongtobeat.com and compare it to my playtime.
I did not. Back when Second Light released I’ve seen people praise the game for how much of an improvement it was. I planned on playing the first one anyway, but I could not find a physical copy.
About halfway through Blue Reflection: Second Light
The story is fine, but I’m unsure about the battle system. At first I loved it, but building up a combo in every fight makes random encounters kind of a drag. I wouldn’t mind this as I could just avoid them - however, you need to farm drops quite a lot for the crafting system.