To be fair, a pity system should definitely be a thing if there’s any sort of gamba. That way there’s at least a hard limit on what you can waste your money on until it’s guaranteed. I at least find GI characters not to be too predatory, you mostly pull them for fun. In fact some of the best characters are the starting 4 stars lol, and you pull cuz you like the character a lot. They really develop the characters a lot, and if you’ve seen any comic cons or anime conventions, you’ll see an insane amount of Genshin cosplays cuz they suck you in by really loving the characters. The gameplay is honestly so easy you absolutely don’t need a good character, and it’s actually incredibly balanced. The earliest characters released are actually still S tier because they fucked up the balance a bit with them so the new characters are still good but more niche focused, so everything is still relevant.
The only hard content is what’s called the spiral abyss, which is a completely optional dungeon that rotates every 2 weeks and 100% clearing it gives you like 5 free gacha rolls, so people really just use it to bench mark characters since nothing else in the game is remotely challenging, nor is there any pvp aspect or anything.
But yeah, also Gacha and live service games tend to be a drug, once they have you hooked it’s hard to quit. Sunk cost fallacy is real hard to overcome in gacha games.
Yeah it’s a legitimately a really good game and still has a huge amount of permanent content, but that’s the nature of live service games. They need that constant engagement to survive. A game like Baulders gate, you buy it and the devs are paid regardless of how much or how little you play, not really the case with live service.
Oh and GI is gacha which isn’t good either. But then they do cool stuff like make a really good card game in game that’s completely free with zero paid stuff, and even hold irl tourneys with big prize pools.
That’s not what fomo means. I have a bad case of FOMO right now with Genshin Impact. I genuinely like the game, but it forces me to login twice a day with the resin system (basically energy that accumulates over time), otherwise it caps and I lose progress. Also a lot of their content is in the form of limited time events. They do this for the obvious reason of it being extremely profitable. This is why you should be very cautious about getting into live service games.
GDC is always exciting because it’s a big conference of devs, mostly AAA devs, telling the technical details of their algorithms and systems. It really helps the game industry as a whole.
They’re easily triple-A size without a single launched game lol. Yet despite the budget and expense of a AAA studio, they’ve put out less content then an indie studio. So what are these developers actually even doing
Really interesting and cool. I enjoyed my time, though it’s a short game. Game of the year… I dunno about that though lol. It wasn’t life changing or anything.