Gaining strength through experience is fun if it’s done in a sane way is fun. Farming the same monsters over and over to unlock common feature is not. Hit the X button 4.5 million times to continue is shit.
It’s not an accident that unlocking this stuff is tedious when there’s an option to just pay more money to do so. That’s the value proposition behind microtransactions in games: Give us money or we’ll force you to do boring shit for many hours.
Games are supposed to be fun. Forcing paying customers to do something intentionally designed to be not fun before they can have fun is stupid. I know I’m in the minority, but I straight up won’t participate in that bullshit.
My hardware is twice as powerful as anything that existed when the game was supposed to release. Still runs like dogshit. I log in once a year to see if the game is still trash. The game is still trash. It’s not a literal scam, but it might as well be because Chris Roberts hasn’t been able to actually complete a game since Wing Commander. Which I loved, and unfortunately that spurred me to flush $40 in the toilet.