It has had a lot of polish aince the beta last year, and the store stuff/season pass microtransaction hell was dialed down. The first season pass appears to be free, not sure how they will handle that stuff in the future.
It is still fun to play although all the flashy daily stuff and the awkward menu navigation is atill annoying.
The author apparently doesn’t know that BG3 (and a lot of other games) has an honour mode that doesn’t allow save scumming, so people can choose to play the exact same way if they want to.
I was always impressed by how creative the artwork made out of text were. Yeah, most were made by a program that converted pics to text, but that was automating something that was already being done and they had to pick and choose art that would convert clearly.
If the mtx is meaningless because you can get it easily in game, then it is predatory as it is intended to be purchased by people who are not aware that they can earn it in game. That strikes me as worse than mtx that is required to do something they can’t without it, because it preys on people’s lack of information and they aren’t making an informed choice.
Unless the entire game is developed by an independent studio and is entirely funded on microtransactions, buying micro transactions is just there for more company profit on top of the regular game sales by stripping content out of a full release. It isn’t supporting the development.
The outcome of splitting the content is that there are a lot of people who want to have everything and they will end up paying far more for a la carte than for an expansion. The people who wouldn’t have bought the expansion still buy nothing, and pretty much nobody just buys a couple of things to save money.
Microtransactions is a system designed to prey on completionist whales. Barely anyone only buys a couple of things and doesn’t end up spending more than $30 over time as the content is drip fed and the new hotness comes along to replace the old hotness. Those that don’t spend anything, or just buy one thing before catching on, weren’t going to spend the $30 anyway.
It is false choice that negatively impacts the game experience.
Overwatch has far better voice acting though, the lines from this clip sounded like practice lines that should have been cut. Like someone clearly pretending to be excited instead of actually sounding excited.