Shadowy Reality wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 9:55 am
It looks to be in bad taste to shit talk someone's current game interest. We all play this 20 year old game, many out there surely would have comments and thoughts about that too.
If you don't like the game for whatever reason, why are you posting here?
While I would
usually agree with your sentiment; Diablo Immortal has actually been banned in my country for good reasons. It goes above and beyond an argument of simple preference and reaches a point of whether or not a product like this can even responsibly exist in a free market society. It's violated digital gambling laws, as lootboxes here were deemed to be gambling some 2 years ago. The game's core gameplay loop was deemed to be a 'lootbox with some gameplay in between the payment and the lootbox'. As long as it does not brand itself as a form of gambling (and thus subject to the associated regulation) it will remain illegal, for the time being.
Now. Yes, I'm told you can play the game without paying for it. And yes, I'm told you could clear all the actually relevant content before it becomes an upward number-crunch of endless upgrading, with slim odds and big payments. If you really like the game you can just play the free bits, get what you want and then call it quits. Or see what kind of difference a 100 bucks makes, even, if you were so inclined?
However this game is not even trying to peel you for a buck or two. But for twenty bucks at a time, upwards to a bottomless amount, it seems. You could easily put 25 dollar into a single dungeon run to improve your odds at good items. And that is independent of any other bonus payment plans you can 'unlock'. At least, as far as I've heard. As I am legally unable to try it out myself to confirm. There have been many speculative arguments conducted by an army of online analysts about just how many
hundreds of thousands of dollars it would take to fully gear a single character for one season. So, you either open another mortgage loan to progress, play another character for a bit, until you hit the same wall, or simply quit playing. And in theory, this should be fine, right?
But this fork in the road is where it begins. For as you play the game, the game, tries to play you as well. It actively goes out of its way to constantly throw its staggering variety of premium payment plans in your face (or so I learned from a video on youtube), and this is the point in the game where these become relevant to your progression. Should you analyse these systems, as many have since done, it becomes evident that the game is doing everything it can to psychologically manipulate its players towards spending money under the veneer of giving them an optimized gaming experience. And while I don't have a very addictive personality and believe in people's ability to govern their own actions (as Ping14 clearly demonstrates to us); I can also tell a lot of talented psychologists must've worked on this product. And I do wonder if they had sold their souls to El Diablo in the process. It is rather jarring that a company thinks to treat its customers like this. The company that published the game in question is also presently involved in a number of insane scandals about how it treats its employees, but I won't be going into detail about any of that.
I would think it irresponsible to not point all of this out. Because there is a strong argument to make that guiltless consumerism of products like these is also propogating these malicious business practices. The more profit a product like this makes, the more inclined investors are to urge publishers, to have their developers hollow out their products, and imbed mechanisms like this into them. All of which is all rather unfriendly to the consumer, with corporations trying to hold the greater hobby itself in their greedy hands.
That said, these practices are already entrenched in the industry. It is why a proper sequel to Neverwinter Nights will never exist in this market. A lot of things we like about it are actually not possible in the framework of modern, big-studio game design.
Imagine, if you will. That Beamdog decides to ask money for its content updates for the Enhanced Edition (like the new renders it is developing for items and characters). By selling these as DLC independently of the game, rather then having them be free updates. But you can only log into the servers using them if you ALSO paid for the DLC yourself. Because otherwise you are "stealing" the content. And then to top it off, the developer would not allow you to upload your own custom content / haks / mods into the game, at risk of you simply copying their paid DLC and stuffing it in for free.
That would be the state of the big-studio industry, presently. And this makes people understandably upset. And while I do think there are better ways of communicating than 'shit talking' down a player, I also recognize that there is a lot of legitimate concern hiding behind it.
I hope with this, your question has been answered in full.
