That’s why steam reviews are better with it being from actual people who aren’t scared of being blacklisted from future access. Even with joke reviews it’s still actually more informative. These review outlets call it review bombing, but I call it review awareness with it highlighting and bringing attention to things paid reviewers neglect and ignore.
I don’t blame the reviewers for reviewing the product they were given. I blame Capcom for the bait and switch, and the editors who won’t edit the review to reflect the current reality
I don’t even necessarily blame the devs, but I do blame the shareholders and people in administrative positions who pushed for this
Yeah man, “professional” reviewers are the biggest joke in gaming, I’ll trust the people who actually after about a h money they spent and the games they played. Genuine people tend to be truth worthy in this regard.
Spoilers: they won’t.
Spoilers: they shouldn’t. They actually reviewed the game and didn’t circlejerk about one completely optional feature.
I think the whole game should be reviewed and that includes the microtransactions. There’s a reason they add them after the reviews are in because they know people don’t like to be nickel and dimed in a game that costs 60 to 70 fucking dollars.
Microtransactions arent the game though. And none of whats for sale makes a bit of difference to the game. Not to mention everything you can buy is in the game already, it wasnt taken out or put behind a paywall.
Do you also rate a game negatively if they have a battle pass? What about other capcom games like the resident evil remakes where you could buy the unlocked infinite weapons for 5 dollars? Do either take away from the actual game? No, no they do not.
Its still not great, i agree, but it doesnt make a good game bad just because you think its scummy. I say this, but i do not have the game nor will i be getting it. Not because of people online crying about a nothing burger, but i just dont have a system strong enough to play it. If i did, i would because i loved the original game.
Yes because I’m not getting the game for free so things like performance and monetization impact my purchasing decisions and what price I’m willing to pay for it, which is what I rely on reviews for. I don’t see reviews as some art piece analysis. I don’t care only about what someone thinks about the gameplay when it comes to spending money.
I think they are the game as the developers can base their game around them (remember battlefront 2?) It’s a paid game, 70 dollars no less, and I’m sorry, but there is no justification for microtransactions.
How come Baldur’s Gate 3 can be without microtransactions for example? It’s greed pure and simple. If they didn’t want you to buy them, and there weren’t people putting in ridiculous amounts of money in them they wouldn’t put them in.
Hey wise guy. I have this amazing solution for that. It’s called not fucking buying them. People are losing their shit about this, yet helldivers 2 does the exact same thing and no one gives a shit.
Oh I’m sorry, I guess I should be grateful that a 70 dollar unoptimized game from a multi-million dollar company has microtransactions. I don’t care what mental gymnastics you come up with, they have no place in paid games.
Every time I see someone complain about an unoptimized game I’m reminded people still use dog-shit computers or ‘gaming’ laptops.
Digital Foundry with their peasant 7800X3D and RTX 4090 dropping frames in a large city.
Removed by mod
How does someone else paying for them affect you at all in a SINGLE PLAYER GAME?
By causing my single player game to be purposely designed to be worse so that they can “sell me the solution” through micro transactions.
Removed by mod
I don’t care that it’s a single player game for fuck’s sake. I have a problem with free to play monetization in a paid game, not just this one any other game.
Ah yes, cause not paying for them will magically make the game not be designed to try and push you to buy them.
except the version of the game they reviewed allegedly didn’t have the micro-transactions/paywalls
Did the review copies have the features you’d need to buy with microtransactions?
The MTX items are in game, the rumour that you can’t fast travel and stuff blatantly false.
Capcom did some scummy shit, but the reason they(the press) didn’t know is because even now post release the game makes no mention of them.
The limited travel, resurrections, and the currency for pawns were all in the first game and they all feel just as common in my experience.
So fuck Capcom, but the game does deserve the reviews it got imo. However, they also deserve all the backlash they are getting, because they intentionally kept it quiet. They knew players would be upset. It’s gross.
The items are included in the game I thought, the microtransactions are just one method to obtain them.
Oof it’s pride and accomplishment all over again.
It really isn’t.
The released game doesn’t have paywalls either. I guess you’re incapable of understanding the issues you feel obliged to complain about.
The game didn’t change though. The items are still in game, have the same in game prices. Fundamentally it’s the same game.
Why would somebody only review a portion of the game you’re playing?
It’s like reading a movie review where the author showed up 30 minutes late to the movie
It’s literally not. It’s like reading a positive review for a movie and then going to see it and being outraged the theater is charging $14 for popcorn. No one is forcing you to buy the popcorn, and not buying it in no way affects your movie experience.
Don’t you have more important things to be outraged about? Isn’t it exhausting hating everything all at once?
This is Lemmy though, you need to toss out common sense before opening the site.
Can you suggest other sites that don’t come with that baggage but still curate worthwhile content?
Oh good, one more AAA I can auto-skip over.
Did you know you can block publishers on Steam?
Why skip when you can pirate it for free? Everything is pirateable these days.
I sure can’t. They just show back up with “Blocked” on the cover
That’s not blocking them. That’s just modifying the cover art
Completely agree. Block means don’t see in my mind.
ITT: Mental Gymnastics competition to see how well one can defend corporate greed
Nobody wants to admit they’ve been taken for a ride.
Mark Twain said it best: “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
Useful idiot is the norm for this generation.
I’m years too late asking this because I get what it means, but what does ITT actually stand for?
In this thread.
Seems so obvious now. Thank you.
I dislike the microtransactions as well, but there’s an insane amount of disinformation about them in these discussions.
Almost all of the items are easily obtainable in the game by just playing, so there’s no gating of content behind the paywall. It being a single player game, there’s also no competitive advantage to be gained by buying them for real money (or inversely lost out on by not buying them)
The whole discussion is blown widely out if proportion.
I view the mtx as basically paying for cheat codes. I’m not interested in using cheats but am opposed to companies trying to monetize them. It’s straight up mobile game level of BS in a PC game. Tbh though, if the store button wasn’t available in the main men, I wouldn’t even know the mtx exist.
From the comments here I can see we learned nothing from Horse Armour.
Lots was learned. They learned they can continue to move the goalposts simply forever it seems.
Wait for the rage over this particular round to die down. Release a game with similar but slightly dialed back bullshit. Tell everyone how much better you are than them.
Repeat until people pay $99 for the right to rent the game for $10 a month plus pay to win MTX.
Sure DD2 is a corpse, but a new game will come growing from its corpse.
Soon the poors won’t be able to play games anyway as that will be forbidden by their owners
Soon the poors won’t be able to play games anyway as that will be forbidden by their owners
This is the nice thing about indy devs. Many of them don’t pull this shit and it is likely a large reason indy games have increasingly grown in popularity. AAA game is basically synonymous with microtranscations at this point.
I’m gonna paste a comment I left the other day pertaining to this:
I will die on the hill of “Oblivion’s horse armor DLC was not the beginning of micro transactions”
Because it wasn’t. There were micro transactions for games long before the hore armor thing. Also, horse armor was a one-time purchase for that mechanic.
I’m pretty sure the mtx for dragons dogma are all 1 time dlc bought on the steam page just like the horse Armour.
Also, horse armor was a one-time purchase for that mechanic.
It wasn’t even a mechanic, though.
The armor literally did nothing, it was a cosmetic.No it was armour. Technically it just buffed your horse’s HP rather than being true armour, but it did something.
There was also a new vendor who sold it and a little quest to enable it.
And it was all of $2.50 if I remember correctly.
Ah, you’re right I guess I was misremembering
Agreed, it’s really not what people think of when they really think of microtransactions. Horse armour was really just mediocre & overpriced DLC.
I will die on the hill of “Oblivion’s horse armor DLC was not the beginning of micro transactions”
Because it wasn’t. There were micro transactions for games long before the hore armor thing.
Such as? Are you saying you could pay a small amount for something in a game before this? Sure, it’s possible.
Also, horse armor was a one-time purchase for that mechanic.
Ok, and? As in it’s a small amount (micro) purchase for a thing?
I’m not sure exactly what hill you’re dying on here. That there was a game somewhere that had buyable things for small amounts of money before Oblivion? Sure, there may have been. And?
Double dragon 3. You had to put coins into the arcade machine to literally buy items from an in-game store…
Also, second life came out before Oblivion.
Double dragon 3. You had to put coins into the arcade machine to literally buy items from an in-game store…
Do you have any links for that? I love to read up on it, had never heard about it before today.
I thought it was going to be hard to find, since this was an arcade game from my childhood… But here’s one article from Neogaf.
If you Google “Double dragon 3 arcade insert coins”, there are reddit articles, forums talking about this, and even the Wikipedia article talks about this being one of the first commercial games to have in-game micro transactions.
"The U.S. version also features item shops where players could use additional credits to purchase in-game items such as weapons, a
dditional moves and new playable characters in one of the earliest forms of microtransactions in a video game, although this system would end up being removed in the later-released Japanese version…"
Also, not defending Bethesda’s practice, but Horse armor also wasn’t their first microtransaction for oblivion…
They also had themes and stuff on the Xbox store, and literally told people that these types of things were going to be released.
To be fair - I didn’t buy oblivion, a friend of mine had it for Xbox, and I went and sailed the kazaa seas and downloaded the base game + all the DLCs without having to pay micro$oft’s ransom. Only pointing out that we knew well before horse armor that gamers will open their wallets for this.
Follow up to my last comment. That link is just user comments discussion about the arcade game, and not an actual publication article that describes the in-game store.
We have to just assume that person posting that comment is knowledgeable and factual, and not astroturfing, etc.
And that the Wikipedia article discussing it is in fact wrong as well…
Sorry, there isn’t a lot of contemporaneous discussion referencing microtransactions on an arcade game that came out in the mid-90s… Back then, we paid up and complained about it to your friends or the person who had their coin on the table.
Basically, the gist is during game play, at specific breaks, you could have the opportunity to buy things like characters, combat abilities, infinit resources, etc.
Here you can even watch someone play the game. Miracle of the internet age, you can just open up a browser, type in “double dragon 3 arcade gameplay” and watch someone play the game and live the experience of being 10 years old in the 90s vicariously through someone else.
Or you could even download the PC port, or play it in emulation on your device of choice so you can truly see if those nasty first-hand accounts are telling the truth and you don’t have to question whether those people posting were knowledgeable, astroturfing, etc.
Honestly, I was just looking for a link so I can read up on it, not challenging you about it.
I actually tried Googling your comment sentence but it just gave me the game and nothing about this feature you were talking about.
I’m going to go take a look at that article you linked for me. Appreciate it.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/10147126
https://lemmy.world/comment/8707129
Here’s a couple replies to my earlier comment that bring up games from before and early in the mainstream console days (pre-Xbox/PlayStation).
I’m sure there are plenty of other examples as well.
Ok, I still don’t understand the ‘hill you’re dying on here.’ I don’t think anyone truly believed that Oblivion was the First Video Game Ever ™ with Microtransactions in it, I’m not sure that was the point, I’m fairly certain the point was how ludicrous it was to force people to pay for Horse Armour in their First Person game. It set off a series of discussions about whether or not this should be the way forward, people acquiesced, and it became standard.
Thus: “From the comments here I can see we learned nothing from Horse Armour.”
Because people are still defending predatory practices in the industry with ‘yeah but you can just grind to get…’ or ‘but you don’t have to…’
“[…]these micotransactions grant more frequent access to features many gamers deem essential for any action RPG. This includes fast travel and character customisation.”
Wait, what? Seriously devs?
the key phrase there being ‘more frequent’. the fast travel and character customization are all in the game and have a more in-universe integration. the game systems are supposed to be more immersive than just click the map and fast travel. you typically either take a cart from town to town or warp using a stone that gets used up.
I like it the way it is, makes leaving town to quest and adventure have another layer of strategy. If someone wants to bypass that strategy layer with money then so be it. I certainly would prefer that it be a mod rather than a MTX, and will definitely not be buying any regardless.
Nah, this is inherently scummy behavior.
Want to enforce a particular tone and strategic layer to a game by limiting fast travel based on a consumable? Cool. Just don’t make that a consumable that can be purchased with real dollars.
I like it the way it is, makes leaving town to quest and adventure have another layer of strategy. If someone wants to bypass that strategy layer with money then so be it. I certainly would prefer that it be a mod rather than a MTX, and will definitely not be buying any regardless.
This has been solved for a long time. If you want to force people to leave the town to quests and adventure just stick to Morrowind style fast travel where fast travel doesn’t go everywhere. If you want people to be able to fast travel everywhere then let them fast travel everywhere. If people can fast travel everywhere but don’t want to fast travel everywhere then it’s a single player game, they’re free to make up their own rules on how they want to play.
There’s no justifiable reason to slap a price tag on fast travel and that’s the issue most people have. The fact that it was removed from review builds shows that even the devs know how fucking shitty it is. No need to defend a shitty practice.
There’s also no justifiable reason the same people bitching about Dragon’s Dogma 2 MTX said fucking nothing about the RE4 remakes literal pay2win MTX. What was the RE4 remakes review count?
Oh, right, 97% positive with almost 90k reviews. (*On Steam)
This is not a new phenomenon. Capcom has been monetizing their games like this since DMC4. Capcom also makes really good games and is one of the few AAA devs that still delivers.
You people acting like this is a slippery slope are just really, really slow.
No. You do not need to limit fast travel for immersion. That doesn’t even make sense.
A lot of people, myself included, do so in Skyrim. It is a completely different experience and way more immersive indeed.
That’s fine. But limiting it is not required for immersion. That’s all I’m saying here. If you want to do it then great. Forcing people to do in the name of immersion, and then selling fast travel for real money is an obvious bait and switch.
Sure, that’s definitely a shit move. And it is not requiered, just pointing out that not removing fast travel in a game (especially if you are familiar with the game, and it has fast travel by default) makes you see that game in another light. Sometimes it is a shit experience, sometimes a great experience, but aleays a journey.
Definitely recommend it!
“Jeez Capcom, leave some evil for the rest of us!” - Satan probably
Aside from the controversy, why does every medieval game look as ugly as oblivion?
Because they’re old-tymey. Everything was sepia tinted and muddy back then, and they didn’t have fancy dyes or expensive rendering software to make many polygons.
Gran Turismo 7 pulled the same shit. I’m still pissed about that one. Plus the lack of single player content basically means I haven’t even played the game since shortly after launch. The grind without mtx is crazy boring.
It’s not going to change much.
It’s crazy dumb they created the controversy but the game is fully complete and excellent.
It’s insane they didn’t see this blowing up in their faces 🤦♂️.
Clearly you haven’t looked at steam. People can’t make it past the character creator due to the constant crashing
It’s anything BUT fully complete
Lololol I’m like 50 hours in no issue
We tried this already - getting ethics in game journalism.
It didn’t work so well.
Can’t tell if you’re joking or not, but gamergate was absolutely not about “ethics in game journalism.”
Did they edit their comment? Neither they nor the article mentioned gamergate.
“It’s about ethics in gaming journalism” was the common refrain for Gamergate proponents.
Not joking. It absolutely was about ethics, at first. The initial kickoff was the boyfriend accusing the girl (Zoë Quinn?) of sleeping with someone else for a better review. That’s ethics in a nutshell. I don’t think that anyone really cared about the game, or who was involved, but rather that the state of the industry was such that you could accuse a well known game reviewer of being unethical, and it was more believable than not.
The fact is, reviewers had already sold their souls and a AAA game get anything less than a 90%. Had reviewers had better ethics, probably no one would have believed the boyfriend, and the entire story would have been a nothing-burger.
Of course it went off the rails after that, the fact that the boyfriend was lying didn’t help, but for a brief moment it looked like there might actually be game news/review industry reform. It was a glorious 24 or so hours.
Which basic features? Almost everything people are complaining about can be obtained in game. I understand the dissatisfaction with the performance issues, but I am failing to understand this current discourse considering that capcom has been doing this in all their previous games.
I heard that fast travel is very limited, but that you can buy fast travel items for real world money.
The problem with that is: the goal of the game makers should be to make the game as enjoyable and fun as possible to sell as many copies as possible.
However, with such micro transactions your goal now is to add annoying stuff to the a level that maximises your profits. How much you can annoy your customers, depends mainly on the conditioning of your target audience.
So the more of that stuff is accepted and financially rewarded by customers, the more annoying games will become to increase the “need” to sell you a relieve.
I assume this discourse of making the game not enjoyable for the sake of maximizing profits is probably from people that didn’t play the first game and haven’t played the new game yet. I know this is a reality in cash grab games, but really doesn’t seem to be the case here.
I see where you’re coming from. There are hard mechanics in many games that are part of what makes the game fun for its players.
However, when I play Dark Souls, I know a part is difficult, because the developers wanted it this way and did not have alternative motives. But when I can pay for difficulty settings, I never know if I’m being “reasonably” challenged or being milked.
If you enjoy the given challenges of this game, good for you. I think many of the critics do, too. However, for them (and me) it’s a matter of principle, because we fear that the situation will get worse - ultimately leading to the mobile gaming industry that uses all of humanity’s knowledge of psychology to make people spend more money than they can afford.
Your argument is correct, however it doesn’t apply to DD2 since the difficulty of acquiring things that are being sold for real money is exactly the same from the first game. If it wasn’t the case I would agree 100% with you.
I do think it is weird the fact they are selling these things, it is quite ridiculous. However, If they wanted to make a lot of money, they didn’t think a lot about it considering that the items that increase your carry capacity are wayyy more interesting and tempting that any of the current ones. Lost opportunity I suppose.
Fast travel for example? Either I allow it or I don’t. But both decision have a huge implication on the game design.
You can get the fast travel stones in game, same thing with wakestones. I can agree it is very unecessary to have these obtainable with real money but this isn’t news for capcom and you can enjoy the game the same way just by not engaging with the cash shop.
Just because it’s nothing new doesn’t make it acceptable for any game, studio or publisher. They are doing this because people are accepting it and know they can get away with it.
Well, they have been doing it for many games including RE and people weren’t reacting the same before, were they? Is just very weird and inconsistent. The game is amazing, people not playing because of something they can just choose not to engage with because they are being misinformed by other people that didn’t even play are just missing out.
That’s the issue right there, you keep justifying this behavior. This is a 70 dollar game from a giant corporation, which you have to pay to play, and they expect you to pay more. MTX have no place here. They are not putting them in game because of the goodness of their hearts, they are doing it because of greed. If they didn’t want you to buy them why would they put them in?
I’m not talking just about this game, this is my opinion about any game. It’s time to put the foot down. They are slowly boiling us like a frog, first with day one dlcs and season passes and now this.
EDIT: Let’s not forget about performance issues for 70 dollars. The real AAA gaming experience.
I see that I need to repeat myself over and over, but here’s another try:
I agree with you. What I fail to understand is why people don’t react consistently to MTX in games. Did people react the same way with RE and DMC? They didn’t. People are spreading misinformation to have more people complain about the game. People were spreading that it is harder to fast travel because they want you to buy the MTX (it isn’t).
Game performance has been fine while playing on the PS5. I thought it was going to be much worse considering what people were talking about on release. But yes, the industry is awful and it seems that playing games on release isn’t a good idea these days. I regret a lot not waiting a few months before playing BG3.
I’m sorry if I misunderstood your comment. Because the industry adjusted people’s expectations and they got the game anyway. I saw threads just like this about MTX in re4.
But it doesn’t matter because we complaining about them are minority, people are gonna buy it anyway, they’re gonna shove more of them in the next game and it’ll break another sales records because nobody cares anymore.
They say in the article that reviewers were told about the microtransactions. Then they mention that one reviewer said he didn’t read the notes that were sent by Capcom. Why would this reviewer need to go back and rescore the game? If he enjoyed it without knowing about the microtransactions, they clearly don’t matter to the gameplay.
The review copies had no microtransactions. They were added at release.
That’s my point. Reviewers gave it great scores when there weren’t any microtransactions and they haven’t changed anything in the game to make those microtransactions important. You can play the game the exact same way the reviewers did by just ignoring them.
~~You misunderstand, the mtx were essentially unlocked in the reviewers versions, not simply missing features. ~~
Edit: apparently my last edit didn’t get submitted somehow, but I’m sorry about being misinformed and unintentionally spreading it. What I was told was wrong as it was spin that I read of what did happen: the those features were unlocked in the reviews… because they’re in the game, this was conveniently left out. Then I misread that as the games otherwise not having those features.
I haven’t seen anything that has said that. I couldn’t find that in the article either.
Edit: I don’t care about the downvotes, but surely one of you could’ve replied with a link showing me where it says that reviewers had the mtx unlocked for them while reviewing.
Bunch of dumbasses just want to be angry for no reason, and it really shows.
See edit
