Any company that has a product built on recurring payments will always tend towards becoming predatory in the money they need to extract because #1 they need to have pinch points to ensure they get money at regular, predictable intervals since they're a business and #2 because there is absolutely no reason for them not to turn the dial up on the micro-transactions -- up and up -- slowly until the profit gained is cancelled out by the quitting players.
It definitely exploits a certain type of person, but for the most part I had a good time with it just free2playing around the open world lol
It doesn't pressure you to buy stuff unless you go looking for it. There's not like popups telling you to buy something or anything like that.
Plus there's a $5 a month package that basically would cover anything you would want, even if you're throwing a few hours a day into it. I didn't even do that though.
Obviously you have the ability to throw as much money into the hole as you feel the need to, but it basically would just give you more anime waifus.
It doesn't feel as exploitative to me as people are making it sound, but maybe that's just because I'm not as susceptible to this stuff or it all kicks in later into the game that I got.
I only made it to adventure level 28, which is the end of the current storyline I think, or so before I just started playing dragons dogma again fwiw.
It feels like people are overreacting to this because it's a Chinese game more than anything else lol
This is actually limited in several ways. You can only purchase x numbers of many things per day/month, a mechanic I can only assume is absolutely intended to prevent someone from buying incredibly quantities in one sitting. If you're going to spend a lot of money it actually forces you to spread it out over many days and weeks.