Do I really need to grind 2-5 hours in 2-4 games each week to "enjoy" them? No. But to get some content I want, I have to. Why? What happened to having stuff be given out for free and letting people have FUN with the product they paid for?
I mean, I get it: HAHA CAPITALISM GOES KA-CHING but come on developers?
Yeah, the worst part is the big chunk of gamers who demand this sort of thing because the idea of just playing a game for fun has become anathema to them
Like, I love playing Destiny, it scratches an itch that no other game does for me, but my god so much of the player base is dedicated to two things
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Grinding down the content as efficiently as possible
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complaining about the lack of content once they've grinded through it
With the season passes this has gotten even worse.
I tried to find some people to run the new raid with a few days ago and everyone was demanding that I know what I was doing or that I use a very specific loadout or that I had beaten the raid multiple times
Like, do you even have fun anymore?
Yeah, seriously, what the fuck is with those kind of people? I've had a friend refuse to get into a game he'd otherwise enjoy because "there's no progression system, so there's no point". Dude, it's a fucking video game, obviously there's no point. It's for fun, just play the game and enjoy the game if you find it fun, don't make yourself do a thing you hate just to watch the level up animation play.
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great way to burn people out on a game too, if I pay for one and start to lose interest in the game, I'll either force myself to "get my money's worth" and get even sicker of it, or leave for a week and never catch up, miss out on some of the stuff I paid for, feel bad and uninstall
I wouldn't mind so much if the grind wasn't so slow. Like PSO2's is fine (for the most part) because you can grind daily/weekly quests for 1-2 stars which will add to your season pass level and if you do the "tier" missions (which can be very easy or hard) you get 5-10 stars that'll instantly level your season pass by like 1-3 blocks. Since there's 30 blocks, that goes by pretty fast.
But stuff like Gwent's where it's a weekly drip-feed or Halo's? Fuck off, that's fucking slow and tedious and unfun.
I've only really had experience with Apex and Fortnite, though I abandoned the former for the above reason but also because they nerfed my main character and weapon which made me lose any remaining interest
I wish I could return to DICE, but DICE doesn't know what made Bad Company 2 so fun. :( ;___;
I mean I even bought the Season Pass/"Premium" for Battlefield 3-4, FFS. I have no complaints about my money there, they just can't find the fun anymore.
Boardgame wise: I've been doing that with some out-of-print/proxy stuff which is nice. But it just doesn't hit the same like wandering Night City in 2077, you know?
https://forums.cdprojektred.com/index.php?attachments/night_city-jpg.11018969/
Your problem is you're playing American/Euro trash and not games from glorious nippon like Devil May Cry and Yakuza
I play DMC (waiting for Virgil 5 PC), but I'm just angry about developers trying to keep player numbers high while doing absolute fuck all on that beyond "new hats!"
Well, I know 343 (at least THEY seemed to be on advertising it) are the ones that put the pointless skin unlock season pass system into the Master Chief Collection. So I don't think MS is the one that mandated it beyond "try to keep player-numbers high." Which (like CD Project's admitted for Gwent) is the goal of the passes.
I'm cautiously for season passes.
On the other hand, they are based on players making the game part of their daily or weekly habits, which can be unhealthy.
But other free to play monetization systems rely heavily on getting a lot of money from a few especially addicted players. I think taking a few dollars from each player every couple of months is better compared to possibly ruining lives. Of course, the real solution is to make all art free after a revolution, but in the meanwhile, season passes are okay compared to the alternatives.
I'd be wiling to pay Wizards of the Coast or CD Project Red a "monthly" like $2-5 subscription fee for a sort of "Living Card Game" model in Magic: Arena or Gwent. But instead they go for these season pass models which just... isn't fun. It's a huge grind to make the "free to play" money to get kegs/booster packs and buidl your collection.
To quote Wikipedia: A lot of people don't donate/look the other way. So it's probably not sustainable to do a free release unless you're like Cave Story good (popular enough to release for money again and get that money/support despite the freeware version being out there in the wild).
Season passes and DLC don’t really bother me that much because the price of games has stayed stagnant for so long. (At least doesn’t bother me anymore than regular capitalism stuff). It gives people a way to choose what they’re willing to pay instead of charging $120 for every game with no extra content.
What I can’t stand is when it’s impossible to pay for the game once and get all of the content in it.
Obviously I’m a sucker for this, but I paid like $100 or $120 for the gold edition of Assassins Creed Origins, but I would have had to pay at least $120 more to get all of the skins, gear and horses from the store (I’m at least not enough of a sucker where I paid a dime to the store).
Prices of games raising this gen just means post-Cyberpunk 2077 I'm going to be highly selective of what I choose. Indies might lose out on that front, which sucks because Bar Devolver they've been a complete random good/bad for me. AAA is the one that gains there, but they only gain on -50% sales because I'm not spending $70 day-one for buggy sequels.
I don't necessarily think price is the major reason Season Passes were introduced. A lot of them seem to be held on "Player Retention" and keeping the game updated to keep eyeballs (and thus money) flowing. Most folks drop something after a week or two, Gwent has (had?) a notorious player-drop in casual players after the newness of an expansion/new set of cards comes out. Instead of addressing Casual players problems (balance or things to do) they try to give "things to do" in the sense of grinding for reward points (for the sake of getting "scrap"/wildcard parts and premium animation "dust" from those reward points being spent) instead. It's a bit of a mess, to be honest. Because Season Passes feel (to me) extremely lazy at trying to find the "fun" for players that keep people engaged.
I have spend concurrently 1,000+ hours across Battlefield: Bad Company, Bad Company 2, Battlefield 3, and 4. What kept me (and made me by Premium) was the core gameplay loop ("Battlefield moments") not the grind (which got a little worse as they went on, 4's gun part unlock system was pretty bad). The gameplay which is the problem that developers seem to have. They can't find a good "hook" now a days to keep people in, and with the flood of newer titles constantly coming out, it's hard to keep people/players "engaged" on a title that released a week ago.
All grind in video games is lazy fucking dogshit that preys on our need for rote distraction from hellworld and has ruined most of gaming.
(it made sense years and years ago when games couldn't even be that big, so to make a long RPG or something, grind made sense to flesh out the game world. but now that games can be absolutely fucking enormous, grind is just a leftover imprint from early game development that now manipulatively gets us addicted to mind-numbing game loops and gets us spending more money with hardly any creativity involved)
