Alright I’ll die on this hill.
Absolutely nothing being sold can’t be acquired in game for a pittance.
The character edit costs 20k gold. I earned this before I even reached the capital city. For reference on how much that costs a night in the inn costs 2k gold and you’re essentially forced to do that every single day.
You earn this so damn easily.
Equipment is all stuff you can easily acquire too.
Nothing feels like it has affected gameplay. None of these prices feel like they increased the in-game cost in order to force you to pay money. They feel like they’re just there for the sake of the chance some shmucks might buy them for no reason. I genuinely don’t know why “pay to win” is even being mentioned, it’s a singleplayer game who gives a fuck? It’s not multiplayer, it’s not an mmo, it’s not pvp, it’s not multiplayer pve, it’s a singleplayer game. “P2W” is literally irrelevant. Rift Crystals are currency for purchasing pawns (companions) and only applies to ones that are 5+ levels above your character, it’s a limitation to prevent people ruining the game for themselves by getting overlevelled companions that trivialise the content. If people pay money for the Rift Crystals they’re literally ruining the game for themselves. The last part about not being able to delete cloud saves to make a new character just seems like a lie.
The review bombing over this is unwarranted.
The game is good. The optimisation is bad, that criticism is warranted, it’s a cpu issue related to physics people think, graphics settings do nothing to change it, Denuvo is probably making it much worse.
I recommend the game if you want real time combat that makes you feel like a DnD party. The game is somewhere in between Fable’s goofyness and DnD with a hint of influence from the Lord of the Rings battle in the Moria mines vs the goblin and cave troll.
I’ll die charging the hill.
So you can “earn” the stuff in-game: so what? That doesn’t excuse it at all and I don’t know why people repeat this. They aren’t mad the item can be earned, they are mad it is sold. These seem like the same issue but they are not. Conflating them as the same issue is a poor attempt to deflect the justified frustration of the people who paid for this game. Their frustration is a basic part of human psychology. It is why we do not allow steroids in sports. It is why we separate boxing matches by weight. There is a fundamental understanding of “fairness” that every leftist should understand and this encroaches on that understanding. As a leftist you should understand how this is indicative of a greater inequity between what is accessible to those with wealth and those without in our society and you should be upset that it has not only consumed our working lives but now consumes our leisure as well.
In so far as your comments on the Rift companions being gated; I’m afraid you’ve put the cart before the horse. They are selling the solution to a problem they designed. This is the exact kind of toxic gameplay elements that people criticize the very existence of cash shops for. We aren’t talking about some cosmetics here. The fact that you are trying to pass that off as a good thing shows just how lost in the sauce you are.
All these systems that must be interacted with in this way are things that must be programmed and tested. It hurts to see a game get blasted for performance issues when those same programmers may have been working on this garbage instead. Would their time have been better spent making sure the game ran nicely? Absolutely. But hey, at least they got the rift crystals and character editor token working right in the cash shop and isn’t that what really matters?
You mentioned that it’s not a big deal to have pay-2-win in a single player game. “Who cares,” you say? Well, uh, a load of people. Why attempt to invalidate their concerns? Very toxic behavior in service to the greedy corporation, comrade. Do better.
Sports are irrelevant here. It is a singleplayer game. Enjoy it how you like.
All this amounts to is putting cheatcodes behind a paywall. And cheatcodes have been gone for decades. If we’re really going to split hairs about this nobody ever complained about the Nintendo Hotline or the various other premium-cost official cheat hotlines in the back of the manuals back in the glory-days people imagine.
I’ll die reinforcing the flank of this (ant)hill (or whatever).
First of all I’m not trying to defend Capcom here, these microtransactions are obviously stupid as fuck. But they are nothing but additions made by out-of-touch executives at the last possible minute. In comparison to the predatory design found in 90% of videogames made today it barely even registers on the scale of bullshit. It’s so half-assed they don’t even allow you to buy the packs that give you in-game currency more than one time. The game was clearly not designed with this in mind and at no point does it feel like any of its design was altered so you’d be inclined to spend money on the microtransactions.
Every single live-service game that works on the users FOMO is a hundred times more predatory than this. Cosmetics in multiplayer games are a hundred times more predatory than this (sure they don’t “affect gameplay” but they are most often the only way to make your character be in any way unique compared to the other players and always function as displays of wealth to an audience of literal children). I’d even argue that shit games like the lauded “Vampire Survivors”, which is five bucks and doesn’t feature any microtransactions is more predatory since it’s from the ground up designed to hit your dopamine receptors just the right amount with no other apparent goal in mind other than to lobotomize you for half an hour whenever you play it.
Every single fucking mobile game is literally eating peoples brains as they play them and this is the shit people get mad about? This is at least still a videogame designed and made by people who have some goals besides brainwashing its users into becoming whales. Yeah it fucking sucks that there’s barely any devs left who are completely free from this bullshit, but I’d gladly take this bullshit over the other 99% of games that are designed to be microtransaction-machines first.
You are agreeing with me. You point out that this game is pay-2-win but just that others in the market are worse. Sure, I agree. This game is pay-2-win and others are worse. Welcome to my side. The march up the hill isn’t so bad and there’s a nice breeze.
Yeah I agree with you, except for the fact where I think it’s important to actually look at the actual games, how they are designed and how things like microtransactions work within them and not just spout “pay-to-win” like it somehow means the same thing in battlefront 2, world of tanks, some mobile idle game, the resident evil 4 remake or this game.
You are paying for things that give an advantage in a game. In some that advantage is gainable in the game. In some it is not. In some that advantage is huge. In some it is trivial. But fundamentally it is all the same at it’s core. It is the purchasing of that advantage that makes it pay-2-win even if the specific variations and severity differs from product to product.
I fully agree it’s worse in other games. Sure, that’s a gimme.
You mentioned that it’s not a big deal to have pay-2-win in a single player game.
You misunderstand.
This isn’t your average pay2win situation where you can totally earn your way to the important stuff. This is as if the Publisher told the Development team to put the cheapest healing potions from the first shop in the village ALSO for sale on the RMT shop. It’s in bad taste, it’s exploitative, but it’s also hilariously irrational all things considered.
The reason why this became a PR loss is because they also removed the Start New Game button after your begin the game. So that lead to a belief that you gotta buy Art of Metamorphosis for 1,99. All in all it leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouths in the pettiest, least lucrative way possible.
No, I understand just fine. Your reply confirms what I know. It’s pay-2-win stuff. What you are saying is the usual pay-2-win scenario. Convenience items, usually trivial ones, and other currencies that are harder to obtain to get advantages in the cash shop. All earnable, albeit some rarer ones more slowly, in-game. It’s your average mobile game microtransaction slop.
What you are saying is the usual pay-2-win scenario.
Not at all. The usual pay2win scenario involves two things. First you actually get something. Second, that something takes a wild amount of time to acquire through normal means. When I said ‘what if the first, shittiest health potion was also on a cash shop for some reason’ I was not exaggerating in any way.
Cash shops have been normalized in an infinite number of ways. There are entire games built around selling cosmetic skins or characters. Capcom has consistently chosen the worst of all worlds with every single one of their games, selling nigh useless things that (rightfully) draw people’s ire.
I reject your second criteria outright. It is ridiculous. If you can pay to get something that gives you an advantage it is pay-2-win. Even if that thing is attainable fairly easily in the game. In the case of this game, there are items, that are rare that are sold. So even by your own criteria this is pay-2-win. By mine, it is pay-2-win. It is pay-2-win.
I think this definition is different from the usual definition of pay-2-win. The way I’ve always seen it described, “pay-2-win” refers to a micro/macro transaction that more or less renders the general content meaningless. So in an 80-hour long game, it would give you the items and gear that would allow you to skip the first 75 hours of it. Persona 5 is a decent example, allowing you to summon level 80+ personas from the very start of the game (well, as soon as you unlock above-level fusions).
The microtransactions in Dragon’s Dogma 2 give you an advantage, certainly, and are a scummy practice by out of touch Capcom executives. But in my experience, your definition of pay-2-win is not the common one. That’s why people here agree with your points but are confused about your conclusion
The way you’ve just described pay-2-win is literally the first time I’ve ever heard it described as such in 40 years of my life.
Either way, this a big movement of the goalposts. You are narrowly defining the term in such a way that so few games would qualify. Hell, Genshin Impact wouldn’t even qualify by your definition (but is still pay-2-win by my definition). Sure you can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on new characters and weapons but you’d still need to DO the content. The only thing that would count is things like level skips you can buy in WoW, and yet the pushback from WoW players is that this is not pay-2-win because just getting to the endgame isn’t “winning”. So, I reject your definition as being a commonly accepted one because in the MMO community (a community of MILLIONS of players) it is a constant struggle in these discussions due to people literally rejecting that definition.
If I’m being honest, and I don’t mean this in an insulting way at all, I do not believe you’ve really considered this issue deeply before in the past. I think your definition and defense of the game is very “vibes”-based. And, look, that’s okay. Most people aren’t borderline obsessive over stuff like this and just live their lives, which is fine and normal. But coming to the defense of a game because you have some outlandish definition of a term that I think most people are somewhat settled on is a bold move.
I think ultimately there are two commonly accepted ways people see as pay-2 win:
Cash shop that gives you any advantage in the game at all. (Most who accept this are still fine with cosmetic-only cash shop items.) This is my stance, of course.
Cash shop items that gives you a competitive advantage that you otherwise could not easily obtain through gameplay (or is completely locked behind the cash shop entirely).
I have assumed this entire time you were of the latter crew. I did not expect to see a definition of pay-2-win that not only have I never heard of but seems so outside the normal discourse I’ve never even considered it before right this moment.
You’re charging a hill that was erected in like 2010 lol. Look at every single game Capcom has released for the last two decades and you’ll see the same thing
So? It was bad then and it is bad now. A bad thing doesn’t stop being bad if enough time has passed that it has become normalized. Reject the settler mindset and be better.
Of course it’s bad, but it’s just so fucking weird to get up in arms about it now lmao. Like why is this the one
Also you get a ton of rift crystals what are you talking about in the other reply
Gaming has sucked for more than a decade. At a certain point, people need to either develop their own games/mods or find a better hobby. But malding about how games suck (after buying them no less) is just pathetic at this point. How much did malding about horse armor back in '06 amount to?
The issues.are not neccesarily about the game being fun or not.
First, and most obviously, this is obviously about setting the discourse to then escalate at a later time. It is meant to create Gamers™ who will make pushing back on MTX exhausting, so that people will be less.willing to push back later as these MTX start paywalling more significant aspects of the game. This was done with lootboxes, battlepasses, horse armor, and most successfully MMO’s - every online game’s monetization is exploitative except mine, you wouldn’t need the premium store if you got gud. Deliberately cultivated fandom toxicity.
Second, the shape of the game is being altered to accomodate this MTX. Save data being intentionally limited to make the MTX seem like it has a point has a negative impact on the game overall.
Third, felony contempt of business model. These kinds of MTX can be used to frame modding and cheats as circumvention of DRM with monetary damages. For now, I think Capcom knows better than to push this, but the DMCA is broad and modding amd cheats are a direct competitor to this monetization model; it is inevitable this will be persued at some point, after previous escalations like bans. It puts DMCA takedowns of mods that do the same thing as in their interest to make ppssible.
“Absolutely nothing being sold can’t be acquired in game for a pittance.” so was the case in battlefront. no p2w shit should be allowed
I see it as a different scenario when that translates to competitive advantage though. I couldn’t care less about this existing here, it does not affect me.
Not losing your shit over small encroachments is how we got from $2.50 horse armour to every single game locking costumes behind a paywall
You are familiar with the expression: give them an inch and they will take a mile? The slipppery slope? The thin end of the wedge?
They are experimenting until they find something that works.
and part of the reason why I think it is so difficult for people to articulate why they are offended, is it just is offensive, it offends sensibilities, it breaks up an enjoyable artistic experience into distinctively marketable chunks, it’s disengaging, a lot of us just don’t want to see a marketplace at all, we don’t want to see price tags for extras, we want the UI, the menu, everything to feel like one complete, cohesive package
can you imagine if you were watching Netflix, and they introduced exclusive content you had to pay extra for? Maybe you could earn enough good boy points to watch it by watching enough ads, on the service you already pay for, so you can still earn the right to watch it for “free”
what if TV episodes were still inclusive, but cut content and behind the scenes footage was extra?
what if you are enjoying a nice piece of art, but now you have to purchase a unique URL which links to your own private copy of it?
can you imagine reading a book and every time you start a new chapter you get an advert to buy another book? what if some chapters were just paywalled behind a link online?
things are just made worse by monetisation, there’s nothing more to it, you had something good, and someone made it slightly shitter in order to turn a profit - capitalism in its purest form
if microtransactions had any artistic merit of course they would be developed in a moneyless society as well
Not losing your shit over small encroachments is how we got from $2.50 horse armour to every single game locking costumes behind a paywall
People did rightfully lose their shit over horse armor way back in the day, and it predictably did fuck all in the end. You even admit this yourself.
what if you could pay to edit someone else’s character?
The last section is kinda how cloud saves are supposed to work. If you could delete your local save and it synced then whaf would be the point. Overwritting a cloud save means you need to launch the game via steam offline mode then when back online you can select to upload the local save file. Although yes its stupid there’s no new game option in the actual game.
The rest is aggregious tho. There was a time when you didn’t have to pay for cheats in a game you just had them. I wonder if this is why capcom went big on anti modding recently cos they wanna charge for mods basically.
I wasn’t looking forward to this at all because I never played the originals and after BG3 I felt like any other similar games would be a step back and I don’t want to waste my time, but this shit is not okay.
It’s not really comparable to BG3 imo, the original was all about the action gameplay with the story being so bad it may as well not have existed in the first place. Much closer to a dark souls.
I’m not at all a fan of Soulslikes, and I’m really enjoying this one. It’s not punishing or unfair in the way Souls games are. It’s also very much not like BG3, though. You’re right that it’s action first. Closest I’ve played is maybe Greedfall, but it’s really it’s own thing. Fun though.
Fully agree with you that the game is its own thing. The closest thing to Dragon’s Dogma 2 is just Dragon’s Dogma 1 haha.
Can you believe that when the first game came out, people compared it not only to Dark Souls, but Skyrim?
I can sort of see the Skyrim angle, but only in the sense that the game really incentivizes just picking a direction and heading out exploring. Skyrim was the first game a lot of people played in which it was just as much fun to wander off as it was to do what the game was telling you to do. DD 2 does that better than Skyrim, in my opinion.
