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Dragon's Dogma 2 mods negate the need for microtransactions on PC
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this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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Nobody has ever claimed you need them to finish the game.
The frequently spoken rule of thumb for micro-transactions being "not a big deal" is that they should be cosmetic only if the base game isn't free.
This game's micro-transactions are gameplay modifying items and in-game currency packs. That's a violation of the rule of thumb, so lots of us are saying it's a big deal.
I don't want this normalized. Because if it becomes the norm then full pay to win is much easier to normalize.
But even without that fear, it's absolutely just gross on its own.
They deserve all of the negative reviews and press they're getting for it.
MTX are bad in general but these MTX look identical to what they've put into recent games like RE4 Remake and DMC5. Mechanically it is all items such as Red Orbs in DMC5.
I wasn't even aware that there were MTX in DMC when I was playing it. Have they made the option more prominent in this game? Or is there just more outrage about this game because it has had a rocky launch and gamers smell weakness?
This game has some designs (that were also in the first) which are rather annoying but opinionated.
The purchasable items lessen the impact of those annoying designs.
An example is one dev saying fast travel in games is bad so they want to make travel fun, and as a result you have to backtrack through areas full of enemies a lot to get places. There are in-game beacons that are given to the player to place to allow them to fast travel, and you can only have four of them. One of the MTX is a fifth one.
It's more impactful than just a premium currency but you can work around the annoying design choices without paying extra.
I personally find both to be disgusting and exploitative dark patterns especially in a paid single player game, but I feel that paying to work around game design decisions is a step further then is usually in these games.
From what I understand mods have already been produced which provide the items in question for free.
Have to agree that it is shady that right after Capcom went to war with mods they are introducing some kind of item scarcity! I need to play the game before commenting more because I don't know to what extent they have made playing without these items a chore.
imo, even cosmetic micro-transaction stuff is disgusting. In single player its absolutely intolerable and in multiplayer its at the edge. Not only it makes creating almost non-existent content more profitable, likely at the expense of worthwhile content because any development costs money. Why make the game better when you can create more cosmetics. I'm not saying creating cosmetics is trivial, but making new skin vs creating actually new content are on completely different scales, especially when those new skins are sometimes just recolouring old ones.
Not having access to cosmetic stuff without paying extra also often detracts from the game for me. As example, in game v-rising there are some cosmetics packs for different skins for your castle's furniture. While you can furnish the place decently with stuff you get, you can be much more creative if you have access to the alternative skins.
If they were all part of some larger expansion pack with something more than just skins, I could accept it but if i have to buy every theme pack separately, I'm not going to do that. I would have much less money available if i had to buy every damn dlc to every game I play. I'd say building and decorating your castle is 50% of the game, less if you don't care about how your castle looks at all. Not buying these dlc make the game less enjoyable for me.
You can frame this as I don't like non cosmetic microtransactions if you like. But you have to agree that isn't what 99% of the online discourse is doing. Almost everyone is making statements that are not true because they want to feel outraged and want others to feel outraged, and because they have been lied to by another person's outrage.
It's a hurricane of lies, and it's honestly been worse on lemmy than on reddit.
If someone is telling lies they should be called out for it, but in matter-of-fact way to avoid pointless drama, while providing sources for the truth.
I haven't seen any of that, myself.
I have seen lots of "it's not that bad get over it" kind of posts but none with any convincing reason why we should accept dark patterns like this in games.
I'd rather they didn't do this at all.
Please, let's not nornalize nickel-and-diming your customers.
That ship sailed over a decade ago. You can look at the current gaming landscape and pretend this isn't already normalized. Compared to most AAA game releases, this is a step in the right direction.
A step in the right direction would be no pointless MTX, as plenty of other games are doing right now. There are no microtransactions in my copy of Days Gone, for example. Nor are there any in Horizon: Zero Dawn.
And even if it's the popular thing to do, that is not an excuse to let them get an inch. "Oh, but he only beat you a little!"...
And in this game your looks matter so much that you can buy an item to let you change them with real money!
This is a slippery slope fallacy. Adding paid for cheats in single player games doesn't make pay to win more normalised if you have a sense of a moral limit. My limit is when game design is changed to account for microtransations. Shadow of Morder was horrible because the game was almost unplayable without it's boosters. Dragons Dogma is the same game.
If Elden Ring came out and had boosters I'd feel the same way. I'd ignore them and feel weird about people who used them. But it literally doesn't effect the game for me or my experience if they existed or didn't
Tell that to the horse armor lol back in the day no one would buy a game with these kind of MTX and we would laugh at it. But now we're saying "it's not that bad come on, it's still a good game". The slippery slope is very much a thing.
No one was saying "no one would buy a game with these kinds of MTX" Skyrim was already out and wildly successful at that point and secondly the Skyrim horse Armor criticisms were amount Bethesda adding paid mods to get cuts of all mods which is a hugely different situation. When Diablo IV and Street Fighter created extremely overpriced costumes we laugh at them because it's stupid to assume anyone is going to buy them
Oh, my dear, sweet summer child, they're not talking about Skyrim. When people say "horse armour" they're talking about one thing:
In the year of our lord 2006, when Skyrim was still half a decade away. the Xbox 360 release of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion had a $2.50 "DLC" for two sets of horse armour, and it was roundly mocked for it. It wasn't the first microtransaction, but it was certainly the first one that set everyone talking about its absurdity. The conversation was absolutely about charging money for cosmetics. In fact the general tone was, perhaps ironically, the opposite of today's prevailing zeitgeist; this was a time when people were accustomed to spending $10-20 for a sizable "expansion pack" or "content disc", and the idea of dropping $2.50 for horse armour that didn't even do anything was absolutely ludicrous.
Fair enough, I don't really remember that and I guess Horse Armor is almost a recurring event at this point
This is the slope having already slipped.
It's not a fallacy to say that this is gameplay features for pay and I am only ok with cosmetics being for pay in a game that isn't free at its base.
I don't want to let them move that goalpost.
Also, not all slippery slope arguments are fallacious. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
While it is possible that a company like Capcom, driven to increase its profit margin, and having normalized pay-to-win-through-convenience-features in this game would choose to not do more pay-to-win options with deeper gameplay impacts in a future game.
Being vocal about hating this game's micro-transactions, especially with the reviews going so negative, is one of the only ways we can communicate that we don't want either.
I never said all Slippery Slope are incorrect. I just think this isn't one of them
In order for an argument to be a slippery slope argument it needs to require that step one leads to step two.
My argument wasn't even a slippery slope argument and is therefore not the slippery slope fallacy.
My claim was that normalizing this type of pay-to-win-light game design makes it easier for them to normalize pay-to-win-full game design. It did not claim that normalizing this will lead to normalizing that.
I don't want either in my games.
If we push back against this now it should make them think twice about considering full pay-to-win single player non-free games, because it could have a much bigger backlash. Which is what I was saying.
I used to be able to just cheat in the game. Just input a cheat and get infinite lives.
Why do I have to pay money for that now?