The Eloquence of Execution, Razorfist, put for a brief rant on the soon-to-crater Fallout: 76 and it dovetails nicely with what's going wrong with World of Warcraft and other big properties in gaming.
The thread? Cynical Skinner Box products with equally cynical User Retention schemes meant to squeeze maximum profit per user as the core concern, over gameplay and aesthetics and anything else you might think would be important to the health of a successful intellectual property in the gaming sphere.
Yes, this is a persistent problem. Rather than bother to figure out how to better satisfy your audience with fulfilling gameplay these companies wuss out like the soyboi bitches they inevitably have become and turn their games into gambling simulators cunningly concealed as the games whose corpses they wear as skinsuits. At least the CCG/TCG genre doesn't bullshit you into thinking that it's not about making you act like a slot slut; they're the honest whores here, sad to say. This? This is the hot chick who plays you into being her paypig while holding up her end as little as possible, like camwhores on Twitch.
Listen to the Razor. The only hard thing this game ought to get out of you is a hard pass.
Bradford,
ReplyDeleteI don't understand the appeal of loot boxes or their origins. In many countries, gambling is either illegal or a tightly controlled govt monopoly. Even more so when kids are involved.
Have the programmers become incompetent or lazy?
xavier
Both, because one usually becomes the other, and it's pushed by corporate stakeholders wanting to maximize quarterly profits over everything else.
DeleteBradford,
DeleteThanks for the reply. Too bad because a good game is addictive and allows a company to build expansion packs and new games. Guess we'really just not allowed to have fun.
xavier