Critics must rescore Dragon's Dogma 2 in light of microtransactions
Gamers aren't happy that Dragon's Dogma 2 includes microtransactions for basic features - and we think critics need to rescore it.
That's why steam reviews are better with it being from actual people who aren't scared of being blacklisted from future access. Even with joke reviews it's still actually more informative. These review outlets call it review bombing, but I call it review awareness with it highlighting and bringing attention to things paid reviewers neglect and ignore.
I don't blame the reviewers for reviewing the product they were given. I blame Capcom for the bait and switch, and the editors who won't edit the review to reflect the current reality
I don't even necessarily blame the devs, but I do blame the shareholders and people in administrative positions who pushed for this
Yeah man, "professional" reviewers are the biggest joke in gaming, I'll trust the people who actually after about a h money they spent and the games they played. Genuine people tend to be truth worthy in this regard.
Spoilers: they won't.
Spoilers: they shouldn't. They actually reviewed the game and didn't circlejerk about one completely optional feature.
Oh good, one more AAA I can auto-skip over.
Did you know you can block publishers on Steam?
Why skip when you can pirate it for free? Everything is pirateable these days.
I sure can't. They just show back up with "Blocked" on the cover
That's not blocking them. That's just modifying the cover art
Completely agree. Block means don't see in my mind.
ITT: Mental Gymnastics competition to see how well one can defend corporate greed
Nobody wants to admit they've been taken for a ride.
Mark Twain said it best: "It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."
Useful idiot is the norm for this generation.
I dislike the microtransactions as well, but there's an insane amount of disinformation about them in these discussions.
Almost all of the items are easily obtainable in the game by just playing, so there's no gating of content behind the paywall. It being a single player game, there's also no competitive advantage to be gained by buying them for real money (or inversely lost out on by not buying them)
The whole discussion is blown widely out if proportion.
I view the mtx as basically paying for cheat codes. I'm not interested in using cheats but am opposed to companies trying to monetize them. It's straight up mobile game level of BS in a PC game. Tbh though, if the store button wasn't available in the main men, I wouldn't even know the mtx exist.
From the comments here I can see we learned nothing from Horse Armour.
Lots was learned. They learned they can continue to move the goalposts simply forever it seems.
Wait for the rage over this particular round to die down. Release a game with similar but slightly dialed back bullshit. Tell everyone how much better you are than them.
Repeat until people pay $99 for the right to rent the game for $10 a month plus pay to win MTX.
Sure DD2 is a corpse, but a new game will come growing from its corpse.
Soon the poors won't be able to play games anyway as that will be forbidden by their owners
Soon the poors won’t be able to play games anyway as that will be forbidden by their owners
This is the nice thing about indy devs. Many of them don't pull this shit and it is likely a large reason indy games have increasingly grown in popularity. AAA game is basically synonymous with microtranscations at this point.
I'm gonna paste a comment I left the other day pertaining to this:
I will die on the hill of "Oblivion's horse armor DLC was not the beginning of micro transactions"
Because it wasn't. There were micro transactions for games long before the hore armor thing. Also, horse armor was a one-time purchase for that mechanic.
I'm pretty sure the mtx for dragons dogma are all 1 time dlc bought on the steam page just like the horse Armour.
I will die on the hill of “Oblivion’s horse armor DLC was not the beginning of micro transactions”
Because it wasn’t. There were micro transactions for games long before the hore armor thing.
Such as? Are you saying you could pay a small amount for something in a game before this? Sure, it's possible.
Also, horse armor was a one-time purchase for that mechanic.
Ok, and? As in it's a small amount (micro) purchase for a thing?
I'm not sure exactly what hill you're dying on here. That there was a game somewhere that had buyable things for small amounts of money before Oblivion? Sure, there may have been. And?
Agreed, it’s really not what people think of when they really think of microtransactions. Horse armour was really just mediocre & overpriced DLC.
"Jeez Capcom, leave some evil for the rest of us!" - Satan probably
At this point I think it's safe to say that if Satan was real, he's the biggest shareholder of every tech company in the world, including those that make video games.
Nah, he's just consulting.
"[...]these micotransactions grant more frequent access to features many gamers deem essential for any action RPG. This includes fast travel and character customisation."
Wait, what? Seriously devs?
the key phrase there being 'more frequent'. the fast travel and character customization are all in the game and have a more in-universe integration. the game systems are supposed to be more immersive than just click the map and fast travel. you typically either take a cart from town to town or warp using a stone that gets used up.
I like it the way it is, makes leaving town to quest and adventure have another layer of strategy. If someone wants to bypass that strategy layer with money then so be it. I certainly would prefer that it be a mod rather than a MTX, and will definitely not be buying any regardless.
Nah, this is inherently scummy behavior.
Want to enforce a particular tone and strategic layer to a game by limiting fast travel based on a consumable? Cool. Just don't make that a consumable that can be purchased with real dollars.
I like it the way it is, makes leaving town to quest and adventure have another layer of strategy. If someone wants to bypass that strategy layer with money then so be it. I certainly would prefer that it be a mod rather than a MTX, and will definitely not be buying any regardless.
This has been solved for a long time. If you want to force people to leave the town to quests and adventure just stick to Morrowind style fast travel where fast travel doesn't go everywhere. If you want people to be able to fast travel everywhere then let them fast travel everywhere. If people can fast travel everywhere but don't want to fast travel everywhere then it's a single player game, they're free to make up their own rules on how they want to play.
There's no justifiable reason to slap a price tag on fast travel and that's the issue most people have. The fact that it was removed from review builds shows that even the devs know how fucking shitty it is. No need to defend a shitty practice.
Gran Turismo 7 pulled the same shit. I'm still pissed about that one. Plus the lack of single player content basically means I haven't even played the game since shortly after launch. The grind without mtx is crazy boring.
Aside from the controversy, why does every medieval game look as ugly as oblivion?
Because they're old-tymey. Everything was sepia tinted and muddy back then, and they didn't have fancy dyes or expensive rendering software to make many polygons.
We tried this already - getting ethics in game journalism.
It didn't work so well.
Can't tell if you're joking or not, but gamergate was absolutely not about "ethics in game journalism."
Not joking. It absolutely was about ethics, at first. The initial kickoff was the boyfriend accusing the girl (Zoë Quinn?) of sleeping with someone else for a better review. That's ethics in a nutshell. I don't think that anyone really cared about the game, or who was involved, but rather that the state of the industry was such that you could accuse a well known game reviewer of being unethical, and it was more believable than not.
The fact is, reviewers had already sold their souls and a AAA game get anything less than a 90%. Had reviewers had better ethics, probably no one would have believed the boyfriend, and the entire story would have been a nothing-burger.
Of course it went off the rails after that, the fact that the boyfriend was lying didn't help, but for a brief moment it looked like there might actually be game news/review industry reform. It was a glorious 24 or so hours.
It's not going to change much.
It's crazy dumb they created the controversy but the game is fully complete and excellent.
It's insane they didn't see this blowing up in their faces 🤦♂️.
Clearly you haven't looked at steam. People can't make it past the character creator due to the constant crashing
It's anything BUT fully complete
Lololol I'm like 50 hours in no issue
Which basic features? Almost everything people are complaining about can be obtained in game. I understand the dissatisfaction with the performance issues, but I am failing to understand this current discourse considering that capcom has been doing this in all their previous games.
I heard that fast travel is very limited, but that you can buy fast travel items for real world money.
The problem with that is: the goal of the game makers should be to make the game as enjoyable and fun as possible to sell as many copies as possible.
However, with such micro transactions your goal now is to add annoying stuff to the a level that maximises your profits. How much you can annoy your customers, depends mainly on the conditioning of your target audience.
So the more of that stuff is accepted and financially rewarded by customers, the more annoying games will become to increase the "need" to sell you a relieve.
Fast travel for example? Either I allow it or I don't. But both decision have a huge implication on the game design.
They say in the article that reviewers were told about the microtransactions. Then they mention that one reviewer said he didn't read the notes that were sent by Capcom. Why would this reviewer need to go back and rescore the game? If he enjoyed it without knowing about the microtransactions, they clearly don't matter to the gameplay.
The review copies had no microtransactions. They were added at release.
Mixed feelings about that - it sounds like you can still access those features so I don't think it really affects the base game at all. From what I remember about the first game, you had to be sparing on the waystones to start with, and it required a bit of work to get the item necessary to redo your character - so not much has really changed there. On the other hand, adding these microtransactions in the first place is a stupid idea and the publishers are shooting themselves in the foot by adding them. Should that really change the reviews of the base game though?
Having limited access to a resource to then hook you on microtransactions is from mobile game design. It's literally a freemium mechanic being put into an already upscaled price game.
It's one of the most abusive and addictive ways to develop a game, and you want to portray that positively.
I fucking hate gamers. We've been having this conversation since the horse Armor DLC for Oblivion yet here we fucking are.
Correct, it’s part of their design, you create a problem then You sell the solution.
Oh I don't want to portray it positively. I agree it's shit. It just seemed to me that it's possible (personally at least) to play the game and ignore the microtransactions. But no doubt that's not the case for everyone
Except having limited access to a resource is from the original game. There's this lie being sold online that it was an intentional decision for DD2 to try and sell more microtransactions, but limited fast travel is a hallmark of the original Dragon's Dogma. People are so quick to blind themselves to hatred that they haven't noticed that Capcom has added completely pointless microtransactions to every one of their games for at least the past 5 years. You can drag them through the coals if you want to over that, and it's as fair a reason to boycott Capcom games as any, but it's not a reason to start going after games journalists.
I kinda think we should go right off and bomb all the reviews, with the hope that it teaches devs to stop doing stuff like this.
Dark patterns are malicious and antagonistic against the end user. The microtransactions add arsenic to the tea.
From what I've read, it seems to be a compromise to me. I imagine the dev team didn't want to do it but compromised with the publisher and in reality they probably don't want you to buy the dlc, as it defeats some of the design decisions. There's a good pcmag article detailing the dlc and how impactful it is. My guess is that the general opinion of any reviewers would remain the same regardless (with the context of the pcmag article).
I scrolled through the mtx and... there is literally nothing in there that anyone should ever buy. Exception for the character redesign item, but if this is like first game, you can redesign your character between playthroughs.
I feel like there's some kinda argument here between the director and whatever suit wanted mtx. That stuff in the store is literally pointless to buy. RC? People will rent your pawn, that's how you get it. Wakestones? Gold in game.
Only thing I'd consider buying would be the eternal ferrystone, but that defeats the flow of the game, and they aren't selling it.
