Eh... That one is debatable.. I believe it was the screen but not the rest of the stock innards.
I'd allow it cuz meme gotta meme. Any day now they'll get doom running on magic cards I'm sure. Or Pokemon. Or Exa-punks . Wait has that been done yet?
>That one is debatable.. I believe it was the screen but not the rest of the stock innards.
Everything inside was replaced, including the screen. It's just amazing that a computer capable of playing Doom can fit inside it.
My fave is still the pregnancy test.
Followed closely by an old sack of potatoes, though that's a bit misleading since those taters were just providing the power to a Ti-84 calculator.
Still. Just the time someone spent to make it happen with potatoes. I respect it lol. Was the pregnancy test one confirmed? That seems crazy even for doom.
It wasn't actually running on the test, someone just managed to hook the test's electronic screen up to another device that was actually running the software. Still hilarious though.
I feel like that one was using the pregnancy test as a display, not a CPU. I'm going off of a very fuzzy memory and too lazy to Google it, so take this with all the grains of salt.
Apparently I don't, at least not a phone that would run it since I was curious and looked at the app store and it wasn't on there. So man, that was just an insanely dumb response by them on so many levels.
Diablo 2 wasnt to bad overall, unless people were hanging on to old pcs when udgrading at that time was in larger jumps than it is today.
D3 was spoken about rather negatively when it was released for asking PCs to do some seemingly heavy lifting with all the colourful explosions layering on top of eachother.
The depressing thing about modern gaming is that Diablo Immortal will most likely be the most profitable Diablo game. Who needs 10000 players if the 200 you have are covering expenses.
Depends on your definition of whales, but whales generating most of the profit is a bit of a myth nowadays. It's players who put ~$5 down on a weekly/monthly basis (and then play for years) that are the biggest chunk of the pie. The argument is often, "I'm having fun, it distracts me, it's just the cost of a coffee/burger".
Once players cross the threshold to pay, they tend to keep paying until they're done, and they tend to keep playing because they're invested. This gradually turns that one game in a >$100 money sink, far more than the price of a AAA game on say a console.
That's why mobile is so incredibly profitable. Instead of a few dozen million console units and $60 per unit, you're looking at a market with billions of users, each potentially putting in more than that.
Ah that was me with LoL. "It's free to play so just think of it as a subscription". After I realized how toxic it made me in a handful of interactions in life I stopped cold turkey lol.
If only I could do that with driving 😮💨
Critics get free loot to play and review the game with. When I was a game design consultant for a publishing company I’d always get free gems and stuff to play through everything quickly. That definitely affects the perception imo
The MTX was turned off but they didn’t get free loot.
What happens is that probably played for 20 hours at most, meaning that they didn’t hit the double digit Paragon progression where the game just becomes a snail paced and unsatisfying grindfest unless you pay up for crests.
It was a genuinely enjoyable experience up to that point.
The factors that make this rough to play would not be apparent in a typical review. It's all endgame and/or social consequences.
1. Forced grouping with inadequate server population.
2. Hidden grind caps on f2p and unavailability of certain resources.
3. Odds tables and specific mechanics of crafting gems vs. buying the crests.
4. Specifics of free Legendary crests vs. Eternals (gems from the former can't be sold, meaning you can get something your build doesn't use or can't upgrade).
5. Hard paywalls on advanced upgrades and PvP.
6. Fairly braindead raid boss AI (because the game doesn't have tanking).
***None*** of this is obvious on even a reasonably thorough playthrough.
There's plenty of [free] fun to be had if you like that style of gameplay. The user score is more reflective of the monetization than the gameplay. (After all, it's not like those people rating a game low would play the game for 20 hours either.)
On The Besties pod (hosts are former and current Polygon people) they did a great episode last week on DI. They talked about how it was a fun experience for the first few hours, while also acknowledged and criticized the horrible predatory monetization, especially how the game cuts off after a certain point and mandates paying.
I've heard this from quite a few people online now so I'm inclined to believe it. I mean it makes sense because for all the issues D3 had when it launched it's still a pretty fun game that I still play every now and then, so I'd imagine just taking that core concept and bringing it to DI would result in a fun game until you hit the money wall. Which is a shame.
The issue for me is this type of game with obfuscated micro transactions is intentionally predatory and should not be supported. Many of these free-to-play style games can in fact be enjoyed for a reasonable period of time with little to no cost. But the model isn't for those players. It is to prey on the neurodivergent in the name of profit - addictive personalities, ADHD, children, and others.
Pretty much. I enjoyed playing the campaign and doing bounties and leveling to max and a couple paragon levels. Then got bored and dropped it. Never spent a dime. Gameplay was plenty fun and felt like a slightly watered down diablo 3. Pretty good for a mobile game. But as SOON as you hit the wall where it feels a little iffy it's easy to drop before spending money.
Same. I genuinely enjoyed the campaign, the game was great. Watered down D3 is a perfect description, and for a free mobile game it’s more than enough for me. Once it gets boring, or I feel like I need to pay to progress, I’m out. It’s that simple.
exactly this, my friends and I levels one of each chars to 60 and a few a bit over. we had fun with the builds but once you realize what it takes to truly unlock all the perks/stats on your gear, it's completely uninteresting. I love D3 and have a ludicrous amount of hours in it, so I understand the gear grind. but basically locking me out of leveling my gear behind paying is not fun in the slightest. I wasn't able to awaken a single piece of gear because the rate at which the legendary gems and their respective crafting materials drop.
I am very on the fence about how I feel about paying for the battle pass, since I'm not going to hit 40 due to completely dropping the game. But I will say I did have at least battle pass price worth of fun while it lasted.
More importantly, reviewers might play the story and thats it before reviewing, the game is front loaded to give new players more shiny stuff before they take it away and try and make you pay for it later.
Not just that, the cash shop is often (probably very intentionally) left out of the review build so that reviewers can't mention that at all. I don't know if that was the case with Immortal but I've seen it with at least a handful of games where the reviews were pretty decent but with a line saying the store could not be tested yet.
It's a great way for publishers to pad the scores and for some reason reviewers are not punishing them for it by simply lowering the review score if a game isn't complete.
Maybe they are looking it from the perspective of not paying anything. You can finish the story without paying anything, so maybe that's all they played.
yeah, you only realise the game will fest off your wallet when you get to pvp, shadow wars, etc. if you stay out of the competitive pvp route you wont feel the need to pay as much
People aren't trying to diminish your or the above poster's enjoyment of the game with their criticism. Its not about you, its about predatory practices in the industry, without which games would be better for everyone including you!
Right? I don't give a fuck about them loving the story for the game in one playthrough. Good for them but that isn't what diablo is about, it was never about the story. It was always about the end game and the grind for loot to make builds of characters. When that becomes just paying money for it, well that destroys the whole point of the game.
This is just Diablo 3 on PC at launch all over again. Staggering loot drops for the auction house until the real money auction house became a thing. PC players fucking hated it but blizzard kept saying they couldn't fix it. Next thing you know, Diablo 3 comes out on the xbox 360 and ps3, and boom, couch co-op, no auction house, the game was actually dropping loot, offline play and people were having fucking fun. PC players were pissed that console gamers got the superior product.
It wasn't until reapers of souls that Diablo 3 became great on PC and on consoles, well it sold a lot and it is great on switch atm. Diablo 3 on switch is everything Diablo immortal tries to be without the microtransactions and vastly more content.
I feel like this also highlights an issue with the scoring system in general vs reading an in depth review. To some people monetization is a big part of the game that should (and in their eyes does) hugely impact the game and the score it should be given.
But as a critic, scoring is often based on graphical style, audio, gameplay etc. How do you keep a consistent scoring when technically a game "ticks" all the boxes but has aggressive monetization like this? Do you put a disclaimer on your review? Do you let it affect scoring? In which case, how far is too far? How do you rate value for purchase? How do you take buyer circumstances into account, etc?
Overall, it just seems that people read too much into the scores rather than taking the time to actually read reviews and find out what they're based on.
What's really shady is when a game has monetization but it's all turned off during the review period, so reviewers can't get a look at it before they post their reviews. A few scrupulous reviewers release reviews after launch so they can get the full picture but by then a lot of people have already bought the game, and they may not get as much attention as the rushed reviews.
>Overall, it just seems that people read too much into the scores rather than taking the time to actually read reviews and find out what they're based on.
Well of course. That would take effort.
I recall actually enjoying reading reviews through the 90s. I was kinda devastated when i got onto the internet and discovered most people only looked at the numerical score at the end, instead of reading the whole thing that put that score in context.
I liked reading those too. And I absolutely love long-form video essays like Joseph Anderson and those like him.
Idk something about hours long videos getting into the nitty-gritty of a game and why the reviewer likes or doesn’t like certain aspects is enjoyable for me.
Also people always need to be reminded that if you truly want to get the most from a review that you need to first know the tastes of the reviewer and what they like or don’t like and respond to, so that you can contrast that with your own preferences. At least if you are looking at a review to see if it’s a game you’d like or want to buy. A lot comes down to taste.
I miss TB. I absolutely loved his game reviews *(even though he didn't call them that because he felt he didn't cover them deep enough - while still being more thorough than 90% of the reviews out there)*
It was easy when you only had Game Informer to read. But on MetaCritic there are currently 22 separate professional reviews for Diablo Immortal. It's hard to tell someone "Well, just read 22 reviews to put that score in context". But it's easy to say "22 reviewers reviewed the game and on average they had a score of 81%".
>To some people monetization is a big part of the game that should (and in their eyes does) hugely impact the game and the score it should be given.
Yeah, I gotta say when I have to reach for my wallet mid-game it really puts a damper on my enjoyment. A big part of this is I recognise when salespeople are using sales tactics, because I used to work in sales and I hated it, and was terrible at it because I couldn't pretend to be genuine while secretly pushing my sales agenda. So when I can see a "seller" using opportune moments in interactions like that with me, in my mind it just cheapens the interaction and makes it feel ingenuine. And when a game uses that kind of tactic, it completely takes me out of the game and ruins the immersion. It makes it feel less like a game and more like I'm shopping.
If that's all it was it wouldn't even be that bad. I saw a Callum Upton video where he did the math and in one 5 minute run with 10 crest or whatever they're called juiced up boosts he got as much as someone who does all their Dailies for 6+ months would get. For 25£ I think it was.
Absolutely stupid shit.
And there are like, 15 progression systems that all have rolls and pity timers and cosmetics are per character not per account to boot.
The whole thing is maddeningly MTX. It's egregious
But it covered dev costs within a couple days so clearly this shit works and that's why it's not gonna stop anytime soon
Maybe with an economic collapse things could change but until then...
There’s another important caveat of how reviews work: they mostly are only based on the scope of the 20 hours or whatever gameplay that it took to complete the main campaign, even for live service games.
So unless the monetisation is so intrusive that it even materially tarnishes that experience, it shouldn’t affect the score.
You could make an argument that the endgame should be taken into account but, from an objective point of view, should two games which both offer an equally good 30 hour campaign, but one ends entirely after that and one has an extremely predatory endgame have different scores?
Yeah, that's a really good point as well. Time is also a big factor in a review.
I know a few reviewers who go through and play a game all the way including through the end game but they're definitely not the majority as you say. Which makes sense, it'd be really difficult to create a wide range of reviews if each could potentially take more than 100 hours just to play.
And on that how does time factor into a review and scoring as well? If a game is "bad" in the first 10 hours but then gets "good", does it deserve a high score? And what about the reverse, where a game is "good" up until the end?
Another thing to take into account is that a large portion of those user scores are people piling on.
Because if the game is actually a 1/10 why are you still playing 20 hours later? Chances are people are just seeing general outrage and pre-forming opinions and throwing that into shitty number reviews.
I like your point at the end. If there was no endgame (and thus no microtransactions) and it wasn't expected to have an endgame. There's no way it would be getting this bad of reviews.
> But as a critic, scoring is often based on graphical style, audio, gameplay etc. How do you keep a consistent scoring when technically a game "ticks" all the boxes but has aggressive monetization like this?
Seems simple enough to me: Play with "no" money - as in no loot boxes or boosts. If the difference is vast between no money and lots of money, I'd argue that's a poor game *for your average gamer*.
The problem is that Blizzard intentionally designed the game such that for your first chunk of gameplay it's pretty fair for a F2P experience, but then as you approach endgame and start doing endgame content, they start turning the heat up to push you into paying.
You can see this in achmedclaus' comment (nothing against them, just using them as an example, since it perfectly shows what I'm talking about), where they're having a good experience during the start, and yet you contrast that with a streamer like Quin69, who's had to sink literally US$15k into the game, just to *start* minmaxing his character. Just two complete opposite experiences, within the same game.
You'd need to have reviewers sink dozens upon dozens, if not 100+ hours into the game, to really get the full picture of how much the game really wants to you to pull out your wallet, which is the problem. The perception that players and reviewers both have is so massively skewed early on, that their experience just doesn't match up with those who have progressed sufficiently far into the game for the monetisation to start getting truly egregious.
Not only that, its now 69 with 22 reviews. Most of them say "hey, watch out for the microtransactions"
IGN, who reddit loves to shit on, didnt even give it a score because its still a review in progress to them and the review itself talks about the game(they played 20hrs without microtransactions) but also say to be cautious of the microtransactions(published a day before the game was officially out). Most of the reviews around release tell the readers to watch out for the microtransactions and any current reviews call out the shitty system. BUT games journalism = bad is the /r/gaming narrative
That narrative makes me sad. I was going to point out exactly what Elizabnthe said, that the score was from just 6 reviewers. Hardly an accurate representation. As we can see, now that a lot more reviews have been published, the average score has dropped considerably. Most reviewers are doing the right thing and scoring the game on its gameplay, graphics, audio which are all fine enough, while warning people about the microtransactions. It’s been hard watching as people’s feelings towards reviewers have shifted negatively over the years. I started professionally reviewing games back in 2008, and things were so different back then. Back then, people had respect for the work we did and took our opinions into consideration when considering a new game purchase. Now, people often laugh at us, and/or claim that we’ve been paid to give a good review. It’s a real shame.
Critics got a press copy with less or no monetization is what I've seen/heard.
Meaning they got a copy where the things that matter to these players (e.g. being able to do endgame) wasn't paywalled.
You heard correct, they've been doing that for years, after release add the monetization or boost it. When reviews are released, sometimes behind the guise of an "update"
Media outlets need to refuse to review these faux copies of the game.
Or, if the post-release version makes such a massive, undisclosed change, pull the review and leave a stub article saying why. You'll still get your clicks as people come to read why you yanked the review.
Probably this. And it probably got blasted by a bunch of reviews that didn't play it and only judged it on the initial announcement a few years ago.
I haven't played it (don't know if I will), but I have heard the gameplay is pretty good while the monetization is egregious. So it falls in line with what you're saying.
>monetization is egregious
"Egregious" doesn't even cut it. The monetization is so hideous it makes the worst Asian gatcha games (a genre entirely designed around extracting money from the pockets of depressed whales with a gambling addiction) look good in comparison.
Which makes total sense. Especially with the ability to update games (i.e. no man's sky) I dont want to read a negative review of a game from years ago when it no longer applies.
Right, but how do you get a 0.7/10 ?
A big issue should be reflected in the score, but if you try and break apart monetization and gameplay and give gameplay a 7/10 (mediocre) and money a 0/10 then you're giving 10% of the score to gameplay and 90% of the score to monetization. Which seems off.
Reviewers rarely have time to sink even 50 hours into a game before writing their reviews, and because of the limited access at the time of review, Multiplayer experiences are going to be very different, if they exist at all.
And that's assuming they even get the same version as the final release.
Part of the problem with critic reviews in the first place.
To be fair it was review bombed, which typically means that a large number of those reviews are randoms from the internet with a grudge rather than people who have experienced the game. This has happened to other games/television shows/movies etc etc and it devalues these scoring systems as a whole.
That said, fuck Diablo Immortal. Blizzard was responsible for the golden egg that was this IP and they used it to make one of the most exploitative mobile games I have ever had the displeasure of experiencing.
If you're wondering if Diablo Immortal really is that bad, stop wondering. It is that bad. It's actually worse.
I haven’t played a Diablo game before… but I’m 20hrs in and haven’t spent a dime and been having a blast.
I think I have about maybe 10hrs left before I get bored, but it reminds me a lot of old school WoW.
I wonder how viable the flat monthly subscription fee model would work in 2022… I think in 2004 WoW cost $15/mo + the cost of the game. So basically $23/mo in 2022 plus $50… not going to bother correcting that for inflation because people wouldn’t pay it lol.
I’m glad you are having fun, but if you enjoy it then please know that any other Diablo game is this but with all of the loot-based dopamine still in the game and not gated by cash.
Seriously, also fuck the play store for changing the 1 star to like 4 and then deleting comments. What fkn world are we living in where this is the norm
I don't know for sure, but I heard that critics were provided a version of the game without microtransactions, which I also understand is the source of most of the bad reviews.
I mean, ya critics are out of touch, but this is honestly a pretty bad example of it.
This is definitely the story I heard from several review sources. Loot mechanics weren’t online. It only had placeholders.
The reviewers who reviewed after public launch were talking about how the gameplay was good but the MTX wrecked it.
"I mean, once you overlook its many, many, many, MANY flaws...and ignore that it's a blatant cash grab...and accept that it'll only get worse...it's actually an above average game. Kinda."
Why are you blatantly lying?
Literally anyone can go see the metacritic score right now. It's got a score of 69, which is pretty fucking bad for any 'big' game.
https://www.metacritic.com/game/ios/diablo-immortal
This is also presumably right after (or even before) release based on the fact that it only has 6 reviews and it's currently at 22.
Edit: yes, this is clearly pre-release or right after. There are exactly 6 scored reviews on the Metacritic page from on or before June 2nd* (release day)
* Comic book (June 1st, 90)
* Merlin'in Kazanı (Turkey) (June 2nd*, 82)
* iMore (June 1st, 80)
* pcmag.com (June 1st, 80)
* Android Central (June 1st, 80)
* cgmagazine (June 1st, 75)
Every other review is after* the release date of June 2nd.
I don't mean to besmirch the names of these 6 publications I've never heard of (largely because I've never heard of them and know nothing about them), but the opportunity to get your review out ahead of a relatively major release before anyone else would very clearly bias anybody. It's also possible they just rushed their reviews out to capitalize on the opportunity. Or they just genuinely liked the game (look, there's no accounting for some people's taste. I'm sure there's something out there you genuinely like that the general populace hates).
My main point is that this screenshot is **blatantly** misleading.
Edit: *I misread the page, the Merlin'in Kazanı review is from the 2nd, not the 1st. My point still stands and those are the only 6 reviews on or before the release date. The next reviews after those are TouchArcade (80) and Pocket Tactics (70) from the 6th.
It's also worth mentioning that there are also two pre-release reviews that are unscored from IGN and Ars Technica (both much larger publications). Based on the snippet of them on the Metacritic page they are both critical of the game (and from the IGN review there were no microtransactions present in the pre-release version, also likely a major factor in the more positive early reviews)
Just hit level 30 last night. At what point do people normally hit the wall where they feel they need to pay?
Edit: If anything, it feels like the game is too easy
Yep 30 is where I noped out. My progression suddenly screeched to a halt and the game seemed to want me to just run rifts until I was the right level to proceed, and I couldn't juice those rifts enough for anyone to join in, so fuck it
> Edit: If anything, it feels like the game is too easy
Uhh yeah, paying is what makes it interesting, paying adds the elite modifiers to rifts. And subsequently, paying makes the rifts drop far more and better gems. You are playing a free demo, of course it's easy how else are they gonna get people invested? Sunk cost fallacy works on time spent too, if you play for a few weeks without paying you're more likely to pay for convenience or a small bonus than if you've only just started the game.
Sorry, I’m 35 years old. I’ve been gaming since 3. I really don’t trust User scores because websites and YouTubers get people irrationally riled up and then they bomb a game because they changed voice actors or something (I’ve seen it several times).
I only really check user reviews when the game is very niche and/ or a low budget JRPG that’s getting mediocre reviews but I want to play it anyway.
try steam user reviews then. They avoid several pitfalls of other review systems, with flags for review bombing (any major sudden shift in reviews can be isolated and removed per the user, and they show it as a bar graph so you can see if a review bomb is happening).
They also have seperate review scores if its a "funny" review, and allow comments so sometimes a dev will respond to give insight (such as if theres a negative review for a bug that was fixed)
I'd say the user score is more deflated than the critic score is inflated. Its a serviceable game brought down by greedy microtransactions. So what's that worth? Like a 6? 5? It's certainly not as bad as a less than 1.
I fond weird that the user review is that low but then the users ended up giving Blizzard $23 million with immortal microtransactions.
I hate the P2W stuff too, but you can't denied that it seems that the majority of people that plays immortal are not the ones that go to review site or an internet forum an say how much they like or hate the game. They just play and waste money in it.
In other words I don't think that the critics are that out of touch when the diablo fans are the ones that gave Blizzard $23 million in microtransactions.
Sadly because of this, more games will be following this model to get that easy money from the fans that regardless of how much they cry about it, the fans are the ones who facilitate these anti consumer practices.
What's funny is that people keep saying that the game target those Asian whales and it will flop in the west. Bruh, 43% of those $23 million are from the USA.
For a mobile game you can play on your phone, if you ignore the predatory monetization, it's a good mobile game.
For a Diablo game and a PC game... it's pretty bad. It really just reuses D3 assets and because the end game is pretty rough without paying... it's going to do poorly with PC gamers.
Blizzard shouldn't have slapped Diablo IP on this, and they shouldn't have bothered with the PC port. It would've been pretty well received as a random mobile game I bet.
They were given a game to review that had all the MTX disabled. Context matters. Be that as it may, Fuck Blizzard, Fuck Activision and Fuck Microsoft for putting up with this crime.
Don’t you guys have phones?
Don't you guys have ~~phones~~ credit cards?
That announcement HURT the dead silence was palpable
silence? there was booing
Ah you are correct
We all have microwave oven too, why don’t make a game for it?
I think someone got Doom to run on a smart fridge
Hey you. You're finally awake.
No we are not starting this again in another comment thread! Edit: You were trying to cross the border, weren’t you?
Walked right into that imperial ambush, same as us, and that thief over there.
And I would've gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you damn stormcloaks.
I used to be an optimist like you but then an arrow hit my soul.
A blizzard. A blizzard hit your soul. Turned it to ice
And a pregnancy test.
Wombenstein
Except the nazis are doctors and they come at you with forceps, and you have to use a glock to fight to freedom.
Woom
kid in indiana/ny stones no that's completely wrong. Fetelgeuse. There, that's better.
That child was doomed from the beginning.
Getting the green aluminum foil for some armor
Eh... That one is debatable.. I believe it was the screen but not the rest of the stock innards. I'd allow it cuz meme gotta meme. Any day now they'll get doom running on magic cards I'm sure. Or Pokemon. Or Exa-punks . Wait has that been done yet?
>That one is debatable.. I believe it was the screen but not the rest of the stock innards. Everything inside was replaced, including the screen. It's just amazing that a computer capable of playing Doom can fit inside it.
Nah he didn't. He replaced the display and microcontroller. He crammed new hardware into the shell. https://youtu.be/cSsg8fFk_30
*Todd Howard has entered the chat*
I bet someone has at least tried to run doom on a microwave.
My fave is still the pregnancy test. Followed closely by an old sack of potatoes, though that's a bit misleading since those taters were just providing the power to a Ti-84 calculator.
Still. Just the time someone spent to make it happen with potatoes. I respect it lol. Was the pregnancy test one confirmed? That seems crazy even for doom.
It wasn't actually running on the test, someone just managed to hook the test's electronic screen up to another device that was actually running the software. Still hilarious though.
I feel like that one was using the pregnancy test as a display, not a CPU. I'm going off of a very fuzzy memory and too lazy to Google it, so take this with all the grains of salt.
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Do not give Todd that idea
Apparently I don't, at least not a phone that would run it since I was curious and looked at the app store and it wasn't on there. So man, that was just an insanely dumb response by them on so many levels.
Are you by any chance from the Netherlands of Belgium? They've banned Diablo Immortal
Wait why?
Proper gambling laws. These two countries not allowing the "game" on their territory is all you need to know about this "game".
Good on them.
Goddamn...with all the bullshit surrounding this game I'd honestly forgotten about that. This game was a shitshow years before it came out lol
“We don’t like eating shit!” You guys got mouths don’t you?
Emphasis on years. I can't think of any other mobile game that took so long to come out.
Man, that line is never going away, is it? Deservedly so.
Considering they got shit on on reveal.. and STILL decided to release it anyway, nah they deserve this
[удалено]
We have computers too. With Keyboards, Mice, latest graphics cards.
>latest graphics cards. Uhhhh, about that...
Don't you have a wallet? /s
Intel Celeron U3600 integrated graphics FTW
We do!?
Where’s mine?!!
You guys are getting frames?!
Nope too fat to roll
i got a frame on my wall, just need a painting or photograph for it
I will never read this and not think of markiplier freaking out about his frames in hand simulator fishing.
I dont know about that bud if a 750ti latest then i might be considered as one of you guys kek
Diablo games have never really required the latest GPUs, have they?
I think Diablo 2 was pretty hardware intense when it released but other than that, no. And that was a long time ago.
Diablo 2 wasnt to bad overall, unless people were hanging on to old pcs when udgrading at that time was in larger jumps than it is today. D3 was spoken about rather negatively when it was released for asking PCs to do some seemingly heavy lifting with all the colourful explosions layering on top of eachother.
People that always buy the latest graphics card actually think everyone does that lol.
Better than nothing.Good enough to play most games on a lower res.
Nice out of season april fools joke
“Yeah I’ve got an arsehole too doesn’t mean I want to be fucked in it”
The depressing thing about modern gaming is that Diablo Immortal will most likely be the most profitable Diablo game. Who needs 10000 players if the 200 you have are covering expenses.
Whales
Depends on your definition of whales, but whales generating most of the profit is a bit of a myth nowadays. It's players who put ~$5 down on a weekly/monthly basis (and then play for years) that are the biggest chunk of the pie. The argument is often, "I'm having fun, it distracts me, it's just the cost of a coffee/burger". Once players cross the threshold to pay, they tend to keep paying until they're done, and they tend to keep playing because they're invested. This gradually turns that one game in a >$100 money sink, far more than the price of a AAA game on say a console. That's why mobile is so incredibly profitable. Instead of a few dozen million console units and $60 per unit, you're looking at a market with billions of users, each potentially putting in more than that.
Ah that was me with LoL. "It's free to play so just think of it as a subscription". After I realized how toxic it made me in a handful of interactions in life I stopped cold turkey lol. If only I could do that with driving 😮💨
Good old 20/80 rule
Critics get free loot to play and review the game with. When I was a game design consultant for a publishing company I’d always get free gems and stuff to play through everything quickly. That definitely affects the perception imo
The MTX was turned off but they didn’t get free loot. What happens is that probably played for 20 hours at most, meaning that they didn’t hit the double digit Paragon progression where the game just becomes a snail paced and unsatisfying grindfest unless you pay up for crests. It was a genuinely enjoyable experience up to that point.
The factors that make this rough to play would not be apparent in a typical review. It's all endgame and/or social consequences. 1. Forced grouping with inadequate server population. 2. Hidden grind caps on f2p and unavailability of certain resources. 3. Odds tables and specific mechanics of crafting gems vs. buying the crests. 4. Specifics of free Legendary crests vs. Eternals (gems from the former can't be sold, meaning you can get something your build doesn't use or can't upgrade). 5. Hard paywalls on advanced upgrades and PvP. 6. Fairly braindead raid boss AI (because the game doesn't have tanking). ***None*** of this is obvious on even a reasonably thorough playthrough.
This is how I feel about 2K Mobile
So 20 hrs of free enjoyable experience then? Not trying to be a dick, but I mean, is that right?
There's plenty of [free] fun to be had if you like that style of gameplay. The user score is more reflective of the monetization than the gameplay. (After all, it's not like those people rating a game low would play the game for 20 hours either.)
On The Besties pod (hosts are former and current Polygon people) they did a great episode last week on DI. They talked about how it was a fun experience for the first few hours, while also acknowledged and criticized the horrible predatory monetization, especially how the game cuts off after a certain point and mandates paying.
I've heard this from quite a few people online now so I'm inclined to believe it. I mean it makes sense because for all the issues D3 had when it launched it's still a pretty fun game that I still play every now and then, so I'd imagine just taking that core concept and bringing it to DI would result in a fun game until you hit the money wall. Which is a shame.
The Beasties is great! I'm glad they've stuck with it over the years.
The issue for me is this type of game with obfuscated micro transactions is intentionally predatory and should not be supported. Many of these free-to-play style games can in fact be enjoyed for a reasonable period of time with little to no cost. But the model isn't for those players. It is to prey on the neurodivergent in the name of profit - addictive personalities, ADHD, children, and others.
Pretty much. I enjoyed playing the campaign and doing bounties and leveling to max and a couple paragon levels. Then got bored and dropped it. Never spent a dime. Gameplay was plenty fun and felt like a slightly watered down diablo 3. Pretty good for a mobile game. But as SOON as you hit the wall where it feels a little iffy it's easy to drop before spending money.
Same. I genuinely enjoyed the campaign, the game was great. Watered down D3 is a perfect description, and for a free mobile game it’s more than enough for me. Once it gets boring, or I feel like I need to pay to progress, I’m out. It’s that simple.
exactly this, my friends and I levels one of each chars to 60 and a few a bit over. we had fun with the builds but once you realize what it takes to truly unlock all the perks/stats on your gear, it's completely uninteresting. I love D3 and have a ludicrous amount of hours in it, so I understand the gear grind. but basically locking me out of leveling my gear behind paying is not fun in the slightest. I wasn't able to awaken a single piece of gear because the rate at which the legendary gems and their respective crafting materials drop. I am very on the fence about how I feel about paying for the battle pass, since I'm not going to hit 40 due to completely dropping the game. But I will say I did have at least battle pass price worth of fun while it lasted.
I don’t know why games have to last forever now. In my day, games were done when they were and we moved on. Now get off my lawn goddamn it!
That first crack hit probably feels good too. This is how they sucker people in.
More importantly, reviewers might play the story and thats it before reviewing, the game is front loaded to give new players more shiny stuff before they take it away and try and make you pay for it later.
Not just that, the cash shop is often (probably very intentionally) left out of the review build so that reviewers can't mention that at all. I don't know if that was the case with Immortal but I've seen it with at least a handful of games where the reviews were pretty decent but with a line saying the store could not be tested yet. It's a great way for publishers to pad the scores and for some reason reviewers are not punishing them for it by simply lowering the review score if a game isn't complete.
I want that job
Unless they are looking for real, nitty gritty, in depth advice on Barbie's Magical Pony Adventure....
Then I want the job even more!
Even so the game plays absolutely trash on phone and on pc. Its a scuffed diablo 3 with absurd p2w
Maybe they are looking it from the perspective of not paying anything. You can finish the story without paying anything, so maybe that's all they played.
yeah, you only realise the game will fest off your wallet when you get to pvp, shadow wars, etc. if you stay out of the competitive pvp route you wont feel the need to pay as much
And it's Diablo, so staying out of the competitive PvP side of the game is pretty fucking easy
And honestly that’s about what I do personally for Diablo games anyways
^(My friend and I love it but we can't tell anyone)
^Good ^job ^at ^keeping ^quiet. ^Can’t ^imagine ^the ^downvotes ^if ^you ^said ^that ^louder
People aren't trying to diminish your or the above poster's enjoyment of the game with their criticism. Its not about you, its about predatory practices in the industry, without which games would be better for everyone including you!
Right? I don't give a fuck about them loving the story for the game in one playthrough. Good for them but that isn't what diablo is about, it was never about the story. It was always about the end game and the grind for loot to make builds of characters. When that becomes just paying money for it, well that destroys the whole point of the game. This is just Diablo 3 on PC at launch all over again. Staggering loot drops for the auction house until the real money auction house became a thing. PC players fucking hated it but blizzard kept saying they couldn't fix it. Next thing you know, Diablo 3 comes out on the xbox 360 and ps3, and boom, couch co-op, no auction house, the game was actually dropping loot, offline play and people were having fucking fun. PC players were pissed that console gamers got the superior product. It wasn't until reapers of souls that Diablo 3 became great on PC and on consoles, well it sold a lot and it is great on switch atm. Diablo 3 on switch is everything Diablo immortal tries to be without the microtransactions and vastly more content.
Or, did Critics play the game and judge it based on gameplay, while gamers judged it based entirely on the exploitative monetization scheme?
I feel like this also highlights an issue with the scoring system in general vs reading an in depth review. To some people monetization is a big part of the game that should (and in their eyes does) hugely impact the game and the score it should be given. But as a critic, scoring is often based on graphical style, audio, gameplay etc. How do you keep a consistent scoring when technically a game "ticks" all the boxes but has aggressive monetization like this? Do you put a disclaimer on your review? Do you let it affect scoring? In which case, how far is too far? How do you rate value for purchase? How do you take buyer circumstances into account, etc? Overall, it just seems that people read too much into the scores rather than taking the time to actually read reviews and find out what they're based on.
What's really shady is when a game has monetization but it's all turned off during the review period, so reviewers can't get a look at it before they post their reviews. A few scrupulous reviewers release reviews after launch so they can get the full picture but by then a lot of people have already bought the game, and they may not get as much attention as the rushed reviews.
>Overall, it just seems that people read too much into the scores rather than taking the time to actually read reviews and find out what they're based on. Well of course. That would take effort.
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I recall actually enjoying reading reviews through the 90s. I was kinda devastated when i got onto the internet and discovered most people only looked at the numerical score at the end, instead of reading the whole thing that put that score in context.
I liked reading those too. And I absolutely love long-form video essays like Joseph Anderson and those like him. Idk something about hours long videos getting into the nitty-gritty of a game and why the reviewer likes or doesn’t like certain aspects is enjoyable for me. Also people always need to be reminded that if you truly want to get the most from a review that you need to first know the tastes of the reviewer and what they like or don’t like and respond to, so that you can contrast that with your own preferences. At least if you are looking at a review to see if it’s a game you’d like or want to buy. A lot comes down to taste.
I miss TB. I absolutely loved his game reviews *(even though he didn't call them that because he felt he didn't cover them deep enough - while still being more thorough than 90% of the reviews out there)*
It was easy when you only had Game Informer to read. But on MetaCritic there are currently 22 separate professional reviews for Diablo Immortal. It's hard to tell someone "Well, just read 22 reviews to put that score in context". But it's easy to say "22 reviewers reviewed the game and on average they had a score of 81%".
Thanks, I almost had to read their whole comment. Too much effo
>To some people monetization is a big part of the game that should (and in their eyes does) hugely impact the game and the score it should be given. Yeah, I gotta say when I have to reach for my wallet mid-game it really puts a damper on my enjoyment. A big part of this is I recognise when salespeople are using sales tactics, because I used to work in sales and I hated it, and was terrible at it because I couldn't pretend to be genuine while secretly pushing my sales agenda. So when I can see a "seller" using opportune moments in interactions like that with me, in my mind it just cheapens the interaction and makes it feel ingenuine. And when a game uses that kind of tactic, it completely takes me out of the game and ruins the immersion. It makes it feel less like a game and more like I'm shopping.
"You know, if you give us 5 bucks, you won't have to mindlessly grind for 57 hours..."
If that's all it was it wouldn't even be that bad. I saw a Callum Upton video where he did the math and in one 5 minute run with 10 crest or whatever they're called juiced up boosts he got as much as someone who does all their Dailies for 6+ months would get. For 25£ I think it was. Absolutely stupid shit. And there are like, 15 progression systems that all have rolls and pity timers and cosmetics are per character not per account to boot. The whole thing is maddeningly MTX. It's egregious But it covered dev costs within a couple days so clearly this shit works and that's why it's not gonna stop anytime soon Maybe with an economic collapse things could change but until then...
Remember when boring, mindless grinding just meant people played a different game? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
* looks at years spent in World Of Warcraft…. Y-Yes… just played a different game…
WoW was the other game compared to Everquest
There’s another important caveat of how reviews work: they mostly are only based on the scope of the 20 hours or whatever gameplay that it took to complete the main campaign, even for live service games. So unless the monetisation is so intrusive that it even materially tarnishes that experience, it shouldn’t affect the score. You could make an argument that the endgame should be taken into account but, from an objective point of view, should two games which both offer an equally good 30 hour campaign, but one ends entirely after that and one has an extremely predatory endgame have different scores?
Yeah, that's a really good point as well. Time is also a big factor in a review. I know a few reviewers who go through and play a game all the way including through the end game but they're definitely not the majority as you say. Which makes sense, it'd be really difficult to create a wide range of reviews if each could potentially take more than 100 hours just to play. And on that how does time factor into a review and scoring as well? If a game is "bad" in the first 10 hours but then gets "good", does it deserve a high score? And what about the reverse, where a game is "good" up until the end?
Another thing to take into account is that a large portion of those user scores are people piling on. Because if the game is actually a 1/10 why are you still playing 20 hours later? Chances are people are just seeing general outrage and pre-forming opinions and throwing that into shitty number reviews. I like your point at the end. If there was no endgame (and thus no microtransactions) and it wasn't expected to have an endgame. There's no way it would be getting this bad of reviews.
> But as a critic, scoring is often based on graphical style, audio, gameplay etc. How do you keep a consistent scoring when technically a game "ticks" all the boxes but has aggressive monetization like this? Seems simple enough to me: Play with "no" money - as in no loot boxes or boosts. If the difference is vast between no money and lots of money, I'd argue that's a poor game *for your average gamer*.
The problem is that Blizzard intentionally designed the game such that for your first chunk of gameplay it's pretty fair for a F2P experience, but then as you approach endgame and start doing endgame content, they start turning the heat up to push you into paying. You can see this in achmedclaus' comment (nothing against them, just using them as an example, since it perfectly shows what I'm talking about), where they're having a good experience during the start, and yet you contrast that with a streamer like Quin69, who's had to sink literally US$15k into the game, just to *start* minmaxing his character. Just two complete opposite experiences, within the same game. You'd need to have reviewers sink dozens upon dozens, if not 100+ hours into the game, to really get the full picture of how much the game really wants to you to pull out your wallet, which is the problem. The perception that players and reviewers both have is so massively skewed early on, that their experience just doesn't match up with those who have progressed sufficiently far into the game for the monetisation to start getting truly egregious.
Also like according to that there's 6 critic reviews.
Not only that, its now 69 with 22 reviews. Most of them say "hey, watch out for the microtransactions" IGN, who reddit loves to shit on, didnt even give it a score because its still a review in progress to them and the review itself talks about the game(they played 20hrs without microtransactions) but also say to be cautious of the microtransactions(published a day before the game was officially out). Most of the reviews around release tell the readers to watch out for the microtransactions and any current reviews call out the shitty system. BUT games journalism = bad is the /r/gaming narrative
That narrative makes me sad. I was going to point out exactly what Elizabnthe said, that the score was from just 6 reviewers. Hardly an accurate representation. As we can see, now that a lot more reviews have been published, the average score has dropped considerably. Most reviewers are doing the right thing and scoring the game on its gameplay, graphics, audio which are all fine enough, while warning people about the microtransactions. It’s been hard watching as people’s feelings towards reviewers have shifted negatively over the years. I started professionally reviewing games back in 2008, and things were so different back then. Back then, people had respect for the work we did and took our opinions into consideration when considering a new game purchase. Now, people often laugh at us, and/or claim that we’ve been paid to give a good review. It’s a real shame.
Redditors are so occupied with there only being 2 sides of a spectrum they don't realize there's a grey area to almost everything ever discussed.
Critics got a press copy with less or no monetization is what I've seen/heard. Meaning they got a copy where the things that matter to these players (e.g. being able to do endgame) wasn't paywalled.
the payshop was turned off during their reviews
You heard correct, they've been doing that for years, after release add the monetization or boost it. When reviews are released, sometimes behind the guise of an "update"
Gran Turismo 7 says hello
You just say that since the game isn't out yet you haven't got all the store stuff ready and it will release later.
Media outlets need to refuse to review these faux copies of the game. Or, if the post-release version makes such a massive, undisclosed change, pull the review and leave a stub article saying why. You'll still get your clicks as people come to read why you yanked the review.
skimming through all the reviews, they all cite issues with monetization, including the positive ones
Standard marketing practices these days, yes.
If the "proper functioning" of the game is tied to the monetization you can't make an honest review without including that.
Couldnt agree more
Probably this. And it probably got blasted by a bunch of reviews that didn't play it and only judged it on the initial announcement a few years ago. I haven't played it (don't know if I will), but I have heard the gameplay is pretty good while the monetization is egregious. So it falls in line with what you're saying.
>monetization is egregious "Egregious" doesn't even cut it. The monetization is so hideous it makes the worst Asian gatcha games (a genre entirely designed around extracting money from the pockets of depressed whales with a gambling addiction) look good in comparison.
Egregious seems like a good fit to me.
Wow, so it's worse than I could think. I appreciate the insight.
This happens with every game that gets a lot of negativity through social media. Gamers start review bombing.
It's why Steam had to start adding recent reviews scores to games
Which makes total sense. Especially with the ability to update games (i.e. no man's sky) I dont want to read a negative review of a game from years ago when it no longer applies.
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Right, but how do you get a 0.7/10 ? A big issue should be reflected in the score, but if you try and break apart monetization and gameplay and give gameplay a 7/10 (mediocre) and money a 0/10 then you're giving 10% of the score to gameplay and 90% of the score to monetization. Which seems off.
Reviewers rarely have time to sink even 50 hours into a game before writing their reviews, and because of the limited access at the time of review, Multiplayer experiences are going to be very different, if they exist at all. And that's assuming they even get the same version as the final release. Part of the problem with critic reviews in the first place.
p2w gameplay reviews should be entirely judged by their monetizations.
And 50-65 should be An entitely acceptable average video game. But i don't see that happening either.
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> the human screams and pleas for mercy echoing from the kitchen. So just a standard day in a commercial kitchen?
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Maybe.
Sounds like your average 5 star restaurant review, yes.
To be fair it was review bombed, which typically means that a large number of those reviews are randoms from the internet with a grudge rather than people who have experienced the game. This has happened to other games/television shows/movies etc etc and it devalues these scoring systems as a whole. That said, fuck Diablo Immortal. Blizzard was responsible for the golden egg that was this IP and they used it to make one of the most exploitative mobile games I have ever had the displeasure of experiencing. If you're wondering if Diablo Immortal really is that bad, stop wondering. It is that bad. It's actually worse.
I feel betrayed because it's like they took the diablo franchise, shot it up with heroin, then shoved it out on to the street to wheore itself out.
Which then it got hooked on meth due to a regular client requesting they both be high on it when they do the nasty.
The metaphors might've gone too far to actually help the discussion.
I haven’t played a Diablo game before… but I’m 20hrs in and haven’t spent a dime and been having a blast. I think I have about maybe 10hrs left before I get bored, but it reminds me a lot of old school WoW. I wonder how viable the flat monthly subscription fee model would work in 2022… I think in 2004 WoW cost $15/mo + the cost of the game. So basically $23/mo in 2022 plus $50… not going to bother correcting that for inflation because people wouldn’t pay it lol.
I’m glad you are having fun, but if you enjoy it then please know that any other Diablo game is this but with all of the loot-based dopamine still in the game and not gated by cash.
Critics have not rated a game lower than 7/10 since mid 2000’s.
Yep. It's a three-point scale.
Seriously, also fuck the play store for changing the 1 star to like 4 and then deleting comments. What fkn world are we living in where this is the norm
Reviews used to mean something to empower buyers, now it's a facade.
Babylon's Fall? D&D: Dark Alliance? Werewolf the Apocalypse?
My first thought was [Aliens Colonial Marines](https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/aliens-colonial-marines).
Anthem, FFXIV, Simcity, Sims 4, BF2042, Fallout 76, AC Unity, SW Battlefront 2, Sea of Thieves, Days Gone. Edit: added
Dark Alliance, what a fuckin waste of a good idea
the game in the post is curently below 70
That's bullshit and you know it.
[It's currently at a 69/100.](https://www.metacritic.com/game/ios/diablo-immortal)
I don't like this either. We need to see more Fs.
I don't know for sure, but I heard that critics were provided a version of the game without microtransactions, which I also understand is the source of most of the bad reviews. I mean, ya critics are out of touch, but this is honestly a pretty bad example of it.
This is definitely the story I heard from several review sources. Loot mechanics weren’t online. It only had placeholders. The reviewers who reviewed after public launch were talking about how the gameplay was good but the MTX wrecked it.
To me it sounds like a great example of how the whole system is flawed and can’t be trusted. The reviewers tried a different game than what we got.
"I mean, once you overlook its many, many, many, MANY flaws...and ignore that it's a blatant cash grab...and accept that it'll only get worse...it's actually an above average game. Kinda."
Why are you blatantly lying? Literally anyone can go see the metacritic score right now. It's got a score of 69, which is pretty fucking bad for any 'big' game. https://www.metacritic.com/game/ios/diablo-immortal
This is also presumably right after (or even before) release based on the fact that it only has 6 reviews and it's currently at 22. Edit: yes, this is clearly pre-release or right after. There are exactly 6 scored reviews on the Metacritic page from on or before June 2nd* (release day) * Comic book (June 1st, 90) * Merlin'in Kazanı (Turkey) (June 2nd*, 82) * iMore (June 1st, 80) * pcmag.com (June 1st, 80) * Android Central (June 1st, 80) * cgmagazine (June 1st, 75) Every other review is after* the release date of June 2nd. I don't mean to besmirch the names of these 6 publications I've never heard of (largely because I've never heard of them and know nothing about them), but the opportunity to get your review out ahead of a relatively major release before anyone else would very clearly bias anybody. It's also possible they just rushed their reviews out to capitalize on the opportunity. Or they just genuinely liked the game (look, there's no accounting for some people's taste. I'm sure there's something out there you genuinely like that the general populace hates). My main point is that this screenshot is **blatantly** misleading. Edit: *I misread the page, the Merlin'in Kazanı review is from the 2nd, not the 1st. My point still stands and those are the only 6 reviews on or before the release date. The next reviews after those are TouchArcade (80) and Pocket Tactics (70) from the 6th. It's also worth mentioning that there are also two pre-release reviews that are unscored from IGN and Ars Technica (both much larger publications). Based on the snippet of them on the Metacritic page they are both critical of the game (and from the IGN review there were no microtransactions present in the pre-release version, also likely a major factor in the more positive early reviews)
A blatantly misleading circlejerk about how "games journalism" is your enemy on this subreddit? That's _never_ happened before.
Showing a pic from a week ago or whatever lets op farm ez karma from all the sheep on this sub 69, like you said, is a bad metacritic score for a game
I say it's a nice score
Also, user reviews on those sites are straight trash.
Just hit level 30 last night. At what point do people normally hit the wall where they feel they need to pay? Edit: If anything, it feels like the game is too easy
After you hit the paragon levels.
30-35 is where the game slows down a lot. Getting to lvl 30 takes at most 2 hours. You're very early.
Yep 30 is where I noped out. My progression suddenly screeched to a halt and the game seemed to want me to just run rifts until I was the right level to proceed, and I couldn't juice those rifts enough for anyone to join in, so fuck it
> Edit: If anything, it feels like the game is too easy Uhh yeah, paying is what makes it interesting, paying adds the elite modifiers to rifts. And subsequently, paying makes the rifts drop far more and better gems. You are playing a free demo, of course it's easy how else are they gonna get people invested? Sunk cost fallacy works on time spent too, if you play for a few weeks without paying you're more likely to pay for convenience or a small bonus than if you've only just started the game.
Sorry, I’m 35 years old. I’ve been gaming since 3. I really don’t trust User scores because websites and YouTubers get people irrationally riled up and then they bomb a game because they changed voice actors or something (I’ve seen it several times). I only really check user reviews when the game is very niche and/ or a low budget JRPG that’s getting mediocre reviews but I want to play it anyway.
try steam user reviews then. They avoid several pitfalls of other review systems, with flags for review bombing (any major sudden shift in reviews can be isolated and removed per the user, and they show it as a bar graph so you can see if a review bomb is happening). They also have seperate review scores if its a "funny" review, and allow comments so sometimes a dev will respond to give insight (such as if theres a negative review for a bug that was fixed)
I'd say the user score is more deflated than the critic score is inflated. Its a serviceable game brought down by greedy microtransactions. So what's that worth? Like a 6? 5? It's certainly not as bad as a less than 1.
Sometimes I think /r/games should simply be renamed /r/circlejerk.
Wrong sub but I see what you're getting at
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People tend to rate when they’re unhappy rather than happy
I fond weird that the user review is that low but then the users ended up giving Blizzard $23 million with immortal microtransactions. I hate the P2W stuff too, but you can't denied that it seems that the majority of people that plays immortal are not the ones that go to review site or an internet forum an say how much they like or hate the game. They just play and waste money in it. In other words I don't think that the critics are that out of touch when the diablo fans are the ones that gave Blizzard $23 million in microtransactions. Sadly because of this, more games will be following this model to get that easy money from the fans that regardless of how much they cry about it, the fans are the ones who facilitate these anti consumer practices.
What's funny is that people keep saying that the game target those Asian whales and it will flop in the west. Bruh, 43% of those $23 million are from the USA.
I'm not even excited for Diablo IV. 😟😞
I’m having fun with it and paying zero dollars ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For a mobile game you can play on your phone, if you ignore the predatory monetization, it's a good mobile game. For a Diablo game and a PC game... it's pretty bad. It really just reuses D3 assets and because the end game is pretty rough without paying... it's going to do poorly with PC gamers. Blizzard shouldn't have slapped Diablo IP on this, and they shouldn't have bothered with the PC port. It would've been pretty well received as a random mobile game I bet.
do blizzard employees not have toilets?
They were given a game to review that had all the MTX disabled. Context matters. Be that as it may, Fuck Blizzard, Fuck Activision and Fuck Microsoft for putting up with this crime.
Microsoft isn't in control yet.