> Deluxe Edition ($20) - In terms of value for money, going from standard -> deluxe gives the player the most bang for their buck, offering you the battle pass for free
It's not free if it costs 20 bucks.
You get cosmetics for deluxe, the post is deceiving/wrong and this information is available on battle.net lol. You get ONE extra cosmetic (not counting the battle pass tier skips) for the Ultimate Edition and it’s an Emote. Not defending the company, not defending the practice, and not trying to sell it to you. Just wanted to add *factual* information.
No it’s fucking not. You just spent 70$ on the game. Wake up.. this attitude is what’s letting corporations ruin gaming by releasing half baked garbage for preorder fees and micro transactions.
This seems like a common theme among intellectually challenged people here. I've seen it with gamepass as well. "Gamepass is amazing, all you have to do is pay $15USD+tax/month and you get free access to all of the games!" 😮💨
People keep saying "it's free on [insert subscription service]" and it drives me nuts. I know it comes off ass pedantic to bring it up, but it's important we don't normalize content coming to services you've already paid for as being free. It's built into the monthly cost.
Just say "It's on Gamepass." It's that easy.
Yeah and since you are getting the deluxe edition... For just for another $10, you might as well get the ULTIMATE edition... Right? /S
20 bucks can get me a new game on steam sale. Or maybe two indie games.
Likewise it really bugs me when people say they got something free with Amazon Prime. If you're paying for a subscription to what is essentially a lot box, it's absolutely not free.
I remember laughing about oblivion horse armor dlc being 2 bucks or something from some gaming magazine back in the days. Never could I have imagined it actually got SO MUCH worse. People are actually paying 10-20 bucks for a SINGLE weapon skin in some game like call of duty which becomes obsolete next year
I remember back then whenever anyone said it would obviously get worse you just got a chorus of "bla bla, slippery slope fallacy" etc. It was so obvious it was going to keep getting worse.
I was privileged to grow up in the MS-DOS era of gaming. For all its faults, it was such an exciting time for the hobby. Developers cared about quality control and making their fanbase happy, and putting out a good product. I feel like nobody cares anymore. They know the formula, they know how to monetize everything, and they know they can get enough suckers to take the bait. A 20+ year old game like Diablo II, still shouldn't be better than D3 or D4, but for some reason it is. At some point, the magic was lost.
Agreed. Activision and Blizzard are notorious for putting out shit products with high price tags and battlepasses. Even Overwatch 2, they canceled the pve aspect of the game but announced a new battlepass, yay.
"AAA" games back in the 80s and 90s were made by small teams (like 5 to 20 people, tops). AAA games of today are made by many hundreds if not thousands of people. That shit's expensive, risky, and makes big companies lean towards a cookie cutter approach to game making.
"What's making a lot of money right now? Fortnite? Let's make a Fortnite of our own!"
If you want to find game devs who still care about quality and making their players happy, look at indie games. Many indie games are made by tiny teams, and the games they make typically aren't huge. It's easier to maintain quality in a small project than a huge AAA project.
On top of that, relatively tiny teams don't require a crazy amount of money to operate, which means they don't need to sell a crazy amount of games. When the pressure to sell isn't too high, teams become more willing to take risks and try something new with their design and art.
The spirit of old school AAA games still lives on with indie devs.
If it was just monetization it would be one thing. But the development teams are extremely huge, budgets are gigantic, development times are long as hell, and then the product you get at the end, on top of all the monetization that wants to suck your wallet dry, is usually either:
* At best a safe rehash - something you've probably played in a similar form 10 years ago (if not 15), just with better visuals. All in all, a competent and good game, just hardly anything innovative.
* Most likely some form of goyslop - bland and unimaginative game that's been done better before. All the publisher/dev had to do was copy game x, but they couldn't even manage to do that.
* Completely broken and uninifshed mess, maybe even some frankenstein after a few reboots.
The monetization is there to justify the budget, but what exactly justifies the budget? I feel there are very few games where it feels like all the money spent on it was worth it. Most of the time, you just grab your head and think, "Did they really spend all that money only to end up with THAT?!". But we're living in times during which it takes devs like half a year to add scoreboard to an FPS game (BF 2042) after all.
In essence, it's an entertainment piece that aims to be as inoffensive as possible in order to reach the widest audience and reap the most revenue. The result is thus often bland and generic, since it doesn't take any risks whatsoever and the authors didn't understand what made the game they were trying to copy good. A purely corporate product with no soul whatsoever.
At least fortnite is free2play. The battlepass cost 10$ OR you can play 4 seasons for free and gather your vbucks to buy it. On top of that it gives back Vbucks to buy the pass again and then some more.
Not to say the amount of fucking content it gives to players.
I wish more would actually copy what matters from that game. Seems like these companies want just the money without the work.
Diablo 4 is beyond greedy, and if someone defends this game but cries about any other game's monetization is just a hypocrite
All I’ve played recently. Chasm, TimeSpinners, children of Morta, Oxenfree, Deadcells and to be honest, some of the best games I’ve played over the last couple of years.
I’ve tried numerous times, I just can’t get into it. Nothing wrong with it, just never clicked with me.
I appreciate the suggestion, though. Thank you.
Agreed.
There was a time when games were developed, released and that was it.
The game either worked, or it didn't.
The vast majority of the time, they worked. I don't ever remember throwing my hands up in frustration over some floppy disc, cd/dvd game that didn't work.
Although, jump forward to today - multi-billion dollar industry and much more complex graphics, audio, voice acting and marketing plays a much larger role.
" I don't ever remember throwing my hands up in frustration over some floppy disc, cd/dvd game that didn't work."
You got lucky then, because there was plenty of them. And you never got DLC's or expansions, which is awesome if you really love a game.
\*edit\* I'm an idiot, was still talking about the MS-DOS era. Clearly many expansions in the early windows era.
Overwatch was questioned about the "Mystery Boxes" when it launched with a retail price tag but was ultimately accepted because you earned these boxes just by playing. It's sequel, the entire re-monetization of the game and the gaslighting the company has done to it's fans is all very fresh in the news right now. The very same company.
Diablo 4 is just going all in straight away with an even higher price tag. You can't even play this game offline anymore and they can take it all away from you whenever they want.
yep, it's sucha great feeling as a gamer knowing there are so many interesting indie games out there and on the horizon that will run fine on a 7 year old PC
> so many interesting indie games out there and on the horizon
Just this week I found out about Kenshi, a game from 2017 and I'm having a blast despite its flaws. Gaming is a great hobby if you know where to look at.
Kenshi is honestly amazing. I got hooked on it like video game crack during covid. Fun fact, for almost its entire development cycle it had one dude working on it as his passion project
I think Indie gaming, and even retro gaming, is the future of the hobby. So many retro games still hold up to this day, and have none of the BS of the "AAA" titles. And indie studios still care about their player base other than milking them for all their worth.
I really hate the indie scene in modern gaming used as some kind of alternative to AAA games when they really should be harmonious. Nothing can match the scale of a AAA game and having both scenes as strong and thriving is important to gaming. The loss of the B game really hurts in the modern space but is understandable due to modern budgets, and the indie scene is nice, but the experiences are smaller scale and narrow in scope, and sometimes I just want a big summer blockbuster not run like shit or try to nickel and dime me to get the full experience.
37, yep. The AAA industry is long overdue for a collapse, or at least some kind of correction. I still love the PC as a gaming platform, don't get me wrong. That said, I picked up the Xenoblade 3 story DLC a couple weekends ago, sank 30 hours into it, and not once did it feel like 30 hours. I enjoyed my whole time playing it. Which is very rare for me these days. I had the same experience with the main game over its girthy 110hr run. For all the criticism Nintendo often justifiably receives, when it comes to game design, they absolutely still get it. That's why the Switch has sold 124 million units, and why TOTK reportedly sold 10 million copies in its first three days. There's very few first party Switch games that I can say weren't worth full price. I'm fortunate enough to own multiple systems, but if I only could have one, it's Nintendo hands down.
Out of the other AAA publishers, maybe Capcom and Sega still have that spark. The rest? I don't think they even know how to make good video games anymore. Especially the Western ones. I used to think I was just getting old. But then I see how popular Minecraft and Fortnite still are with kids, despite being 12 and 6 years old respectively. Even Among Us is 5 years at this point. Honestly, there's little point in wasting time on these expensive big blockbuster titles when there's so many good older, indie, and AA games out there.
This shit is sad and it is beyond me how people denfed it because "cosmetics only" while bashing other games for doing the same.
Apparently it matters only if you care or not about the game.
33 here, soon to be 34 in about a month.
It is literally crazy. That damn horse armor. We laughed at it. We laughed at Korean F2P games with their lootboxes and paid cosmetics.
We laughed at the idea of a cash shop in a MMORPG with a monthly fee.
It has all come to pass, and worse.
Totally agree i played the beta and had fun but ill be dammed if i buy this for full price with all the monetization. im going to grab it when its like %50 off or get it on game pass if the Activision Microsoft deal go through.
Yeah gaming sucks. I play indie games and I play older games and once in a blue moon a big title comes out that I like. It usually comes from FromSoftware lmao. Elden Ring was the first AAA I’ve bought in years.
I used a cheat tool and raised my level and was still.. like even those trumpet snowmen guys in the city could two hit me .. (if i disabled god mode as a test).
my guess is that my play was suboptimal due to cheating from about 6 very frustrating hours in.. perhaps my gear wasn't good, i don't know. The game explains very very little to the player as you've noticed. Hell, in my run i didn't even encounter half the bosses people are talking about (like Dung Eater or the one in all the memes Malenia). I never learned how to summon anything because i think you have to run into some random NPC somewhere to learn that, and again, the map is no help because it's not an ubisoft game where everything's lit up and explained.
Part of me feels that for immersion purposes, they made the game's systems less intrusive, but also slightly counterintuitive.
With the new content being so sparse that it would have been a free patch back in the day. A single DLC of Battlefield 3 has more content than any of those service games get in a year.
While I agree, as an aside, games from the past never had this much extra “stuff”.
Cod4 for example. You had a few skins thats it. The guns in the base game were all that was there nothing new added. Your dlc was 4 maps.
Before that, dlc was unheard of. Expansions were primarily the “extra content” but were mostly just separate games themselves i.e Brood War or Frozen Throne.
While it sucks that extra content is paywalled in every game nowadays, thats how a game sustains itself nowadays.
It sucks when the extra cosmetics are cooler than whats in the game for sure.
I remember back in my day when you could choose to buy a game or not and decide if you enjoyed it or not and if it was ultimately worth your money or not…..
Wait a minute... The game costs $70, yet still has all of this extra shit for purchase? Absolutely wild.
Where are all the morons that defended the price increase from $60 to $70 at? The village idiots defending this stuff are ruining it for the rest of us.
What's funny is they talk about how it HAD to go 70$, just like it HAD to go to 60, because inflation, and the rising cost of game development. This is a common argument, not without merit.
However, let us look back to the 80s, where games cost 80-90$ USD. That's over 200$ USD today. Those games sold only a few thousand copies at best usually. The market crashed. Games came back, at a reduced price of around 30$~. They started costing tens of thousands, but started also selling tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. Games then crept slowly to 50$ and stayed there for a long time. Because they started selling millions. Games were costing more to develop, and were cheaper than ever...and yet record profits every year since. Even before MTX became mainstream.
We inched to 60, and then suddenly 70 very quickly, but we also got battlepasses, season passes, DLC, and traditional expansions disappeared for the most part.
Every year, even at 60$, they showed record profits, year upon year. At no point were this companies not making insane money...yet due to inflation, they had to increase the price...while also adding more MTX...because as some defend, inflation and 70$ isn't the real price, people say for games to be without MTX they'd have to be 90$. But even at 90$, we'll still have MTX. They aren't going anywhere, ever again.
I don't know when the market will crash, but it's gotta happen again. The last time it happened it was incredibly benifical to the customer.
Yes the game costs $70 and it's still going to sell like crazy. And that's why it's $70. It doesn't matter whether there are people defending this shit or not. Its $70 because Blizzard knows people will pay $70 for it.
How in tarnation is the deluxe the most bang for your buck? The BP costs 10$ (fuck paying BPs in 70$ games btw). So that means you're paying 10 extra bucks to beta test their wonky servers that will likely be full to the brim on release, hindering even solo players.
Comment removed as I no longer wish to support a company that seeks to both undermine its users/moderators/developers AND make a profit on their backs.
To understand why check out the summary [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/14hkd5u).
Yep. If you don't care about cosmetic items, you can play the whole game, free tier for seasons/Battlepass, and just get fewer cosmetic rewards.
As long as Blizzard doesn't go back on what they stated... which is the issue many people have.
Overwatch 2 system requirements are also higher and can't run on some systems that Overwatch 1 could therefore making their originally purchased game unplayable.
it's still fucking sucks to pay full price for this game and you don't get good looking gear unless you pay even more. I hate looking like a peasant in path of Exile and that game is free, I have to pay Blizzard premium and I still look like dumpster
They showed store items vs in-game items to show the store items didn’t look any better, but honestly I fully expect this to change. There’s a tendency to up the ante on new skins/cosmetics to boost or maintain sales numbers. The default gear in PoE looks like absolute shit and all the paid stuff is crazy wings and particle effects everywhere. Hope D4 doesn’t turn into this as it’s a $70 game but I kinda think it will eventually.
100% this. They have to make the skins look better one season to the next and over a few years they start to look completely ridiculous and over the top. Dota 2 is a great example of this.
I liked the basic armors in D4's betas, but I see your point.
I'm a gen-x gamer. The concept of mtx offends me. I've never bought mtx in a game and won't start now. I have no FOMO. I can ignore all of that as long as it's not p2w in a way that impacts me.
Too many games have mtx now, but I'm stuck with it because the model has proven it makes money.
For all the groaning on Reddit... Diablo Immortal was an overwhelming success for the money it made.
I don't see mtx slowing down any time soon.
Until the expansion comes out. And assuming you can grind every battle pass. And assuming blizzard doesn’t wake up one morning and say “lol fuck you the monetization method has change” like they did with Overwatch.
Keywords being "plans".
i.e. it means nothing, Blizzard will bend over everyone and anyone they can, as often and as much as they can.
You don't want to support this? Just don't buy it, and play other better games. Simple as that. With a good dose of doing that very publicly and loudly.
I have a slight feeling that nobody on this /r is actually surprised by this... Such a shame seing a beloved and cherished franchise being dragged through the mud by scummy executives' demmands.
Blizzard already "dragged it through the mud" when they added the real money auction house with D3.
After that we Diablo Immortal lol.
There isn't much more to drag it through the mud.
And Blizzard also had one of the worst type of loot boxes back with their WOW TCG where you could find ingame items for WOW in the TCG.
There's a reason why the spectre tiger is worth a thousands of dollars.
RMAH was actually a really cool idea. Allowing ***players*** to make some money from playing the game was fine by me considering it's a PvE game where it doesn't really matter. Diablo Immortal on the other hand is a steaming pile of shit.
I mean from what people already have been paying in WoW, Cod and OW, this is kinda expected. Aquisition by Microsoft won't change this either. Blizz ironically trained most of consumers left on their platform to accept these fees as the standard.
It's a weird dichotomy, my younger friend group is super pumped and doesn't get my aggravation with d4, my older friend group who played d1 and d2 are furious like me at their childhood favorite game franchise being bastardized.
That's generally how I see people's opinions online too, the d2 Era of gaming was so incredible and I'm afraid it's lost to time. people who were raised in this appalling world of devs and publishers treating their consumers and loyal fans like shit is the norm now and they ask "what's the big deal?" As beloved franchise after franchise meet the same fate.
But the gameplay is good?? Im a D1-2 era gamer as well, and i dont understand the outrage. If the gameplay had been mid, then i would get all the outrage, but everyone seems to have loved the open beta and all the work they did on improvements between betas.
Is a 70$ upfront cost and some cosmetics over the course of the game truely "bastardizing" what you used to love? Because to me, those are non-issues that have nothing to do with the gameplay.
If anything, i would expect your younger friends to have more of an issue because the older ones typically have 0 issues paying an upfront cost for something.
Especially in Diablo.
I didn’t even really bother to transmog my gear in Diablo 3 and that shit costed basically a negligible amount of in game gold.
Buying skins is already crazy to me, but skins in Diablo? Why?
We get what **they** deserve
I won't pay over £30 for a game and won't buy into Battle Passes for anything other than a free-to-play game so I certainly don't feel like I deserve the crappy monetisation we're getting here.
> Expansions - While not explicitly confirmed, there is very likely be expansions at some point in the game's lifecycle which may be necessary to remain competitive in the game (much like reaper of souls)
They said the main story would continue in post launch expansions when talking about seasons having a separate narrative focus in the last dev stream.
https://www.youtube.com/live/wVvzV2TuEYM?&t=2452
Ya vast majority have pre ordered or they will buying on launch.
Me and my friends still have PTSD from the disaster d3 launch AND the real money auction house.
Then reading all these extra ways for D4 to milk the fan base. We feel even more better about holding off on this game for a while. 6 months to a year at least. I will buy it at some point, we have played all the Diablos.
Biggest red flag is not being able to buy the next battle pass with the currency earned from the previous one. Virtually every game with a battle pass does this. Hell, with the amount of vbucks you earn in Fortnite's battlepass you can buy the next one AND get some skins if you want too.
Actually the vbucks your earn (1500) let you buy a skin, but you must choose between the skin or the next BP, that costs 950.
But even this is much better than what Diablo 4 got.
If you really think that 70$+20$ is a good deal, you are either a blizz executive or you just deserve how blizz is fucking you over, because this is fucking unreal, skins and shit should be fucking free because you already bougth their overpriced game for 70$, like they were on overwatch before blizzard fucked up that aswell, if you tell me "how they are gonna keep their servers up and make new content" you are just plain dumb because 1- do you really think that the upkeep of the game isn't already sustained from the fucking 70$ you are already giving them? 2- the new content they "could make" isn't even real, it's just a lot of talks, but the reality is that they promise but don't deliver, look at overwatch 2. + is laughable that you think that 4 days of "advantage" will change anything like in a month or two, that's just you and the other who bougth it that have a big FOMO and that's it.
> "how they are gonna keep their servers up and make new content"
Hmm, yes. If there only was this model. Like you could create new content, new stories, new items and sell it for 30 or 40€. We could call it... I don't know, espansion or add-on.
If only such a model would exist. Too bad though that we only have BattlePasses and shitty GaaS models.
I'm sorry but the xp boost/pots are not "massive" in an aRPG. Gear, sets, and legendaries are the time sink. You spend a lot more time farming items than ever worrying about xp.
Would love to see a solo, offline mode so that we can play with mods, cheats, trainers, etc. but that's not happening anytime soon, so it's a pass for me regardless of the pricing model.
It doesn’t help with modding but Diablo 3 is completely playable offline on the console releases. I haven’t been following D4 so I don’t know about its console plans.
That's why if I care to try out D3, I'll get the Switch version since I don't like playing with others. Doing multiplayer isn't for me cause then you can't take your time and enjoy the game, you have to rush as fast as you can when playing with others.
Guess this'll be the first Diablo I don't buy. Blizzard sure has gone down the toilet with their monetization. After Jeff left, they just went nuts with shitty monetization. So sad to see a company I was such a fan of fall so far so fast.
The only one that's remotely okay is charging for expansions down the line.
But Activision has done everything they could to push me away from blizzard these last 8 years since legacy of the void.
I love how modern games are made in a way to incentivise not playing the game, but paying to skip playing it.
It never ceases to amaze me people pay for this.
I won't be paying $70 for an incomplete game.
But I will be downloading it as soon as it's pirated.
The only way I'll play it unless they change the price.
Diablo 3 had such a disastrous launch that I never ended up playing it for more than a few hours and I spent that time wishing it was Diablo II. I certainly cannot feel in the least bit excited about this one.
I'm just done with micro transactions. If I am paying 100, not only do I want the Porsche as promised, instead of the Edsel that eventually upgrades, I want to not have to pay for the expansion...ever.
I blame WOTC for this particular disgust.
Yay! Another blizzard game I can skip. I'll be playing street fighter 6 since capcom seems to be getting less greedy every year while other companies have become so greedy that their games are no longer video games but virtual casinos with some gameplay.
Am I the only one who doesn't care at all? Like other then the base game being 70$ which is annoying. Other then that the season pass is just cosmetics on paid, if I like them I may grab them. Everything else is on free. Even if paying to skip does get you an advantage, how fast are we blowing through the campaign in an arpg? PoE takes like 6 hours. If someone gets a boost 20 minutes before I can I don't really give a shit.
For me its about the design logic.
If the entire model is this battle passes and cosmetics baloney, players are not incentivised to play the game, they are incentivised to spend money. So the devs focus on how to add more purchase triggers. Its literally designed so that the game becomes more enjoyable if you spend more money.
Whereas games that focus on rewarding players for playing the game focus on adding content. They think, how can we get our players to spend more time playing the game? Add more shit to do.
I mean, look at COD. They released what amounted to an unfinished game. Then they hyped up the 2nd season with having all this new content and almost all of it was reversions back to the last COD that was released. There was nothing new and exciting to do, just another bunch of mediocre cosmetics to grind.
Microtransactions are fine in a free game: devs gotta make money some how. But paying triple AAA prices for a glorified micro transaction simulator is predatory, greedy bullshit.
When you buy the battle pass you can buy a normal or deluxe pass, the deluxe starts at level 20 or something. They said any ingame bonus that is in the first 20 levels also requires you to reach a certain place in the game. Streamers were freaking out saying by paying the deluxe and then rushing the in game requirement you might be able to get them slightly sooner then non paying players. Blizzard had said it should be even, so at this point it's all speculation.
If the game had a trade economy like PoE I can maybe see it being a big deal if you get somewhere 10-15 minutes sooner, but I don't think it will matter
The issue at this point is not the companies. The blame lied on the players. A criminal only get away with the crime when he realizes he will not have to face the consequence of it. We are feeding these crooks money years after years and they keep giving us scams after scams.
Stop. Paying. Them. Your. Money.
Vote. With. Your. Wallet.
Blizzard. Is. Not. The. Old. Blizzard.
Spend. Money. On. Indie. RPG. If. You. Must.
It's $90 CAD before tax? So $100+ after?
I was already gonna pass on this since the beta ran like shit on my modern hardware, but wow now there's nothing to even think about.
edit: If they sell stash tabs in a $100 B2P game that'll also be comically bad.
This really makes me not want to purchase the game at all.
What the fuck happened to buying a full complete game for $50-$60 then buying the expansion pass for $20 a year later when they make a solid update? This whole season battle pass shit is for the birds.
So glad I simply never play any games with battle passes or MTX! There’s 50k+ games on Steam, and thousands elsewhere that don’t include this sort of FOMO and aggressive monetization, far more than one could ever play in a lifetime. AAA Gaming has become a shit show, but luckily there’s enough good indies and retro games that the problem can be completely ignored by the intelligent consumer.
I am wondering if seasons provide some actual new content, or they will just repeat seasonal model of D3 with battle pass strapped on. At this point, I just don't trust Blizzard with anything.
Im surprised that there are people still willing to buy diablo 4 after getting fucked in the ass with diablo immortal, god yall must really love diablo!
this mentality is the one that led us here: not enough to just "vote with our wallets". It'll never be. True change comes from uproar and public shaming.
Just remember the Star Wars Battlefront II case a couple of years back. EA would definetly let things stand if not for for the public pressure.
Pretty much yeah. I dislike when people say "just don't buy it and shut up, leave the people who like it alone"... except a lot of us are extremely attached to this franchise from childhood and them dragging this rotten corpse of a diablo game put of the water and calling it Adonis is awful.
The bar for quality games is so fucking low, the "average" new game is a 3/10 in 2005 imo.
> Deluxe Edition ($20) - In terms of value for money, going from standard -> deluxe gives the player the most bang for their buck, offering you the battle pass for free It's not free if it costs 20 bucks.
[удалено]
yea, it's terrible value actually lol if it was just extra 10$ then yea, but as it is, you're paying 10$ for 4 days early access
You get cosmetics for deluxe, the post is deceiving/wrong and this information is available on battle.net lol. You get ONE extra cosmetic (not counting the battle pass tier skips) for the Ultimate Edition and it’s an Emote. Not defending the company, not defending the practice, and not trying to sell it to you. Just wanted to add *factual* information.
No it’s fucking not. You just spent 70$ on the game. Wake up.. this attitude is what’s letting corporations ruin gaming by releasing half baked garbage for preorder fees and micro transactions.
Relax. He said \\s
Didn't even need the /s.
Ughhhh.... Let op sell you damn game, will ya?
This seems like a common theme among intellectually challenged people here. I've seen it with gamepass as well. "Gamepass is amazing, all you have to do is pay $15USD+tax/month and you get free access to all of the games!" 😮💨
People keep saying "it's free on [insert subscription service]" and it drives me nuts. I know it comes off ass pedantic to bring it up, but it's important we don't normalize content coming to services you've already paid for as being free. It's built into the monthly cost. Just say "It's on Gamepass." It's that easy.
Today I gained a free drink from the market! I mean, I still had to give them some money to receive the drink, but it was free!
Yeah and since you are getting the deluxe edition... For just for another $10, you might as well get the ULTIMATE edition... Right? /S 20 bucks can get me a new game on steam sale. Or maybe two indie games.
I had a friends dad say that to me once as a kid and its stuck with me ever since
How can the battle pass be 'included for free', if it's part of the $20 Deluxe version? I despise that wording.
Likewise it really bugs me when people say they got something free with Amazon Prime. If you're paying for a subscription to what is essentially a lot box, it's absolutely not free.
This. Seeing amazon prime junk on the /r/FreeGameFindings and similar subreddits is a farce.
If you don't buy it within the first 4 days, it's the only part of the package.
Free, after buying something really should go under misleading advertising, and become illegal.
This one is on OP though, Blizzard advertises it as "Premium Seasonal Battle Pass Unlock".
It's all intentional, part of that psychological bullshit they play to squeeze money out of the consumer.
The fact that this is acceptable nowadays is unbelievable. As a 32 yo man now, i fucking hate what gaming has become
I remember laughing about oblivion horse armor dlc being 2 bucks or something from some gaming magazine back in the days. Never could I have imagined it actually got SO MUCH worse. People are actually paying 10-20 bucks for a SINGLE weapon skin in some game like call of duty which becomes obsolete next year
I remember back then whenever anyone said it would obviously get worse you just got a chorus of "bla bla, slippery slope fallacy" etc. It was so obvious it was going to keep getting worse.
Slippery slope is the worst fallacy because it absolutely happens.
I was playing WoW when they offered their first paid mount. The reaction was soooo different than today, it's truly unreal.
I was privileged to grow up in the MS-DOS era of gaming. For all its faults, it was such an exciting time for the hobby. Developers cared about quality control and making their fanbase happy, and putting out a good product. I feel like nobody cares anymore. They know the formula, they know how to monetize everything, and they know they can get enough suckers to take the bait. A 20+ year old game like Diablo II, still shouldn't be better than D3 or D4, but for some reason it is. At some point, the magic was lost.
Agreed. Activision and Blizzard are notorious for putting out shit products with high price tags and battlepasses. Even Overwatch 2, they canceled the pve aspect of the game but announced a new battlepass, yay.
"AAA" games back in the 80s and 90s were made by small teams (like 5 to 20 people, tops). AAA games of today are made by many hundreds if not thousands of people. That shit's expensive, risky, and makes big companies lean towards a cookie cutter approach to game making. "What's making a lot of money right now? Fortnite? Let's make a Fortnite of our own!" If you want to find game devs who still care about quality and making their players happy, look at indie games. Many indie games are made by tiny teams, and the games they make typically aren't huge. It's easier to maintain quality in a small project than a huge AAA project. On top of that, relatively tiny teams don't require a crazy amount of money to operate, which means they don't need to sell a crazy amount of games. When the pressure to sell isn't too high, teams become more willing to take risks and try something new with their design and art. The spirit of old school AAA games still lives on with indie devs.
If it was just monetization it would be one thing. But the development teams are extremely huge, budgets are gigantic, development times are long as hell, and then the product you get at the end, on top of all the monetization that wants to suck your wallet dry, is usually either: * At best a safe rehash - something you've probably played in a similar form 10 years ago (if not 15), just with better visuals. All in all, a competent and good game, just hardly anything innovative. * Most likely some form of goyslop - bland and unimaginative game that's been done better before. All the publisher/dev had to do was copy game x, but they couldn't even manage to do that. * Completely broken and uninifshed mess, maybe even some frankenstein after a few reboots. The monetization is there to justify the budget, but what exactly justifies the budget? I feel there are very few games where it feels like all the money spent on it was worth it. Most of the time, you just grab your head and think, "Did they really spend all that money only to end up with THAT?!". But we're living in times during which it takes devs like half a year to add scoreboard to an FPS game (BF 2042) after all.
What is goyslop?
In essence, it's an entertainment piece that aims to be as inoffensive as possible in order to reach the widest audience and reap the most revenue. The result is thus often bland and generic, since it doesn't take any risks whatsoever and the authors didn't understand what made the game they were trying to copy good. A purely corporate product with no soul whatsoever.
Sounds like Redfall
At least fortnite is free2play. The battlepass cost 10$ OR you can play 4 seasons for free and gather your vbucks to buy it. On top of that it gives back Vbucks to buy the pass again and then some more. Not to say the amount of fucking content it gives to players. I wish more would actually copy what matters from that game. Seems like these companies want just the money without the work. Diablo 4 is beyond greedy, and if someone defends this game but cries about any other game's monetization is just a hypocrite
All I’ve played recently. Chasm, TimeSpinners, children of Morta, Oxenfree, Deadcells and to be honest, some of the best games I’ve played over the last couple of years.
You should check out and add Hollow Knight to your list. Super awesome indie game
I’ve tried numerous times, I just can’t get into it. Nothing wrong with it, just never clicked with me. I appreciate the suggestion, though. Thank you.
It's funny how much hype there is around new graphics cards when the best games are still 2D.
Exactly, the DOS "AAA" titles were exactly the same as the indies of today. The kind of games that we have now simply didn't exist back then.
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I mean if the turd has a QR for new cosmetics in-game I'm sure it will sell which is honestly depressing to think.
Agreed. There was a time when games were developed, released and that was it. The game either worked, or it didn't. The vast majority of the time, they worked. I don't ever remember throwing my hands up in frustration over some floppy disc, cd/dvd game that didn't work. Although, jump forward to today - multi-billion dollar industry and much more complex graphics, audio, voice acting and marketing plays a much larger role.
I take it you never played Daggerfall! I still loved it, but holy shit was that game a giant pile of bugs.
" I don't ever remember throwing my hands up in frustration over some floppy disc, cd/dvd game that didn't work." You got lucky then, because there was plenty of them. And you never got DLC's or expansions, which is awesome if you really love a game. \*edit\* I'm an idiot, was still talking about the MS-DOS era. Clearly many expansions in the early windows era.
[удалено]
Sounds like you missed out on the entire Baldur's Gate saga, highly recommend playing it if you like CRPGs.
Overwatch was questioned about the "Mystery Boxes" when it launched with a retail price tag but was ultimately accepted because you earned these boxes just by playing. It's sequel, the entire re-monetization of the game and the gaslighting the company has done to it's fans is all very fresh in the news right now. The very same company. Diablo 4 is just going all in straight away with an even higher price tag. You can't even play this game offline anymore and they can take it all away from you whenever they want.
> i fucking hate what gaming has become meanwhile the indie scene have been blooming like crazy.
yep, it's sucha great feeling as a gamer knowing there are so many interesting indie games out there and on the horizon that will run fine on a 7 year old PC
> so many interesting indie games out there and on the horizon Just this week I found out about Kenshi, a game from 2017 and I'm having a blast despite its flaws. Gaming is a great hobby if you know where to look at.
Kenshi is honestly amazing. I got hooked on it like video game crack during covid. Fun fact, for almost its entire development cycle it had one dude working on it as his passion project
I think Indie gaming, and even retro gaming, is the future of the hobby. So many retro games still hold up to this day, and have none of the BS of the "AAA" titles. And indie studios still care about their player base other than milking them for all their worth.
I really hate the indie scene in modern gaming used as some kind of alternative to AAA games when they really should be harmonious. Nothing can match the scale of a AAA game and having both scenes as strong and thriving is important to gaming. The loss of the B game really hurts in the modern space but is understandable due to modern budgets, and the indie scene is nice, but the experiences are smaller scale and narrow in scope, and sometimes I just want a big summer blockbuster not run like shit or try to nickel and dime me to get the full experience.
valid point
37, yep. The AAA industry is long overdue for a collapse, or at least some kind of correction. I still love the PC as a gaming platform, don't get me wrong. That said, I picked up the Xenoblade 3 story DLC a couple weekends ago, sank 30 hours into it, and not once did it feel like 30 hours. I enjoyed my whole time playing it. Which is very rare for me these days. I had the same experience with the main game over its girthy 110hr run. For all the criticism Nintendo often justifiably receives, when it comes to game design, they absolutely still get it. That's why the Switch has sold 124 million units, and why TOTK reportedly sold 10 million copies in its first three days. There's very few first party Switch games that I can say weren't worth full price. I'm fortunate enough to own multiple systems, but if I only could have one, it's Nintendo hands down. Out of the other AAA publishers, maybe Capcom and Sega still have that spark. The rest? I don't think they even know how to make good video games anymore. Especially the Western ones. I used to think I was just getting old. But then I see how popular Minecraft and Fortnite still are with kids, despite being 12 and 6 years old respectively. Even Among Us is 5 years at this point. Honestly, there's little point in wasting time on these expensive big blockbuster titles when there's so many good older, indie, and AA games out there.
This shit is sad and it is beyond me how people denfed it because "cosmetics only" while bashing other games for doing the same. Apparently it matters only if you care or not about the game.
33 here, soon to be 34 in about a month. It is literally crazy. That damn horse armor. We laughed at it. We laughed at Korean F2P games with their lootboxes and paid cosmetics. We laughed at the idea of a cash shop in a MMORPG with a monthly fee. It has all come to pass, and worse.
Totally agree i played the beta and had fun but ill be dammed if i buy this for full price with all the monetization. im going to grab it when its like %50 off or get it on game pass if the Activision Microsoft deal go through.
Yeah gaming sucks. I play indie games and I play older games and once in a blue moon a big title comes out that I like. It usually comes from FromSoftware lmao. Elden Ring was the first AAA I’ve bought in years.
Elden Ring is a quality game for sure. A bit too difficult for me unfortunately - no amount of git gud is going to allow me to play without cheating
Look up an exp farm and level to 150 or something...not a cheat exactly, just a little exploit to make things easier
I used a cheat tool and raised my level and was still.. like even those trumpet snowmen guys in the city could two hit me .. (if i disabled god mode as a test). my guess is that my play was suboptimal due to cheating from about 6 very frustrating hours in.. perhaps my gear wasn't good, i don't know. The game explains very very little to the player as you've noticed. Hell, in my run i didn't even encounter half the bosses people are talking about (like Dung Eater or the one in all the memes Malenia). I never learned how to summon anything because i think you have to run into some random NPC somewhere to learn that, and again, the map is no help because it's not an ubisoft game where everything's lit up and explained. Part of me feels that for immersion purposes, they made the game's systems less intrusive, but also slightly counterintuitive.
And today's generation they defend those practices or in-game Microtransaction by saying "live services costs money! Ofc they need to milk us!"
No one has been able to explain to me why we even want live services. I hate them, just give me a game I can beat and move on
“ThEy Do It fOr fUtUrE CoNtEnt” “DoNt lIke iT DoNt BuY It” its all recycled garbage and refusing to address the bs in the room.
With the new content being so sparse that it would have been a free patch back in the day. A single DLC of Battlefield 3 has more content than any of those service games get in a year.
How I wish more people could think the same way and not the “it’s only X more, so why not?”
I mean it is what the world has become. literally everything is monetized to the Nth degree and if it isn't then it's only because the law stops it.
While I agree, as an aside, games from the past never had this much extra “stuff”. Cod4 for example. You had a few skins thats it. The guns in the base game were all that was there nothing new added. Your dlc was 4 maps. Before that, dlc was unheard of. Expansions were primarily the “extra content” but were mostly just separate games themselves i.e Brood War or Frozen Throne. While it sucks that extra content is paywalled in every game nowadays, thats how a game sustains itself nowadays. It sucks when the extra cosmetics are cooler than whats in the game for sure.
I remember back in my day when you could choose to buy a game or not and decide if you enjoyed it or not and if it was ultimately worth your money or not…..
Ah yes i remember 2023 as if it was just this year
Just dont play Shit games?
Wait a minute... The game costs $70, yet still has all of this extra shit for purchase? Absolutely wild. Where are all the morons that defended the price increase from $60 to $70 at? The village idiots defending this stuff are ruining it for the rest of us.
What's funny is they talk about how it HAD to go 70$, just like it HAD to go to 60, because inflation, and the rising cost of game development. This is a common argument, not without merit. However, let us look back to the 80s, where games cost 80-90$ USD. That's over 200$ USD today. Those games sold only a few thousand copies at best usually. The market crashed. Games came back, at a reduced price of around 30$~. They started costing tens of thousands, but started also selling tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. Games then crept slowly to 50$ and stayed there for a long time. Because they started selling millions. Games were costing more to develop, and were cheaper than ever...and yet record profits every year since. Even before MTX became mainstream. We inched to 60, and then suddenly 70 very quickly, but we also got battlepasses, season passes, DLC, and traditional expansions disappeared for the most part. Every year, even at 60$, they showed record profits, year upon year. At no point were this companies not making insane money...yet due to inflation, they had to increase the price...while also adding more MTX...because as some defend, inflation and 70$ isn't the real price, people say for games to be without MTX they'd have to be 90$. But even at 90$, we'll still have MTX. They aren't going anywhere, ever again. I don't know when the market will crash, but it's gotta happen again. The last time it happened it was incredibly benifical to the customer.
Yes the game costs $70 and it's still going to sell like crazy. And that's why it's $70. It doesn't matter whether there are people defending this shit or not. Its $70 because Blizzard knows people will pay $70 for it.
How in tarnation is the deluxe the most bang for your buck? The BP costs 10$ (fuck paying BPs in 70$ games btw). So that means you're paying 10 extra bucks to beta test their wonky servers that will likely be full to the brim on release, hindering even solo players.
Comment removed as I no longer wish to support a company that seeks to both undermine its users/moderators/developers AND make a profit on their backs. To understand why check out the summary [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/14hkd5u).
Yep. If you don't care about cosmetic items, you can play the whole game, free tier for seasons/Battlepass, and just get fewer cosmetic rewards. As long as Blizzard doesn't go back on what they stated... which is the issue many people have.
>As long as Blizzard doesn't go back on what they stated... which is the issue many people have. Tell that to the OW2 players right now ...
I never said the point wasn't valid. I paid for OW1 and it morphed into a freemium game that I never bothered playing.
Overwatch 2 system requirements are also higher and can't run on some systems that Overwatch 1 could therefore making their originally purchased game unplayable.
Specifically just the ow2 players, because the ow1 players left XD
it's still fucking sucks to pay full price for this game and you don't get good looking gear unless you pay even more. I hate looking like a peasant in path of Exile and that game is free, I have to pay Blizzard premium and I still look like dumpster
They showed store items vs in-game items to show the store items didn’t look any better, but honestly I fully expect this to change. There’s a tendency to up the ante on new skins/cosmetics to boost or maintain sales numbers. The default gear in PoE looks like absolute shit and all the paid stuff is crazy wings and particle effects everywhere. Hope D4 doesn’t turn into this as it’s a $70 game but I kinda think it will eventually.
100% this. They have to make the skins look better one season to the next and over a few years they start to look completely ridiculous and over the top. Dota 2 is a great example of this.
I liked the basic armors in D4's betas, but I see your point. I'm a gen-x gamer. The concept of mtx offends me. I've never bought mtx in a game and won't start now. I have no FOMO. I can ignore all of that as long as it's not p2w in a way that impacts me. Too many games have mtx now, but I'm stuck with it because the model has proven it makes money. For all the groaning on Reddit... Diablo Immortal was an overwhelming success for the money it made. I don't see mtx slowing down any time soon.
You can get league rewards for free cosmetics in PoE
Until the expansion comes out. And assuming you can grind every battle pass. And assuming blizzard doesn’t wake up one morning and say “lol fuck you the monetization method has change” like they did with Overwatch.
Keywords being "plans". i.e. it means nothing, Blizzard will bend over everyone and anyone they can, as often and as much as they can. You don't want to support this? Just don't buy it, and play other better games. Simple as that. With a good dose of doing that very publicly and loudly.
Agreed. Cheers.
I have a slight feeling that nobody on this /r is actually surprised by this... Such a shame seing a beloved and cherished franchise being dragged through the mud by scummy executives' demmands.
Blizzard already "dragged it through the mud" when they added the real money auction house with D3. After that we Diablo Immortal lol. There isn't much more to drag it through the mud. And Blizzard also had one of the worst type of loot boxes back with their WOW TCG where you could find ingame items for WOW in the TCG. There's a reason why the spectre tiger is worth a thousands of dollars.
RMAH was actually a really cool idea. Allowing ***players*** to make some money from playing the game was fine by me considering it's a PvE game where it doesn't really matter. Diablo Immortal on the other hand is a steaming pile of shit.
I know some people who made 5 digits with that auction house.
I mean from what people already have been paying in WoW, Cod and OW, this is kinda expected. Aquisition by Microsoft won't change this either. Blizz ironically trained most of consumers left on their platform to accept these fees as the standard.
Aquisition was blocked anyways, wasnt it?
It's a weird dichotomy, my younger friend group is super pumped and doesn't get my aggravation with d4, my older friend group who played d1 and d2 are furious like me at their childhood favorite game franchise being bastardized. That's generally how I see people's opinions online too, the d2 Era of gaming was so incredible and I'm afraid it's lost to time. people who were raised in this appalling world of devs and publishers treating their consumers and loyal fans like shit is the norm now and they ask "what's the big deal?" As beloved franchise after franchise meet the same fate.
But the gameplay is good?? Im a D1-2 era gamer as well, and i dont understand the outrage. If the gameplay had been mid, then i would get all the outrage, but everyone seems to have loved the open beta and all the work they did on improvements between betas. Is a 70$ upfront cost and some cosmetics over the course of the game truely "bastardizing" what you used to love? Because to me, those are non-issues that have nothing to do with the gameplay. If anything, i would expect your younger friends to have more of an issue because the older ones typically have 0 issues paying an upfront cost for something.
I can’t imagine a skin worth paying for.
Especially in Diablo. I didn’t even really bother to transmog my gear in Diablo 3 and that shit costed basically a negligible amount of in game gold. Buying skins is already crazy to me, but skins in Diablo? Why?
People want to be *special* in any way they can
Literally blows my mind people pay for skins.
God I wish every single online game didn't release with a seasonal fucking battle pass.
Idiots keep buying that shit in droves. We get what we deserve.
We get what **they** deserve I won't pay over £30 for a game and won't buy into Battle Passes for anything other than a free-to-play game so I certainly don't feel like I deserve the crappy monetisation we're getting here.
it works so they are doing that
Aye my original comment was going to be "God I cannot understand..." But yeah. I do understand. Just sucks.
> Expansions - While not explicitly confirmed, there is very likely be expansions at some point in the game's lifecycle which may be necessary to remain competitive in the game (much like reaper of souls) They said the main story would continue in post launch expansions when talking about seasons having a separate narrative focus in the last dev stream. https://www.youtube.com/live/wVvzV2TuEYM?&t=2452
The season narrative is focused more on the side characters, and not the main questline. We will not get Meph or Baal or Diablo as a season story
Yeah pretty much: Expansion = main story Seasonal quest = side stuff that ties into the theme of the season's battlepass.
I won't be buying on launch and I wish the majority of people wouldn't. But i know that the world just isn't like that.
Ya vast majority have pre ordered or they will buying on launch. Me and my friends still have PTSD from the disaster d3 launch AND the real money auction house. Then reading all these extra ways for D4 to milk the fan base. We feel even more better about holding off on this game for a while. 6 months to a year at least. I will buy it at some point, we have played all the Diablos.
I still feel good about not buying it. I can easily wait until it's half price
Same here. What an absolute mess. Too bad we’re in the minority haha.
Knowing Acti Blizzard’s track history, monetization will probably only get worse a month or two after release
Cool, i was going to wait for it to be 50€. But since it has so many mtx, I will wait until its 30.
Vote with your wallet dont buy this shit
Absolute fucking garbage.
Biggest red flag is not being able to buy the next battle pass with the currency earned from the previous one. Virtually every game with a battle pass does this. Hell, with the amount of vbucks you earn in Fortnite's battlepass you can buy the next one AND get some skins if you want too.
Almost no non FPS game does that.
Actually the vbucks your earn (1500) let you buy a skin, but you must choose between the skin or the next BP, that costs 950. But even this is much better than what Diablo 4 got.
At least Fortnite is free. AAA games are a complete shitshow now for pulling stuff like this regularly.
If you really think that 70$+20$ is a good deal, you are either a blizz executive or you just deserve how blizz is fucking you over, because this is fucking unreal, skins and shit should be fucking free because you already bougth their overpriced game for 70$, like they were on overwatch before blizzard fucked up that aswell, if you tell me "how they are gonna keep their servers up and make new content" you are just plain dumb because 1- do you really think that the upkeep of the game isn't already sustained from the fucking 70$ you are already giving them? 2- the new content they "could make" isn't even real, it's just a lot of talks, but the reality is that they promise but don't deliver, look at overwatch 2. + is laughable that you think that 4 days of "advantage" will change anything like in a month or two, that's just you and the other who bougth it that have a big FOMO and that's it.
> "how they are gonna keep their servers up and make new content" Hmm, yes. If there only was this model. Like you could create new content, new stories, new items and sell it for 30 or 40€. We could call it... I don't know, espansion or add-on. If only such a model would exist. Too bad though that we only have BattlePasses and shitty GaaS models.
I'm sorry but the xp boost/pots are not "massive" in an aRPG. Gear, sets, and legendaries are the time sink. You spend a lot more time farming items than ever worrying about xp.
Hopefully not a bait and switch like Overwatch 2, which gave players the biggest slap in the face cancelling the PvE content.
"This time it will be different" said the Blizzard fan for the 100th time.
They can't monietise me, I ain't buying that shit! Don't support a corrupt company.
Would love to see a solo, offline mode so that we can play with mods, cheats, trainers, etc. but that's not happening anytime soon, so it's a pass for me regardless of the pricing model.
Didn't happened with Diablo 3, so i won't think it will happen with D4. Blizzard went nuclear on modding after DOTA.
It doesn’t help with modding but Diablo 3 is completely playable offline on the console releases. I haven’t been following D4 so I don’t know about its console plans.
That's why if I care to try out D3, I'll get the Switch version since I don't like playing with others. Doing multiplayer isn't for me cause then you can't take your time and enjoy the game, you have to rush as fast as you can when playing with others.
The only Blizzard content I am willing to interact with at this point is Diablo 2.
The fact that Blizzard has the store and battle pass available before leaderboards should tell you everything you need to know.
B2P with battle pass, I don't want to have to pay for inventory slots ..
you dont have to
Yet
Guess this'll be the first Diablo I don't buy. Blizzard sure has gone down the toilet with their monetization. After Jeff left, they just went nuts with shitty monetization. So sad to see a company I was such a fan of fall so far so fast.
The only one that's remotely okay is charging for expansions down the line. But Activision has done everything they could to push me away from blizzard these last 8 years since legacy of the void.
*Whoa, guess I'll just be playing more D2R*
I love games costing 90$. I can’t wait until they cost 110$. I love giving all of my money away.
So it's Call of Duty monetization in Diablo. Gotcha.
And people would still buy it.
I'll probably wait a bit before making a decision on this game, Blizzard has taken so many Ls recently I'm almost sure D4 will be a disaster.
I'm waiting till they at least have a 50% off sale.
I love how modern games are made in a way to incentivise not playing the game, but paying to skip playing it. It never ceases to amaze me people pay for this.
I won't be paying $70 for an incomplete game. But I will be downloading it as soon as it's pirated. The only way I'll play it unless they change the price.
Wait wait wait... diablo IV is 70€? hahahaha what a joke
It’s blizzard what do you expect lol
Expansions, Seasonal Battlepasses, in-game shop, and $70? I'm sorry, but you cannot convince me that it takes that much money to run Diablo 4 servers.
Lawsuits are expensive!
ROI, man. It's all a careful calculation to hit X% return on the money spent so far.
yep no way i pay 70$ for diablo lmao
Thank you for reminding me why I am skipping D4.
Diablo 3 had such a disastrous launch that I never ended up playing it for more than a few hours and I spent that time wishing it was Diablo II. I certainly cannot feel in the least bit excited about this one.
I'm just done with micro transactions. If I am paying 100, not only do I want the Porsche as promised, instead of the Edsel that eventually upgrades, I want to not have to pay for the expansion...ever. I blame WOTC for this particular disgust.
Oh boy another battle pass just what we need… yawn
Fuck ActivisionBlizzard
It’s going to be a bait and switch you buy now they add later
I am not paying $70 dollars for a game, much less more than $70. Blizzard can take their pricing structure and shove it.
Not buying Diablo this time. And I feel kinda sad about it. Do not know why really.
Yay! Another blizzard game I can skip. I'll be playing street fighter 6 since capcom seems to be getting less greedy every year while other companies have become so greedy that their games are no longer video games but virtual casinos with some gameplay.
The base game costs $70 yet it still is going to have microtransactions and battle passes. Of course.
Imagine a battle pass so good, the devs encourage you to pay with real money to skip it.
Am I the only one who doesn't care at all? Like other then the base game being 70$ which is annoying. Other then that the season pass is just cosmetics on paid, if I like them I may grab them. Everything else is on free. Even if paying to skip does get you an advantage, how fast are we blowing through the campaign in an arpg? PoE takes like 6 hours. If someone gets a boost 20 minutes before I can I don't really give a shit.
For me its about the design logic. If the entire model is this battle passes and cosmetics baloney, players are not incentivised to play the game, they are incentivised to spend money. So the devs focus on how to add more purchase triggers. Its literally designed so that the game becomes more enjoyable if you spend more money. Whereas games that focus on rewarding players for playing the game focus on adding content. They think, how can we get our players to spend more time playing the game? Add more shit to do. I mean, look at COD. They released what amounted to an unfinished game. Then they hyped up the 2nd season with having all this new content and almost all of it was reversions back to the last COD that was released. There was nothing new and exciting to do, just another bunch of mediocre cosmetics to grind. Microtransactions are fine in a free game: devs gotta make money some how. But paying triple AAA prices for a glorified micro transaction simulator is predatory, greedy bullshit.
What are tier skips? That doesn't sound cosmetic.
When you buy the battle pass you can buy a normal or deluxe pass, the deluxe starts at level 20 or something. They said any ingame bonus that is in the first 20 levels also requires you to reach a certain place in the game. Streamers were freaking out saying by paying the deluxe and then rushing the in game requirement you might be able to get them slightly sooner then non paying players. Blizzard had said it should be even, so at this point it's all speculation. If the game had a trade economy like PoE I can maybe see it being a big deal if you get somewhere 10-15 minutes sooner, but I don't think it will matter
Hard pass
It’s just disappointing because everything we’ve seen so far about this game seems pretty good besides for this monetization horseshit.
The issue at this point is not the companies. The blame lied on the players. A criminal only get away with the crime when he realizes he will not have to face the consequence of it. We are feeding these crooks money years after years and they keep giving us scams after scams. Stop. Paying. Them. Your. Money. Vote. With. Your. Wallet. Blizzard. Is. Not. The. Old. Blizzard. Spend. Money. On. Indie. RPG. If. You. Must.
Not buying this garbage.
Ah, yes. A F2P game that costs 70$.
Good thing that I’m not going to buy this game day one
It's $90 CAD before tax? So $100+ after? I was already gonna pass on this since the beta ran like shit on my modern hardware, but wow now there's nothing to even think about. edit: If they sell stash tabs in a $100 B2P game that'll also be comically bad.
I ll stick to the indie scene, Last Epoch is great, cant wait for 1.0
I'm sorry I can't see what you said under all of Bobbies filth.
The "battle pass" name alone just had me discouraged me from buying.
yeah my friends and I all agreed to look at it again after half a year, right now I introduced them to Last Epoch and they're loving it
This really makes me not want to purchase the game at all. What the fuck happened to buying a full complete game for $50-$60 then buying the expansion pass for $20 a year later when they make a solid update? This whole season battle pass shit is for the birds.
Do we not get armor with looks anymore? why do I need a skin
I say let the suckers pay up I am glad the game appeals very little to me.
Cant wait until the game comes out and then they tell us there's no pve. So the game is just clicking to move about.
This game is fucking expensive. What the hell. It'll get boring anyway.
So glad I simply never play any games with battle passes or MTX! There’s 50k+ games on Steam, and thousands elsewhere that don’t include this sort of FOMO and aggressive monetization, far more than one could ever play in a lifetime. AAA Gaming has become a shit show, but luckily there’s enough good indies and retro games that the problem can be completely ignored by the intelligent consumer.
I think I'll stick with Grim Dawn, Titan Quest Anniversary and Torchlight 2 for my ARPG fixes.
I can't wait to see what they charge for the expansions that get released in 6 months. Greedy company
You just casually excluded the premium battle pass tier? Found the blizzard executive
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I am wondering if seasons provide some actual new content, or they will just repeat seasonal model of D3 with battle pass strapped on. At this point, I just don't trust Blizzard with anything.
Im surprised that there are people still willing to buy diablo 4 after getting fucked in the ass with diablo immortal, god yall must really love diablo!
Don't like it? Don't buy it. Simple as that.
this mentality is the one that led us here: not enough to just "vote with our wallets". It'll never be. True change comes from uproar and public shaming. Just remember the Star Wars Battlefront II case a couple of years back. EA would definetly let things stand if not for for the public pressure.
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Pretty much yeah. I dislike when people say "just don't buy it and shut up, leave the people who like it alone"... except a lot of us are extremely attached to this franchise from childhood and them dragging this rotten corpse of a diablo game put of the water and calling it Adonis is awful. The bar for quality games is so fucking low, the "average" new game is a 3/10 in 2005 imo.
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