What you need to know
- As Dragon’s Dogma 2 launched on PC Thursday evening, a previously hidden suite of microtransactions became available for purchase.
- Things you can buy for the single player ARPG include fast travel points, Rift Crystals for hiring Pawns and buying special items, appearance change and revival consumables, a special camping kit that weighs less than normal ones, and a few others.
- In response to the microtransactions, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is being review bombed, with the game currently sitting at “Mostly Negative” on Steam.
I will die on the hill of “Oblivion’s horse armor DLC was not the beginning of micro transactions”
Because it wasn’t. There were micro transactions for games long before the hore armor thing. Also, horse armor was a one-time purchase for that mechanic.
I think Double Dragon 3 unlocked certain moves depending on how many quarters you’ve put into the arcade machine. Also some of those cryptic NES games would have hint hotlines that would cost a ton of money, this stuff is old as hell.
It also had literally no game impact. It was purely cosmetic. There are far more egregious examples.
It was armor. It’s… of fucking course it had mechanical impact, that was the point. Only the color was cosmetic.
But mounted combat in Oblivion wasn’t really a thing, so your horse having armour never ended up mattering.
Horses pick fights in Oblivion. A lot of them get killed. Horse Armor was a direct response to player complaints.
The first game I remember seeing MTX in was gunbound, a game that was like worms Armageddon. You could earn in game currency to buy equipment or you could spend a bit of real world money on them. And before that, gold farmers and their buyers would get banned in waves on WoW. I knew instantly when seeing the gunbound system that it would make money.
Personally, I always had contempt for anyone who would pay money to gain an advantage in a game, but the fact that they kept banning more farmers and buyers in WoW told me the demand was there even when it was risky, so when the game itself was selling that shit, it would do even better.
Though I can also thank Turok for N64 for teaching me that using cheats just increases the rate at which the game stops being fun. Paying to win would do the same thing, only it costs you money to ruin the game.
The currency-selling started way before wow too. In one mmo the money-spiral went so far the drain that people who played 8 or more accounts simultaneously were the tits. You had to buy a 2nd acc at the very least to be half-way competitive. It disgusted me so bad that i ultimately quit this otherwise beautiful game (dark age of camelot).
As to cheats. I love cheats and use them to my hearts desire. Be it to see everything on the first run (there are too many games in my backlog nowadays) or to make a fun 2nd run, or just to skip things i don’t enjoy (like carryweight in an rpg, me being a hoarder). I never cheated in online games of course. That would beat the purpose. Using denuvo anticheat on a singleplayergame just to make cheating impossible so that people buy their cheats… That’s where they can really suck my schlong and I’ll just pirate.
Yeah, anti-cheat is clearly being used here to try to prevent mods that can give the mtx items for free. Or, maybe worse, allow people passionate about the game to come in and make a better version than the people selling it made because a passion for the thing itself tends to give better results than just the passion for money the business majors calling the shots have.
But it was the “beginning” with the most exposure to the average gamer. Everyone hated it, nobody wanted it, yet seemingly more than enough still bought it, which ultimately lead us here.
Yet, which game exactly started it, isn’t important for my point being. It somewhere started, and we still purchased and decided with our moneyz if such practices are fine with us. And obviously it was fine or else this thread Wouldn’t be there.
Oblivion’s Horse Armor was probably the start of DLC though, maybe. At least with consoles?