It's no secret that Patrick Johns AKA Sn0H and I have been friends for a very long time. He's an avid PC gamer and notoriously the one who I blame for my obsession with Monster Hunter World and its expansion, Iceborne. He is also one half of the LazyGamers YouTube channel and the mastermind behind the Sn0H01 Twitch channel. He's never been one to bite his tongue about his opinions concerning the gaming industry as a whole and this testimonial that he sent me last week is no different. I wanted to take the time and share this in its entirety since he wanted to me to share this with my readers and followers on here:
What’s happening to gaming? What happened to the days where you bought a game and got a full experience without having paid DLC shoveled down your throat? The days where an expansion to a game was a legit full experience? Now I’m not talking about pure cosmetic DLC, I’m MOSTLY fine with that (Looking at you Dead or Alive with your over 2 grand worth of costume DLC). I’m talking about the dreaded “battle pass” that every game seems to have to have now.
Now there are some cases where a battle pass type thing is mostly harmless - Fortnite, Dauntless, Team Fight Tactics - to name a few. Where you have some free rewards, then a premium track that gives extra cosmetics, and in the case of Dauntless (can’t speak for Fortnite because I do not play it) you gain enough premium currency from completing it to effectively get your next season pass for half off. I’m talking about borderline predatory season passes, where you miss out on potentially game changing items by not buying premium every few weeks.
One example of this is Destiny 2. Now I know it’s semi rebranded itself as a free to play game now so they gotta make money somehow, but in the free season pass you get maybe 4 or 5 cosmetics for completing it (which is quite the hefty grind I might add). The paid one however gets your exotic gear, legendary armor sets, materials, sometimes an exclusive quest for an exotic weapon.
The other example I have is the one that caused me to write this though. Division 2. Now I LOVED Division 1 after they finally did the overhaul a year later, it turned it into a great game, I would have had NO problem paying for expansions for it as well as a battle pass simply because it was a complete experience with a LOT to do. Division 2 however… Well firstly, Massive seems to have taken everything they learned about design from Division 1 and completely threw it in the trash (but that’s a different rant for a different time.). But honestly I don’t regret spending the money on the game at launch and I’ve had enough fun with it that it was worth it.
However a year later, they’ve released an expansion: Warlords of New York. On the surface it seems amazing, we’re going back to New York to track down the big bad behind the virus and end all of it. To the developers credit, the story for the expansion was enjoyable, if a bit pointlessly grindy. It took me about 18 hours or so to complete New York 100%... That’s 18 hours to complete a $30 game, hardly worth it in my opinion. But that’s only the story part of it, as part of the expansion they added a “season pass” type thing to artificially expand the content by adding a set of rogue agents every few weeks. Now on it’s surface I don’t have too much of a problem with it, hey consistent new content, what’s not to like. The reality of it though is that they’re rather uninspired boring rehashing of the same stuff we’ve been doing since the game launched.
The way the seasons work is each season there’s a set of 5 rogue agents that unlock over the course of it, you have to complete certain objectives to “gather intel” on the agent before finally unlocking a bounty to kill them. For instance: One particular one requires you to complete 4 specific invaded missions, then capture a certain number of control points in 4 different zones of DC (did I mention this content all takes place in the base game’s area? Not the new expansion zone?), and complete a bounty in all 4 of those zones before finally obtaining the intel needed to start the bounty to kill the rogue agent. Now here’s the rub: There are ZERO meaningful interactions for this. No special dialogue, no mini missions like the rogue agents in the WONY story had, not even a special one liner from the bounty mission giver upon clearing it. And to further rub salt in the wound, it would appear they’re locking all new skill gadgets behind these seasons. Want that new EMP sticky bomb? Well you gotta grind out all 4 of these agents intel missions to unlock the lead agent who’s bounty rewards it. Massive has also stated that these are limited rewards/bounties as well, so if you miss it, guess you’re never getting that new gadget unless they decide to recycle the seasons.
Add to all this at the same time they’ve also implemented a “League” system that runs concurrent with the seasons. This basically is the meat of their season pass (that they gave for “free” for people that bought the WONY expansion). As you complete challenges and gain EXP from regular gameplay you unlock a few cosmetic items, materials caches, with later levels dropping an Exotic Cache which will give you a random Exotic Weapon or Piece of Armor. Each season is going to run 12 weeks, and will cost $10.
It’s become a worrying trend with modern games where they seem to release unfinished products then sell you battle passes or season passes to add content that should have been launched with the game. Long gone are the days of getting a complete experience out of a $60 game or a $30 expansion, devs (or publishers depending who you want to blame) know they’ve eased the gaming community into being okay with this. Now I’m not an idiot, I realise AAA games cost an extreme amount of money these days, but honestly I think I’d rather pay $10-$20 more at purchase if it meant I was getting the full experience and not a partial game with microtransactions to finish it.
There are some nuances and exceptions to how I feel on this; free to play games, I’m mostly okay with them doing a battle pass type thing as long as it only rewards stuff that’s not game breaking. That’s not to say F2P games are innocent in all of this, MANY of them are plague with blatant cash grabs and pay 2 win mechanics, or in some cases set up in the classic gamble crate setup where the crates are full of 95% useless garbage and 5% good stuff that you have a sub 1% chance of even getting. This kind of crap has seeped into modern console AND PC games due to developers seeing how much money simple mobile garbage like candy crush made.
So far a lot of the things I’ve mentioned seem to be sticking to multiplayer games (a big problem for me since I tend to prefer multiplayer games), but single player games are developing their own scummy issues, such as the episodic release schedule, the perpetual early access cash cow (Looking at you survival games), and again, more of the gambling mechanics. As I get older the more I realise that if this is the direction the video game industry is going, sadly I want nothing to do with it. Gaming has been a huge part of my life as long as I can remember, it’s been a reliable way for me to escape the outside world the unwind. If I’m unable to pay for a game and not have a full experience I’ll just have to give up on buying anything new and just replay old games and more importantly funnel my extra money into more Gundam models.
I'll Weigh in...
Sn0H's not wrong. When a new game releases, I look at it with a sense of dread, even when it is something I really want to play because I know that developers are going to tack onto a season pass or hold off for some sort of DLC component down the line. This type of marketing makes me not even want to buy games at launch more often than not.Capcom has built up a notorious reputation for their shady DLC tactics over the years, but I'm pleasantly surprised with their good will and means of restoring faith with both Devil May Cry 5 and Monster Hunter World. Devil May Cry 5 didn't have a single shred of an additional DLC content outside of the means to purchase all of the skills and/or abilities outright if you didn't want to level your characters throughout the game. Monster Hunter World's content for the duration of it's first year since its release was entirely free from its quarterly new monster updates and regularly event quests and festivals to reward players for sticking with the game. When Capcom announced World's expansion, Iceborne, I was up in arms like most other players that felt that this was going to be Street Fighter IV and V all over again with a new expansion to wrangle out money from players looking to continue to enjoy the game and not miss out on the new content. Even though I was leery about it during the first few weeks of the expansion, I have to admit that I definitely got my money's worth out of it - a rare exception from gaming these days. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, a game that's clearly not for everyone though, definitely gave me my money's worth. It didn't have a shred of additional content after buying the base game.
When Gearbox announced Borderlands 3 last year, I knew instantly that I wasn't buying that at launch from the sheer amount of post-release content that their games have. Hell, I still haven't even touched all of the content in Borderlands 2 nor even started Pre-Sequel, so why even bother getting Borderlands 3 at launch? I'm content waiting for the inevitable Game of the Year Edition that bundles all of that in there for one set price. As much as I loved the PlayStation 4 exclusive Spider-Man game, I didn't spend a dime on buying the DLC episodes separately. After my initial Redbox rental, I waited until the game was on sale and bought the Game of the Year Edition to avoid that unnecessary headache.
I don't play nor invest into too many online multiplayer games nowadays like Sn0H does, but the biggest turn off for me is the fact that you have to have all of the DLC and post-release content that everyone else has or you can't play with them properly. I didn't like it when WWE Games were doing it with their annual releases that tacked on an additional $20-40 to the $59.99 price tag if you wanted to have EVERYTHING out of the box or what was in the pipeline. I still don't understand how players justify that every year. You're paying $100+ for what is essentially a DLC roster update expansion with a new story campaign while playing the same damn game for about 3-5 years now. Mind you that said game tends to remove beloved features in every new release only to repackage them as "new" features down the road.
Hell, I wouldn't even touch a game if it doesn't have any sort of a single player component either. The older I get, the more it feels like pulling teeth to align time tables with friends and/or family members for gaming online or in physical setting/environment. So yeah, I rather not deal with that headache if I can avoid it for the most part.
I'm not crazy about this direction where gaming is leaning towards that you're merely putting down a down payment for the "premise" of a complete product down the line. Gaming is turning into an array of hopes and false promises found on Kickstarter campaigns more often than not. Your $59.99 purchase at launch is merely for an incomplete product which will be finished depending on how much of your hard-earned cash you pump into said game to get the most enjoyment out of it before you're forced to repeat this process all over again. What's even scarier is the fact that companies are digging into their backlogs of older, beloved titles that were complete experiences and offering to remaster, re-release, or remake those properties with a fresh coat of paint for modern era consoles. We've seen it happen already with Capcom's Resident Evil 2 Remake last year, which wasn't a bad game at all, but 2020's Resident 3 Remake has become the hot topic of discussion. It released with a $59.99 price tag and only offered 6-10 hours of gameplay for the entire campaign from start to finish. Capcom bundled it with the online multiplayer squad-based shooter, Resident Evil Resistance, but players have mixed reactions about that too (it was borderline unplayable for the first week of launch before post-launch patches/fixes) with most players leaning towards the opinion that this game could have merely been an expansion to RE2 Remake if there wasn't going to be much effort to spice up the sequel like they did with RE2 Remake outside of the visuals and VERY minor gameplay differences. This wasn't the first time that the gaming industry released a barely passable game at full price for retail and it definitely won't be the last.
I'm currently thirty-five going on thirty-six years old. I have bills to pay and a full-time job, but putting down a $59.99 investment into a video game still feels like a risk more times than not. More often than not, I find myself asking myself time and time again, "Am I going to get my money's worth?" "Is this going to be worth dropping that much cash right now?" "Can I just wait until this drops in the bargain bin?" Very few video games make me question that. I have friends and co-workers who ask me all the time, "Why do you waste your time playing Monster Hunter World all the damn time? There's other good shit out." I could easily stick it right back in their faces and ask, "Why the fuck do you waste your time buying annual bullshit sports games every year?" or whatever is the current cash cow flavor of the month in terms of gaming, but I don't.
The gaming industry is going to continue ripping gamers off like this as long as there's plenty of people who are stupid enough to cave in and settle for this cycle of buying games in installments. I'm no exception. I'm guilty of it too at times. I caved for Final Fantasy VII Remake for crying out loud. We as gamers should be DEMANDING the industry give us complete gaming experiences and not just "settling" for less. I get that these games take time and effort to make, but the players, who clearly are the backbone (i.e. meal tickets) of this industry, should be able to get the satisfaction of going home with a complete product instead of an I.O.U. slip saying, "My bad homie, we got you down the road when we finish this up."
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