The penance design is a bit baffling because VT2 had it down quite well.
I don’t hate them nearly as much as other people seem to. In particular, I don’t mind some of them being wonky and hard to get, it’s just that the corresponding things for Vermintide were so much better (all of the mission-specific stuff, but that’s hard when you can’t even choose your mission!).
I don’t agree at all. Microtransactions like Vermintide did it is perfectly fine. The game costs 40 bucks. That does not cover development costs. I bought plenty of micro transactions in Vermintide, or the extra classes, or the DLC just because I played the crap (I’m not allowed to say s**t apparently
) out of that game and felt that I could absolutely drop a bit more just to support development.
I’d much rather drop another 40 bucks on Vermintide than a Ubisoft tower climber, and as far as the cosmetics goes its completely optional.
On the other hand, you are absolutely right to be wary about this stuff. I get what you are saying even though I don’t quite agree.
The biggest problem with Fatsharks premium cosmetics is that they charge the respective rate for a free to play game. I understand they require a bit of work as they’re fairly detailed but they’re still too expensive.
Couple that with all of the graphical problems of darktide’s premium cosmetics which you can’t try on your character and it’s pretty fair that players feel taken advantage of.
I do think the cosmetics are comically overpriced in this game, but that’s a hard “whatever” from me because I won’t even consider looking at them, let alone buying them at their current prices.
What I’m talking about is when the game has a box price, yet is still designed to be frustrating so that players will spend money to make the frustrating features go away.
Think about this:
Progression is siloed here so that you have to spend more time leveling and gearing each character. It is used to extend your game time with each character, which not only forces you to be exposed to more things you can buy for longer (thanks to no hotkeys for the hub), but also increases the likelihood that you’ll ‘connect’ with each character and want to buy cosmetics for them. The lackluster cosmetics you can buy for in-game currency only helps here.
Then new characters are released which almost certainly will be paid dlc. You can’t really be bothered going through the leveling or gearing process again because you’ve done it 4+ times at this point, but there’s conveniently a range of boosters you can buy (leaked on reddit) which increase the rate of gear and resource drops or boost your XP rate and again, will almost certainly be real-money only.
They’ll probably be perfectly priced for those few extra aquilas you had lying around after buying just more than you needed for your skin bundle, or would’ve been back when they’d “forgotten” to add the aquila pack that matches the skin bundle price. Just enough for a taste, of course, you’ll have to buy more aquilas to keep them flowing.
So now, we’re looking at a possible scenario where:
Now note that that a mere cosmetic bundle is almost half the price of the base game. Imagine what the rest of that list is going to run you, and that the game is intentionally designed to be frustrating for people who choose not to pay past the initial purchase.
This is some Diablo Immortal level garbage.
This admittedly a hypothetical. We don’t know whether classes or boosters will be real-money only. However, it would be totally indefensible if they are, and this is the scenario that I am afraid of. “Development costs” doesn’t cut it.
The one saving grace on the cosmetic situation in the game right now is is that the penance cosmetics are genuinely quite good.
Funny thing is, if it were possible to earn aquilas through gameplay I’d probably have no problem dropping $5 here or there when I get tired of grinding for a new outfit. To make it so the only way to get a premium outfit is to spend almost half the price of the base game just feels unjustifiable.
It could be as little as 1 Aquila for a tome and 2 for a grim, a steady enough drip if you play those missions with any regularity. Seems like a fair enough implementation but I guess they’re really going after the whales on this one.
I think you are wrong on the “losing players” assessment. Tide games always were something you play, burn out, come back few months down the line and so on. So players leaving will be back. It’s not subscription based game. That approach actually respects your time more then using all cheap tricks to keep you playing and calling it “endgame” like many games do.
Pretty funny guy.
Its a case of arguably the best melee weapon being balanced by not being on a melee class. It has poor survivability compared to my Zealot but it clears hordes easily. But not mixed hordes. A few heavy elites will ruin your cleave and you have low dodge count. So im not convinced its that good. Its just really good. Theres no reason to take anything else as a vet.
The video creator framed his comment about MTX spenders and mental health a little differently than how it’s being framed here.
The video defined “whales” as people being most likely to spend a relatively high amount of money on MTXs - and that whales are compelled to do so because of either tons of indispensable income or underlying mental health issues. And that it is the latter specifically that makes Darktide’s MTX shop predatory, because its designed to prey dissportionally on people susceptible to dark patterns and manipulative practices.
There’s still assumptions being made in the above statement, but the point was pointing out the unethicalness of FATSHARK by them deliberately designing systems that prey on a people with certain personalities or impulses.
Not for long, not necessarely for FS games, but for the majority of games releasing in the far future? Definitly.
Remember Oblivion horse Armor? Devs/Publishers will try over and over again to see how far they can go and take one step back for every two they do if there is backlash until we finally succumb to these small changes that become “normal” until we get the next thing to complain they are slowly going to try and sneak into games.
No, it is pretty close to what the content creator ranted about.
What unethicalness did Fat Shark create? A timer? Not unethical. Unethical is not having you confirm charges or double charging and not refunding. FOMO is also not unethical, what others are calling FOMO, everyone else seems to call a limited time sale. The complaints about MTX stem from other areas and often unrelated to the actual store. Simply offering extra products is not unethical.
Know what is unethical though? Saying a business is part of the Chinese mafia simply because they are Chinese. That’s a quote from the content creator of that YouTube video that was shared in this forum. How ethical was that statement?
I watched the whole thing. Video was excellent. Despite the goofy style, he ends up being pretty fair in his assessment. He doesn’t touch on every single thing that they got wrong, but definitely hits the worst offenders. The segment on how the entire game is built around exploiting whales was the most insightful bit.
A hit dog will holler.
I also like making up weird phrases that are completely meaningless to others.
A whack a mole gonna type.
very good video and sums up nicely what many of us are thinking and going through right now
I lived the V2 saga from start to now and it’s just unbelieveable at how Darktide turned out how it did, I can’s state how disappointed I am
Most of the time they don’t even need to step back because there are consumers out there who will just pay anyway. They don’t care about the damage they’re doing.
And then you have ‘premium’ cosmetics like the cowl which would take less than 5 minutes to create the model (including starting up your modelling app) and another few minutes to texture it.
Then they just released it without even bothering to make it work with hair.
This cosmetic in particular is insulting, its an incredibly simple model with an incredibly simple texture with absolutely no functionality to work with the characters its designed to be used on. It removes your hair and facial hair, it clips through everything including the set it came with
The hair removing thing is probably a function of adding a head cosmetic rather than being linked to any cosmetic piece in particular.
They probably realised too late how hard it would be to make every hairstyle work with every head cosmetic, so they decided to just delete hair whenever a head cosmetic is equipped.
That, or the game considers hair and head cosmetics to be the same thing and can only use one at a time.
Neither scenario is super encouraging…
… yet they charge an arm and a leg for these cosmetics. I realise the problem (you get an exponential blow-up of all possible combinations of hair and head gear) but there are ways around that. I hope they figure it out.
To be fair, its really common for games to make it so headgear removes or remodels the character’s hair. It’s a corner that gets cut in games that ship way more feature complete than DT, so I guess I tend to not really expect it. Unfortunate and hopefully it’s something that gets fixed later on, it would make the headgear options look a lot better and more worth buying, and customization options as they are now are pretty weak considering how much FS hyped the system up.