Happy to chat about it, HN, since otherwise I'd just be playing more Genshin Impact.
My capsule review of the game nobody asked for: if you like Breath of the Wild, you'll likely enjoy it a lot. It is not as pure of an exploration game at BotW is, and the emergent game mechanics that made BotW such a joy, a toy which produced its own unique stories with every player, are mostly absent. The exploration doesn't tie in closely with the plot like it does in BotW.
But, other than that, it's an extremely, extremely effective game. Excellent art and music design; the graphics compare favorably to anything I've ever seen in an AAA game if you like this anime-inspired visual style.
I find the combat similar to single-player WoW with more interesting strategic choices (regarding party comp, etc) and less interesting tactical choices. Harder encounters are fun puzzles to solve.
While the actual story in the game is nothing we haven't seen done better before, the character interactions are an extremely interesting Chinese take on Chinese/Japanese/Western fantasy tropes. Someone could get an East Asian Studies thesis out of it fairly easily. It's amusing to "read" with that cultural commentary lens on; the localization is also surprisingly well done (including both English and Japanese, to the extent you credit me with being able to perceive that).
The metagame about how to progress as quickly as possible, and where to invest your resources / how to harvest them efficiently, also pushes my buttons very effectively.
I learned all I want to know about that game while my 11 year old was playing it. Sounded like BotW with annoyingly long and useless grinding to get weird crystals or something that are needed to buy better weapons (or buy loot boxes of a sort with low good loot chace, IIRC).
It didn't sound horrible, because he seemed to like the gameplay, but I didn't feel any desire to get into a game where you can pay for benefit (I tend to the other end of the spectrum, repeatedly punishing deaths until you get better, like Dark Souls).
He probably spent a total of ~$80 on the game, over 4-6 months. I don't count that as too bad, as it's not much more than buying it and an expansion would cost, and it provided him a lot of entertainment. That said, the reason it as only ~$80 is because I was controlling the purse strings.
That's the rough part with acquiring characters (or anything) through the equivalent of cash-funded roulette: you can set out to spend a certain amount to attain something you want, but it might not work, and if you're sufficiently unlucky it may turn into an order of magnitude more spending than you originally intended.
While you could of course commit to only spending $X and dealing with the results even if they're unsatisfactory, this can be surprisingly difficult psychologically, combining the best of the gambler's fallacy with the sunk cost fallacy (among many other behaviors very cleverly inspired by the game's developers) into one.
Worse for me, as I'll likely ignore the pay route and go the exceedingly long and grindy route, and if I feel they've made that far too punishing for the rewards, I'll likely feel the game isn't rewarding enough to play. I'm not really interesting in proving to myself that I can pay money to do better than other people, so it doesn't help me enjoy games that are competitive in any way, and if it's a non-competitive game, I just feel like I'm being manipulated, which also saps the enjoyment out of it for me.
I don't mind purely cosmetic offerings being present in games, and I'll even buy a few. But if I feel like I'm competing on a field that's stratified by money, it just kills the enjoyment for me. It's the same reason I stopped playing Magic: The Gathering back in the mid nineties a few months after when it was first released. It was fun when we all had starter decks, but after friends started collecting special cards, I saw where I thought it was going an opted out. The realization just sapped a lot of the enjoyment out of the game for me.
I feel like that a lot, so called pay-to-win games (or perhaps pay-to-progress) aren't my thing either for similar reasons, even though I could afford them. I've played GI for a bit, but very casually (even more so as it doesn't run on Linux, so I've only played it on mobile myself), and as long as I am finding things I enjoy, for example the music, voice acting, and UX, I don't mind the game's profit model, but I definitely will end up playing less when/if I reach the point(s) to where I am increasingly penalized for not paying.
At some point I hope this model evolves to engage content creators.
Clearly the biggest "draw" for these sorts of games is new content, and that is a sort of sunk cost with developers who pay people to create new content so that they can monetize it.
However, when it shifts into something like an MLM scheme where an "end user" can develop new content and then deliver it through the game engine, and then the game engine owner and person who developed the content "share" in the monetization (one by game sales etc, the other by in game currencies) then games like PoE and others can grow diversity without hiring.
The incentive alignment is pretty clear, really avid players can both improve their own playing experience (enrich themselves in game) by doing this, and the game developer gets more people playing because there is such an interesting mix of things to do an see.
At some point this evolves into market exchanges where people who can conceive compelling stories find others who are skilled at art or puzzle design and they can form a group for the purposes of delivering a bit of gameplay content that they share in the rewards from.
If you are having a hard time visualizing this, consider WoW for a moment. Let's say Bliz had a way for an avid player to "design" an NPC, write their back story, their interaction dialogs, and the quests they would give in the execution of their "story". An artist teams up with this person to provide textures for either an existing character type, or potentially designing a completely new kind of creature for this. All WoW quests have a fairly fixed set of game mechanics choices to work from so putting those together in ways that are interesting might be the role of a third member of this ad-hoc group. Once completing the story line you have access to a vendor NPC who will sell you various items for WoW gold (pets, spells, recipes, etc). If the "team" that came up with this whole package got a cut of the WoW gold that the vendor received for their wares, that would provide an incentive to this team to make their content compelling. That may be all the incentive they need. And Bliz gets a quest chain + vendor + content that enhances game play for all players and keeps it fresh.
Sort of like the virtual gig economy where players add content to the game in exchange for in game currency.
What you’re describing sounds a lot like Second Life, which launched in 2003 and is still running. (Incidentally, to tie it back to Genshin, Second Life recently banned gacha-style transactions on its platform [0])
I'm familiar with SL. And yes it has some of the elements of this, what it doesn't have (or didn't when I last looked at it) were constrained physics story lines and a questing model tied to in game currency. Mostly it was around converting "real" money to "Linden" Dollars[1] to facilitate in-game transactions.
[1] And at the time (2008) there were sites that would convert your Linden dollars back into cash.
> If the "team" that came up with this whole package got a cut of the WoW gold that the vendor received for their wares, that would provide an incentive to this team to make their content compelling.
There's have to be careful thought as to how this works, as the incentives might work out to a lopsided amount of content that maximized the thing that resulted in designer compensation.
Since the resources used aren't really an internalized cost in most cases, the NPC needs to be balanced against an idealized cost/value system that is often judgement based, meaning that a lot of work is required assessing if the designed asset is good for the system or not.
The simple example would be an NPC that if you walk up to grants you ten minutes of immunity for 1% of your wealth. Not only will something like that be extremely popular on it's own, if the designers get a percentage of the received gold, they are incentivized to make it always used. Maybe that means making it easily available almost all the time, and only taking 0.1% of wealth, so people use it even more often. But the real question is, does that break the game? The designers can be entirely motivated by profit, and not care about overall game function and health. The only way to combat this is to either carefully align incentives such as game health to function which is tricky (everyone might love the immunity boon for the first week and always profess to like it but end up playing less because of less challenge and engagement) or to have the game runners carefully assess and tweak all submitted proposals, at which point what you're getting from the public may not be worth it.
Maybe it would work if it was more just a nice kickback for contributing though. Design a module or something and submit to be accepted into core, and if it's accepted into the core you get a set amount of game currency which is predefined at certain amounts based on contribution, and a one time payout. Then the monetary incentive is to appease the game runners and provide something useful for the game, which aligns with any altruistic incentive to improve the game you're playing.
Its a fair point, and as I was saying in another response consider the "App Store" model where this new content is given to the internal team to review before releasing it. Clearly something that unbalanced the game like this would be rejected.
So Minecraft, Roblox, Rust, and other mod-friendly and sandboxed games are close to what you are describing. Centralized games like WoW is almost like the opposite.
In order to support custom content creation and integration, the game needs to have a specific type of asset and tooling pipeline that can be community-driven, something that's more or less determined at the conception of the game.
I agree with you in that we do need more big studios stepping in this direction. It takes guts for these CEOs and CFOs to say to their investors "Yes we will have first-class mod support, LAN support, and give the players the tools necessary to alter the game with their creativities."
> So Minecraft, Roblox, Rust, and other mod-friendly and sandboxed games are close to what you are describing.
Yes they are. There are also 'total conversions' in the gaming community where a game had nearly all of its assets replaced to become a new game. The pieces are all out there, but they haven't yet combined into a single thing yet.
We often think of ideas as being these amazing things that spontaneously spring into existence, however they are more often the amalgamation of a bunch of things that have emerged on their own and then contextualized in a way that unifies them into a cohesive whole. My thinking is that distributed game economies are going to be such things.
One of the early things about WoW was the emergence of "gold farming" which exploited legitimate game tools (questing, mailing gold to other players, in game transactions) and demonstrated you could earn real money off players by selling them virtual goods. Personally, I think that was the point when game product managers said, "Hmmm, that is money we could be making" and the "freemium" model was accepted as a legit model.
They still keep 'game flow' and 'game assets' in house however, but the curated app store model has shown business people how you can let third parties make stuff and then give them a platform to sell it and skim the profits. When you combine these two models in games you get this new thing.
That's a very interesting point about WoW. I was not a hardcore WoW player but I did play on and off in my high school years (Vanilla + Burning Crusade).
I remember selling 1000g for $50 USD at some point. Then a month later the average price for 1000g dropped to $15. It seemed like the price would eventually match the absolute lowest of 3rd world labor cost (until WoW tokens were introduced). So that pretty much aligns with your point of management finally giving in to the new model.
> the curated app store model has shown business people how you can let third parties make stuff and then give them a platform to sell it and skim the profits.
After being involved in both kinds of work fields (content vs platform), I can say that it's really a grass-is-always-greener-on-the-other-side thing. When we were making in-house contents we would think how nice being a platform is (no creativity involved, just skim off other people's success). But when we made our own platform, we often felt the insecurity of not having our own contents and people jumping ships. Plus, licensing headaches and dealing with lawyers became a norm.
The only kind of platform that doesn't have this issue is one that is a near monopoly (cough App Store). Netflix, after realizing the rise of their competitors, went to town with in-house productions and declared "Content is King".
I like Breath of the Wild, but trying Genshin Impact was like having a root canal done on my brain. After around 30 minutes of playing it I had to put it down, grinding a game for the promise of being able to buy microtransactions is not a effective way for me to spend my time. Maybe it's just because I'm not an MMO fan, but Genshin feels like a regression in the genre of JRPGs.
I'm of two minds on it. On one hand, yeah. Grind for a chance (a low one, even among other mobile games) of pulling a favorite character can be a discouraging model. And having no end in sight can be disenheartening for those wanting to binge on a compelted game.
But on the other hand, JRPGs tend to not get major updates, and are now taking 3-5+ years per game to meat that criteria. Unlike fighting games, you can't make meaningful character DLC post release that would mesh into the game. The very closest I've seen to this in modern times is Kingdom Hearts' 3 DLC letting you play as 2 additional characters... for one specific boss fight each out of a ~5 hour DLC of a 30-40 hour game.
Meanwhile, new characters, events, and areas drop monthly for Genshin. Without a direct subscription cost if you treat the game as a JRPG with some 4-5 playable characters gotten in story (which is average for a modern JRPG) and ignore the new characters other JRPGs don't have the option for. There are some very niche benefits and workaround of issues most JRPGs have today in Genshin.
----
I don't really have much of a point here. Just rambling on some musings that I wish console JRPGs could take lessons from. I guess I just miss those days where is didn't feel like Final Fantasy (and ONLY FF) was the only big JRPG in town pushing graphical boundaries, and Genshin gave me some of those vibes. Moreso than any JRPG in the 2010's outside of FF and KH. Tales of Arise coming in a few weeks gives me some hopes, but I want to hope this isn't just a one-off fluke in the genre.
I think the distinct lack of enemy diversity is what kills it for me. Even the boss designs are overall lackluster. A bunch of cubes casting spells, or an ice/fire flower. I go to challenge this water goddess thing and instead I fight water squirrels and crabs. That and I can only kill about four bosses a day for rewards.
First going in I thought I would be playing with friends and fighting bosses. Now I've been told not to do that because you don't want friends stealing your chests. Maybe I'm doing things wrong.
Enemy diversity is just part of another big issue for me: General gameplay diversity. Most of the stuff the game has you do outside of story content is just fighting the same enemies or boss types. There's no unique dungeons or bosses, the "domains" you need to farm for gear are all just waves of enemies, daily quests are just killing enemies, etc. There's rarely any unique mechanics or novel ideas that actually change the way you play, which makes the game get stale fast.
Strong disagree, if you like BoTW and are looking for similar you might get tricked into liking it for a bit until you notice how incredibly lackluster it is both at being BoTW (and at being interesting otherwise). The lack of emergent mechanics is a huge deal, but even the basic exploration sucks. Mondstadt is an utterly forgettable area (OK, the town is kind of fine, but the surrounding countryside is samey and unremarkable), and while Liyue is more interesting, it's mechanically awful as suddenly the verticality of the scenery increases massively so now your 'gameplay' consists of micromanaging your stamina meter as you tediously scale mountains. I quit before the new area so maybe it's better, I suppose?
And the non-BoTW elements are bad too. The 'strategic' choices in combat involve knowing what you're going to fight, matching your elements to that as best you can (oh, by the way, the two guaranteed free fire element characters are awful at actually delivering fire damage, so hope you gacha-ed one of the good ones if you need fire element). Where's the interesting strategy there? And then the actual fight is just spamming your attacks and rapid-fire switching characters so the elemental effects stack. Also, quite likely you're fighting a boss design that is literally a cube (there are multiple of these).
The 'meta-game' is knowing which bosses/domains/whatever you're going to grind x times today to maximise the chances of dropping one of the hundreds of materials you need to level up whichever character/weapon/skill you're targeting at this point. It's not exactly complex, the game tells you what drops you can expect. It's just a tedious grind, and it's cynically designed to keep you coming back to the game day after day (for people who haven't played: you can only grind these bosses/domains x times per day, and it doesn't take long before grinding up the materials you need to level up something requires multiple days of this grind. You can, of course, pay IRL money to grind a few more times in a given day. Oh, and you can only grind certain things on certain days of the week. So monday you're grinding for a weapon upgrade, tuesday for a skill upgrade, etc. It's incredibly obvious manipulation.)
And then after all that, the game levels up the world as you progress. You start out the game hitting level 10 hillichurls with your sword 5 times to kill them. After hours of playtime and leveling up and forging advanced weapons, you're now hitting level 60 hillichurls with your sword 5 times to kill them. Wow!
I've seen it announced a thousand times on the trains in Tokyo, and I'm always drooling at how beautiful it looks, but assumed it was just marketing and not the real gameplay. I'll give it a try, thanks for the review!
My capsule review of the game nobody asked for: if you like Breath of the Wild, you'll likely enjoy it a lot. It is not as pure of an exploration game at BotW is, and the emergent game mechanics that made BotW such a joy, a toy which produced its own unique stories with every player, are mostly absent. The exploration doesn't tie in closely with the plot like it does in BotW.
But, other than that, it's an extremely, extremely effective game. Excellent art and music design; the graphics compare favorably to anything I've ever seen in an AAA game if you like this anime-inspired visual style.
I find the combat similar to single-player WoW with more interesting strategic choices (regarding party comp, etc) and less interesting tactical choices. Harder encounters are fun puzzles to solve.
While the actual story in the game is nothing we haven't seen done better before, the character interactions are an extremely interesting Chinese take on Chinese/Japanese/Western fantasy tropes. Someone could get an East Asian Studies thesis out of it fairly easily. It's amusing to "read" with that cultural commentary lens on; the localization is also surprisingly well done (including both English and Japanese, to the extent you credit me with being able to perceive that).
The metagame about how to progress as quickly as possible, and where to invest your resources / how to harvest them efficiently, also pushes my buttons very effectively.