this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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The main issues I have with it are the grinding rpg style gameplay loop, and forcing players to return to the ship as often as possible.
Maybe I'm being too cynical but I assume its to try to get people to play as long as possible and look at the storefront as often as possible.
You can unlock a lot of things for free including some premium currency, but that's just to increase player familiarity with the premium store and to make the player think about the cosmetic upgrades as often as possible.
Another issue is with the difficulty scaling: it doesn't scale with the number of players or add AI players to the game if someone drops out. On its surface this can be explained by not wanting to spend the man hours to develop smart friendly AI or put more work into difficulty balancing, but the financial incentives also work against this as without it people are encouraged to invite friends to play with them, thus generating free advertising for the in game store.
That's just a couple of examples, but every game design decision gets influenced to some extent by the way players interact and think about microtransactions. This isn't really the case with baulders gate 3, which is in a completely different league in terms of quality(and dev budget tbf) to hell divers: it feels a bit like comparing McDonald's with a michelin star restaurant π (I haven't played lethal company so can't comment on that one)
Calling you back to the ship frequently so that you have the ability to change planets or change systems. The entire map of the game is basically real time and dynamic with a game master occasionally coming in to fuck with things.
You're supposed to tug of war fight with the AI over different planet systems and objectives. A lot of people are just basically sticking to One Planet their entire gaming session and it's currently causing super Earth to not really gain much ground because they will simply hard liberate a planet say from the automatons but then rush over to the bugs who have taken over a planet in the meantime. You're supposed to try to spread your effort out like it's an actual Active war
And there is so much design language in the game that shows this, did you know that if you are looking out at the ships while you're at a planet that those are fairly real time? Not perfectly obviously but when you see ships out your window shooting down orbitals sending down drop pods or exploding that's all something that was caused by an active gameplay session on that planet.
When people call down supplies you see that, if their ship explodes it means they just lost the mission, it helps you gauge how well a planet is currently going with the idea being you can now decide whether or not this planet is in need of more help or you should go elsewhere.
You also may want to change your loadout, you may have gotten enough metals to unlock a new weapon enough samples to unlock a new strategym or a ship module. So if you weren't frequently going back to the ship to spend them you would be stuck on an equipment set for quite a while which could easily kill the pace of the game.
Literally everyone I know is currently playing the game and I did a little bit of a pole in my group and most of them don't even remember that there is a store for spending real money and not a single one of us ever has spent any real money the game really isn't pushing it hard you can ignore it completely very easily
I'm not saying it's difficult to ignore the microtransactions, but it influences the design in a way I don't like π
I guess it's just not for me as I couldn't care less about the lore or the global state of planets and position of other players ships π