Games as a Service are exhausting. We've been keeping up with this shit for a decade. Its tiring. I don't play games with seasons anymore.
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023
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You don't like standing in circles, and throwing energy orbs at things, for 22 seasons in a row?
Don't forget shooting at crystals and not using the weapon you want.
Bungie really had a thing for making us touch as many balls as possible.
hey now we also have to go between three different telephones the size of washing machines all 20 meters apart in a world where you can communicate across the entire solar system instantly with no delay.
They are still doing that?
exactly. I gave MMOs a try, I gave looter shooters a try, and eventually I figured out GAAS is just not for me. single player offline only games please and thank you.
It's not that my interest is n d2 waned. My Interest is the same, but I'm less and less willing to fork over large sums of money to continue to experience the same game.
First time I'm hearing the phrase "games as a service." What does that mean??
The more established term is a live service game: A game where development continues far beyond release with a trickle of content to keep players playing (and paying).
To put it simply, season passes.
Maybe the interest would be better if the story wasn't rushed garbage.
And for those who say story quality doesn't matter... BG3 is another reminder.
More that there's only so much you can do with a looter shooter. Sure you can dress it up but you're always endlessly shooting bad guys and occasionally collecting things and putting them places. They didn't help themselves by sticking weapon crafting unlocks behind forcing you to do the daily bullshit over and over hoping to get 5 goddamn red borders to shred so you could continue to grind until you finally had a version that you cared about when in reality you probably already got the roll you wanted before you even unlocked the pattern.
OK yeah maybe destiny does suck now and I wish it was season of the forge again.
I don't think looter-shooters (and loot games in general) are inherently limiting, but loot needs to be exciting. I've played thousands of hours of Path Of Exile, and hundreds of hours of other looter games, and what holds my interest is interesting loot and build variety/depth. That simply doesn't happen in Destiny. Compare Destiny to Borderlands, for instance, and you can see how boring the loot really is. Look at games like Path Of Exile, Grim Dawn, or Last Epoch, and you can see how boring the skill trees are. In all of those other games, I've had items drop where I've been excited to redo my entire build to accommodate it, or to make a new character built around it. In Destiny, items just don't feel exciting enough. (Not every game needs to be as complex as Path Of Exile, but Destiny is incredibly shallow.)
And, of course, Destiny's story has consistently been disappointing. There's some great lore there, but they've failed to translate that into a well-told, engaging story over and over again.
combined with fragments, aspects and seasonal mods it's just a spreadsheet simulator now.
When in other games I can pick something up with a big green number and purple text that indicates "this will blow shit up real good" Destiny has a icon with some circles and a dot which indicates that if the community does a few hours of research, I can look up on a third party website that this gun will increase my fire rate by 0.3% but decrease my airborne accuracy by 0 .2% unless I'm within 9 meters of 3 enemies and I threw my grenade longer than 1 second ago but sooner than 8 seconds ago in which case it'll decrease my airborne accuracy by 0.1% and increase any shoe-related buff cooldowns by a third of a second
"is that good?"
"dunno"
See, I love spreadsheets and being able to optimise things, but I do need to actually be able to feel the impact in the gameplay, too. And yeah, Destiny is terrible for that; the buffs and upgrades you do get just feel irrelevant, for the most part. Especially with the terrible scaling system they use where you never feel any stronger against weaker enemies, just weaker against stronger enemies. When getting a huge numerical upgrade (in terms of gear score) doesn't change anything about how the game feels to play, I think that's poor design.
I did have a pretty bonkers warlock build that had a bunch of mods or gear that gave me rift regen, plus the boots that shoot orbs as people while I stand in a rift. I basically just used rift on cooldown and could have as many as 5 at once and spam healed the team. Also used rose to heal as well. Obviously not optimal, but I wasn't about to spend the time collecting the obscure mods and stats that the spreadsheet wizards said I should have, only for the meta to change completely next season.
More that there’s only so much you can do with a looter shooter
Warframe seems to disagree, for better or worse they have a new gimmick every few years to keep it interesting, and a pretty good and interesting story to go along with it. I'd sooner say it's just destiny's problem in this particular case.
Destiny's onboarding for new players is literally the worst. If you don't have a veteran guiding you into the game it's literally impossible to pick up. You want more interest in the game, then make it easier to actually pick it up instead of flat replacing the starter content.
100%! This was exactly my experience when trying to guide a new (to Destiny) friend through the story and get him geared up. He ended up quitting in frustration in less than a month because nothing made sense.
As a gamer who grew up in the 80’s, lots of games that have any significant online component at all feel like this now. If you don’t pick it up in the first couple months, forget it. It’ll be full of people who play 9 hours a day and it’ll have so many layers of systems and currencies it feels like an absurdist satire. Seasons and prestige and lore and so much baggage. I get so tired of asking “wait, can I earn the blue triangles by playing, do they cost real money, do I trade orange circles for them…?”
The very first time a game tells me I have to pay for something with real currency in game that isn't purely cosmetic, it gets dropped. It'll be a cold day in hell before I let a game tell me that the blue triangles are mtx only.
Generally agreed. But it shocks me just how many games out there are making crazy amounts of money just selling cosmetics. I still remember horse armor! It was a scandal!
One of the reasons I still play rocket league now and then. Everyone else can have all the rare cosmetics they want, and great for them.
But when the match starts, we’re all on a level playing field (lol), and when the match ends, it’s because the winning team just executed better.
I tend to find this type of game at least a little less depressing. A fun little skill test with a social component.
I started a game that had been out for only hours (the Finals) and people already had advanced builds and insane map knowledge. These guys are preordering and then no lifeing the closed beta. Its crazy man.
Gotta love dropping $100 on a free game before it’s even out, then drip-feeding it thousands more over time when the game intrinsically provides nothing more than a highly engineered dopamine drip. No story, no meaningful progression, no value or benefit to you as a human, just obsessively learning and mastering a skill that has literally only one purpose on the planet: playing that game.
I'm glad I learned this lesson back in the N64 days when I used cheat codes on Turok to get all the guns and infinite ammo. It was fun for a little while but ended up ruining the game for me. There was one weapon that had a piece hidden in each level and then you only get three shots with it. With the cheats, I just went around spamming it until bored, but then I found I wasn't really motivated to play the game properly. Going out and finding the stuff was as much the game as using it.
So when MTX came along, I remember thinking "holy shit, that's going to make money" after seeing Blizzard failing to stop people from giving money to gold farmers even though they'd sometimes remove items or ban accounts they'd catch doing it. But I also never had much temptation to buy them myself because I knew that I would just be spending money to get bored of the game quicker after a brief time of feeling like I was awesome (which would also be false because putting money into a machine isn't awesome).
Yeah, I’ve become much more of a believer in the craft of a tight, solid experience. That’s so much harder to find than a repeatedly gratifying but ultimately meaningless interaction.
It's by Nexon anyway. If you don't play it you probably dodged a bullet. Their games are extremely P2W and they literally pioneered the earn in-game currency that you can only use to trial weapons and characters method of wealth extraction. It's been so long since I've played one of their games, but that form of microtransaction has always stuck with me as a "if I see it, I'm immediately deleting your game" approach to gaming.
Hell, as a "vanilla" destiny 2 veteran, last time I tried to check it out I had no idea where to go.
A lot of us left because we weren’t satisfied with the dropping quality. Let’s see how you firing the QA will work out for you, chief.
So you don't like running solo Master Dungeons and then being kicked to orbit right at the end?
So you don't like running master dungeons and then being wiped from being crushed by an invisible wall?
Sounds like you don't have Stockholm syndrome.
Sure the ceo is skilled enough to blame waning interest, but is the ceo skilled enough to ask why interest has waned?
To be fair I couldn't tell you either. Destiny has been rehashing the same shit for years now but for some reason this year people finally got fed up. I can't believe it's just because they released a completely filler expansion but most of the other issues have been around from previous years.
Grinding for days for every fucking thing in the game(including the godsdamned fashion aspects) might have something to do with it.
Is there anything to do in that game other than grind?
Roll hunter, triple jump everywhere.
I genuinely want to hear what he thinks the cause of this issue is. Surely he is intelligent enough to put one and two together.
If you continuously underdeliver, repeatedly ignore community feedback, gaslight people into thinking something other than what they believe, and then top it off with mtx of way higher quality than the game itself - that's all we need to know.
Make a good fucking game, and people won't have "waning interest". Even the most die-hard fans within my friend circles have refunded TFS, and I fully understand why
I like to think of CEOs as defense attorneys. They aren't saying what they believe or know to be true, they are saying what their job requires them to do.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
-Upton Sinclair
No shit, they've alienated everyone interested in the first place.
Gaas was a mistake and I'm hoping companies begin seeing this and course correcting. I get why it happened as it was wildly successful for most, but I'm pretty sure customers don't actually want the same game and content for forever. Maybe there's a way to fix it without abandoning the model entirely, but personally I'm hoping it goes away for good.
Very few people want to play a single game forever. But a lot of people are willing to hop from Gaas game to Gass game.
but I’m pretty sure customers don’t actually want the same game and content for forever.
The success of long lasting MMOs like WoW, EVE, FFXIV, GW2, Warframe seems to suggest otherwise, as well does the longevity of games like Fortnite, LOL and other non-MMO gaas games. There are even other examples that I'd count - I'd call paradox games like stellaris GaaS as well since they live off constant updates (stellaris has had them for 7 years now and going) and paid DLC. Hell, there's people that have been playing Ark, Rust and games like that for a decade now.
So I'd say there is definitely an audience for it, a massive one, as long as its done well. Destiny devs just sucked at it and had years of controversies, this is just the latest of their fumbles.
Amazing how just rehashing the same missions over and over again for 5 years leads people to lose interest.
I never played and I don't see myself playing now as I probably missed a lot of storyline and lore that is long gone.