I do love last epoch a lot. It's uniquely fun just because it's doable just to make builds yourself and find enjoyable and good synergies and take those builds all the way to endgame.
I never really described myself as a Gamer, but I wouldn't deny it if someone called me one. Blizzard fans have made me describe myself as someone who plays games, but is not a Gamer(tm).
I think the only "AAA" thing I'll consider is the next Doom game, but fuck preordering. Dark Ages actually looks slow compared to what I look for now anyway.
Never could get into that game, I do like deep systems but not so much path of exiles where you pretty much create a character that is useless then you have to make a new one and follow a guide. I do appreciate it's existence but I liked torchlights more casual gameplay and aesthetic.
Bought at %50 off and still don’t think I’ve gotten value out of it. And then kind of feels bad that I won’t really be able to go back to it after the next expansion because I feel the base game will then be obsolete without it.
I don't understand. I play Diablo 4 all of the time and I've never had a microtransaction. I've had a macro one because that game cost like $70 when I bought it, but nothing after that. Why do people do that?
Who knows... I think all the ones you can buy are ugly while the free ones from seasons are pretty cool. Would never buy anyway if they changed that but I am happy as it is now.
My coworker plays those F2P games on her phone and she has shared that she's felt guilty that she played this game for like 500 hours and haven't spent anything, and considers throwing them $5-10 bucks a month.
She's also the kind of person who has like 8 tv subscriptions.
My experience:
I do the game sharing trick on xbox where you and a friend can mutually access both of your digital libraries. Preordered collector's edition, which included 5 days of early access before launch. Blizzard had implemented a special access control on the server side which checked for a unique collector's edition license. My friend could download and launch the game using my license but couldn't login during early access. I refunded my purchase because the point of the extra cost was invalidated by that.
I later bought the standard edition. My account still had all the preorder and collector's edition bonuses, including MTX currency & a battle pass token. Said token was later redeemed by mistake via Blizzard's dark pattern implementation at the start of S1. There was some backlash about that at the time which was certainly valid, but personally I didn't feel affected because I got it at no extra cost.
I've played for 1000s of hours since but never spent the free in-game currency. I had never seen another player in-game using MTX cosmetics until the wings items were recently added as preorder bonuses for the upcoming expansion. It's not surprising that only 15% of the revenue came from MTX because the paid cosmetics are pointless, expensive and they aren't substantially better than the free ones. Using transmog at all robs the player of any sense of cosmetic progression. Paid portal skins are kinda cool the first time you see them, but the free activity-specific ones like for infernal hordes are cool too.
I'm left confused at why someone would boast about these figures given they're evidence of not having implemented any solid post-launch monetisation strategy, and more generally the half-baked nature of the post-launch development for the game. The MTX is purely for vanity and it doesn't even achieve that. The skins might as well be a dork sign. I wouldn't be surprised if their revenue figures included my original purchase as well.
tl;dr my read is that this dude has done more to unintentionally subvert blizzard's MTX sales than he's done to generate them
My brother plays a lot of D4 himself and even though he does spend money on the game for the battle passes (I think), he never bought skins because he feels the same way you do: your characters look less like they're your own because the armour you equip is not visible. Then again, I'm wondering what else they could sell that isn't cosmetics. Change the way spells look maybe?
From a developer perspective, tonnes of stuff. Shortcuts, power (edit: see Diablo Immortal for some live examples). From a gamer perspective, it's really the ideal scenario in this day and age, but Blizzard'll cop hate all the same.
Other similar games like Last Epoch are doing paid alt animations for skills, but Diablo team just aren't that creative, and the game wasn't designed well enough to accommodate something like that.