Hoping to cover costs solely from cosmetics is a pie-in-the-sky fancy and they knew that, the only way that works is if your game blows up in the way that only those rare, 0.01% of games do. Saying they expected that to work out was some fucking bullshit. I sympathize with their plight, it’s obvious that if the options are sell DLC or shut down the studio, you sell DLC, but it shouldn’t have happened like this.
They were dishonest at worst or brutally naive at best from the start. I’m willing to accept that latter simply because these were originally Reddit people who wanted to make their own mark on the genre, but it’s still inexcusable. I have zero involvement in the industry and I could tell you that was not gonna work out.
I totally agree with ditching a game over MTX, but doesn’t PoE also want to stick its hand in your wallet? Making a game more restrictive to sell “quality of life” is just as bad as selling a character.
Everything is cosmetic last I checked aside from stash tabs, which granted should be earnable in-game, but it’s nothing like an entirely MTX-only class. I do wish the game had a transmog system though at least, even Diablo 4 does, and we all know how Blizzard is.
Could be better, could be worse.
That’s rough. I tend to cycle in and out of games (particularly ARPGs).
Paid DLC content acts as a deterrent to me going back to a game that I only play fairly casually. Not saying that I won’t do it, but it does raise the bar on my expectations.
But this one really stings.
“Half baked skills and items for the existing classes have never been fixed, tooltips LITERALLY LIE TO YOU in some cases”,
Text is the easiest thing to fix in a game. And that just reeks of shotty work, especially in a MMO.
As soon as Krafton bought them out it wasn’t just downhill from there, it was a steep drop off a cliff. The game had so much promise but got royally fucked.
Shoddy? Or shitty? Honestly probably both. Lol.
But in case you didn’t know.
It’s not an mmo.
It’s an arpg
Mmos and arpgs are intrinsically linked by their gameplay loops. Admittedly, this can vary to a greater or lesser degree depending on the specific games being compared, but Diablo 2 was, in many ways, proto-WoW.
Nah. Both games have some pretty different mechanics.
They also have a lot of nearly identical mechanics.
Alright. Gimme some specifics.
In other news, runescape classic is still good.
They should have just put a fork in it when it became very apparent early on it was too ambitious for the studio to handle. And that was long before it blew up in popularity. Now the game has been unprofitable for the past few expansions and their owners are coming to collect. Live service was a massive, greedy mistake as Bungie is also not learning with D2.
After ditching D2 last year well past the 10k hour mark, I’ve been bouncing around a bunch of different games, mostly working through the backlog but also looking for a long-term grind to scratch that same itch. Out of everything I’ve tried, PoE2 and Warframe feel like the only ones doing live service “right”, especially the latter. Between both games, the only MTX gripe I have is PoE2’s stash tabs.
Last Epoch had a ton of potential but the team were in way over their heads and forced to start cashing in, and the Krafton buyout was the nail in the coffin. It feels like they just flat out didn’t have the budget to keep it going.
I fuuuuuucking KNEW IT.
But grim dawn has classes in the dlc expansions 🤔
Grim Dawn was an excellent and finished game on release, and said DLCs came out years later via DLCs that acted as expansions to the campaign.
Last Epoch doesn’t even have a complete story, just some unfinished tripe with no real lore and oh here’s a bunch of alternate versions of how the unfinished thing you encountered could have happened differently.
They’re not even in the same class. It’s why I have 440 hours on Grim Dawn and would play it more still. I dropped LE at 170 hours and don’t really see any reason to play more. Hell, Last Epoch had a cash shop before the game even left Early Access. It feels like the development and costs were mismanaged out of the gate. I waited to buy it on discount.
Grim Dawn was completed before the devs started releasing DLC. Last Epoch, apparently, still has severe bugs and unfinished content.
Additionally 2 of 3 DLCs in Grim Dawn are more akin to olden timey expansions rather than modern cash-grab DLC.
Not defending last epoch but Grim Dawn did not feel complete. The base game story ‘ends’ on a complete cliffhanger quest the way a TV show Season 1 ends.
I like Grim Dawn but it pisses me off that the base game is so cheap when the studio knows the experience is super incomplete without the 3x as expensive expansions.
Well you do defeat the big bad at the end. The fate of that NPC doesn’t constitute a cliffhanger for me.
More importantly: all features were done. Personally I don’t really care about the story in ARPGs anyway.
Valid. I just cannot play ARPGs absent a decent enough story. I’ve dropped a few due to uninteresting grinding, but I understand that is an appeal in and of itself to other gamers.
Apparently in 2018 the devs stated publicly they’d never add paid content to the game. At least that’s what the fans state. I dunno.
I bought it a year ago, played it for ten hours. It’s a fun little game.
Ah. I didn’t know they said that. It’s definitely shitty to go back on that promise. Although in a vacuum, I think this is the kind of non-cosmetic content that’s somewhat acceptable to me as paid DLC. It’s not a competitive game and assuming the class is balanced, it’s just adding content that gives more variety. I’ve been fine with paid DLC in other big games as long as it’s a worthwhile amount of content for the price and it’s sold in a straightforward way without any funny business. Given that this game has online co-op, I think it makes sense that they’re gonna keep the content expansion free so it doesn’t divide people who would want to play together (also I guess there is trading, but I’m a CoF player so…) and then this is something that mostly just affects someone’s individual experience. Like if you were going to be happy enough to keep playing the game with existing classes, then this doesn’t really affect you.
So in principle I’m ok with this… but like I said, the bigger issue is them going back on their word.
Yeah, feels like an overreaction to me, especially given the economic upheaval affecting the world since 2018.
Devs gotta eat and the game is not only good but fairly priced already.
I guess they made the promise to compete with poe but eventually found out why it is so hard to make work.
Still, interesting explanations from everyone. thanks
Grim Dawn is not a live game service.
Last Epoch promised to only have MTX and pay only once to get the full experience. That’s not the case anymore.
Last Epoch studio got bought out and people were afraid they were gonna get enshittified and it is happening right now.
Yeah. But think about the shareholders. They are way more important than the customers. The customers can go fuck themselves.
When did the buyout happen?
Literally the first sentence in the article “Since it was bought by Krafton in July”
