Gwen

The monetization drama around Dragon's Dogma 2 is so weird to me because, like, the game is so complex, and so bad at advertising its own mtx, that I genuinely did not know the game had any additional monetization if not for the drama. After eight hours of play I don't think it even tried to sell me anything.

This kind of thing is why I've retreated from most social media (I say understanding that many people cannot or will not for myriad reasons). Everyone I've spoken to about the game is having a good-to-great time and when The Wider Discourse About How It Objectively Sucks appears I get to react with "oh some dumbass is saying that shit? I have no need to engage with this" and move on.

the monetization drama is fuckin frustrating because its also extremely obviously a Policy From Corporate too, capcom demands that all their releases have a ton of DLC or mtx, so the dev team's options were either to spend a lot of time making assets for a lot of little paid cosmetics (which is what the monhun team seems to go for) or just put in the minimum effort on mtx with something like this

as a dark souls 2 enjoyer I have spent an entire decade now being quietly puzzled by what gamers will call "lazy" or "broken", and treating their analysis with the same seriousness I treat the kind of movie reviewers who devote themselves to pointing out "plot holes", "objectively".

I've been watching hours of different streams of it and nothing about the streams would even remotely give you a hint that it is something other than a great game. Granted, part of that is that the performance for them was good, but everything besides that is just a big nothingburger. Even acknowledging the controversy almost feels like giving it too much credit.

People really amp up their ciriticism when a game performs badly I found.

I've got a laundry list of things that annoy me about this enthralling game but none of them relate to THE DRAMA. There are, to be absolutely clear, things that are broken (some quests, some NPC behaviours, etc.), and those things tend to frustrate me because it seems clear that the intention is for those things to function one way, but a bug or oversight might cause them to function in another. But none of these are THE DRAMA. I wish I had the time or inclination to write a deep dive, because I have a zillion and one opinions on the game, and each one contradicts the next.

I feel like every time a new game comes out nowadays influencers test the waters and see what the initial vibe is and decide to praise it or shit on it based on that. Vibe came out early with "performance is bad" so they ran with thumbs-down and are actively trying to pick it apart.

at this point, yeah kinda. any game or “content” that is big enough, popular enough, will get its own DRAMA DISCOURSE. it’s just the law of averages at this point coupled with the fact that social media tends to bring the most divisive and “ragebaity” material to the forefront.

Having not seen any of this outrage aside from one screenshot about dragonsplague (too busy having fun running around gransys throwing wolves in rivers and exploring elaborate cave systems), I'm grateful for this regardless. It's BLEAK out here, man. A broadly distinct and incuriously willful rejection of literacy or even the idea of authorial creative intent has been growing alongside the adoption of hypercommercial media consumption as collective identity or whatever. That's a messy sentence but I just woke up. Apologies. I assume some version of this discussion will be circling around for a bit, hopefully I can organize my thoughts a bit more coherently.

It sucks that so much of the discussion before/around a game's launch amounts to people (somewhat understandably) finding ways to express or justify whether or not they will commit their time and money to that game. But just like you said, when the viral content aparatus accelerates all of that it's...kinda' horrifying. The people that are subscribed to that type of content are just shoved down the fast track to gamer reactionism, if they aren't already neck-deep in it. And sometimes the perception of the entire game is permanently shifted by only a momentary swell of social activity.

I do think Dragon's Dogma 2 will be lucky enough to grow in the community's estimation far past this moment. Not only by its own merits, but because of what type of game it is, and who made/published it, and what types of critics are interested in it. Maybe some of the people who are mad now will go on to see actually meaningful merits and criticisms of the game, and recognize that the launch window outrage was a total waste of air. Maybe.

But 2024 has continued to underscore the alarming power that the largely unmoderated Steam Community has. Like, the worst kind of people are spending way too much time on there, and they're going to want another target soon enough.

I'm in the same boat as seemingly a lot of people where I'm so disconnected from The Discourse at this point that I've only heard it via second hand echoes.

It's a bit interesting that it blew up with this though, this kind of DLC has been going on for a while (Namco has been doing it in the Tales series for like a decade). Maybe because it's a AAA game?

this is the first i've heard of this game at all. not sure what that says about what, but it's a data point, maybe

This is the first time I've seen microtransactions abbreviated as "mtx" and that's weird. I don't like it.

yeah, i've, uh, completely given up on video game Discourse because fuck, yall, everything sucks, we know everything sucks, this is universally acknowledged, and it's okay to acknowledge that and move on and look at the game as an experience

due to this, my mechanism for finding out if i should get a game is "do my friends enjoy it or is it from a developer whose other games i have liked or is it simply Intriguing due to trailer/marketing blurb/vibes" and i'm happier now

everything i have seen about the game on social media (twitter) has been people having a great time, being surprised by things, hey that NPC lady has big hadonkeroos, look at this NPC interaction, these hired pawns are my children now, help i am bound by physics oh wait my pawn caught me, etc. i had no idea there was negative discourse until this post??

Among other reasons, I think this is why I've leaned so much more into the history side of games while moving away from contemporary stuff, because there's so much more range to express and explore something that doesn't have an immediate present-day consumer console war hot take What Does This Say About Games imperative.

Video games are largely a luxury medium that's only getting more and more expensive (and time consuming to play), especially in the realm of AAA titles, so the discourse will only get louder as people who can't afford something need to morally justify themselves and come up with reasons on why X is bad according to their personal politics.

I would also say "engaging with the themes" was always a minority in video game analysis. It had its heyday in the early 2010s because those discussions got combined with millennials going "wow the treatment of women in video games is fucked up" for a hot second, but just like nowadays was always a niche thing.

Game seems to have a mad high review score and is in the top selling for steam which tbh I would have never expected from a Dragon Dogma IP related thing since its kinda niche.

So the talk and rage seems to have affected very little overall. Still I guess its a shame the issues and rage where so overblown since it is a actual big/serious issue microtransaction and monetization methods of games the last 6 or so years.

I don't think the problem lies with any of the specific complaints (or their amount), so questioning their legitimacy is probably a waste of energy. The issue is the Content Machine and takes as a currency.

Tho I gotta say, deeper discussions of themes and mechanics were never the norm or even common, so this is nothing new.

The last Assassin's Creed game I played (Valhalla) had way, way worse "cash shop in a single player game" stuff, and I don't remember anyone flipping out about that? But maybe that's just UbiSoft fatigue.

my only coment is that mh world and rise has a mountain of dlc that shouldnt be there and capcom as a publisher can suck it, the devs make the games i like and the directors have to go out and run defense for the suits, DLC is backlash good imo

Hell, even as an avowed Hater, someone who is extremely critical, likes being critical, thinks it's good, and doesn't care for "let people enjoy things," it's still frustrating because like.. for the most part the people criticizing the game aren't criticizing the game, they're not really talking about the game at all, they're getting angry about ancillary minutiae

I like Dragon's Dogma 2 and my friends like the game too. That said - I have spend zero dollars and zero cents in the Micro-Transaction store.

I shared this post and got a bunch of people saying "But the monetization IS really bad! It's so bad you SHOULDN'T talk about anything else!"

I'm so tired.

I look forward to anything you put out in the future about the limits and triumphs of the pawn system, how imsim emergence has taken hold in a lot of Japanese games, contrasting DD's frictions to DkS's etc if and whenever you put those together, because I know from your prior work it will be interesting and valuable in itself and will also prompt further thoughtful conversations.

I understand of course that those types of expressions take significantly longer to put together than snipes about microtransactions or framerates, and I think that is the real first-mover's advantage of the "ancillary" critiques.

I mean, I'm sure there is a lot of nuance here, but I feel like this has been the question since the internet started. Everything is negative rage bait. I do think we are kinda wired to gravitate towards negative views as some kind of reptile brain defense mechanism. However, it's also a lot more common to see negative writing because negative writing is magnitudes easier than writing positively. A lot of people don't know why they like things which is kinda where the magic happens in art for me anyway.

2 things?

Yeah, I haven't played the game and I know nothing about it, but this macroculture just feels like the pits. It's not like I always cared about things other than "fun" in games, and I think it took a lot for me to start to see beyond "flow" and "polish" and "style" (though imo this one's still super important) and "good game design", but I look out and see so many indicators that people who play games cannot, or simply choose not to, care about the experience of actually fucking playing, thinking about, or even watching games.

To drag both popular hyperfragmented fixation hivemind repository and myself, reddit fucking sucks so bad about this, and it makes me feel like an asshole. I'm in a fairly niche subgenre subreddit, a genre that, for better and worse, I adore (though it may be becoming much larger than I anticipated), and I feel like I'm going to lose my fucking mind because nearly everyone seems so boring and incurious. I don't know if it's always been this, but it feels so dire. "This mechanic is bad because it's clunky", "This is how [insert basic genre pillar] should be done", "[AAA niche blockbuster] is a gold standard for the genre", "[meaningfully unique game] is shitty because it doesn't do [bog-standard implementation of a basic idea]", "Y is just a clone of Z, which we all know is better", "what's your tier list?", "what things would you like to see in [genre]?"...That last one being bad because it's coming from the goddamn GAME DEVS themselves! (I didn't even get to the classification and exclusion arguments, which I do participate in, if only to try to fuel the fire against the homogenization of diverse design spaces)

I've turned into a huge snob (while still not trying to obey some arbitrary and self-constructed standard for "artfulness"), and it's worse because I feel justified in doing so! Where's the celebration of what we love, the dialogues and perspectives about what has been achieved, the nuance that everybody seems to demand for serious things that often don't deserve grace, the unabashed shilling of one's wares crafted from a tangible messy human perspective and enthusiasm?

I'm no patron of the arts, nor a historian. I love Pseudoregalia because it's janky and neurotic and hypercompetent, and I also kind of like Sybil's butt! I sing the praises of Super Mario 64 because it was the first game to give me some mild form of post-finale depression as a child, and because Mario goes, "ya-wah-yahoo!" I'm a philosopher, I'm a believer, and I'm a clown.

I write like this now, and I don't know if that's okay!

(oh god there's still a second part)

I heard about the Dragon's Dogma 2 DLC and immediately got upset over it and wrote it off as corporate corruption of someone else's favorite thing that I was now glad I never tried to understand. I suck! I'm part of the problem! I want to reduce something I don't know to its bare components when I get a whiff of something I don't like. I want to endlessly excoriate AAA business practices without having much of an actual stake in the thing. I want to remind people that games are made by people with their own ideas, feelings, and experiences who set out to bring beautiful things into being, and I disregard the value of those high-fidelity behemoths with massive cultural gravity. I refuse to say that From Software are the "good ones", but I sure do think they are, and dread the day when some really nasty shit breaks about the studio's culture!

This feels like hell!

This is 100% why I've stopped using bluesky/mastodon to engage in any conversation about games. We talk about how SEO killed games media but we don't talk about how engagement chasing killed social discourse

I don't know if I represent the majority as a terminally online autistic young-adult male, but the outrage mill on microtransactions is for me about sifting through the flood of games. As time goes on, I'm starting to realize that playing even every good game is an impossible feet for me (who prefers to read manga than play games).

Part of the issue is that games are art, and that means any time you find a reason not to play a game you need to ask yourself "is this just me being closed-minded". Even without that though, there are just too many great games coming out. Q4 2023 had Alan Wake 2, In Stars and Time, Ghostland Yard, Lunacid, Talos Principle 2, Thirsty Suitors, Jusant, not to mention a tonne of demos. Plus I'd need to gamble on a few less remarkable ones because it's the ones I discover for myself that I end up loving the most.

If deciding based on artistic merit is a rabbit hole that'd take almost as long as playing the game while also spoiling it for you, and playing everything is unreasonable from a time standpoint, then all we're left with is whether the people who would receive our money are more evil than average.

this is something that's always struck me as being really well done in the board game review space (SU&SD, NPI)