Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General So what now?

Because (once again, ironically) it's usually WAY cheaper than the "free to play" approach.

I'm still a little surprised that people think F2P is "cheaper" than subscription based games. A SINGLE empowered rift, or whatever their called in Diablo Immortal, can cost you $20. That's like 4 - 5 minutes of "gameplay" and reward for $5 more than a months subscription on something like FFXIV. do four empowered rifts and you have yourself a full expansion in a sub based mmo.

I still remember this comic, and it's still true:

Then there's players like me, that don't spend a lot of money in F2P games. I paid a sub for ESO, for example, because I wanted the crafting bag, and in swtor because of all the stuff I like to do that I'm essentially locked out of, unless I want to drop a couple hundred bucks. Now, I could have, and could have skipped out on the sub, but it actually was cheaper, for me, to just pay the sub.

There is a big gap, though, between F2P league and F2P Diablo Immortal.

No business model is inherently bad/evil. All types of games, F2P, subscription, single purchase, DLCs, expansions, can offer a good value of money, but unfortunately when a CEO thinks how he can get a fat bonus at the end of the year, greenlighting finely crafted games with fair business model, while treating his staff like valuable employees is usually not an answer.

My main, (and really only) main argument and gripe against F2P models are how the allure of the money through monetization may negatively impact how a game is designed from the ground up, at the expense of the player's natural experience. See some recent Assassin's Creed games with grindy content but you can buy exp boosts for convenience to speed it up. Would it perhaps have been made differently and less "repetitive" if microtransactions wasn't a thing? Or SWOTOR, the MMO, that has some pretty severely limiting features unless you pay for a sub, to a point where there's basically no point in playing the game unless you pay for a sub.

Or basically everything about Diablo Immortal, which genuinely could've been a pretty good Diablo game, if made as a full priced genuine title from the get go, with no microtransactions in mind. If you remove any paid anythings in Diablo Immortal at the moment, the base game is fundamentally broken, as you can't get higher than rank 2 stars (out of 5) and gem ranks gets exponentially more expensive as you improve them. And there's basically no point in Diablo's gameplay loop than grind for stronger gear to kill stronger enemies, so they'll drop stronger gear so you can kill stronger mobs. If there's a cap to that, it's a cog in the fundamental gameplay wheel of Diablo imo.

Genshin Impact has a pretty good model as far as F2P goes, but it also benefits from not being a competitive game or have PvP in it, so balance doesn't really matter. Hence much less pressure in farming for the best characters, items, etc. If it had a competitive element, then it'd be bad, as any monetized design that directly influences player power levels through either progression (gear upgrades) or access (unlocking characters), it's bad.

People, at least in the west, generally prefer to pay a flat amount by either subscription, or upfront for box title, and the gameplay itself to be an even, level playing field from there. Preferably anything should be obtainable in-game through playing the game, without any external factors, not even exp gain boosts. Yes Ubisoft, not even that.

I also vastly prefer subscription models over the typical P2W F2P model. There was a great game I played years ago: Spiral Knights. MMO cute hack and slash with 1-4 player dungeons. Originally it was a subscription model - everyone got limited daily energy to dungeon-delve, but for $5.99 a month you got unlimited dungeon-delving (and essentially could convert your free daily energy into valuable items).

Then they changed it to a F2P model, removing the dungeon-delving limits per day. Great, right!? No. They also replaced the fairly easy & quick progression system with an incredibly tedious, grindy, and annoying system. Heat to raise item's exp, then orbs to level up said items, then even rarer materials to advance said items to the next tier. Oh, and there was only a ~30% chance that leveling up an item would be successful, unless you used a lot of orbs. Oh and the drop rate of those items while playing was horrible. But guess what you could buy in the store for real money? I estimate it would have cost me >$30+ per month to gain the equivalent amount of progression I originally got for $5/mo.

Also something something runescape, but I only played OSRS-no lootboxes or dailies, but solely member vs nonmember-so can't comment on the current version.

tl;dr: F2P models often suck and make a game less fun *because* design decisions are centered around encouraging players to buy microtransactions

Disagree. Or at least, I'll assert that certain business models are inherently *more* evil than others, if not necessarily objectively Evil. Offering value doesn't make them not evil.

Lootboxes, dailies, FOMO-inducing limited time events, ads...all are inherently more predatory and addicting than a single up-front price-point for a game. The following line says it all:
"Good" F2P games are the exception to the rule, and often qualified as being good mainly in comparison to other F2P games.

Completely agree. The recent Diablo Immortal fiasco has only cemented that in my mind. "It's a mobile game, what did you expect?" It really does say it all.

Yep. Glad you read it correctly.

I play Lord of the Rings Online, one of the older mmos still going, it originally started with a sub model, but went ftp with paid after maybe 2 years online. Despite what a lot of people feared would happen, that game has not turned into a monetisation hellscape. Most of the big ticket items in the store are actual content, region packs, quest packs, expansions, or character-based items that give boosts, not instant wins.

BUT they never got rid of their sub options, and gave subs a currency allowance and free access to non-expansion content that you would normally have to pay for. It's not perfect, and they've still struggled to find the balance between paid and non-paid players. Now, LOTRO is actually one of those games that you can genuinely not pay for, because it's not hard to grind in game for store currency, and people do so, to great effect.

I like to compare mmos like LOTRO (and DDO, which is made by the same company), with mmos by Cryptic. Crytpic had a similar start with some of it's older games, but they very quickly embraced the f2p model as it became popular. Their older games retained their sub options, but their newer games did not (they did eventually, but after the damage was done), and those games did turn into a monetisation hellscape, because without the option of falling back on a regular income from players, they began to get exploitative. I played NWO for a few years and got continually very upset at the level of money-grubbing going on, until I stopped playing entirely. It's also upsetting that that game is WOtC's flagship mmo for D&D.

Fair enough - I meant it in more general sense: F2P vs subscription vs. DLCs vs. single purchase. What you describe are engagement/monatization methods and can appear in all kind of releases.

While F2P are fascinating topic ...
I thought this one it for crying that we want finaly next PFH and Patch 8 anounced.

And i do! Come on Larian, dont give us another sad weekend.

Even if Sven drops a hint, that still means the actual patch is still a week or two away, right?

Well, imagine if he doesn't.

Genshin Impact is actually legitimately good. It's just too bad it does have gacha stuff and that it's largely modeled around player retention, but it's a fairly high quality game all around and the game doesn't try to pressure you to spend money at every opportunity. Does it stand up to a high quality single player game? Maybe not, but after playing it for a year and a half, I think it's rather unfair to pair it with the rest of the mobile gacha scene. It's just kind of its own thing at this point.

(It's also pretty much a PC game in all but name only. There's a significant part of the playerbase that wants the devs to drop mobile support because it controls AND runs like shit on mobile, the file sizes are getting way too big for most phones to handle, and there's a belief that designing Genshin with mobile in mind is holding the game back.)

Ehh. I will be abandoning my PC for a month this Sunday, so can’t say that I care at this point.

While i bet you are important person ...
I still kinda do and your potential absence didnt affect it much. :-/

You did say "we". I assumed you were referring to collective BG3 playerbase.

I was ... kinda.
Sure there are exceptions tho.

Well (back to original topic I started), looks like we're gonna pass through June with no new patch. Lets hope July fares better.

My hope is for

(1) At least 1 new class (Bard or Paladin would be awesome).

(2) An increase in the level cap to level 6.

(3) One new area to explore.