Read this and try to explain to me again how going free to play does not corrupt a game's design :)
There are a thousand great things to say about Genshin before you even get anywhere near talking about the nonintrusive and ignorable monetization model. I think people hear "Gacha" and mentally lump it in with spammy 2d animated gif idle clicker games. But it's a better BOTW, and anything else misses the forest for the trees.
For example, having multiple characters that you can switch between by pressing a button, which are also somehow characters in the story. Nobody in-world ever says a thing about whichever character you're currently using. You can have characters talking to their own clone.
> everything "fun" is time gated and restricted arbitrarily by a currency. The game is very much structured around pushing the user to log in for 15-20 minutes every day and anything more or less than that is painful
I suppose both of those things might be true. But #2 sounds like the primary issue that always prevents me from enjoying f2p games.
I've thought about what a non-live service, $60 one-time purchase version of Genshin Impact would look like, and I've come to the conclusion that it probably wouldn't be anywhere near as good. Even assuming it had the same amount of content it has now (which is quite a lot), the large and diverse roster of characters goes a long way in avoiding the feeling of repetitiveness and tedium that plagues most large open world games nowadays, and having to carefully pick and choose which characters you want to obtain and invest into (if you're not a whale, at least) and having to dedicate time to build up each one makes you care a lot more about them.
> the large and diverse roster of characters goes a long way in avoiding the feeling of repetitiveness and tedium
It's just the same tedium but you change the combos every 10000 repeats?
> that plagues most large open world games nowadays
Open world games have grown too large for their own good, but that's a different discussion. The worst is when some title is succesful and they get money and they make a sequel that's thrice as big.
Horizon Zero Dawn: perfect length if you ask me. Horizon Forbidden West: could have been 50% smaller for the same enjoyment.
Even Witcher 3 and Elden Ring, which are great non repetitive open world games, could have been smaller for the same effect if you ask me.
if you're going to reduce it to that, we ultimately can go back to the 90's and consider all video games as a useless waste of time that corrupts the mind.
Ultimately, you figure out why games are fun for yourself and focus in on that, be it gameplay, story, charactters, art direction, or simply comfort (I'm sure I can find a few friends who easily threw X000 hours into Stardew Valley). I don't like competitive FPS, but people have made friends, professions, and entertainment just around watching other people play those games. Let alone their own personal experience.
>The worst is when some title is succesful and they get money and they make a sequel that's thrice as big.
that's simply consumer demand, and despite that meme most people are not asking for shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less. Fortunately, games are diverse and you can definitely tailor to your needs unless you must have AAA graphics for your presentation. There are thousands of indies released yearly, but maybe a hundred AAA on a good year spread across a dozen genres.
Valve, even though their games have lootboxes, they got it [mostly] right by trying their best to make sure there's no "pay to win" (save for accidental cosmetics' bugs, which are half of the time are "pay to lose" and either way are typically fixed promptly) and all game mechanics are equally accessible to everyone from minute zero, with lootboxes being purely cosmetic.
it varies immensely, and honestly there's no consensus among gacha players what f2p even truly means. It could mean that you can experience all content and eventually pulled some desired characters without paying (e.g. no paywalled characters nor features save cosmetics). It could be more based on a vague metric on how competitive a free player can be in the game (e.g. obviously not going to be top 100 in most games, but maybe top 1000 for a player who plans). It could mean you get a lot of pulls and can grab most of the roster without spending (with whales going for dupes to make money). etc.
People will probably argue about it until the end of time, and I dont particular care to give my take on it. Just wanted to share a few other perspectives.
As much as you'd like to prove it's a different animal, the game's design was corrupted in that case as well.
1. some huge giga spends are more or less subsidizing your experience so you can play this game for no cost. This is obviously a boon in low income countries where a console game can be an extreme luxury to buy new.
2. The game can provide an RPG experience that will continually update for years, compared to a traditional RPG that is either one and done (possibly rushing out the last third and never following up on plot threads) or needs to sequel bait for the next entry in 3-4 years (on the most generous side).
so it really comes down to your personal situation on if this is liberating or a bastardization of the genre.
The success of gacha games is not in overcoming those steps, rather in capturing a new market that doesn't care about such perverse mechanics. They're not playing for the same reason you are playing games, persistency is the key here as a virtual "job" they play after their real job.