Is the Golden Age of Gaming over?
Many people saw or at least know about the happenings of this years Blizzcon where fans of the Diablo franchise were angry about the announcement of a mobile Diablo game and no news on Diablo 4 or the Diablo 2 remaster.
However this is but one of many signs in recent years that makes me believe that the golden age of gaming has past by now.
The future of gaming does not look good...
The Diablo Immortal Disaster
So to briefly come back to the Diablo Immortal announcement. If you did not hear about this yet, at Blizzcon 2018 many fans of the Diablo franchise were expecting some good news since Diablo 3 has been out for many years and Blizzard has not revealed anything new for the fans to look forward too for many years.
It was known for some time however that Blizzard was working on multiple Diablo projects at this moment. And since they made remasters of Starcraft and now Warcraft, many fans were hoping for a Diablo 2 remaster.
So when the moment was there and the Diablo Devs came on stage to finaly give the fans something new to look forward to.... They gave us a mobile only Diablo game.... So many people were really upset, leading to massive dislikes of the official Diablo Immortal trailer on Youtube.
In the below video you can see for yourself how the fans feel about this announcement.
The long awaited Aion 2 is in the works
So following this disaster there was even more bad news. Many fans of the MMORPG Aion made by NCSOFT, were hoping for a new Aion game for some time now. And the developers finaly announced that they are indeed working on Aion 2.
However....
You wont believe it but they plan to release this long awaited game on mobile............................
So what the hell is going on in the gaming industry? It looks like pretty much all studio's are now just in it for the money way more then it used to be.
Some more examples
Star Wars Battlefront 2
I am sure you guys remember the shit EA tried to pull on us with Star Wars Battlefront 2 right? In short, EA was trying to sell us a full priced AAA Game where you pretty much had to spent even more money on micro transactions to unlock the full potential of the game.
This caused the gaming community to riot and even made governments look into loot boxes and micro transactions. The aftermatch of this leading to DOTA 2 and CSGO to have to make changes to their loot boxes in the Netherlands and Belgium.
Bless Online
Oh and let us not forget the crap Neowiz pulled with their new " remade" Bless Online MMORPG. The MMORPG market has been really shallow in these years. So everytime a potential good new MMO comes out, fans desperately buy in to it hoping for the next big thing. Only to realise they bought into a game that is pretty much death on arrival. This happened also with games like revelations online.
But with Bless, things were really nasty. You see, Bless was already released in 3 regions and failed in all 3. So the devs promised us a new remastered version of Bless to release on Steam as a early access titel. The devs promised us better combat, bettter optimisation and more. So the MMO community got hyped once again and bought into the next dead MMO.
But wait, there is more!
So micro transactions were pretty common in recent years in many f2p titels (DOTA, LOL) but also in almost all MMORPG games. Even World of Warcraft got a cash shop these days, and i am kinda OK with that as long the store won't have too much "Pay to win" items in it. In many cases the cash shop would just offer skins and thats fine by me.
I even like cash shops in mulitplayer games so you can make your online character look the way you want it to look and leave intended impressions on other players.
But....
Micro Transactions in Single Player Games now??!!!
What iam not OK with are fully priced AAA games like Assassins Creed and Battlefield to implement things like "Time Savers". If you don't know, in Battlefield you can pay money to skip progression of weapons or class levels. But even worse is Assassins Creed Odessey where there are micro transactions for gear, weapons, currency and materials.
Let me tell you a true story here why this shit is wrong.
A friend of mine who is a very casual gamer recently bought a PS4 with AC Origins and Odessey. And my mate is not really up to speed with all these developments of micro transactions and he is weak against these types of things.
So he was playing his game he paid 70 euro for in the PSN store and took a look at the in-game store since he got 200 helix credits for free. And there he saw so many cool mounts, weapons and gear. So he thought well i guess i can spend like 10 euro on this.
So he did and bought himself cool looking spartan armor with legendary quality on level 1. Little did he know it would soon be useless. To explain further, when you buy outfits in AC origins you can just buy it one time and use it over your gear to make your character look cool. But in AC Odessey you dont buy outfits, you buy armor.
This armor has to be upgraded with materials in-game to keep it relevant for usage. While my mate only wanted a cool looking outfit. Remember he is a really casual gamer, and is not up to speed with gaming news or reviews or anything like that. Since some people probably know about this feature.
So, now he has bought 10 euro worth of items where 5 of it is already useless at lvl 5 in the game. So he thought i just upgrade my gear so i can still look cool. Little did he know the materials needed to upgrade legendary armor is so insane, you can never keep up with it just by playing.
So he went back into the store and bought himself 40 euro worth of materials so he could upgrade his gear. To make a long story short, he spent like 120 euro on that game in micro transactions alone at this point.
And he did this, because the in-game methods of getting the stuff you need are either made boring, too hard or too time consuming to make it worth your while.
So where is this all leading to...
I don't have really high hopes for the future of gaming anymore. The devs that once tried to make amazing games and please the fans, are now just trying to make as much money as possible with little effort put into the actual games.
I personally think that these companies will dig their own grave with all the shit they have done and are doing. There is a point when people simply will not take it anymore (although reaching that point may take years and many many new titles...).
A certain big AAA game company (EA...) said that single player games are dying. No they are not. People are always playing single player games, saying otherwise is just some big companys bullshit.
I think that the golden age of gaming is just beginning. I of course mean modding communities, you know? Some modders in Bethesda titles are producing better quality content than these game studios. People who enjoy playing and creating. There's the future in my opinion!
Well said my mate. And yes maybe the future of gaming lies with the modder community indeed.
To the question in your title, my Magic 8-Ball says:
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Let us start a discussion here guys, how do you feel about the future of gaming and all these crap micro transactions!
I can think of a lot of different times you might consider the end of the "golden age" of gaming. All of them were a long time ago though.
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