Yes siree, the excitement never stops!
- 0 Posts
- 67 Comments
I realized after writing this all out that it was closer to a sequel than a remake but… oh well, I thought it was a neat idea nonetheless.
And yes now that you mention it this is actually similar to the Golden Sun series irt the dueling groups of protagonists (antagonists?), but I swear I did not realize this and was going more from the DB Xenoverse time demon angle.
I do not actually know as this is the first time I am even hearing of Chrono Cross.
Youre telling me theres a sequel?!?!?
I only ever managed to play Chrono Trigger on ZNES something like 20 years ago and remember being blown away by how different and more interesting it was from basically every other JRPG up to that point.
Now I must find this sequel.
Well I am surprised no one has mentioned this but:
This is the best possible JRPG to do a retcon/reimagining of as is going on with FF7, but a bit differently.
Time travel!
So, start a new story with new characters, but intermix this with the old cast and story beats resulting in a completely new story that brings back old favorite settings and characters, introduces new ones.
Maybe you change significant plot points of the old story, maybe you don’t, maybe you doom the world to some entirely new kind of catastrophe, maybe you get stuck in what would otherwise be called a soft lock but is actually in this world an intentional plot device that just looks like a soft lock but isnt.
Hell, if you /really/ want to go hog wild with this:
Make the new set of characters generally opposed to the original set of characters, have their own method of time travelling, and make it so much of the game is actually about attempting to out-time-travel-wit the others, basically with certain characters attempting to be time demons ala DB Xenoverse and others trying to stop them… all mixed with the narrative possibilities at many points for many characters to switch allegiances, go rogue, or mostly team up.
even moooore possible endings
No I have no clue how you could actually write something this complicated, but the entirety of Kingdom Hearts exists and people tell me somehow that all makes sense, so I am confident a team of competent writers can pull off an absurdly complex multivariate story line.
I appreciate the straightforward answer, thanks!
But uh… fuck. This fucking sucks, Yuzu is basically dead now, they have to disband and take down their code.
If Yuzu lives it will only be pirate copies floating around, further development will… basically have to go underground more like game crackers, as this very settlement establishes that Nintendo will sue you into oblivion if you publicly work on this.
It isnt so much vaporware as basically massively bad funding model and development practices.
They have software. There is a ‘game’ you can ‘play’.
Its just that its still buggy as fuck and the gameplay doesnt really meaningfully work.
Its… more like an alpha that never stops adding features and content… and as a result, never does a feature lock and actually make what they have into a non buggy, actually compelling game.
Also by this guy’s correct logic, Deus Ex is more truly an RPG than FF7.
Good luck explaining that to a JRPG fan without them becoming either manic or passive aggressive though.
Dont get me wrong, FF7 is a great story… but… as with nearly all ‘RPGs’… youre not really role playing, as role playing involves meaningfully being able to … play… the role you want… for your character(s).
Nearly all RPGs are more like role insertion: you are this character and this is how their story goes.
The Witcher and Mass Effect series both attempt to avoid this… though I’d argue that the Witcher series pulls this off far more convincingly.
Oh and of course Cyberpunk 2077, which is actually a great game now that its had years to get fixed up.
These 3 are still ultimately linear stories, but at least choices in decisions you make or things you do or do not do can have pretty significant impacts on the grander world / main storyline.
Hell, Kenshi is a better role playing game than most linear story ‘RPGs’ too, though you’ll likely need a few dialogue expansion mods for this effect to become more obvious/convincing.
I know that from an actual standpoint of generally speaking most bang for your buck, pc’s have made more sense for over a decade.
But, console gaming is still a huge part of marketshare. Yes, it doesnt really make sense. But literally millions of people still haven’t got the memo.
Only people I know who still use consoles basically just have them for that /one/ exclusive they can’t wait to play.
The wider gaming landscape is not like us though.
Basically, there are still a ton of kids and/or casuals. We are likely inundated and affected by literally decades of following industry news and learning at least a decent amount of the technical hardware and software capabilities and principles… a huge amount of people still basically just view games with very little of that background knowledge.
Oh hey Im surprised that all even posted, my connection crapped out right as I hit send.
But uh haha yeah.
My one saving grace is I have a lot of time on my hands.
But I expect it to take probably at least 6 months before I even have what Id consider a working combat prototype with a variety of different weapons and Ai routines, and maybe a barebones model of a procedural map generator.
Im guessing that me soloing a whole project like this could take 3 years, but if I can get a prototype working, I might have enough money to pay for some 3D assets to speed up dev time a bit.
Almost certainly not enough money to hire anyone lol, and I really really do not want to do kickstarter or early access and deal with the community and possible total failure.
Im the exact opposite of a PR person.
Except that you cant actually use it as a computer without DRM without a ton of fucking work, nor as a gaming device without DRM without a ton of work.
MSFTs development notes and such for the Pluton CPU architecture heavily draws from wanting to be able to stop people hard-modding existing Xboxes.
A separate, physical security co processor doesnt work because people figure out how do basically flash an Xbox, or do some kind of software stun lock, then physically remove the anti piracy doohickey, then finish flashing the thing into a hackDbox.
Thankfully the linux community appears to have neutralized that threat for PCs running Linux, at least.
Probably similar in many ways, but ideally I would like to make it as or more in depth with other features from something like xenonauts.
Youve got resources such as vehicles of differing kinds you may choose to deploy or not, but you have to store them somewhere and also be able to repair them. All this comes from pools of funding from at first probably just completing a mission according to guidelines, but some things take maybe an R&D program or just outright raiding a rival faction or something.
Maybe you want to go a more special forces type route and have a few exceptionally well trained / equipped soldiers and leverage things like helicopters to do infil and exfil and leverage the element of surprise.
Maybe you want to act more like a conventional military and go with larger numbers with decent equipment and a wider array of possible vehicles and support systems.
Maybe you want to focus as much as possible on gathering intel before missions, maybe you want a more intelligent active battlefield info you can access in mission via various sensors.
So… what I am aiming for is something that eventually allows for a more broad array of mission profiles and sort of map archetypes, which, depending on many factors, will have surprises that may occur, like an enemy force having the ability to call for reinforcements that maybe you did not know about, and might force you to withdraw.
Or maybe some missions will take place with a relatively high number of civillian AI running around and your org you work for/run will suffer massively if you just go scorched earth.
I dunno, these are all ambitions at this point, and Im going to focus on at the very least getting a functional combat prototype done first, and then testing out how well that and what I can make combat AI actually do actually works.
Its possible I’ll find some kind of thing that really works well, or really doesn’t work, and change scope significantly.
So far all I have really figured out is that a near future setting would seem to work best with the scope of either my minimal working concept, or a more extended version of it.
???
Oh my god please be Yboy and include an absurd marketing campaign designed by boomers, aimed at zoomers, looking to re popularize 2000s era skinny jeans emo-lite sort of fashion with unimaginable pretention, but with absurd zoomer/gen alpha lingo.
Be a Yboy. Play a Yboy.
Get you a man that plays on Yboy.
Girls be like: Nah, he don’t play Yboy?
Only one thing to say: Y, boy?
(as the mixed race female instagram influencer manically switches from sultry disappointment to extreme anger, then to giggling, while leaning down exposing her cleavage as she wags her finger)
Everyone in the single player fps demo is replaying the old good games, or seeking out like custom doom wads or the occasional actually good indie fps single player game, having at this point long given up on large studios being able to make a compelling single player fps.
Sure, a lot of us enjoy lots of other kinds of games too, but good lord is there an unscratchable itch for a new, compelling FPS campaign thats actually interesting and challenging.
Quite seriously I am actually looking to attempt to solo indie dev a sort of fps/tactics/management hybrid FPS that would at least start out as single player, and titanfall 2’s gameplay is something I am drawing inspiration from.
My basic idea is: What if you had the squad management and mission planning depth of basically Xenonauts, but you actually played out the missions in first person, with combat systems and load outs and player (and enemy) capabilities that resembled titanfall2’s mix of athletecism and gunplay?
Im in very early stages, but yeah basically titanfall2/xenonauts hybrid with (this is likely the hard part) procedurally generated, 3d levels, strung together with a kind of narrative generation engine, something sort of like rimworld’s system that simulates world conditions and then generates certain events based off of them, but also responds to certain specific things you do or do not do in mission, or what missions you choose to embark on over others.
Probably Im gonna focus on core gameplay systems and not really worry about graphics or assets at all until I can get any of this to an actual working concept level.
Yep, nobody enjoyed playing through Half Life 1/2, or FEAR or Deus Ex, or the early Medal of Honor or Call of Duty campaigns, or the Doom series or Battlefield Bad Company or the Wolfenstein Series.
Just because most modern popular FPSs are basically cartoony tf2/overwatch clones/derivatives and there are a lot of highly competitive multiplayer FPSs filled with screaming, racist misosynist babies and manbabies alike doesnt mean theres no market for a single player FPS.
It means that making a single player FPS game these days is apparently too hard for modern game devs to figure out how to do.
Basically not unless /another/ anti-trust lawsuit is brought against them, and also somehow Teddy Roosevelt time warps into exactly Biden’s location, explodes him Dr. Manhattan style inside out, immediately asks for a fitting suit, signature glasses, and this somehow stuns everyone into just letting him be President for the rest of Biden’s term.
Hah, Ive gone uh, full tilt, and actually am working on making a game myself that will hopefully /actually have meaningfully innovative and compelling gameplay/, and i dont plan on or seem to have any real need to fall into the kickstarter/early access trap.
From a developer standpoint, both those approaches mean deadlines and managing expectations, which is basically maddeningly stressful and soul crushing.
From a gamer perspective, more often than not that means throwing money at a promise that at best will not live up to the hyped experience you have generated with the fandom, and at worst is just a total bust, failure, or scam.
So yep, my plan is tinker away for a year or two until the fundamentals are technologically sound and the actual gameplay is unique and compelling.
Then, only then, would i maybe release a demo or in depth teasers or testing session footage.
Yes thats right. Testing. Remember when games used to actually be playtested, not just for bugs, but for actual gameplay experience?
Many of at least my favorite games and mods were hugely shaped by tester feedback that radically reworked certain game elements to solve unexpected gameplay problems, or to further an idea that the testers found fun or useful that tje devs didnt even realize was really possible in the world theyd constructed.
Anyway… woo video games, shit sucks mostly these days but there are some notable basically niche exceptions, and hopefully i can make something thats at least niche successful.
In the words of a person i truly do think is an actual genius of game design:
These things, they take time.
Time where no one has any real clue wtf youre actually doing, haha.
First off, dang thats a pretty good username, second:
sigh yep, youre right.
I am the only avid video gamer I knew who actually refused and refuses to buy anything ever again from Bethesda after FallOut 76.
I personally know a good deal of gamers who said theyd do the same… and actually did not, some even pre ordering Starfield.
Gamers are basically hilarious hypocrites from the standpoint of market research, public sentiment analysis and actual dollareedoos.
Which is why i would have been an actual idiot at this point to think that an actually significant number of gamers could actually successfully pull off a boycott as a means to influence the overall market conditions.
This is not /that/ complicated.
Who plays video games these days?
Children, and adults who are basically working shit jobs and have little disposable income, but theyre generally likely to get hooked into a game that offers microtransactions of some kind.
Ok, so, we all know AAA studios are more or less led by extremely money hungry bullies who see games as a product to sell to consumers for the purposes of maximizing shareholder profit, and they know they have to mainly compete against other games, and movies and tv (netflix hulu fucking whatever).
Gamers also basically expect high quality graphics and the production value of basically a blockbuster movie, if you go by sales data.
Sure, other games with less astounding graohics and actually unique or novel gameplay exist, thats neat, they have teensy tiny draws, excepting the essentially totally unpredictable break out hit thats popular for maybe a month, maybe literally days.
So, we need huge studios for huge production values, and then the only way to possibly make profits on that is exploitative games as a service with microtransactions and season/battle passes.
Their brains are stuck in a loop state basically, and going by their logic, it makes sense from their position and with their motives and personalities.
Theyre following corpo logic basically perfectly.
You can say theyre the bad guys, and I can say go rewatch V for Vendetta and replay the part where V says ‘you only need look into a mirror’ multiple times.
How does this situation actually change?
Either, somehow, not one but a number of basically indie games somehow become huge successes with massive regular player counts, and most importantly they somehow have to draw people away from the mostly unoriginal schlock that is most AAA money printing games these days…
Or, basically, a significant number of big name studios/publishers need to basically just go entirely bankrupt.
Are either of these likely to happen?
Probably not, not soon, barring an extremely serious basically global economic downturn.
The fact that there is this much uniformity in strategy means that there will be sort of attritional damage done to the less successful, but that… might result in a sea change of market strategy to some other basically fad for AAA game studios… or it might result in even further buyouts and consolidation of once great IPs and studios.
Welcome to video game hell, nearly no one is truly innocent.
You are wrong about this, there are literally right now huge arguments going on and legal battles likely to start soon over the fact that ‘AI’ generated content is effectively a giant plagiarism/synthesis machine, as the models are nearly always trained on /massive/ swaths of content that include /many/ copyrighted works, as well as stuff that was simply never given express permission to be used in such a way.
Valve, for example, has officially taken a side, a few days ago stating in a policy update that you are not allowed to publish a game with ‘AI’ gen art, dialogue, or code, unless you can prove the training set for the ‘AI’ did not contain any source material you do not have the rights to use in a for profit manner.
To me the funniest part is his praise for Amazon for being strong supporters.
So, ok, heres what that means:
Twitch will basically fold and crumble and be cannibalized and/or spun off it it cannot hit the growth rates it needs to hit in order for higher ups at Amazon to view it as a worthwhile money sink now that could actually contribute net positive to the company in the long run.
But, if Twitch cannot grow fast enough, they will basically pull the plug as it will be too much money lost that could better be used elsewhere.
And the inherent problem with Twitch is that its fucking madness, generates some new insane bad PR fairly reliably with some outrageous thing some streamer does, or doesnt do, or maybe did… or via generating the terms of service version of ‘a huge amount of people didnt like that’ that is impossible to not have happen for nearly any significant TOS change because again Twitch is full of crazy idiots who do not care about anything other than their really weird niche or their favorite streamer, because basicslly the whole point of twitch is to go there and have an unhealthy parasocial relationship with someone, at least thats the kind of interaction that generates revenue.
But that is also what generates all the insane PR nightmares that are preventing Twitch from growing fast enough.
Its essentially an unwinnable situation of paradoxes that will nearly certainly lead to business decisions that functionally either milk more money out of the current user base in one way or another, possibly combined with something like an adpocalypse.
This makes it more profitable in the short run, but lowers long term growth prospects.
The entire economy is currently under a lot of stress, and Amazon’s two core businesses of shipping stuff everywhere and providing basically servers for businesses are very likely to feel effects of a general economic downturn more rapidly than many other kinds of businesses.
Twitch isnt core, its not even profitable, its a PR nightmare.
What would you do if you were an Amazonian Higher Up and you wanted to preserve Amazon’s general profitability?
How many people will really cancel their Amazon Prime if that involves a curtailed aspect of Twitch benefits, or none at all?
The one I personally know of most people who play is Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms.
Its the natural evolution of a kind of JRPG gameplay. The actual combat is so boring you might as well just automate grinding. So they did!
I don’t even get why you have this be a game at this point. Why not just make a visual novel or like a YouTube series? Again, I just do not understand the appeal.
Here are some others:
https://diamondlobby.com/platform/steam/best-idle-games-on-steam/
Yep, you continue to be wrong in ways that I have already explained which you obviously do not understand, and in more baffling ways that would require even further in depth explanations from me which at this point you quite clearly would also misunderstand.
You often do not even understand how to make relevant criticisms and simply assert something false or irrelevant about one point I make and use it to argue against some other point in a way that I have already shown to be false or failing to even grasp the concept being discussed.
You are in this latest post just outright contradicting yourself within the span of two adjacent sentences as opposed to separate posts.
Obviously you are someone who plays games and has opinions about them and has no actual programming or tech industry or video game creation experience, as opposed to myself who does have actual experience making games and has worked in the tech industry for a decade.
Again, you have no idea what you are talking about and have basically been wrong about literally everything you have mentioned.
DRM still is not DLC. Yes. They interact. That does not mean they are the same thing or necessarily must coexist. DRM is not /content/ it is /content management/.
Their interplay or relationship is irrelevant to a discussion about MTX, which you still fundamentally fail to grasp is a system with definable attributes, which I again have already defined more than sufficiently, which you again are either forgetting or ignoring.
You insist on relying on astoundingly vague and unspecified concepts of ‘good’ DLC vs ‘bad’ DLC which is obviously not possible to legislate or regulate because it is not well defined.
We absolutely do not run the risk of banning any kind of DLC if MTX is regulated against.
Again, as I already stated, in a world where say games were not allowed to, within the actual game itself, offer access to the player to additional content that applies specifically to that character’s avatar as either a cosmetic or a functional in game item, where the actual digital code for said items is already present to all players without additional download, this would 1) lessen impulsive purchases 2) reasonably result in many games moving there stores for MTX to a program or website not actually in the game itself.
Then, if you combine that with my other theoretical restriction of being able to purchase additional DLC for a specified game only every so often, or put a cap on max spending on DLC in a time period, what this results in initially MTX individual items to be sold as bundles, and at the very least highly incentivizes game companies that rely on MTX to make reasonably priced bundles, while also not seriously affecting non MTX games that semi-regularily release DLC that contains more substantial things than just items for the individual player.
While this would not entirely destroy the ability of MTX games to sell more content, it would seriously dampen the exploitative power of their predatory business model to harm those susceptible to it.
In the world of preventing addictions and similar things, there is never a full proof solution, but there often are very effective harm reduction techniques.
Not that you have any understanding of such policies as you apparently still cannot grasp that addiction literally is a self regulation problem, but also simultaneously that it is and MTX is somehow unique and special and different than other addiction problems and should be addressed by methods which are very, very well known to be very ineffective for all other addiction problems.
I cannot believe that I have actually wasted my time repeating myself due to your inability to string together consistent concepts from my differing posts.
You are just arguing for the sake of wanting to be right and have absolutely no ability to realize you are incorrect, uniformed, and also just at this point unable to make a coherent argument.
Ciao for now.
No, there’s no technical reason.
Apple designed their different protocol early on for no actual reason other than to intentionally be incompatible with the standards used by the entire rest of the industry, entirely to use as a peer pressure and marketing tactic to make less technically knowledgable users believe that it is somehow better or has more features or is more secure or somethimg.
It isnt, it doesnt, and it isnt more secure.
They easily could have used existing standards, but again, decided to develop their own exclusive standard and them basically lie and make misleading statements that would promote exclusivity and a superiority complex amongst its user base.
Your quibbling about the definition of DLC is irrelevant and pointless, and you do not seem to know what DLC is if you think DRM is DLC. Its not.
I already outlined substantive definitions of what constitutes DLC and MTX, and you are just repeating yourself saying the line between them is blurry. It is no where near as blurry as you think it is, and its now becoming clear that you do not appear to be able to comprehend what I have written.
The only difference is absolutely not how they are marketed. I think you are referring to how they presented in a UI.
-
I already addressed this, MTX is a system that has identifiable characteristics and properties that make it distinct from DLC, regardless of UI labelling.
-
Thats not marketing. Marketing is promotional material, trailers, paid game reviews, statements made by the company selling the product for the purpose of getting you to buy the product, a demo held at a convention, that sort of stuff.
As to your preference for allowing customers to self regulate:
Congrats, you have missed the entire concept that large demographics of people do not have the ability to self regulate their addiction problem, because an addiction problem literally is the lack of the ability to self regulate in regards to a certain activity or substance.
Anyway, I was not saying I would be necesarilly for or against such a measure, I was merely proving to you that it can legally be done, with examples.
Its clear your reading comprehension is not that good and you have at no point acknowledged that basically I have disproved everything you think you understand about how anything we have talked about works, functions, is actually defined, etc.
I will likely not be responding to you on this matter further as it is evident you basically have no idea what you are talking about.
Thanks for letting me know what the green bubble blue thing is. I have never and will never use an Apple product for many reasons, so, didnt know that.
That being said, yeah, thats another example of an exploitative business decision that has no technical reason for existing whatsoever, and uses peer pressure to get children to waste money, like MTX.
I expanded my post a good bit a couple of times but maybe you missed it: Purchasable premium currency is /also/ a horrible, exploitative practice that is functionally indistinguishable from MTX in almost every way.
The fact that RockStars shark cards and gold for rdr2 are only purchasable on steam in the DLC section does not make premium currency DLC.
DLC is essentially an addon pack, an expansion of the original game with new levels, characters, maps, weapons, equipment, new gameplay modes, etc.
Another way of looking at DLC is that in the old days before it was practical to download more than around 100mbs as a patch, and a game developer wanted to release an expansion pack, they would sell a whole new cd at stores for maybe 1/2 to 1/3 the cost of the base game.
Now, for the rest of your comment:
I am not saying that outlawing MTX would be 100% effective. My point is that MTX is /bad/, games that heavily rely on MTX are often bad, that it is exploitative, blah blah blah already wrote everything.
That being said: Your reasoning here is not certainly wrong, but likely not very good. Loot Boxes have been functionally banned after the EU figured out how to precisely define them, and shortly thereafter many games had to alter their mechanics to not explicitly be loot boxes, and these days it is rare for new games to come out that feature them.
Should a law be sufficiently well worded and have the teeth to be enforced, I would say its actually pretty likely that the practice of designing MTX into games could functionally be ended, though of course not totally, not perfectly.
I personally do not care if F2P games with MTX are affected, as being F2P is the equivalent of a crack dealer offering you your first hit free of charge. Enough people get addicted that to the game that its profitable to just sell them new cosmetics.
Further, nearly all F2P MTX games are based around extremely boring, simplistic and repetitive gameplay, which is itself designed to actually be effectively random in terms of your skill level having anything to do with your actual success at the game. Less mature players will believe that they can actually get good at the game by playing it enough, because either they have not played many games before or they basically become addicted to the gameplay loop itself, which is /also/ knowingly designed to be both addictive and rage inducing.
So with F2P MTX you generally get the absolute worst possible situation from the standpoint of a child or a person susceptible to peer pressure or with basically the same personality of a gambling addict.
The technical implementation of MTX just shifting everything over to being outside of the game itself /would actually be a significant success/ from the standpoint of preventing impulse purchases quite literally because it forces the user to undergo more steps before making their purchase.
Another thing that could potentially be done from a legal standpoint is to quite literally make it illegal for a game to allow you to spend more than so much on MTX or Premium currency in a certain amount of time, and/or only allow a purchase every so often, and or display government mandated warning placards in the same vein as cigarettes must display every time you access any in game or out of game market for the game.
These things are all definitely legally and technically possible to implement.
It does not matter what section of some menu has what UI label to a well written law. Such tbings are laughably easy for any competent programmer to alter within at most a month.
What matters is the functional workings of the entire system in its totality, and the precedent for this approach working has, again, already been established by the EU’s ban on lootboxes.
My issue is that MTX is an exploitative predatory model for designing games and funding game development that essentially always leads to games that are unoriginal, that allows for and incentivizes very toxic social dynamics amongst its players, and that this often leads to many people with either poor impulse control or those susceptible to aforementioned toxic social dynamics will spend /too much/ of their money to the point it seriously negatively impacts their lives.
No, I would not be ok with a certain color being MTX only.
Not sure what you mean by blue bubble vs green bubble, but there are many ways one can seperate themselves from the masses in many games that feature character customization that do not feature MTX.
So, no DLC is not the same thing.
MTX to a large extent works by incremental gradualism in terms of the actual psychology of how it exploits susceptible people.
DLC on the other hand does not do this. Here is an outlined block of content, it usually features many new things in addition to new cosmetics, and usually all those things are not dependent on further microtransactions, but actual game play of some kind.
This is a much more straightforward and much less manipulative way to expand your games content.
While it still is not very common for games in general to allow players to play on maps they do not have, but a friend does, yes you are correct that a few games feature this.
This is irrelevant to the discussion of MTX, though. I do not have total and complete knowledge of all video games, but I have /never/ heard of playable maps as MTX before. Even if such a phenomenon does exist, maps are not usually tied to the player being able to alter gameplay for themselves /specifically/ or to clothing or weapons that /specifically/ are proven to be crucial elements to the toxic amd exploitative dynic that MTX creates.
The closest thing I can think of would be maybe an MMO with a player customizable house that has many things only obtainable via MTX, but I am not aware of a game with such features, and I would be against it anyway. Just make the things obtainable in game.
As to your views on fashion, I mean yes, many tasteless people view fashion only as a way to flaunt wealth.
That is /not/ what fashion actually is though to anyone with an actual sense of creative style.
This is not my area of expertise by any means but try asking actual character art designers what fashion is and how it works.
Different color schemes, styles of clothes, materials can all be mixed and matched, or paired neatly to convey certain elements of a character trying to be portrayed visually.
People who obsess over branded clothing items are nearlt always tasteless and have absolutely no sense of style.
It is entirely possible in many games, with and without microtransactions, to take different individual pieces of clothing amd make a unique look.
As example, though I dislike RockStar’s incorporation of a premium currency mechanic that allows for players to pay real world money for in game content, the games both feature a wide array of clothing choices that can be mixed and matched individually to create your own looks for your character.
Or, you can buy a pre made outfit and immediately be laughed at by everyone for spending money on it, because there are now thousands of other clones that look just like you, and its entirely possible to look good without doing this, you just have to put in some effort and actually, you know, have an actual sense of fashion to determine what looks good or conveys what you want your character’s appearance to convey, and when you have done this, it will actually be unique to you and your character.
Another example of this would be Cyberpunk 2077.
Its entirely possible to have a wardrobe that both looks good and is also effective in game… and is not just a cookie cutter clone of some faction or other character, but this requires actual work.
Much like how actually looking fashionable in real life does.
Further examples would be countless MMOs and even some more clothing heavy Survival Sims and MilSims at this point. Those games less commonly feature outright MTX, and again its entirely possible to do actual fashion by mixing and matching things until you find a ‘look’.
The point of true fashion may be said to convey certain things about yourself or the character via their attire, and the art of it comes in to understanding how styles work, how the human form works, how colors work, how materials work, and then all of this is constrained by other factors such as practicality, affordability, etc.
Its more impressive to pull off a good looking cheap dress than a just as good looking but 20x as expensive one, unless your entire goal is projection of wealth /over/ actually looking good.
Work boots are relatively common and know for being useful in hard physically demanding conditions, so both a construction worker and a soldier may wear different versions of them.
But when a construction worker puts on mil grade knee pads and a scavenged carrier rig, and carries a battered rifle, this conveys a very different character than a standard soldier in BDU does:
We can immediately tell that he is doing this not as his profession and as a rather impromptu affair, that he likely did not plan for this.
I list these examples to attempt to show you how fashion and character appearance is far more than a competition of wealth display: In video games and movies it is very often a means of conveying the character through ways other than what they do or say.
As yet another example I once designed basically Sam Fisher in Arma 3, wearing pants utilitarian enough to be practical, but also conventional enough to look like many civilians. Had a button up dress shirt with plate body armor with PRESS emblazoned on it, shades, no helmet.
Practical, Fashionable, Mission Appropriate.
And I did not need any MTX to accomplish this.
I am not opposed to cosmetics.
I am opposed to having to pay more real world money for content that already exists in the game, for everyone, that has no other way of accessing it.
You could, for example, have a cosmetic system that works something like the character creation spore:
Design a bunch of modular elements that can be assembled together in many ways, though bounded by various constraints so they would not break gameplay.
An even simpler version would be ok you unlocked this style of say pants, and it has various ways it can be hemmed or rolles up or dyed or have accessories mounted to it, and there are accompanying in game mechanics for being able to do all that.
Honestly PayDay 2 has a fantastic system for its Masks: Some masks you can only get via certain in game achievements, others from luck of the draw (but its not a paid for loot box). Then the game has other similar ways to handle how you get the items to be able to customize your masks.
PayDay 2 does not have microtransactions.
It does have DLC. This is a far better funding and development model than MTX.
Finally, if your sense of fashion in the real world is that you have to pay more to look good, then you have no real sense of fashion beyond signalling ‘Look At Me I Am Cool Because I Bought Expensive Thing’.
That is not a sense of fashion, that is just flaunting your wealth in am ostentatious, crude and immature manner.
Yes, thats the point.
Here you are, considering whether it is worth a dollar to show off your fashion to those you compete against and or cooperate with.
This is literally how it starts.
I cannot say with certainty that you in particular will become addicted to buying more and more cosmetics, but I can say with certainty that many, many people do, especially when combined with the feedback loop of peer pressure.
Further, there are many other alternative funding models that would easily allow for lots of in game content to be added to a game, and then you can make it unlockable via achievements or specific missions or something.
Any one who tells you that games /have/ to do microtransactions to exist in some cases is basically nearly always lying. You can prove this easily by saying: What if all these game studios cut the pay of their executives in half or down to 1/10th?
Its not like they need the money, and its not like they usually even make good decisions in terms of game design, when you are talking about larger studios or those beholden to large funding entities for recognizable IP rights, or some new unique graphical technology or something.
MTX is also astonishingly easy to recognize as a deplorable joke from those who have been playing a wide breadth of games for a while.
A phenomenon that originally started in MMOs and has since spread to other genres is this:
When content becomes stale, when gameplay becomes boring due to those who are not good st the game leaving and those who are good basically becoming near god like, these situations often devolve into the game simply becoming a fashion contest.
What this actually means is the game needs something new to keep it interesting, or it needs to be gently put into retirement phase, perhaps open sourcing some server material for the truly dedicated to be able to continue playing it.
What MTX represents, with the knowledge I just outlined, is that you basically have a cookie cutter core game whose general gameplay loop is known to appeal to a certain demographic, but you /know/ the only new real content you can expect is the fashion contest, maybe a broken or OP item or weapon from a patch that will be heavily rebalanced by the next patch.
You can also know the game will never add anything that really radically forces players to re evaluate the way they play it, because that would alienate the core player base.
So, any game that embraces MTX heavily from the get go is thus usually always a very boring game anyway, at least to those who are interested in novel and challenging experiences, and there will be many slight variations of the same game with slightly different art, characters, or gameplay, but usually very similar core mechanics and general experience.
Thats /an/ alternative.
Another alternative is /social networks this large should not exist/.
There are many, many other alternatives.
Its just that social networks this large have basically destroyed the brains of people who use them, so now they can hardly imagine alternatives.
And that is /another/ argument for why they shouldnt exist, the fact that they normalize themselves they way social and cultural institutions do, but with no actual accountability the way that local and state governments at least theoretically do.
This is also an explanation of why such things are not likely to go away. In addition to being addictive at an individual level, the network effect causes peer pressure to engage more, and otherisizes those who do not and makes them social outcasts, at least amongst the relevant ages ranges for given platforms, but this has also already become more pervasive in matters of direct economic importance, with many companies not hiring, and apartments not renting if they cannot first verify your social media presence on these large platforms.
To slightly inaccurately quote Morpheus from Deus Ex:
The human being desires judgement, without this, group cohesion is impossible, and thus, civilization.
At first you (humans) worshipped Gods, then, the fame and fortune of others. Next, it will be autonomous systems of surveillance, pervasive everywhere.
Welp, turns out that real life mass scale social media networks literally are a hybrid or synthesis of the elements of the latter two mechanisms of social reverence/judgement.
Yeah thats the main problem, significant development is likely to be crushed.