Yikes.
I guess that explains why they didn’t want it on steam.
From Wendelius’ link:
UPDATE: [VG247 asked Bethesda’s Pete Hines whether you could buy the packs with real money and he said “no”.]
Sure.
Technically you can’t buy them right now but when we launch the game on bethesdanet, you can purchase Bethesda Bucks™ and use them across all of our games!
We need a MMORPG where you can be a forest. Growing and having life inside.
Or you are a molerat in that forest.
Of course the card to be a forest is superrare, and players would be able to share it.
People could “attack” the forest and weak it, by cutting the wood. But a friendly forest would allow some wookcutting and benefict from a relation with friendly “elves” friends.
People would pay 10.000$ to get the really rare cards, only no in real money, but some fake premium coins.
I guess people don’t want that. The average person want to be a average hero. Had give them infinite power, they will just get bored, and logoff maybe forever.
One people could achieve “server domination” by acquiring all the forest cards, then stop any wookcutting, and ask astronomical prices for wood. Forcing people to pay fat sums for a few logs. War Victory by Economics.
Fallout 76 could be a good game if they allow the player to be ugly and mutated, to play a molerat. Grown extra hands=> Gain a DPS boost (but lose the ability to use some human armor)
Yeah, they clarified that you can’t buy the card packs-- I guess they’re really afraid of their game being called gambling in the EU parliament etc.
I was fine when you could buy them, because they just offered additional choices you chose not to pick when leveling up, so I’m cool with that too.
Here is the exact question and answer:
Because of how card packs resemble loot boxes, I wondered if they were going to also be available to buy. Here’s what Pete Hines, SVP of global marketing at Bethesda, said when I asked him.
“No,” he answered. “You get them when you level up, every two levels – two, four, six, eight, ten – then after that, every five levels. You only get them as a reward for levelling up.”
I asked again if there was any way at all to purchase them, either with real or in-game currency, and he reiterated his stance.
As Reddit might say: gamers and pre-condemning games for sins they haven’t committed yet, name a more iconic duo.
I was pretty clear that I was fine with it, both in my original post and the follow-up. I’m sure some jerks on reddit were pissed off, though, sure.
Cocaine is still a drug if you get it for free. I guess games may have loot boxes that you don’t have to pay money to feed a habit. So when the habit is created, remove the kid glove from the iron fist and start asking money for it.
Gambling is a illness, and I feel games need to stay away from gambling has much has possible, as they may affect some people lives in a very negative way, maybe even destroy lives.
Yeah, this is how I feel about it as well.
Publishers saying one thing and then doing another.
That is pretty iconic.
Tons of games are skinner boxes. Operant conditioning is what makes you run a dungeon for the 1000th time in WoW. Those intermittent rewards trip some switch in the human brain. That’s why people continue to play those sorts of games, why they remain engrossing after you’ve experienced the content many, many times.
If you outlaw skinner boxes, which are by any reasonable definition gambling, you destroy entire genres of games. So yeah, I’m pretty much against that.
These games can play a different song.
Play better, improve yourself, get rewards.
Unveil the story, learn more about this world, get you rewards.
I am not ready to make a big stament. But maybe, maybe games that last forever and having nothing to teach you, challenge you. They are bad. But the difference of bad and good is not binary, but a blurry line. Lootboxes games are evil, trough. Fully on the dark side.
They do all that stuff, but creating content is expensive. Every new WoW expansion has (and I’m speaking generously) 40 hours of truly new content. But they want people to play that expansion for two years.
It’s the intermittent unpredictable nature of those rewards that keeps people logging in every day.
I have no problem with lootboxes in isolation, my primary concern is that when they’re linked to real money and not completely cosmetic, they will have negative gameplay effects.
And while I’m basically OK with cosmetic-only purchases, they definitely do lead to less choices available for free, which sucks.
Thats the duality, is not it?
Games that are addictive because they exploit brain hacks, versus games that are addictive because are good.
We need to tell the difference. And when a game is trying to be exploitative warn people of it.
I am not against something that exist purelly to waste your time. I am against stuff that waste your time, and on addition to that, they trick your brain with hacks. And on top of that, they generate monetization streams to monetize that.
Loot boxes are mechanism that is hard to use in a way that don’t lead to people wasting their time. But they can be addictive. They are not fun, only addictive.
Games can be fun, or relaxing, they give you that. But a lootbox is a bad mechanism to get that. And highly exploitable.
I can think of very few titles with more than 20 hours of gameplay that don’t indulge in “brain hacks” of this sort. Strategy games with procedurally generated content, mostly. Very few narratives.
Like I say. Is not a binary thing. But a blurry line.
Anyway the games you have played more than 700 hours are multiplayer games. And the games you have played 20 hours or less are singleplayer.
The differentiator is that “on a multiplayer game, the other players is the content”. You are playing more hours multiplayer games, because you are a human, and humans are social animals.
Yes, multiplayer games, particularly competitive PvP ones, are another major avenue to extend playtime. Humans are, after all, unpredictable.
Yep, theres always something to learn from humans.