What you need to know
- As Dragon’s Dogma 2 launched on PC Thursday evening, a previously hidden suite of microtransactions became available for purchase.
- Things you can buy for the single player ARPG include fast travel points, Rift Crystals for hiring Pawns and buying special items, appearance change and revival consumables, a special camping kit that weighs less than normal ones, and a few others.
- In response to the microtransactions, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is being review bombed, with the game currently sitting at “Mostly Negative” on Steam.
I don’t disagree, but some of the articles / reactions I’ve seen are like “you have to pay for fast travel points!” which isn’t accurate.
I’m thinking back to deus ex: mankind divided, which had a strongly negative reaction due to the fact that you could buy praxis kits. But if you played through those games…there was absolutely no reason you needed to buy praxis kits. The game was definitely not one where you would find yourself grinding out praxis kits, and in fact buying them would’ve probably spoiled the experience.
Then there’s about a million jrpgs like the Tales of series, or falcom’s trails series, where you can buy high potency healing item kits as DLC. Again these are absolutely not needed to finish those games. But they’ll make certain achievements a lot easier. And again this has been going on for a long time.
I don’t know, while I think this stuff crosses a line (and the fact that they deliberately hide it from reviewers shows they’re well aware), the line has been steadily moving for a long time. Personally I have never once in my life bought one of these dlcs (I actually hate when they make them free in complete editions! Don’t break game balance as a “bonus”!) but obviously people do cause they keep selling them. I have no idea how gamers reset this. But at the same time, review bombs are just…kind of lame. People will be looking at steam reviews 5 years from now and not even remember what the controversy was.
No review bombs are really good actually, they are the only reason why Square patched the steam version of nier automata years later, people reviewed bomb the steam release after they released a much better port on the windows store.
Right because when I’m browsing game reviews long after whatever kerfuffle is forgotten, it’s really helpful to have to guess whether it’s a legitimate problem that was long since fixed, a controversy that had to do with a dev’s actions completely external to the game, some Andrew Tate loving incels upset because WOKE, or if it’s actually a bad game. Review bombs are childish and people have a hair trigger for them. And I don’t think they’re terribly effective. I’m also pretty sure Nier Automata only got patched due to microsoft’s gamepass requirements.
Nope, it’s another version entirely. The steam version received no patch for 4 years until the review bomb started.