Check out 31 minutes of gameplay in this demo walkthrough from Soulframe, the upcoming free-to-play open-world adventure game from Digital Extremes, the deve...
What are your criteria for a mechanic being predatory?
Heed to my long explanation of what I would consider predatory or not:
In my opinion, a predatory mechanic is one that is set to make you spend more money by means of obfuscation.
So, obstacles to progression, purchases with no affirmation, currency obscuring and etc.
In this way, for example, if an item can only be bought with non-tradable premium currency, the currency is predatory. However, if the currency is tradable then it isn’t predatory because it’s main purpose lies in trading and not obfuscation.
Same way gacha is also a predatory mechanic, gambling is predatory, and loot boxes. Because you don’t explicitly know what you’re getting and how much it costs you to get the thing you want.
Therefore to me a free battlepass cannot be considered predatory, as it’s main purpose is to increase level of player engagement.
I would agree, however, that making BP permanent would make it a much nicer feature. As in, you can work towards completing previous BPs you’ve missed. Otherwise it’s kinda meh. I don’t particularly like them anyways, it’s a pretty lazy way of achieving that goal.
What are your criteria for a mechanic being predatory?
Anything that uses shady practices & dark patterns to lure / coerce you into something by triggering certain aspects of our brain. Lootboxes would be a krass example of this, as it is basically gambling, but there’s a lot of more subtle tactics too, which I already explained to a degree.
The battlepass dictates what you should do and when you should do it. No internet? Sick? Or just want to play something else? Tough luck I guess. For me this just causes me to feel pressured to play, and not even play what I want or how I want, just to get some artificial points to eventually get the rewards that the game will pack away if I am too slow to finish it in time, or simply unable to do achieve certain tasks (like some of the group content, or just other annoying open world crap).
The only benefit of having the BP sort of a rotational multiplayer feature is that everyone is doing it and its activities at the same time, but that isn’t really all that important imo, especially if you primarily play solo. But even with friends it wouldn’t really matter whether there’s help for that type of content for just one of them, just like people can help in quests they’ve already done in the past as well.
I’m missing one key detail here.
What are your criteria for a mechanic being predatory?
Heed to my long explanation of what I would consider predatory or not:
In my opinion, a predatory mechanic is one that is set to make you spend more money by means of obfuscation.
So, obstacles to progression, purchases with no affirmation, currency obscuring and etc.
In this way, for example, if an item can only be bought with non-tradable premium currency, the currency is predatory. However, if the currency is tradable then it isn’t predatory because it’s main purpose lies in trading and not obfuscation.
Same way gacha is also a predatory mechanic, gambling is predatory, and loot boxes. Because you don’t explicitly know what you’re getting and how much it costs you to get the thing you want.
Therefore to me a free battlepass cannot be considered predatory, as it’s main purpose is to increase level of player engagement.
I would agree, however, that making BP permanent would make it a much nicer feature. As in, you can work towards completing previous BPs you’ve missed. Otherwise it’s kinda meh. I don’t particularly like them anyways, it’s a pretty lazy way of achieving that goal.
Anything that uses shady practices & dark patterns to lure / coerce you into something by triggering certain aspects of our brain. Lootboxes would be a krass example of this, as it is basically gambling, but there’s a lot of more subtle tactics too, which I already explained to a degree.
The battlepass dictates what you should do and when you should do it. No internet? Sick? Or just want to play something else? Tough luck I guess. For me this just causes me to feel pressured to play, and not even play what I want or how I want, just to get some artificial points to eventually get the rewards that the game will pack away if I am too slow to finish it in time, or simply unable to do achieve certain tasks (like some of the group content, or just other annoying open world crap).
The only benefit of having the BP sort of a rotational multiplayer feature is that everyone is doing it and its activities at the same time, but that isn’t really all that important imo, especially if you primarily play solo. But even with friends it wouldn’t really matter whether there’s help for that type of content for just one of them, just like people can help in quests they’ve already done in the past as well.
So, it’s the same idea, but not necessarily related to money? Understandable.