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?
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.
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.