Re:A serious critique of Genshin Impact [video]
by derefr on Sunday August 15, 2021 @12:14PM
(#28189935)
Pay-to-win and pay-to-have-fun are actually pretty distinct game-design philosophies. There are a lot of free-to-play games that are pay-to-win for at least some element of the game; but where the game can still be fun without paying.
What usually happens in pay-to-win designs is that the game can be played, if more slowly, in a fun way, for as long as you’re playing against other regular people who also aren’t paying-to-win. This lasts until you get good enough to end up on the competitive-ranked top leaderboard; at which point the only way to advance on that leaderboard is to pay for extra-fancy items/equipment, because everyone else on it already did. (Analogy: doping in sports. Nobody in the minor leagues dopes, because nobody else does, so there’s no need to do it. But everybody at the top does, because everybody else at the top does, and so doping is the only way to even stay viable in the major league. The sport is “fun”, without doping, right up until you hit the majors. Then, suddenly, having any more fun requires doping. That’s traditional pay-to-win.)
With traditional pay-to-win game design, you can still extract fun from the game without paying, if you treat “the game” as being just the subset of the game that lasts until you end up in the major league with all the doping players. If you think of that point as the point where you “beat the game”, put it down, and don’t play it any more — and the game up until that point was fun and worth playing — then it wasn’t a waste of time to have played it.
Genshin Impact is apparently not this type of game, though. It’s the other kind of free-to-play game: the kind where you’re at no point having fun if you’re not paying. (But, of course, which tries to give the illusion that you can have fun, sort of like a casino tries to give you the illusion that you can have an edge.)
It takes a pretty deep dive into a free-to-play game to figure out whether there’s a subset it that is fun to work through without paying. So I don’t fault the author for needing to spend an hour on the topic to properly prove their thesis out.
What usually happens in pay-to-win designs is that the game can be played, if more slowly, in a fun way, for as long as you’re playing against other regular people who also aren’t paying-to-win. This lasts until you get good enough to end up on the competitive-ranked top leaderboard; at which point the only way to advance on that leaderboard is to pay for extra-fancy items/equipment, because everyone else on it already did. (Analogy: doping in sports. Nobody in the minor leagues dopes, because nobody else does, so there’s no need to do it. But everybody at the top does, because everybody else at the top does, and so doping is the only way to even stay viable in the major league. The sport is “fun”, without doping, right up until you hit the majors. Then, suddenly, having any more fun requires doping. That’s traditional pay-to-win.)
With traditional pay-to-win game design, you can still extract fun from the game without paying, if you treat “the game” as being just the subset of the game that lasts until you end up in the major league with all the doping players. If you think of that point as the point where you “beat the game”, put it down, and don’t play it any more — and the game up until that point was fun and worth playing — then it wasn’t a waste of time to have played it.
Genshin Impact is apparently not this type of game, though. It’s the other kind of free-to-play game: the kind where you’re at no point having fun if you’re not paying. (But, of course, which tries to give the illusion that you can have fun, sort of like a casino tries to give you the illusion that you can have an edge.)
It takes a pretty deep dive into a free-to-play game to figure out whether there’s a subset it that is fun to work through without paying. So I don’t fault the author for needing to spend an hour on the topic to properly prove their thesis out.