I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
If Genshin Impact was a Steam game, it would be the game from the screenshot for me (and if anything, 1.4k hours is a lowball - I’ve racked up over 500 hours this year alone on PC, not to mention the years before on mobile).
It would have been goated if it wasn’t a gacha game and battlepass timesink, but now I can’t recommend it to anyone, at least not if you’re strong-willed and can resist the gacha and fomo or willing to try setting up a private server … which I imagine people here on fedi might be more likely to be, now that I think. (The private server thing, that is.)
I really loved the primary storyline and the artistry of the world.
I absolutely despised the grinding, especially the dungeons, where it feels like they just gave up on anything being fun. You’d walk through those big double-doors and be in some endless hallway full of slightly-too-difficult encounters. Then you’d get “Pay2Win?” dangled in your face.
Definitely understand how they made so much money. But fuck, what a waste of art assets.
I have a love-hate relationship with Genshin, and the only reason I’m still playing is that I love the exploration and I consciously ignore everything else in the game 😅 (aside from fun event minigames)
I used to be a lot more susceptible to fomo (“oh no this event is only available for 3 weeks, I should grind through it even if I don’t enjoy the story or the minigames”), but Genshin trained my fortitude against its psychological manipulation, and now I don’t even touch the story or any content I don’t enjoy. Thanks Hoyo for making me care a lot less about your game lol…
It looks like Dragonsword, a single player gacha game, just released the other day if you wanted to scratch that itch.
I don’t have a gacha itch. Genshin is my exception to the “no gacha” rule for one big reason (co-op that isn’t region-locked) and I’ve just gotten some grasp on my time management. So describing Dragonsword as a single-player gacha isn’t really making it appealing to me, and I really shouldn’t be picking up a new game right now. (Not to mention that after looking it up, it doesn’t seem to be a gacha, which is a big plus in my book.)
I was going to still wishlist it, but unfortunately, while reading the Steam page and reviews, I noticed a few major deal-breakers:
And that in a game that prices itself above Deltarune.
(To be fair, I also think Genshin shouldn’t be considered a free game weight-class-wise but a 40-50ish Euro game at least since that’s probably the approximate average revenue per player Hoyo gets.)
That’s a pretty damning breakdown, thanks for sharing your thoughts. I wonder though, if a game like that can’t even attract current/former gacha players then maybe the genre really can’t exist without the freemium payment structure.