Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
The games you opt to play, and the target audience for those games, continues to paint a disturbing picture. Battlepass doesn't give you more things to do in game. It makes you pay for the same amount of things to do in game.
You seem to be talking about it as if without the battlepass existing, that "content" you talk about (which is really only an exposition, not actual content) also wouldn't exist. The truth is though, without a battlepass, that content would exist, it would just be a part of the new season.
Essentially, all the battlepass is doing is preventing you from enjoying that new content at the pace in which you want to enjoy it. They are spreading out your enjoyment of it to a pace in which they want you to enjoy it.
When I saw you detail the "content" from the battlepass in the childrens game you are now playing, I was going to make an argument that Intrepid have said they won't charge for content in Ashes. However, after reading what you typed, I find that particular argument to be invalid, as your description contained no content.
As a more general argument, that would hold though. There is no place to argue that Intrepid should add a battlepass to Ashes that included content, because Steven has said they won't charge for content post launch.
A fairly nice number for a pretty niche indie game.
https://deeprockgalactic.fandom.com/wiki/Performance_Pass
Everything is completely free and goes into the game after the season is done, so nothing is fomo. This is, in a way, a perfect BP. The only reason for its existence, as I can see, is just telling people what to do in the game. At which point I'll simply agree with other posters in this thread in saying that it's a very sad state of affairs if gamers have rotted their brain to such a point where they need to be told how to play a game.
The game on its own is not gamefied enough to be a game, I guess, so they had to add a BP to make playing the game more fun.
I guesss, the other reason could also be removal of rng in the cosmetics acquisition. BP just gives you everything, while if you've missed stuff from it - you'll have to get lucky in other sources, if you wanna get the precise item you missed.
But, considering that the devs have direct control of all those other sources - this could've been designed in a different way. I also don't know how the rng works in DRG, cause it might have a system where you can't get dupes from it, at which point we're simply back to the "BP serves no purpose" thing.
That is still a BP UI, with not only seasonal rotations (obviously to keep people subbed for longer) but even with a monthly cap on currency (an even huger push for people to stay subbed).
But what I was talking about is you saying "I'd only play for 40-60h w/o a BP, but for a 100 with a BP", even though you'd literally be playing the same game, doing the same things, but now your gameplay is artificially increased because the BP is preventing you from getting your reward sooner.
Another question on this point though. If the BP required you to play for 200h to get the final reward - would you play for 200h?
And this is the exact point that, in my mind, goes directly against your liking of BPs. You limit your gameplay to a preferred point, but you're completely fine if a BP makes you play for almost twice as long to give you a reward.
I just can't wrap my head around your reasoning here. But that's beside the point now.
I'm talking about taking it even further. The cosmetics NPC never cycles cosmetics, he only gets more and more of them. And also every single activity in the game just gives you cosmetics currency.
Cosmetics in the store are priced based on that currency distribution, but are sold purely directly with a free choice of the item.
IRL money could be used to change color schemes on those items or give them some additions (i.e. a breastplate gets an insignia on it).
There's no BP UI, there's no progression line. There's no ties to seasons or whatever. You simply play the game and buy cosmetics. Certain quest lines will have their own specialized cosmetic items, so that doesn't go anywhere.
And the final point ties into this\/ Ashes is already planning to do that, just as Fortnite is already doing that. And, as I said, BP has nothing to do with new content, other than making people stay in the game longer for better gameplay metrics for the corpa.
Except it wouldn't be full expansions, and it would just be new pieces of content, just like seasons work in other games.
And so this then brings another question. If my suggested system was implemented - would you play the game for 40-60h and wait for the next released content, or would you play for as long as you can to get all the cosmetics that interest you in the store (while potentially throwing a buck or few here and there to maybe pick a color on them or get an addition that would match your preferred RP)?
BPs just make use of those children. They keep the kids playing the game for longer, to keep up the metrics high. They get literally billions from them by having fomo and prolonged BP grind (because rich kids can flaunt their boosted BP cosmetics on the second day of the BP, while the poor kid has to grind for weeks for it). And on top of all of that the best cosmetics are obviously behind the paid BP, so kids beg their parents to buy it for them.
It's all a huge damn scheme to rob children of their pocket money. And it's obviously working fucking perfectly.
I just find it really interesting that Dygz' mind is also prey to these schemes. Though if he's happy playing it - all good, cause he's at least a grown man. I just don't want this shit in Ashes, because I want Intrepid to do better.
Two of my nephews both love it. It isn't a sandbox game to them though.
There is a reason Microsoft released the dungeon aspect of Minecraft as a stand alone game. I totally agree that this is what it's doing, and that it's working. it is also why Epic is probably going to lose a few billion in law suits (they are at half a billion so far) and be forced to alter their monetization.
This specific form of monetization is going to be illegal soon.
I'm not surprised that Dygz falls prey to such things. Without actually trying to be mean or anything, he does have the mind of a child in many ways.
If Steven opted to try and make this kind of thing a key part of Ashes monetization strategy, it would see the game fail -whether from lack of interest from players, or from having the basis of their monetization strategy rendered illegal at some point in the future (wouldn't be surprised if that happens before Ashes is released).
Either way, there is no need to actually worry about this kind of thing infecting Ashes.
Social media has also most likely influenced how children interact with the game. All the youtubers creating stories or speedruns, or anything like that would obviously lead to children trying to imitate that in their gameplay, so the sandboxiness loses out.
This is close to my experience.
One of my nephews that "plays" minecraft makes buildings and such. He uses it as an artistic outlet. Some of his creations are quite impressive. I would have loved to see him play EQN/Landmark.
His brother uses it to make "things". He is more mechanically minded as opposed to artistic - it is a construction set to him. He'll happily build a machine to automate getting some specific resource in the game, but he never actually plays the game in a way where he needs to actually use that resource.
Both stick to their own little sphere of what they use the game for, and ignore everything else. They both do indeed have their own YouTubers that they watch (fortunately, they are both too smart to put up with TikTok), and these youTubers do give them ideas.
I actually don't fault the way either of them play the game, to be perfectly clear. They play it in a way that interests them, and the way they each play it challenges them in ways they each enjoy. It's just that neither of them make use of more than about 10% of the game.
I would think that if Minecraft had a battlepass (or other gemification system), it would completely ruin it for both of them.
I can only add as someone who works on that game ('community' and modding side, it's a platform after all) who has to research this, that's not the reason.
And it ties directly back into this. Children love sandbox games, but it has to be a true sandbox and MineCraft has technically never seriously been one. It has a whole mode for that, but part of its problem is that it is a sandbox only in the platform sense, not in the gameplay sense.
It's not that the youtubers are 'giving children something to imitate', it's that MineCraft is actually TERRIFYING if you don't play it on peaceful mode and even when you do, you still need to follow a certain play loop to actually do anything that lasts more than 5h worth of most people's interest.
It's mildly relevant to this topic, but probably not worth me expounding on other than to say that Dygz would almost certainly have the same reaction to MineCraft stuff. The described playstyle has a specific demographic that differs from yours. You'd be so different even as MineCraft players that there's no way for you to 'get it'.
There are also free Battlepass paths.
I play the free path of the WoW Battlepass.
I play the free path of the NW Battlepass.
I guess, technically I pay for the Fortnite Battlepass - but it doesn't feel like it because it comes as a perk for being a member of the Fortnite Crew: a monthly sub that costs the price of the cheapest Skin in the Item Shop.
Fortnite Crew gives 1 new Skin (which is the main reason I buy it), 1K vbucks (about $2 less than the cheapest Skin), the Main Battlepass (which will give me ~7 Skins) and the Rocket Pass (for the car racing Game Mode).
So... for less than the price of 3 Skins, at the end of the Season, I will have 10 Skins.
That's not making me a loot pinata. It's also not fucking me over.
For less than the price of 3 Skins, I end up with 10 Skins.
And I have 100 hours of fun playing the game.
That is win/win.
I guess the way NiKR might phrase it is - there is a Battlepass tied to the Seasonal DLC.
But, the Battlepass Tasks can keep players who primarily play for Quests and the dev-curated story and who like Cosmetics playing twice to three times longer than it takes to complete all the Quests and the dev-curated story featured in the DLC.
The Battlepass system is not really outside of the main game.
It's kind of like questing one meta-layer above the game - similar to how an atmosphere is tied to a world.
And BPs are usually designed around some kind of gameplay limitation that inevitably changes how you play the game. If anything, the sheer fact that Dygz, who's been a very staunch proponent of "the game gotta be this way and played in this way", gets his gameplay style adjusted by the BP to get its rewards - it just goes to show just how powerful of an influence BPs can have on players.
And when it gets taken into the context of corporate monetization schemes, we get people like Mag who support these scheme simply because they're so damn effective, that not using them can be seen as highly detrimental to the company's financial wellbeing.
It's all a mess that can only be stopped through legislature, which, even if it does in fact come, would only come years later.
Perhaps a better statement than my originan "children don't play Minecraft as a sandbox" comment would be better expressed as simply stating that children prefer direction.
My mother owns an early childhood education center. Something she noticed years ago is that if you put children (especially those aged 3 or 4, but it applies up to about 11) in a play situation without rules, one of the first things they will do is create rules.
If the rules they give themselves exclude a given piece of equipment, then that piece of equipment will go unused.
This is what I was referring to with my nephews. They have each given themselves their own set of "rules" within which to experience Minecraft. They don't experience anything of the game outside of their self imposed rules.
Sure, an argument can be made that this is perfectly fine within a sandbox, but that argument rests on the notion that a sandbox is what ever you want, thus everything is perfectly fine within a sandbox.
My point was more along the lines that they have given themselves rules within that sandbox.
This is the part that's relevant to this conversation the most though.
MineCraft is barely a 'game' if you play it in true Sandbox mode. It's actually not that much better when you don't, without mods.
In many ways it does 'tell you what to do' by effectively gating many activity options behind challenges of very specific kinds. They don't always come in the same order, but that's purely luck of the draw at world creation.
So for you, you would 'make your own fun and objectives' which is how you also want to play Ashes. For some others, they have to 'start over in a new world' and repeat the same ones with the variation provided, to get a new experience.
Choosing to do that is an ability that moves MineCraft closer to a true sandbox, and it's probably what Dygz would end up doing/want the equivalent of, in Ashes. It's just that Ashes has to put effort into doing it, whereas MineCraft can just leverage random terrain generation to give that type of person more content.
A BattlePass, would effectively be closer to 'get all these specific achievements in your Survival world to get a new cape, skin, and special FX for your character!', and it would probably work, because those people don't dislike logging into the same World they've been playing for the last month, they just don't naturally generate new things for themselves to do, once they have jumped over all the hurdles and through the hoops of the early game.
Eventually they get 'bored', get 'nostalgic', and then restart the loop, jump through the hoops again for that enjoyment, and feel better, but some people don't have the capacity to feel 'rewarded' doing this because brains are just like that.
If that developer curated story was just a part of the game, and gave cosmetics as you followed it, why wouldn't that keep these players just as interested in the game?
Essentially, imagine the same thing as a battlepass, but without calling it a battlepass, and with it just being a part of the normal new content.
With that in mind, why is there a need for it to be broken off and made it's own paid-for thing?
I wouldn't get it even more, cause I've always been a Terraria person too. And it has even more enemies that screw your gameplay up and it's also more of a combat experience overall, which I'd assume wouldn't interest Dygz at all or at least not as much.
Though even with all that combat, my main gameplay loop in Terraria has always been:
From what I've seen of Minecraft's plain gameplay I'd imagine I'd play it in the same way.
I'm not the one who's claiming that a Battlepass must have a paid path. And I also haven't said that Ashes must have a Battlepass.
And I've been saying that modern Battlepasses have very little fomo.
I expect Ashes will have a Battlepass.
MMORPGs were a very sad state of existence the moment they reached the common state of gamers racing to Endgame in 6-8 weeks and then needing to wait 12-18 months for new content via an Expansion.
That's 15+ years.
Yep. Typically 75% of the population that peak at the beginning of an Expansion leave after 60-100 hours of play.
A Seasonal BP attempts to get a surge in players playing for 100 hours 4 times per year instead of a surge of players playing 100 hours once every 12-18 months.
I dunno what "just gives you everything means".
Quests just "give you everything, too". The difference is, we can see in advance what all of the rewards will be.
And you can the rewards by doing a wide variety of things in the game whenever you are in the mood to do them, rather than the rewards being tied to a specific quest or a specific mob.
You still have to do a bunch of stuff in the game to get the rewards on the Battlepass. You've got three months to play 100hours to get all the stuff, so.., probably won't miss anything. And if you do miss for some reason - you may be able to get it later in other ways.
Maybe but...
Battlepass works fine. And they serve their purpose. Might not be interesting for your playstyle - just a Raids are not interesting for my playstyle.
I have no clue why dupes or RNG needs to be a thing for the Battlepass.
Show time! More later!
The kind of thing you are talking about in both WoW (season passes) and Fortnite are dupes. Battlepass is the mechanic by which that dupe is obfuscated.
With Fortnite specifically, there is always a better, more consumer friendly manner in which that content could be offered to players - but doing it in that more consumer friendly manner removes that camoflage of the dupe they are purpetrating.
Again, that is the issue we all have.
The content you are talking about is fine, in and of itself. No one is saying it can't or shouldn't exist, if Intrepid feel it is worth it. It is the nammer in which it is added to games that is the issue.
You've not managed to come up with an argument at all as to why this couldn't just be added to the game - why it needs to be in the form of a battlepass.
Please move one from the "12-18 months" thing. It's pointless in the context of Ashes, because Ashes will have new content every quarter (supposedly).
"Everything" here being all the cosmetics on the BP.
DRG's cosmetics from the BP move onto in-game acquisition methods, which are mostly rng-based. Which is why I said that BP provides a way to get all the cosmetics that it has, while missing some of them might result in your waiting longer to get them due to rng.
They don't and that's not what I was talking about. I was simply saying that even DRG's system is not as perfect overall, even though it's way better than absolute majority of games with a BP.
For less than the price of 3 Skins, I end up with 10 Skins.
And I have 100 hours of fun playing the game.
That is win/win.
That is awesome it works this way for you. However your not the average player either.
https://www.demandsage.com/fortnite-statistics/
Source: Statista.
Fortnite gamers in the United States reported that they had spent an average of $102. 42 in the year 2020. While the average spending of Fortnite players in the year 2018 was $84.67.
Year Average In-Game Spending By Fortnite Players
2018 $84.67
2020 $102.42
Source: Statista.
58.9% of the players spend 58.9% on outfits and characters. In contrast, 18.06% of players spend on Gliders.
The following table displays the categories on which Fortnite players spend the most money:
Category Percentage Of Fortnite Players
Outfit and character 58.9%
Gliders 18.06%
Harvesting tools 13.52%
Emotes 9.52%
I won't go digging sure deep into all the background research on this. Going to take this at face value. But if this is that stats as reported you are far from the average player in this demographic.
I searched for : average amount players spend in fortnight 2024 and most links coincide with this metric.
The Battlepass itself is around $2 per month. And I spend around $100 per month on Skins from the Item Shop.
What I love about Fortnite is the diversity of the characters/character Skins. Because I had to wait 20+ years to be able to play characters who look like me and who reperesnt with wide range of cultures I went to grade school with, rather than being stuck playing characters who either look like white European Americans or Evil/savage/bestial Furries.
Even before Fortnite had a Battlepass and a Battle Royale - I would spend $100 each month collecting a team of Heroes and Survivors that is mostly comprised of African/Americans and Latinos.
And that's always so that I can have diverse protagonists when I create machinima microfiction.
Adults like making stories for kids.
I don't play RPGs because I'm a competitive gamer.
I primarily play RPGs because I'm an actor/singer/dancer (in that order) and I crave the cooperative, interactive storytelling aspects of RP that allow me to virtually experience Fantasy Novels.
I use the rules and mechanics of Races/Classes/Stats/Skills/Abilities to inform how I'm going to act out the personalities of my characters.
I'm basically playing a role as if it's a stage play - with quite a bit of improv, but also quite a bit of authored story. And, yeah, that might sometimes involve combat and sometimes PvP - but that's why I'm 0% Killer on the Bartle Scale.
I am not at all interested in playing a Sandbox RPG. I prefer to play a Themebox RPG. And I will settle for a Themepark RPG.
https://x.com/DygzBriarthorn
I never thought ud be into fortnite. this is so surprising to me. like do u actually log in and kill people?
I'm playing LEGO Fortnite. A few months after release, LEGO Fortnite added a PvP option you can turn on, but of course I have that turned off.
When I played vanilla Fortnite 6+ years ago, it was Save The World.
They didn't have the Battle Royale yet. And I think they had Loot Boxes; not a Battlepass.
During the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Chapter earlier this year (Jan-Feb?), I jumped into the BR for a bit, but I played it pretty much exactly the same way I played APOC - focusing mostly on the non-combat Tasks on the Battlepass, but occassionally killing people.
I mean, WOW making billions on cosmetics, and they are a sub game? A BP is essentially just a cosmedi package you can buy. So I dont see a problem with it. Its not something you have to buy. The normal sub,is to make sure there is money to make new content, customer service and the like.
You are watching too much YouTube you are going to get brain rot. All these videos are for click bait views. Unless you are agree with him Halo should be free with 0 monetization. You are trying to live in a echo chamber.
Which at this point you should just ask IS to make AoC free with 0 monetization. Random youtube videos are not helping any point, just shows me how bad takes they have.
I had no idea there was a lego fortnite game and that fn had a mode that wasn't battle royale lol
I find your emotional attachment to Steven's wallet ....interesting.
Personally I hope this game is so successful Steven becomes a Billinoaire from it.
Several times, several of us have asked why this is a good thing and so far money is your best answer.
I am still working to understand why it is ok for companies to take content that should be in the game and put it behind a paywall outside of the game.
because people want that. if people didn't, companies wouldn't. duh. no one is going to sell something no one will ever buy.
anyways, content that should be in the game..whats in the game or not is decided by the game makers. there isn't anything wrong with adding skins later on and selling them through the shop or a battle pass. they could just not add anything in the first place and people wouldn't complain.
I like this answer.
Given that sometime ago IS had a pinned thread asking what makes Role-playing better and they say PvE builds the world and PvP destroy it, content you like could be introduced as events happening in regions affected by the fall of a metropolis.
Players who participate in them, beside getting something they can collect, should help grow the nodes (because instead of spending time with caravans and commissions whey spend time with such events)
Also these would compensate the monster coin events which are focused toward attacking and destroying nodes.
Will you participate in such events?
Only thing I will be doing is exploring as much of the map as possible with the lowest Level(s) I can maintain - and 0 Kills.
So, that means I won't be participating in any activity that could resuly in me going above 0 Kills.
And I also won't be doing anything other than exploration that could increase Levels.
But, everything we do in the game helps increase Nodes, I think.
I guess that should include exploring - I dunno.
And a Battlepass is typically cheaper than the cheapest item in a Cosmetics Store/Cash Shop.
Why are you watching a video that claims it takes 100K hours to finish a Battlepass as if it's anything beyond clickbait farce??