Are you
tired of Jim Sterling's skits?
Are you
sick of being told Capitalism is bad?
Are you
outright done with listening to a Brit convince you his tits are true and honest?
Do you think Jim is/was
capable of making good points but he's too much of a spiteful, bigoted, terminally-online Twitter weirdo to live up to that capacity?
If you said
yes to any of these, then don't worry.
Gloria From Pokemon Sword (and Shield) Presents:
THE JIMLESS JIMQUISITION
with your host: not Jim Sterling
Today's Record-Setting Revised Topic: Diablo Immortal
Diablo Immortal might be the perfect example of why people hate mobile games. You have a fun example of a lite Diablo game ruined by damn near everything being monetized. This is because, instead of traditional loot boxes, they effectively sold raid modifiers with degrees of randomness and preset unlocks. I'll spare you the ins and outs of it, the important part is there's a consumable that makes the game 800% faster (or in other words, 9 times as quickly), something the game goes out of its way to tell you straight up. And in case you (somehow) didn't hear, the game takes your pay-to-win bonuses away if you don't log in daily.
Yep, what was once something these live-service/freemium games did to incentivize you to keep playing has now been mutated into a terminal illness that will kill your rushed progress. It's like when there was the Chocobo GP controversy of Mythral expiring and then Activblizzard and their Chinese overlords went "that's not a bad idea."
Apparently, maxing out a single character will cost over $100,000 or literal months of grinding. But beyond these extremes, this is sadly nothing we haven't seen before. Another whale hunting game, only this one takes a not-crap base game down with it. I imagine that, as this game exists for longer and longer, more controversies about it will come to light, but from the outside, it's just a better dressed-up song and dance this sub-industry has been doing for a literal decade. I get wanting to be hopeful that this one would be different, but can you really be surprised that the company that brought EA's Football Lootboxes to their darling OverWatch was willing to screw over a classic like Diablo? Cause I'm not.
A shorter Jimless Jimquisition this time, but that's due to this game being a thing we've seen time and again, and I'm fairly confident that nothing coming out will change my stance on it for better or worse. Otherwise, I'd at least wait until Friday to do this.
