Golfing on the Moon 1971
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 13, 2022
Correct. Either they are not a fulltime player and come back to the game every now and then and might drop some money to pull a character they really want (for the Genshin clones, you get 2x premium currency for up to your first $200 spent per year, with the bonus resetting when the anniversary comes around). Or they are a fulltime player but they only buy the monthly subscription ($5) and battle pass ($10). For Genshin and its clones, that usually means they can afford to buy teams of limited characters and some vertical investment in them, buying their weapons and a few dupes for eidolons/constellations.
For comparison, being a year round WoW or FF14 player costs about the same. A $50 box purchase expansion every 2 years (averaged out to $25 per year), and then a $15 monthly subscription ($180 for 12 months). And then there are a lot of cash shop items and mounts that you might buy. In FF14 you are strongly incentivized to purchase 2x additional retainers to get more bank space.
A couple hundred bucks per year is an extraordinarily cheap hobby.
It varies.
For Granblue Fantasy, the main content for me is the fully voice acted (in Japanese) visual novel stories, both the main story chapters and the event side stories that release every month. I have found GBF's stories to be more enjoyable than most box purchase JRPGs I have bought and better than many mainline Final Fantasy games. I only come back to play when new story drops, and then leave once I am done with that. GBF also has a grind intensive raiding endgame with multiplayer raid boss fights with WoW levels of overdesigned mechanics and phases, but I do not engage with that at all.
Arknights releases new main story and events similar to GBF, though they are unvoiced and the scene presentation and directing is not as good (as in the number of facial expressions, effects, character sprites being moved around to simulate movement, etc). The writing is also poor (this is an issue with all of the Chinese gachas, because unlike Japan they did not have a situation where the novel and VN scenes were dying and thus a lot of great writers available and willing to try their hands at videogame writing). So the story alone is not a strong motivation to play it. The gameplay is tower defense missions and can get pretty involved, if you are into that.
In Genshin Impact and its clones (Honkai Star Rail, Wuthering Waves, Zenless Zone Zero, Arknights Endfield), generally the main thing to do is to progress through the main story, which takes you to new areas and new fights and meet new characters and so on. There is also some amount of side content and minigames in these areas. There is also monthly event content to do, which is often characters getting to meet and interact with each other, and new minigames. I personally find the minigames to be pretty neat.
Once you have exhausted all of that and are waiting for new content to release, but still want to continue engaging with the game, then the only thing left to do is to expend your daily energy to farm for relics (gear drops with randomized substats like Titanforging in WoW). This takes a few minutes. You will farm relics for a character until you get an acceptably good combination of substats, and then move on to farming for another character. Once your teams are sufficiently powerful, you can tackle the optional endgame battle content like the Abyss/Apocalyptic Shadow/The Tower/Shiyu Defense/etc. This usually requires you to beat increasingly strong waves of enemies and bosses while on a timer (similar to WoW's Mythic+). Most of the tiers of this gameplay can be cleared by casuals, but the last few tiers will only be cleared by people with teams of limited characters and vertical investment in them. Clearing these last few tiers will only give you negligibly more rewards. These endgames refresh every few weeks with new effects and mechanics.
As these Genshin clones go on (and thus the veteran players accumulate more and more characters), they have been adding new endgame modes that require more and more characters to complete, like Genshin's Imaginary Theater, HSR's Anomaly Arbitration (requires three invested teams of 4 characters each), ZZZ's Deadly Assault (3 teams of 3 characters each), etc.
Personally I do not like M+ or these endgame modes too much, so I just casually clear as high as I can when they refresh and move on.
The main problem with most of these gacha gameplays is that the gameplay is almost entirely just fights about reducing enemy HP to 0 (and on a timer when you do endgame modes). Which just is not that interesting to me as SRPG encounters where you have objectives that need to be captured/held/defended, bombs that need to be planted, VIP cars that need to be protected, etc. The original Arknights is the only one of these gachas that is a little more engaging, since it is tower defense. Sadly its sequel, Arknights Endfield, is not like that and is just another series of fights.
There is also an issue where characters do not have many abilities. They usually just have a basic attack, their skill, and then their ultimate you press when it is charged up and ready. Sometimes characters might have a trait/passive that does more, but that's generally it. There is also no way to teach your characters additional spells or abilities. Contrast that with the Trails series of JRPGs where each character has 3 to 5 crafts and 1 to 2 ultimates, and you can teach them a plethora of spells.
Another issue with most Genshin clones is that they have MMO cooldown rotation nonsense. But here you can instantly swap on the spot between your other party members (who are not fighting with you on the battlefield). So you switch to a character, fire their cooldowns, and then swap to the next character to fire their cooldowns, etc. I find that unimmersive and bad, so the only one of the Genshin clones I have stuck with is HSR which is the turn based one where you have the whole party there onscreen. Arknights Endfield has your party members also fight with you when you are not controlling them.
Another issue with the Genshin open world clones is the open world design. There is a huge world you have to hike across to open up a chest that gives you 5 primogems. Also, to do your dailies, you have teleport to a nearby POI and then hike across the world to reach the quest location. I just don't find this fun or immersive like forming a party and going out to a camp location in oldschool MMOs. Fortunately HSR doesn't have an open world and lets you just queue for whichever daily farm you want and alt+tab out while the game autobattles. ZZZ also does not have an open world so you don't have to hike across huge maps to find the chests.
The minigames are a big part of this new generation of gacha games (Genshin and after). They are promoted as major patch content and are pretty polished, and some of them have a couple hours of gameplay and story. WoW and FF14 rarely release minigame stuff anymore, and when they do it is just nowhere near as polished or as well presented.
The minigames usually do not require that you own any characters and usually do not use those character's stats or mechanics, so it's pretty friendly.
HSR has been moving towards allowing you to use any character in the game for certain gamemodes like Divergent Universe and Currency Wars, even if you don't own them. You will get a rental version of the character with a lackluster relic loadout, and ofcourse no vertical investment eidolons or light cones. So if you actually own the character you will do much better.