I'll start this off by saying "Blizzard/Activision are a horrible company and I will not support them in any sense" is a totally valid and appropriate reason to not want anything to do with Immortal, and even be angry it's existence in discourse.
I am playing Immortal, as many other people are/will, because it's free and currently popular. I have no intent of spending any money, and no means currently to become a whale without losing my house and internet connection first. But I may end up spending money on this game accidentally, and that's the real menace of the design. As someone who has been playing a lot of f2p "MMOS" (and Immortal gets a lot closer to a classic mmo than most) for about as long as they've been a thing, a lot of the specific discussion I've seen about this has been frustrating. Which is more what I want to get into using this game as an example, more than framing it as a specific discussion of this game (which is will be, using direct references).
Friday wrote:Diablo Immortal is a trap designed to create and milk whales.
This is definitely not the main intent, and a big part of my issue with the discussions. As came up in discord yesterday, these games do not aim for, or count on, whales. I think a diablo game specifically, and blizzard fanbase, will definitely get more of them than most f2p endeavors, but it's not going to be the big money.
A tangent before going further in. Of all my experience with game marketplaces, the one I inarguably fell the deepest into was ArcheAge. The pinnacle of korean mmo design, tempered by the NA publisher to adapt to the more lax regulation on in-game gambling (and this is before they added a whole host of themepark gacha in a rerelease). Endgame was basically spending hours farming with raid-sized groups in open PVP areas to get the materials you needed for your next gear upgrade. You then spent a bunch of real money on marketplace items that make it slightly more likely that your +9 weapon will actually upgrade to +10 (1/9 chance it would have the stat set your build needs) instead of exploding and leaving you with nothing. I put nearly $10k real dollars (USD, not NZD) into this game over the course of 2 years, enjoyed
maybe one year of that, struggled through the next, and quit cold turkey when my max upgrade, third-from-best enchant weapon (only two dps better geared on the server at the time) broke on the upgrade attempt the day before a big guild fight. Even with the awesome advantage and sense of power being overgeared in a game that relied on pvp for endgame, that game wasn't actually focused on whales like me either. They made most of their money from people paying $5 over and over again to upload custom .pngs and put them on their houses and boats.
Friday wrote:As Tycho of Penny Arcade (and many others) also said, this means that it is, at its core, fundamentally fun. People who bring up that the game is fun are missing the point. An unfun game is not a trap because you cannot trap people with an unfun experience.
I would also argue against this. The "mobile" design specifically is more about gating the potential for fun. Classic gacha card games will put up a wall where you can't reasonably progress without that current 7-star rare special in the store, or at least a few booster packs for upgrade materials. Games like Genshin Impact do seem to have a fun game at the core, but then hit you with a stamina system you have to pay to feed to keep playing when you want. Then after you paid for an extra 2 hours on sunday, it would be dumb to not play the full given time on monday, so on and so forth. And that's without even getting in to the fact that Immortal is a AAA (owned, not developed by this time) franchise. It definitely did not need to be fun in any sense to sell. And really isn't even fun enough that I'd take the fact that is should be for granted. But that'll come up more in a minute.
Friday wrote:"Fun" also includes great sound design, satisfying visceral feedback to attacks, graphics, etc. This game looks and plays amazingly well for a mobile game. It plays basically the same as Diablo 3, which for a mobile game (or a port of a mobile game for PC) is an actual amazing technological feat.
I can promise you it has none of these things. I'm playing the PC port, and it is so definitely a port, with absolutely no enhancements or design considerations for PC input. I have to imagine it plays a bit better on mobile, as intended, but it's also a glitchy mess in both design and implementation. A big part of why I finally gave it a go was a video of someone falling through the same floor forever while global chat was scrolling past with gold selling bots and DPS that don't know how to use LFG. One of my experiences in-game so far was competing with many other people all doing the same dailies, with not nearly enough individual mob spawns for everyone. This is not a great, fun game that you want to invest money in being the best at. Only addiction and fanboyism could feed that delusion. Which, while certainly embraced as a part of the exploitative economic design, is not the main intent. Those numbers basically make themselves.
Friday wrote:Again, though, the gameplay is identical to Diablo 3, which is a one time pay... If you then move to "but Diablo 3 is old and this is new and my brain likes things that are new" then I suspect you are REALLY THIRSTY FOR A NEW DOPAMINE LOOP because so much was lifted directly (and I mean both assets and gameplay) from Diablo 3 that I really, really don't think it counts as "new" in any meaningful way.
Diablo 3 is a game I can play alone on my PS4 and maybe find a discord server with people who have years of constant experience that will be so much more aggressive than me it will not be any fun. That is, if I don't burn out before getting into Hell difficulty solo, anyway. I've never actually taken a diablo game past a second playthrough, nevermind whatever ladder hell real fans have been in.
Immortal is an mmo, more so than most games that advertise the term these days. I can go into it and be surrounded by other people currently starting out. I can be playing alone and have someone offer a group when we notice we've been hitting the same objectives on this map. I can get a random prompt for a secret zone group, not say a word to them, and go back to my solo play right after. I can enter pvp arenas at the first level it's available and beat out top-level teams because no one playing understands what an objective is yet. Immortal is not a single-player diablo game. It is using as much of the diablo story and name as it can to attract people, and the resources to save money on development. But the way you interact with this game is completely different to other diablos. Free or not, scam or not, good or not, it's a major aspect that can't be handwaved.
Friday wrote:If you play this game and do not pay for it, and are having fun despite the game slowing to an absolute crawl in terms of progression, then I suggest reinstalling Diablo 3 because it's the same dopamine loop and you can actually get to the endgame, you know, in this lifetime without spending money.
Coming back around now to the main discussion, which I started to mention with other mobile or f2p games. Immortal does not do this. Most F2P games do not do this anymore. That is exactly what most people know to look for and to avoid. All the discussion of this being what could have been a good game but with bad monetization is almost the opposite of the truth. The monetization is the only aspect of this game with clear design and oversite. I've made it to level 50 of 60 (in main progression, there's more to come after that) without spending a cent, and have yet to even be challenged by an enemy, never mind hitting a wall. I died once so far, last night, because I had gotten so lazy I stopped moving off of damage zones and didn't realize there were 10 more stacked under the first one. If I had at one single moment been in a spot where I felt like I needed to grind or pay, I would have quit there.
There hasn't been a single instance of a tutorial requiring you to use the real money shop, or a quest you need to pay to unlock or for access to. But there's a lot of "while you're here..."s. Oh yeah, of course you can do the challenge dungeons as much as you want and get rewards, but, while you're here... for just $1.30 you can be guaranteed an item of the type you're looking for, if not the exact stats/rating. Oh yeah, you could keep playing normally and you'll probably get the drops you need to upgrade that gem. Hell, you don't even need to upgrade it, nothing's been that hard so far. But while you're here... we do have a special for people that got that drop that lets them upgrade it for just $.99. No, don't rush, this isn't a limited time offer. Play some more, get a feel for just how rare some of these drops are and come back to us. We know if you miss a good deal you might decide you missed the chance and never buy it, and we wouldn't want to do that.
And
THAT is the real issue in my eyes, that people completely blow over. When I see the big story is that someone spent $6k and didn't get the super good legendary, my honest first thought it "huh, maybe it's not pay to win". When I see lazier articles that say he spent $25 a piece on loot boxes and didn't get a single legendary I think "this game doesn't have lootboxes, and it doesn't have anything for $25+ in the store except that crazy-big in-game currency bundles, and for just $2.30 I can guarantee myself a legendary gem drop on my brainless daily dungeon run. This article must be complete bullshit, and maybe the game isn't bad at all." And it all completely misses the point while thinking its being so smart calling out the small percentage of players that have actual issues being exploited any everyone points and laughs and meanwhile their kids are spending $3 a day on roblox custom designs.
So yes, Immortal is a not well made game with a terrible monetization design at its foundation. I can't blame people for not wanting to play it at all, and as I do I will continue to make fun of anyone who actually pays up until I quit out of frustration when they kick my undergeared ass over and over in PVP. But these games can't be written off as games, because they're available, and the playerbase for "free, online, and I heard about it" just keeps growing. And they can't be written off as exploitative design without actually looking into how that design exploits. Plus it's pretty funny that if this were a KMMO that guy that spent $6k would have at least legally been required to have a drop rates sheet to see just how unlikely it was.