[bakugo]

It's easy to say "F2P bad" or "live service bad", and I'm usually inclined to agree, but in this case, the entire game was carefully designed around the monetization model from the very start of development, to the point that it probably wouldn't work very well without it.

I've thought about what a non-live service, $60 one-time purchase version of Genshin Impact would look like, and I've come to the conclusion that it probably wouldn't be anywhere near as good. Even assuming it had the same amount of content it has now (which is quite a lot), the large and diverse roster of characters goes a long way in avoiding the feeling of repetitiveness and tedium that plagues most large open world games nowadays, and having to carefully pick and choose which characters you want to obtain and invest into (if you're not a whale, at least) and having to dedicate time to build up each one makes you care a lot more about them.

[nottorp]

Yes, every game based on a multiplayer grinding treadmill would be a shitty game if you made it single player.

> the large and diverse roster of characters goes a long way in avoiding the feeling of repetitiveness and tedium

It's just the same tedium but you change the combos every 10000 repeats?

> that plagues most large open world games nowadays

Open world games have grown too large for their own good, but that's a different discussion. The worst is when some title is succesful and they get money and they make a sequel that's thrice as big.

Horizon Zero Dawn: perfect length if you ask me. Horizon Forbidden West: could have been 50% smaller for the same enjoyment.

Even Witcher 3 and Elden Ring, which are great non repetitive open world games, could have been smaller for the same effect if you ask me.

[johnnyanmac]

>It's just the same tedium but you change the combos every 10000 repeats?

if you're going to reduce it to that, we ultimately can go back to the 90's and consider all video games as a useless waste of time that corrupts the mind.

Ultimately, you figure out why games are fun for yourself and focus in on that, be it gameplay, story, charactters, art direction, or simply comfort (I'm sure I can find a few friends who easily threw X000 hours into Stardew Valley). I don't like competitive FPS, but people have made friends, professions, and entertainment just around watching other people play those games. Let alone their own personal experience.

>The worst is when some title is succesful and they get money and they make a sequel that's thrice as big.

that's simply consumer demand, and despite that meme most people are not asking for shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less. Fortunately, games are diverse and you can definitely tailor to your needs unless you must have AAA graphics for your presentation. There are thousands of indies released yearly, but maybe a hundred AAA on a good year spread across a dozen genres.

[_lvbh]

Even if “live service bad”, Genshin Impact has been reverse engineered to death; you can run your own server, mod the game to get all the cosmetics, and do just about whatever you want.

[bakugo]

True, but you mostly can't play quests or events on private servers, so they're pretty useless right now.