Black Ops 4 (a cautionary tale)

[lightsout]

Let's look at the state of online gaming as of now. A little over a decade ago, games were released with the expectation that they are complete products. Your $50 back then was spent and spent well. You got exactly what you expected out of the product and gaming life was good. PC gamers had access to online play for some time and Dreamcast had some online functionality on dial-up, but the PS2 and Xbox consoles were just tapping into it. Online gaming was different then and very few console gamers took advantage (at least in my neck of the woods growing up). Select titles had features, and you needed an additional piece of hardware as well as a game with functionality and third-party support. The games with online features were fairly basic and not too groundbreaking, but functional. 

Then came the introduction of last-gen consoles, the PS3 and Xbox 360. Games went up to $60, but the graphical difference between the system predecessors and the general quality improvements made most of us ignore that. With these consoles came the boom of online gaming popularity. Call of Duty became a monster of a franchise in the early days of these consoles releasing. PlayStation Network and Xbox Live gave people the chance to play online (for a price in the case of the latter) and so now, you could compete with other people without the need for split screen and having a friend or sibling available. You could talk with people and game for hours without ever being physically close to another human. Games like CoD released additional content like map packs and weapons and these were often for a price, but a reasonable one for what you get. Did you HAVE to get them? No, but because of the new nature of online gaming for non-PC gamers and the fact that microtransactions weren't a thing at this point, most of us avoided eating McDonald's and going out with friends for a month so we could afford the additional content. Everything is fine in gaming at this point. 

Then something terrible happened. Microtransactions became a standard practice. It started harmlessly enough. Pay $3 for an armor for a character, $2 for a new character model, things like that. You didn't need it, but if you wanted it, it was available to you. Did it seem money-hungry and like you were missing content that SHOULD have been in the game? Yeah. Did any of us get heavily upset? Not really given that you could purchase these things for the price of a drink and a snack at the gas station. Then, it started effected the act of buying a game. Want to play online? Well, first you have to own the game. Easy enough, go to GameStop, find a used copy, save yourself a few bucks and have the game. But wait, the publishers of these games weren't profiting off of those sales. What is their response? Previous content that was included by owning the game is now behind a paywall UNLESS you buy a new copy of the game that came with a code to use in the console's specific online marketplace to unlock this content or you pay $10 for that code since you bought it used and the original code has already been used. Want online team play in an EA Sports title? Better buy new OR buy used and that $10-$15 you saved buying used now becomes insignificant because to purchase a new code will cost you $10. If you don't do either of these, you have no code and no access to a feature that is in the game and was free just a couple years prior.

Snap forward to the last few years. Loot boxes pushed by companies like EA have become widely known and widely detested and even challenged and banned in certain countries. You're purchasing a product for the CHANCE of getting a thing you wish to have. If you didn't get it? Well just buy another and try your luck. Did Activision learn from the legal issues of this? No. 

Now, let's look at Black Ops 4 and see what they did from a MTX standpoint.

-The game comes with the standard $60 price. No issue here.
-A $50 season pass for additional content which includes new maps (which are maps from previous CoD titles), character skins and an amount of MTX currency in-game. 
-And as of the current update....loot boxes. That's right, they went all the way with their shady practices.
-Certain content was offered for direct purchase, but the prices were simply outrageous for a game that you already purchased $60 for AND spent $50 for a season pass. And these content selections expire and new content is then put in their place. Want to get that thing you missed out on last week? better get a loot box and hope since there's a chance you'll get something you already have.

Now, are you REQUIRED to purchase these things? No. However, if you don't, it makes playing online more difficult as you cannot search lobbies of players as easily due to you being restricted from a set of maps stuck behind a paywall and on top of that, you're missing out on content that you paid $60 for because you refuse to give another $50 to the same game which came a little barebones out of the gate. Their model was always to make you pay more for what they deemed to be the complete experience of the game. It is no exaggeration to say that for you to get all of the content in this game's life cycle and unlock all of the cosmetics, you either must invest countless hours of gameplay grinding OR spend in the hundreds of dollars to get everything. 

On that last part, the issue with grinding BO4 for the cosmetic unlocks? Each "operation" (what Treyarch is calling the "seasons" of this game) is limited time and if you fail to progress through the tiers to get the guaranteed unlocked content, you may well NEVER get them because there is no way to directly purchase the particular items you want after the season is over. Also, once you've progressed through the set 100 tiers that give the same guaranteed unlocks to every player, you USED to get something in "reserves" (old season gear. Duplicates were placed in this system however, so you may play 4 hours and in 10 tiers, get 3 things you didn't already have. It's like opening a pack of baseball cards and getting one new card that you didn't already have per pack...and these packs cost $2 each). Now? They've reworked this system to somehow lessen the reward even further. The icing on the cake is the current content update is called "Grand Heist". Fitting, considering the way they've made their MTX model worse than it was at release.


All of the above being said, does BO4 PLAY well? Sure for what it is. It offers a battle royale mode, which was necessary given the boom of PUBG and Fortnite. It offers a multiplayer experience similar to the golden age of CoD and mostly consistent balancing updates to keep the game feeling good to play for the most part. And it offers a pretty expansive Zombies experience for those who enjoy that. However, when the majority of the content you are "releasing to players" is stuck behind chance and paywalls, you are no longer offering a product to players. You are daring them to not give you money knowing many just can't resist because they want to experience the content.

BO4 was supposed to be the game-changer. The game that returned CoD to glory after the failure of the past few titles. The game that would for sure have MTX but not so many that it felt like you were getting cheated out of content if you didn't pay the ransom. The game with constant updates to the user experience that would include free content for all of it's players and not players of only one game mode (Blackout). What it turned out to be was a cash grab. 


The answer? Respawn, the company born of the minds responsible for the early Modern Warfare titles in CoD's history that were so massively successful. These people were also responsible for the Titanfall franchise and now Apex Legends. A free to play game, akin to Fortnite in that sense at least, with MTX that is purely cosmetics as of now that can also be earned pretty simply by investing time in the game. An in-game currency which can be earned by playing the game affords players the chance to directly buy the cosmetics they want. Loot boxes exist in this title, but they are also earned by gaining experience points and the content therein is duplicate protected, which means you will be getting something new each time you open one of these loot boxes. Characters that are stuck behind a paywall can be earned by this currency. As of now, Apex Legends is the game that we hoped BO4 would be. And Apex Legends is a free game. Yes, they've announced you'll have to buy a pass each season and yes, again, there are loot boxes. But when the game is free and the content is good, it's far easier to stomach that because they've already given you your money's worth before you've spent a necessary dime.

MTX are not going anywhere. You will always be paying extra for specific content for the foreseeable future. However, there is a better way to go about it. Here's to hoping Activision and companies like them learn to stop screwing over customers. Ultimately, however, this falls on us as consumers. We have to demand better. We have to show this with our wallets. As long as Activision can charge $140 for a full game, we're in for a long, terrible ride.

[Dex]

I agree it sucks. But it costs more money to make quality games today.

[Zaximus]

We are slowly getting to where we need to be, as long as gamers keep protesting.

The best models are:

1) Free to play, then have MTX (cosmetic not pay to win). - Fortnite, Apex Legends, Path of Exile, etc.

2) Buy to play, with MTX (cosmetic not pay to win) but with free "content", like maps and characters and whatnot - Overwatch, Battlefield V etc.

Of course, with any MTX, it needs to be fair, there needs to be things like transparency on the percentages and duplicate/bad luck protection (Apex nails this).    Overwatch has fair boxes as well (though I think they'd make more just selling skins for $5 outright like League of Legends).    

CoD did it all wrong.    If you want to put stupid MTX in it, all the map packs should be free, that's what you invest to keep people around buying those MTX.   Also, the MTX last time I looked were just garbage, like the skins were just recolors of existing ones.      Blops4 has other issues as well but we're just talking MTX ha.    They put all their eggs in the BR basket and haven't cared much about multiplayer, but if they offers the maps free and put more effort into multiplayer they'd be fine, even if BR fans chose Fortnite or Apex.   

I hope Fortnite and now the recent success of Apex further pushes game devs to wake up.    Also as gamers we have to vote with our wallets.   

[Arroz con Panther]

Every year I tell myself that I won't buy another CoD and then I go do it, only to play for about a month. They won't get me next year!!!

[Zaximus]

And with CoD selling map packs it really dilutes the player base.     EA actually did it right with BF:V with giving out maps free and not screwing with that.

[Arroz con Panther]

Just now, Zaximus said:

And with CoD selling map packs it really dilutes the player base.     EA actually did it right with BF:V with giving out maps free and not screwing with that.

Agreed. I would still be playing BF:V if Apex didn't drop.

[RealBitsOfPanther]

10 bucks for a "battle pass" in Fortnite isn't bad at all considering that you get hours of gameplay within it to unlock everything. Also, it helps that the game is good and fun to play. I think that's the biggest thing. 

[Zaximus]

20 minutes ago, RealBitsOfPanther said:

10 bucks for a "battle pass" in Fortnite isn't bad at all considering that you get hours of gameplay within it to unlock everything. Also, it helps that the game is good and fun to play. I think that's the biggest thing. 

Well it also isn't splitting the player-base like paid map packs are.   It's completely optional.     It's optional yes to buy the CoD map packs but it kind of isn't because your game experience is not going to be "full" without it.