EA’s greed for microtransactions has become a plague

Remember when you paid for a game and got to enjoy 100% of its content at launch? Those days have long gone, with publishers seeking to drain you of hard-earned money as much as they can. The explosion of DLC packs created for games after launch was the culprit at first, following most major IPs through their life cycles. Not everyone liked that push, though gamers were never forced to pay in most cases. A bunch of games didn’t follow that, but you always get a few of those greedy oddballs in the industry. More so, we’ve got to experience some brilliant stories added the games post launch, with likes of Mass Effect 2: Lair of the Shadow Broker and The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine providing quality entertainment once you’ve finished the main storyiine. Now, however, the industry has adopted a mass trend of throwing microtransactions in every pot, with publishers like EA and Activision being worst offenders of the bunch. The former seems to take up a new headline each year, with no end in sight for slowing its greedy momentum. You pay for a game, then buy some DLC (which doesn’t seem to be that widespread these days), and maybe you’d also want to spend extra cash on useless cosmetics or worst case – pay to win the game. Costs of a new release now suddenly spike to over $100 from initial $60, with especially EA known to be most aggressive with its premium currency.

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I’ve started getting serious fatigue from open-world gaming

Open-world games are by far my favorite way to spend time when I boot my computer to sit back, relax, and enjoy a few hours of entertainment. Undefined by a specific genre, these now cover a myriad of gaming concepts and have come to include a broad range of franchises and new IPs. Yet in recent time, I’ve been feeling an increasing sense of fatigue when it comes to playing open-world titles, and I’ve spent some time thinking as to why it may be. Perhaps I’ve played way too many by now, and simply interjected little variety through experiencing different genres. That wouldn’t be the case, though, as I’ve never had such a problem in the past. So, what exactly led me to start getting exhausted from games I play and enjoy most often?

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The gaming industry just won’t quit making remasters

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Dark Souls Remastered

We are well into the first half of 2018 and given a year or two, will be looking into a new console generation. Competition between Intel and AMD to produce the fastest processor with the highest amount of cores will no doubt play into that, and games will be created even bigger than they are now. Still, that doesn’t stop the gaming industry from cranking out remasters of older games year after year and isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. I like that roughly in the recent year, publishers focused on bringing titles from a generation or a few ago rather than titles from 2010s before the Xbox One and PS4 came out. This is generally because they’ve already exhausted the catalogue of games produced in the period of 2010-2015 and don’t have much elsewhere to go beyond that. With fairly recent Dark Souls Remastered and Far Cry 3: Classic Edition popping up for release, however, the gaming industry isn’t quite done with remasters just yet.

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