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How much of a cash grab is this game?
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Member UncommonPosts: 602
Been doing some research on it the last few days and very close to picking it up for a good price however earlier I heard from a few old guild friends that they find the game to be a huge cash grab. For example, the cost of a mount is ridiculously high or a £20 collectors edition upgrade. Does that sort of thing set the tone for the whole experience with a lot of the ingame stuff or does everything feel viable and fair without splashing extra cash on microtransactions?
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It's a massive cash grab.. just like every game ever made. If there wasn't any money to be grabbed, there wouldn't even be any games. No one would have even bothered inventing computers if no one was willing to pay for them.
My serious reply though.. it's easy to obtain a mount and you can travel around just fine using way shrines before you get a mount.. they are all over the bloody place. There are so many way shrines that most of the time you won't even be bothered to press your mount key. There is nothing you need to pay for.
Well, the horse is the only thing on offer.
It also happens to be a pretty slow horse fyi (aka, your character can run almost as fast). You can port around the map using wayshrines for free too.
Your friends are either:
A. Idiots
or
B. Don't play and are completely mis-informed.
There are no microtransactions as of right now. The horse you get with the imperial edition is a nice perk for buying the game for an extra $15-$20 (depending on where you buy).
There are currently 4 things to spend gold on. A horse, inventory/bank slots, skill/attribute resets, and gear. You can easily do without spending money on gear for the first 200+ hours of gameplay. You don't need to buy any gear until you are level cap (veteran rank 10) which takes a long ass time.
If you plan your build/character well, you can do without skill/attribute resets as well. There are 300+ skill points in the game, so you can easily own every skill without ever paying to re-spec.
You can easily do without purchasing inventory/bank slots. You can make 7 alts that have 60 slots each...so you can add 420 "bank" slots for free.
So the only 100% required gold purchase in the game right now, I would say, is the horse. The horse costs 42,500 gold.
I just hit veteran rank 1 last night which means I finished the 1-50 levelling experience. I have 120 hours of time logged in the game. I currently have 91,037 gold...and that is after I've bought my 42,500 horse, re-specced my skills once for 20,000 gold, and upgraded my bank and inventory both to 100 spaces (probably another 80-100k gold cost).
If you only get gold from looting/quests you're going to be poor, just like in any MMO ever made. If you participate in the economy by buying/selling mats and goods, you can make more than enough gold.
TLDR; The game isn't a cash-grab by any definition. Your friends are wrong.
Thanks for clearing that up for me.
Go to Amazon.com for thoughts about this from people that bought the game. Its low score should help you decide.
The horse and Imperial race isn't a big deal and more fluff than anything else so take it or leave it as you like. As for the box price and sub, well you either pay now or you pay later but there is no such thing as a free ride in this world. Some people don't have issues with what F2P does to the games themselves and for those more power to them but I personally can't bring myself to invest more than 30 or 40 hours in those so called free games. As for B2P, TSW is the only one that even does it mostly right and even there they have fallen into the trap of random cash shop boxes. GW2's Gem store is a deal breaker for me and is 10 times worse than selling imperial editions could ever be in my book.
So no ESO isn't a cash grab. It's a game that couldn't have been made at the scale it is as a F2P or even B2P game.
You can feed it and make it faster or give it more stamina or give it extra carrying capacity like any horse in the game.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Yeah cuz everyone knows if you want to see if an MMO is good or not you go to Amazon.com!
The cash shop only as a mount available for now (ZOS as stated they'll be adding vanity pets and other stuff latter on).
As i've discussed this in the Angry Joe thread, the first mount costs 17k gold, which isn't that easy to obtain. Unlike most mmos, where you reach level X and pay abit of money, this one can be obtained at any level, but it you'll need to make some gold along the way.
And that's where the horse in th CS comes in. Personally, i hate it, but, it's not game breaking. It can be annoying getting the 17k, but you'll get there.
The bigger "cash grab" IMHO, is the whole "play in any faction if you pre-order BS". So, besides that, and the Imperial Edition, nothing else really.
Where's all the extra cash they grabbed from doing that then? Ah, yeh.. it cost the same.
I agree that everyone should be able to play any race in any faction.. it's a stupid limitation. But.. they didn't grab any cash.
If getting 17k is annoying, you're playing the game wrong.
I had 20k just from questing when I finished Rivenspire (Daggerfall Covenant 3rd zone...level 25ish).
Except that's over with and you can't buy it anymore. If that was a cash grab it would still be for sale which it isn't. That was a pre-order campaign and probably a pretty successful one at that. It probably did get a lot of fence sitters to pre-order who might have waited till launch otherwise but I seriously doubt anyone who didn't want to play the game bought it just for the ability to play any faction.
How the hell do you have a 3 ping? lol
LOL...ok.
FYI I'm in 2 clans consisting of about 110 total unique players. We have 3 players that I know of that rolled Imperials. The passives are very specific to straight tanking. So if you want to play anything else other than a straight tank, there's probably a better race.
As for playing any race under any faction...it's a nice perk. But not even remotely close to required. Each faction has at least 1 race with generic enough passives that they can fit any playstyle. For DC, Bretons have reduced magicka cost of spells. That's helpful to just about every build I can imagine besides straight stam builds (which suck because you'll stat out insanely fast).
It's my line at work. We have a direct Fiber Optics line to that Dallas Server XD
I wouldn't generalize all F2P games as such.
Path of Exile comes to mind as an extremely well done and successful F2P game, with massive content updates every 4 months, and smaller content patches almost weekly. PoE is not an MMO though.
I think RIFT does F2P very well, if you're looking for an MMO example.
In my head, I define "cash-grab" as a product that has no redeeming qualities, but was created to exploit an already existing fan-base.
For example, I view all of the marvel comics movies as "cash-grabs". The movies are, at least to me, ungodly terrible. But the movies don't need to be good because there is an inherent fan-base of nerds that will inevitably pay to see these movies.
I view SWTOR as a "cash-grab". I personally felt like SWTOR was one of the worst games I've ever played (MMO or otherwise). The game was built simply to exploit the fact that millions of star wars nerds would inherently purchase it.
Before I played ESO, I viewed it as a "cash-grab". I felt this way for the same reasons above with SWTOR. I figured the game would be awful...and its whole purpose would be to exploit the inherent elder scrolls fan-base.
As far as ESO goes, I haven't had this much fun in an MMO for a long, long time. This is by far my most favorite game release in the last 5 or so years. Others will feel differently...and thus, others might view ESO as a "cash-grab".