I don’t know about you chaps but I absolutely detest the modern approach companies have with their franchises and games.
I remember you’d get the game on disc and that was it. Or maybe a expansion to go with it which improved it 100%
An example would be say the mortal kombat games, you used to be able to have all the characters or Unlock them. But now you gotta pay up to 100% the game if you want everything.
What rustles your jimmies lads?
Thank you!
Street Fighter 6 recently came out, to pretty high praise from reviewers and the general public.
The game has a “Year 1 character pass” that adds 4 new characters. Eventually, there will be a year 2 character pass that will add more characters. If you’re not buying these, you’re literally not getting the entire game. When you play online, you will face opponents playing characters that you can’t even play yourself.
There are lots of games that have similar features where not spending the extra cash means you’re literally not getting as much content as everyone else. It’s not just about cosmetics anymore and hasn’t been for years now.
So for fighting games, character passes are a good thing(overall).
If you bought SF4 at launch and continued to play the game throughout it’s life, you ended up buying the same game multiple times. This was essentially a few characters and a balance patch(had new mechanics as well). This the fragmented the player base a lot, so if you were playing the base game you couldn’t play with someone on the latest version.
Street Fighter 5 however, switched to character passes and even being able to unlock characters with in-game currency(difficult if you came to the game later but possible). This means everyone got the balance patches and major system updates, so the player base stayed as a single entity.
For a niche genre, this is significantly better than multiple purchases of the same game, and allows for a game to get more updates over a longer time.
However I do wish they kept in more unlockable content like costumes, colours and stages.
Specific to Street Fighter 6 though, they have a battlepass(which is not good, but isn’t terrible either) which the free version gave/gives out a bunch of character rental tokens, so you can play with DLC characters you haven’t purchased.
That’s actually a very fair point. I don’t play fighting games, but this is a common theme for many multiplayer games now. A lot of developers have worked to make the newer character options “fair”, but even when they work to balance new with old, just having confusing tactical options that some players can’t play as is enough to mess with someone’s strategic skill development.