I suppose, on the face of it, there's no reason why I should have. There are a lot of new action RPGs or open world RPGs coming out all the time in this post-Genshin Impact world. It's like a virtual gold rush sometimes.
Usually, though, something filters through about them long before they're due to release. In some cases, like Neverness To Everness, for which it feels like I've been waiting at least as long as I expect to wait for a new MMORPG, although it's really been barely half as long, the problem isn't so much failing to hear about them as it is having to wait so long that all my enthusiasm and excitement has long since drained away by the time I get to play them.
Not that it matters. Anime-inflected acion RPGs and MMOs, most of them cross-platform or ported from mobile, come so thick and fast these days there's no longer the remotest chance of keeping up with all of them in any meaningful fashion. If you were to take the idea of playing them seriously, you might possibly have time for a couple, three at the outside, but even if you plan on merely dabbling, you'll still struggle to paddle along in the shallows of more than a small selection.
In theory, I'm currently playing three and that's at least one too many. In practice, I'm not playing any. As I'm frequently to be found whining, Wuthering Waves is just too good to waste anything less than my full attention on, which means I don't play it at all. Crystal of Atlan and Blue Protocol: Star Resonance are a lot easier to take lightly but they still each require more commitment than I'm willing to give them, at least if I'm going to see much more than the first couple of chapters of their storylines.
And they keep coming. And I keep wanting to see them all. Mostly it's out of comfortable curiosity. I do love a new thing that's almost the same as an old thing. Then there's the blogging opportunities every new game offers. Those First Impressions posts all but write themselves.
The problem is, every new game pushes the rest out of the way. It's how it's always been, only the timescale used to be measured in months or even years, not weeks, much less days. I look back on Keen, complaining bitterly about the mayfly attention span of the three-month cycle and his concern seems quaint.
Three months! When did I last play a new game, exclusively, for a whole three months?! When did you?
Anyway, that's all a little off topic. The point I was making was that Duet Night Abyss had managed to creep up behind me unseen, somehow, and now it was about to sprint off into the distance before I'd even taken a quick look at it. So I took one.
Well, I tried to. The website for some reason does not want to display properly on my makeshift PC. I can see the static images and read the text (The lore is extraordinarily dense.) but any video just doesn't run. Or rather the images don't. The sound plays, which is really weird.
The launch trailer worked perfectly on YouTube, though, so I watched it there. I think it was the same one I would have been watching on the website if it had played properly because it has a very distinctive and unlikely jazz soundtrack.
And I mean jazz. Actual jazz. Not jazz-rock or jazzed-up pop. There's this thing I keep reading about how GenZ love jazz. I guess it might even be true if this is what they think is going to sell a mobile port nowadays.
The music I liked. The rest of the video didn't do much for me. It's all fights. Here, take a look for yourself and see what you make of it.
That's the 1.0 launch trailer. There are several more promos on YouTube, going back to the first reveal two years ago. I skimmed them all and none of them look very interesting. I'm used to seeing a lot of world-building and non-combat gameplay in promotional material for these kinds of games. That's always what gets my attention. I'm not seeing much of any of that here.
Which, honestly, is a good thing. It means I don't feel tempted to download DNA (Nice acronym for the Marketing Dept. there.) . It is on Steam, which would make it very easy to give it a try when the servers open tomorrow but I'm not planning on it. (I still might anyway, of course.)
So, if I'd never heard of it and I don't intend to play it, why am I even mentioning it? Mostly because of the other interesting thing about that MMOBomb piece, which is that apparently, until a few weeks ago, DNA was going to be a gacha game. Now it's not.
The developers, Hero Games, changed course late in development, following feedback from two closed betas. They decided to make all characters and weapons free, where previously they had used a gacha system for both. They also removed a stamina system designed to throttle progress.
MMOBomb describe the changes as shifting to something more like the model used by Warframe. I think this is supposed to be seen as a positive move because Warframe has long been held up as an exemplar of how to do F2P properly for a Western audience.
It doesn't quite have that effect on me because, while I did briefly play Warframe and didn't exactly hate it, I didn't much like it either. That, it should be said, had a lot more to do with how it looked than how it played. I certainly never got far enough in the game for the payment model to become an issue , one way or the other.
In trying to explain why the change to a single new game might have repercussions for an entire genre, the article went on to attempt to codify three types of gacha-game players:
- Min-maxers, looking to build the perfect team and willing to spend as much as it takes.
- Gamblers, getting a thrill out of the gacha rolls for their own sake
- Audience members, wanting to follow the plot and enjoy their favorite characters.
I'm guessing the argument would be that Type 1 will spend a lot of money under any system and there are a lot more of Type 3 than Type 2, so catering to Type 3 should compensate for losing the gambling dollars. Or something. I wasn't paying that close attention.
Obviously, there are more types of player than that but I think those three do probably cover a lot of ground. I don't feel like I fall neatly into any of them, although clearly the last one comes closest to the way I approach most games these days.
Even so, I feel there ought to be a fourth group:
4. Freeloaders and tourists, happy to take whatever's going for free but never becoming sufficiently invested to spend any money at all and always being half-ready to move on to another game.
As far as I can remember, I've never paid a penny to any game to which I wasn't also subscribed. Mostly that's because I'm not willing to give them my payment details but it's also because they rarely have much to sell me that I want and nothing at all that I need.
Free to Play, to me, means exactly that. In gacha games, it also means I don't have much chance of building a specific team. I have to work with whatever characters or weapons I happen to get from whatever free pulls the developers see fit to give me.
I'm guessing that to anyone in any of the first three categories, that's going to sound like a problem. Maybe a big enough problem to make the games not worth playing. I mean, in some ways it's the main point of the game.
To me, it's a bonus. The thing is, I don't like building teams. At best I find it a tedious necessity, sitting somewhere below sorting my inventory. (Quite a long way below it, actually. I like sorting inventory or at least I used to. I am kind of over it now though. Guild Wars 2 pretty much killed inventory management for me.) At worst, building teams is something I dislike doing enough to avoid it, even if that's to my own detriment.
Sometimes i can get into it but on balance I would probably prefer the game do it for me. In some games I'd be happy with pressing a single button to have some algorithm check all the characters and gear I have available and put together the best available combination. And then a second press to go apply all the available upgrades, too.
I know. It's dangerously close to asking the game to play itself. Throw in auto-pathing, auto-questing and auto-battling, all of which I'm broadly in favor of, and the very valid question even I'd ask myself is "Why are you even bothering to "play" this game at all?"
It's a question that would be harder to answer if I hadn't just started playing another game, one with an "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating on Steam from almost five thousand reviews and a Metacritic rating of 87, in which I'm doing even less than that. I played it for almost forty minutes yesterday and I did literally nothing other than press LMB to keep the dialog flowing.
After my first session of S;G ended, I googled to see if anything you might call "gameplay" ever came into it. It does not. It's clicking LMB all the way down.
So, clearly, you can have games where the player doesn't really play. And now you can have gacha games where there's no gacha. In the reverse of Wilhelm's Dictum, which is that there's no feature so bad that someone won't claim it's their favorite part of the game if you take it away from them, there's probably nothing in any game you couldn't strip out without make the game feel like it just got more fun for someone.One person's tedium is another person's thrill. One player's motivation is another player's frustration. Et cetera.
If I'm going to be completely honest, I think the Steins;Gate approach leans quite a bit too far towards dis-involvement for my comfort. The reason I googled to see if it ever changed wasn't wholly unconnected with boredom. Now I know that it's going to stay that way, I might just forget about the game and watch the reportedly excellent anime instead. That way I at least won't end up with a sore mouse finger.
I guess I don't want to see my action RPGs and MMOs ending up like visual novels but I wouldn't be sad to see all that obsession with team builds and upgrades shunted off to AI. The good AI, that is. The old kind.
As for the gacha pulls, I'd miss my free ones. I do love me a bit of RNG. On the other hand, it would be nice to be able to play the characters I want rather the ones I get. I may not be much for building the teams but I do like to collect the people.
On that basis, I think I'd give a qualified nod of approval to the possibility that Duet Night Abyss might be the harbinger of change for the format. It's not going to happen, though, I feel fairly confident in saying. It'll need a bigger, better game than this to shift the needle.
Or so I reckon, knowing nothing more than I saw in those trailers. Maybe I will download it and try it tomorrow, after all, just to see if there's anything in it...
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