popsicledeath
Potato del Grande
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I should have been more specific that I was thinking of mostly the NBA Live 19 and the NBA2K franchises were shockingly bad in the way they cripple your player in career mode and of course for online play. The career modes are the big thing they offer that is supposed to be so innovative, but it's only because that's where the microtransactions come in and it's all tied to online play. To be fair, you can just play with regular NBA teams without being handicapped, but they put a ton of time and resources into the career and online modes just to fuck you if you don't pay out for credits to improve your character.
Just go to the Microsoft store and look at how expensive the special editions of the games are that come with credits that are used to improve your character. It's sick. And if you don't it's a long, frustrating path to just being able to compete, and I'm not even talking about online. I refuse to play online, but just having your guy not do retarded, scripted shit in the game takes forever because they intentionally cripple you to frustrate you into paying to get credits to level up your character.
That's not even considering how somehow the games play like utter shit and the NPC players are so fucking dumb. Sometimes I would just sit on the bench watching the games and the computer controlled characters were doing shit that didn't even resemble basketball. It was weird. But, boy the in game currency systems are fully developed and thought out!
All the NBA games seem to be like this. I don't want to say there is a demographics component, but imo they're exploiting certain demographics and cultural aspects of certain peoples who value things like spending thousands of dollars on sneakers or spinner rims.
To be fair, as
Valderen
points out MLB The Show wasn't as bad, but I imagine if you were someone who just wanted to play online primarily the system is still heavily skewed toward paying for credits to shortcut your character to be competitive. The career mode was more tolerable, but it still had the same issue. You're a top prospect and instead of just making the learning curve being learning to play the game, oops, sorry, your stat number isn't high enough so your character runs like shit and can't throw a ball. The basic, fundamentals, sorry no you actually suck at those.MLB The Show was different in that they reward you a ton of shit, but it was a lot of small gains (unless you grind or pay for currency to buy the best stuff). So, in some ways it was worse, because they'd reward you with cards and equipment non-stop like you were some bird in a skinner box, but the actual improvements to your character were the same long-ass grind that I feel isn't realistic if you're supposed to be some ace prospect so good you're breaking convention as a two-way player. And of course there are the options to just buy currency if you want to be competitive.
It didn't help there was a bug so I played over half a minor league season and my character wasn't gaining any level ups, while still hitting over .500 as a contact hitter on hall of fame difficulty. It was boring and I wanted to have more power, so rerolled a slugger, and my character would strike out non-stop and became a popup artist, but was leveling up at least now so my pitching was decent. It was still annoying how apparent the 'number too low, can't hit the ball' or 'number too low, can't stay in the strike zone' systems were.... which of course you could improve with some in-game purchases!
The game industry is now so often full price games, shit game design where resources go into everything but the basic mechanics of the game, on top of major bugs, and a focus on in-game currency. Especially the sports games that are a shitty and woke as the real leagues and full of social justice bullshit. Nah. Fuck that.
