Persona 5: The Phantom X’s saga of post-launch controversy continues, as Atlus and Black Wings Sport Studio’s response to participant backlash has solely made some members of the sport’s neighborhood extra indignant, as they don’t really feel like their considerations are being heard.
To convey you in control, Persona 5: The Phantom X is the brand new gacha recreation set in a distinct timeline from the unique RPG. Like most live-service video games, it has occasions, content material roadmaps, and microtransactions that bake FOMO into its design. The Phantom X initially launched final 12 months in China, and eventually got here to the West final month. Atlus and Black Wings introduced they might be dashing up the story content material rollout within the West to catch everybody up, however when it turned clear that the sport’s in-game rewards weren’t being improved to compensate for the accelerated tempo, followers began evaluation bombing the sport for what they known as unfair remedy. The group acknowledged the suggestions and stated it might be responding to it, however stopped in need of saying it might be making precise modifications to deal with these issues. Now, the studio has held a livestream to speak concerning the recreation’s 1.2 replace that goes dwell tomorrow, and gamers are saying the group hasn’t truly mounted something, and in some instances, is simply making issues worse.
Some modifications the patch brings about do acknowledge points gamers have complained about; it provides extra login rewards and items in response to gamers getting fewer rewards throughout their play time, as an illustration. Nevertheless, whereas some rewards have been rebalanced to be extra in-line with the Chinese language model, the patch doesn’t do something on high of that to compensate for the accelerated schedule, nor does it implement greater possibilities to drag uncommon characters within the recreation’s gacha techniques. A significant level of rivalry is that characters are usually not being added to plain banner (mainly the baseline pool of characters you may get when rolling for brand spanking new Phantom Thieves so as to add to your occasion) till they’ve been within the recreation for six months. Based on the stream, it’s because the group needs to “act out of consideration for gamers” who use premium foreign money to accumulate extremely wanted characters, which followers have interpreted because the group saying they need to proceed to incentivize gamers to pay up if they need a greater probability of getting these characters.
“Straight up ‘we solely care about individuals who spend cash,’” nightoftheghouls wrote on Reddit. “You aren’t speculated to say the quiet half out loud guys.”
What stays to be seen is that if this might be commonplace process for the sport transferring ahead, or if it’s simply being utilized to some characters launched within the recreation’s first month whereas the devs proceed to regulate its monetization and launch roadmap. Followers fear this would possibly make the sport an even bigger time and cash funding whereas the accelerated rollout continues to be in place, and create a grindier recreation with much less payoff.
“So not solely do we’ve an insane launch tempo of recent characters, we won’t be able to get any of the ‘Commonplace’ characters going ahead till at the least 5 months from now?” N0tZekken wrote in one other Reddit thread. “Remember the fact that they’ll truly pull it off for each new character, and so they may truly make it worse. What’s stopping them from growing this to a 12 months if gross sales are usually not passable? Wouldn’t be the primary time we’ve been lied to within the face by Sega/Atlus.”
The feedback on the dwell stream VOD are crammed with related disappointment, with a number of viewers expressing the concept that if the sport have been to only roll out precisely because it did in China, lots of their points can be mounted. However for now, non-Chinese language gamers are coping with an accelerated, FOMO-driven recreation that’s been modified in ways in which supply no actual profit. Nicely, none for gamers, at the least. Atlus stands to realize rather a lot by forcing gamers into conditions the place spending real-world cash is the simplest repair.
