Steam Deck

I’ve never played deep rock galactic. It very well could be the exception that proves the rule.

Feeling punished for not playing, and feeling like a company is trying to manipulate me with psychological tricks to make me play their game is why I don’t play games with battlepasses.

I didn’t mind Diablo iii’s seasons journey at all, and that had rewards that were missable. But Diablo iv has like 90 levels, it costs money and you have to do stupid shit like kill world bosses 15 times with them being on a timer.

I’m not going to set a fucking alarm to log into a video game. I play games on my schedule, not the developers.

It sounds like deep rock has a much more sane system. Maybe I’ll give it a try.

I know people like to hate Halo Infinite for a number of reasons, but IMO battle passes are one thing they do fine. MP is free, while the $10 battle passes are optional and you can buy and finish them any time.

I’m still on season 2 while everyone else is on 4 (I think?) I play a few rounds once a week, maybe, but there’s no FOMO because you earn the rewards at whatever pace you want. Once you finish a battle pass you can buy the next one. Or you can buy them out of order or skip any of them.

The only other one I know is from Warframe, which is free but still pretty bad for a number of reasons. I think throwing the rewards into the regular reward pool sounds good, but I'm not familiar with the game so I can't really judge how this actually plays out. In WF they throw the old rewards into a special store that uses currency earned through the battlepass, so you still have to play it and let it dictate your game if you want to buy them. In the case of WF though this whole system came on top of already existing tactics to keep you in the game & playing certain content, like the relic rotations for example. It was like the last drop that eventually made me quit. So it's hard to judge from the outside when I don't know the game, but in general I find such mechanisms terrible. It's sort of like dark patterns but adapted for video games and inherently predatory.

Warframe has a similar free battle pass system where they introduce new stuff as well as routinely cycle old stuff in.

Only thing that hasn't routinely been recycled were the in-mission elements from when the battle battlepasses had story elements.

I'm not OP but I definitely don't like the DRG battlepass. I don't hate it, but I'm neutral towards it at very best. I'd rather just have this content as part of a regular game progression.