You call this progress?

Back in the day, when this were all fields and so on, most games were like Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (p108). They had a beginning, a middle and an end, and your progress through them would be its own reward; you’d see new sights, hear new stories, and do a host of different things along the way. Then the climax, and the credits – and then, most likely, you’d put the game back in the box, and move on.

Publishers are terrified of you doing that these days, and so these finite games are fast becoming the exception, rather than the rule. Unfortunately, as is often the way, we’re getting thoroughly sick of the rule. If we have to play one more theoretically endless game with a loot-based progression system, we may actually lose our lunch.

Oddly for a game whose singleplayer component begins with people’s legs being blown off, Call Of Duty: WWII (p112) sports a somewhat gentle, and largely ignorable, loot system that focuses on forgettable cosmetics, at least at launch. And we can’t complain about it having a progression system, since the series has had one for over a decade now, and Sledgehammer Games knows better than to mess with that formula. Elsewhere, though, it’s a different story. Animal Crossing: Pocket

Camp (p116), the series’ mobile debut, is as cheekily monetised as anything on the App Store, even if its loot comes in the form of nice furniture you can craft. Need For Speed Payback (p114) fares little better, with a dice-roll upgrade system that looks like an actual slot machine – okay, it’s set in a pseudo-Las Vegas, but that doesn’t make it appropriate, just all the more brazen.

You probably already know the identity of the main culprit, of course (p104), which takes the concept to such a miserable extreme that it’s prompted a rethink in how we review games that seem more interested in taking more of your money than they are in giving you value for what you’ve already paid. And they say the older generation is wrong to fear change.