You’re not wrong to be cynical, but it won’t be as simple as that, either.
My expectations are that they’ll go into early access and stay in it for months. At the end of it, the product will probably be relatively polished and will appeal to a wide enough group of players from which they would expect the cash shop whales to emerge after a while. Knowing Funcom, there will be certain not-quite-finished mechanics and other such things that they will “promise” to finish and polish up in the future.
I expect that the biggest turn-off won’t be quality problems, not right at the beginning where everything is still fresh enough and the code hasn’t rotted enough, but rather the fact that the game will most likely be heavily oriented towards monetization. Marketable features and content will have top priority from release 1.0 onward. I expect lots of typical FOMO bullshіt, and maybe even some P2W on top.
So yeah, I don’t think it’s going to be bad, but it will be the kind of game that embodies all the practices that I’m hoping the game industry is slowly starting to move away from.
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