If there’s one thing that rustles my jimmies is that new games will sometimes put on an always online experience even when it is single player.
Why the hell do firms do this? What, to make you purchase a copy of the sequel of that game? They surely realise that putting a single player game or any game in general on life support through live services is stupid and makes their public optics look like shit to the consumer.
I bought your game, do not expect me to pay up extra or care about your baked in battle pass crap nor the sale your putting out for that gold skin costume.
The moment Bethesda were selling HORSE ARMOR in a single player RPG (Oblivion) it was all over from the start…
TLDR - Modern AAA sucks ass with only a few gems between.
I can’t claim I’ve never been part of a live service trend. I played a lot of Dead by Daylight (probably still will, just feeling it’s in a downturn) and bought into cosmetics and new characters - likely for a decent amount of money over time.
Honestly, once a dev has a formula that’s successful, it does make sense to just slowly iterate on the formula, give it out for free, and sell cosmetics, instead of trying to find a reason to write 8 new levels/characters and call it a “sequel”. But I can also admit most games have applied at least a few scummy practices to get that in place, and it victimizes a lot of players.
I will also remind people not every single DLC item is scummy. It’s worth evaluating each for yourself, as well as using basic consideration to ignore the ones you don’t want (and don’t complain about them if the game never visibly advertised them to you). For instance, Witcher 3’s extra story content would technically count as DLC - and most say it’s worth it.