Genshin Impact’s first anniversary was the most horrendous one I’ve seen.
They couldn’t even bother to send out an in-game message to congratulate the players.
What they did instead is paying thousands of dollars for Twitter emojis and dishing out a few give-away events where you had to practically advertise for the game to enter. Were you guaranteed to get any reward? No.
Essentially, instead of even acknowledging the anniversary, they made players advertise their game.
They were also supposed to introduce a paid bundle with some cosmetic items alongside a free concert stream (the concert was pretty good). But that was after the anniversary. Keep the bundle in mind, however.
What did it lead to?
Thousands of outraged players flooded social media.
Their discord was spammed with “qiqi fallen” emote (one of the characters laying on her back with a blank stare).
Review bombing got to the point where even Google Classrooms became one of the casualties
I’m probably missing some other details, but this lasted for weeks.
After a long while of non-communication, the devs gave in and finally decided to give players something. This “something” turned out to be the bundle that was supposed to be paid content alongside some (read “very little”) in-game resources. There was also another another giveaway event with, this time, guaranteed rewards. The rewards were, practically, you either get a scooter or one cent. Needless to say, it left a sour taste afterward.
Honestly, it felt like a slap in the face, but it was enough for the things to start calming down.
So far, even though they’re still very stingy with any sort of rewards, they at least make sure to congratulate the players somehow and give something.
Fire Emblem delayed their 30th anniversary game by two years. It sat, completed, on the shelf with no real proper explanation as to why. Instead they did a temporary release of the original 8-bit version of the first Fire Emblem on the eShop, when a superior version in essentially every way is available on the DS. If all they were going to do was release an original game on the eShop, the least they could have done was do a worldwide release of one of the games in the series that’s still stuck in Japan. Then the actual anniversary game (Engage) finally released two years later, and… it’s mid. Not bad, especially gameplay wise, but held back by a laughably cartoonish story, especially compared to its predecessor Three Houses. The mobile game Heroes has some better stories than Engage.
Elder Scrolls Online just is wrapping up it’s 10th anniversary event, and it’s been pretty underwhelming. They basically did what they do for every event, and made it about farming rewards only on specific activities that result in people grinding mindlessly, and too many people congregating on the same things, which causes bugs and issues so many players don’t even get rewards.
I barely partake in ESO events anymore. They’re copy/paste, and hardly any fun. And your reward is often the 10 billionth style you won’t use anyways, but everyone has FOMO so they go nuts.
I would have much preferred unique quest lines revisiting past incidents, stories, characters. Especially if the game detected how long you’ve played and how much content you’ve cleared and sorta systematically gave you a somewhat tailored event to go down memory lane. Or if it had been more broad and not specific to small parts of the game world or specific activities. The only broadly applied stuff were endless loot boxes that get old.
You can grind for great rewards but they also are encouraging easy endeavors for a lot of points and any content is giving the 100% XP bonus which makes even questing feel nicer. There is a grind if you want true flame or one of the other 4 this-time-only items but that’s some people’s enjoyment.
The only ball dropping imo is the PTS debacle but they are giving the affected all the items, like a years endeavors, and a ton of other stuff that seems fair to me.
I think it can be hard for someone if they always feel the need to maximize anything they do, they probably just grind the whole time to earn millions of gold. I did a few grinds to get the loot high but doing dailies I had not tried yet has been fun since I get the 100%xp and an extra loot box for each.
For its 30th Anniversary Magic the Gathering hyped up the return of $1000 card packs with the CHANCE of pulling non legal reprints of its original Alpha set, including the covered Black Lotus, that is…again…not legally playable in any format and is worth the same as a lotus you get from your home printer. For $1000.
For the 25th anniversary of Super Mario Bros, Nintendo released Super Mario All Stars for the Wii. It was just an emulation of the SNES game from years before. It was released for $30 even though you could buy all of the original games on the Wii shop for like $21 total. It just reeked of “We know you’ve already bought these games like 4 times, but please buy them again”. They did do a better job on the 35th anniversary though.
Is the 35th anniversary the release of 64, Sunshine, and Galaxy on the Switch? I'd say the artificial scarcity aspect to induce fomo wasn't any better. It might have even been worse.
They did do a better job on the 35th anniversary though.
No, they didn’t.
For the 35th anniversary, they did all this.
They removed Mario 3D All Stars from the eShop and stopped selling it in stores to get FOMO sales so people would care less that it was a lazy overpriced cash grab collection.
They removed Super Mario Bros. 35 from the eShop and shut down the servers, making it completely unplayable.
They removed the ability to upload levels in Super Mario Maker 1.
The way how Nintendo has a complete inability to understand modern, usually online, entertainment services, is truly an achievement. Just creating an NNID for your console is already a colossal pain in the ass, but it doesn’t begin or stop there. The way how fairly modern games got their entire service lineup completely shutdown is just unacceptable
Well I mean, they also ADDED Super Mario Bros 35 to the eShop, for free. You can’t just mention the removal as if it had always been there. I agree it was shitty for them to remove it though, it was one of my all time favorite games. But I’m at least happy that I got to play it.
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