The business model for Uncharted Waters Origin

Quizzical

It has now been three weeks since Uncharted Waters Origin launched.  On launch day, a lot of people saw that there was a gacha, then immediately ragequit and left nasty reviews.  But not all gachas or other item mall stuff that you can buy is equivalent.  One problem is that even if you can see what is offered, it can be difficult to understand whether something is essential or irrelevant.  It can similarly be difficult to tell whether something comes only from the item mall or whether it is readily obtained by playing the game.

It has now been three weeks.  Steam says that I have played for 75 hours, though some of that was with the game running in the background.  That's enough that I think I can give a reasonable explanation of the game's business model.  I don't see it as a predatory business model, and there are only two things that I find concerning.  I'll come back to those later.

The game has three main currencies:  ducats, blue gems, and red gems.  Ducats are the normal, in-game currency that is obtained by playing the game.  Most things that you buy are with ducats, as is everything that you sell other than on the auction house.  Ducats aren't really part of the business model, and really couldn't make a game pay to win.

Blue gems are obtained in a variety of ways by playing the game, including daily login rewards, achievements, and the free component of various season passes.  Red gems are obtained only buy buying them with real money.  The item mall generally sells things for red gems or else directly for real-life money.  A number of in-game things outside of the item mall sell things for blue gems.  If you don't have enough blue gems, you can substitute red gems, but not the other way around.  If you want to know if a game's business model is pay to win, then blue and red gems are really the things to look at.  So let's have a look at what the game sells for blue gems first, and then I'll come back to red gems.

The game seems to hand out quite a lot of blue gems.  I don't know exactly how many I've spent, but I think I've earned about 4500 blue gems so far.  To substitute red gems for that would cost about $50.  If the daily login rewards for the attendance event remain the same in future months, then just logging in briefly once per day alone would get you 900 blue gems per month.

In a cathedral, you can get some stat bonuses.  You can have one prayer and one donation bonus active at a time.  The prayer bonus has two options, one of which is free, and the other of which costs energy (loosely, stamina).  The donate bonus has three options for different levels of stat bonuses, with the two cheapest costing ducats, and the most expensive costing blue gems.  So far, I haven't seen enough reason to care about this to buy even the ducat version of the stat bonuses.  The cost in blue gems might vary by level, but it's currently 70 gems for a 24 hour (real time) buff.

The in-game item shop prices nearly all items in ducats.  However, if you go at the right time of night, there will be a black market option that has several random items.  Sometimes they'll cost ducats and sometimes blue gems.  For the latter, items typically cost 5 or 6 blue gems, but you will typically be some random thing that you don't want.

At the market, trade goods normally have prices update about every half hour or so.  There is an option to spend blue gems next to a timer.  I'm guessing that that updates prices immediately.  I haven't tried it.

There are four types of quests from different sources, and you can normally have at most one quest of each type active at a time.  Once you finish one quest, you can acquire another of the same type.  The main quests come from unions, but if you pay 200 blue gems, then it will give you a second union quest slot for seven days.  I think that this is one of the major ways that the game developer expects people to spend a lot of blue gems.

When you build a ship, it randomly rolls many of the stats from within fixed ranges that the ship can offer.  For example, a schooner will have vertical sails somewhere in 308-439.  It will show you the stats that it rolled, and you can pay some blue gems to reroll all of the stats.  There are at least 15 stats that are rolled randomly for each ship, so you're not going to roll something high in all of them all at once.  And you can only pay blue gems once per ship.  The cost to reroll varies by ship grade.

After you have built a ship, you can modify its cabins in a shipyard.  A ship typically has about ten or so cabins, and they're divided into six types, five of which are modifiable.  Most of the options that you can modify a cabin to cost ducats.  The cost seems to scale by ship grade, and for a grade 7 ship, is about 700k ducats per cabin.  One of the types of cabin slots (default is Old Rudder or Old Deck) has some options priced in ducats and some in blue gems.  The cost seems to be 10 * ship grade blue gems for small ships or 20 * ship grade for medium ships.

Modifying a cabin slot modifies it for all ships of the same type.  Thus, for a grade 7 schooner, most cabins can only cost ducats to change, but you could spend up to 280 blue gems to modify the two cabins that have blue gem options.  If you do this, then all schooners that you ever build will have the cabins that you chose, at least unless you later modify them to something else.

You can use blue gems to expand the number of items that you can carry at a time.  This does not affect your cargo hold.  Rather, this is for small, personal items, not big crates of goods.  Expanding storage costs 10 blue gems per slot for the first 10 slots, then 20 per slot for the next ten slots, with the price per slot ever escalating as you buy more.  In total, you can buy up to 600 additional slots for a total of 244,400 blue gems.  Furthermore, you can do this separately for each of three types of storage:  gear storage, tool storage, and parts storage.

Gear storage is for items that a mate can equip in any of the six gear slots.  You get 50 storage slots for free, and any items that are equipped by some mate do not count toward the limit.  Even without adding more storage, leaving the cap at 50 basically means that every couple of weeks or so, you have to go through and figure out which low rank junk you have that you'll never use and vendor it.

The tool storage section includes many items that don't count toward the limit.  Furthermore, even among items that do count, you can have up to 50 stacks of items, not just 50 items.  Items generally seem to stack to up to 1000.  You'll need about 20 or so slots for items to counter disasters, as different items cure different disasters.  Add in some other, scattered items and a cap of 50 is awfully tight.  Spending 600 blue gems to increase that to 70 was the first thing I spent blue gems on, and I haven't needed to increase it since then.

Parts storage is for equipable ship parts, such as anchors or cannons.  As with gear storage, items that are equipped do not count toward the limit.  Thus far, I only have 16 items that aren't equipped, and have never needed to vendor anything to make room.

Quizzical

By default, you can only have one ship under construction at a time.  This cap is rather painful, but you can buy additional shipbuilding slots.  The first extra slot costs 500 blue gems, the second 1000, and the third 1500.  I bought a second slot, but don't see any real need for more than that.

By default, you can have up to seven ships docked.  This does not include ships in your active fleet, nor does it include ships that are currently under construction.  You can buy space to dock up to twenty additional ships.  The first one costs 500 blue gems, the next four 1000 blue gems each, the next five 2000 blue gems each, and it goes up from there.  While you will want to switch back and forth between different types of ships a little, you'll usually want a mix of different types of ships in your active fleet.  I'm skeptical that there will ever be any urgent need for more than seven docked ships.

You can also buy tax exemptions with blue gems.  It costs 175 blue gems to get a 3-day tax exemption for one country.  The country's home territory and allied ports have separate tax exemptions, so it's 350 blue gems if you want both.  There are 8 countries in the game, and being exempt from one's taxes won't help you with another.  Tax exemptions are purchased in a country's capital, and you have to go back there to renew it.  A tax exemption is powerful and can boost your profits trading considerably.  But they're also expensive, and a lot of hassle.

The big item that concerns me about blue gems is hiring additional admirals.  You pick one of five starter admirals when you start the game, but can later hire others once you reach level 25.  The first costs 100 million ducats, but subsequent ones cost 5000 blue gems each.  You don't really need all of the admirals, but each one does have his own storyline, so I'd like to play through all of them.  Depending on how quickly that happens, I'm not sure if I'll have plenty of blue gems or if I'd need to buy red gems.

To buy red gems generally costs about $11 per 1000 red gems.  Or at least that's the price that you'll eventually pay if you want to buy a whole lot of them.  However, there are a bunch of packages that give you about that value in red gems, plus some other stuff.  For example, if you buy the grade 9-10 ship privilege for $55, it will give you 5000 red gems, plus enough blueprints to build four of each grade 9 or 10 ship.  It does not give you the materials to actually build the ships, however.

Red gem items are mostly limited to the item mall, with one exception that I can think of.  When a mate reaches level 10, he gets access to two skills that he can learn.  One of them costs 10 red gems, and the other costs some ducats and in-game items.  Even multiplied by a few dozen mates that you could eventually have active all at once, 10 red gems each isn't much.  However, there are additional pairs of skills at levels 30, 70, and 90, and one of them will cost red gems each time.  Having not yet reached level 30, I can't see the prices.

So what about the item mall?  What can you buy for red gems there?  The main thing seems to be the gachas.  There are two main ones, with a superior mate gacha and a superior item gacha.  Those each cost 4000 red gems for a batch of 10 pulls.  There are also some alternate mate gachas that tweak the probabilities to make one S-grade mate more likely and the rest far less likely.  The situation with the mate gachas is complicated, so I'll return to it later.

The special section will let you buy some items to skip certain cooldowns.  I think that those items are generally dumb to buy.  You get a lot more than I have any need for handed to you for free.

It also contains some chests with all of the materials needed to build two ships.  It's 1000 red gems for grade 5-6, 1100 for grade 7-8, 3000 for grade 9-10, or 3600 for grade 11-12.  You can buy at most three of each chest per week, and the blueprints to build the ships are not included, nor does it grant you the shipbuilding level necessary to build the ships.  You can get those materials by playing the game, so I see no need to drop a lot of money on buying them.  For that matter, I already have six ships of grade 5-6 and two of grade 7.

The admiral memoirs are basically a season pass for playing through the storyline for any particular admiral.  There are some free rewards, but for 5000 red gems, you can unlock some additional rewards.  The free rewards include the contracts necessary to rank up each of the storyline characters for that admiral to rank 2.  The paid rewards include the contracts to further rank the characters up to rank 3.  It also includes 60 basic mate gacha tickets (for B- and C-grade mates), 6 superior mate gacha tickets, and 6 superior item tickets.

The effects section offers a bunch of 28-day subscriptions for various things for red gems.  There are five categories, each of which have three tiers.  The top tier of each category costs 1800-2800 red gems each.  Some of them are hard to explain.  Blessing of the Great Admiral is probably the simplest.  For 300 red gems, you can decrease the ship repair cost by 20%, supply cost by 20%, and insurance cost by 10% for 28 days.  These normally cost modest amounts of ducats, but the subscription decreases the cost.  For 600 red gems, you can decrease each of those three costs by 20% (instead of 10% for insurance), and also decrease the crew recruiting cost by 20%.  For 1800 red gems, you can decrease each of those costs by 30% (instead of 20%) and also increase your ship speed by 3%.  To me, that sure sounds underwhelming for $20, as the ship speed increase by 3% is most of the benefit.

The product section has three chests that each contain 12 pieces of B-grade gear for 700 red gems.  If you attack a foreign country too much, they may try to block you from their ports, but you can buy an anonymous veil to get around that for 3 days for 150 red gems.  For 100 red gems, you can buy a truce agreement that will let you opt out of combat when attacked 10 times, in addition to the default 10 per day that you get for free.  For 300 red gems, you can disable disasters for 3 days.  For 250 red gems, you can buy 50 each of some disaster recovery items; the whole package would probably cost about a million ducats in a normal item shop.  I don't find any of those options particularly interesting.

There are also some scattered things that you can buy that make me ask both why would they offer to sell that, and also, why would anyone buy that?  I'll skip over that, as this post is quite long enough.

Quizzical

So that leaves the superior mate gacha as the other concern.  If I'm reading the Korean wiki correctly (via Google translate), it looks like all mates in the game are obtainable via normal gameplay, without the gacha.  I've covered recruiting admirals earlier, and while you have one admiral active, you can use any others that you have obtained as S-grade mates.  Furthermore, it looks like you acquire another S-grade mate associated with the admiral's story at the very end of it.

So you don't need the gacha?  Not quite.  You can also rank up your mates.  If you draw a mate in a gacha whom you had previously hired, you get 30 contracts to rank up that mate.  It takes 10 to go from rank 1 to rank 2, 20 to go from rank 2 to rank 3, and 40 to go from rank 3 to rank 4.  There is also a rank 5, but I haven't gotten any to rank 4 yet to see the cost to go from rank 4 to rank 5.

Ranking up a mate generally increases his stats by about 10% or so.  Additionally, it allows the mate to unlock additional skills.  A mate gets two skills available at level 10, then two more at level 30 and rank 2, then one at level 50 and rank 3, two more at level 70 and rank 4, and two more at level 90 and rank 5.  You can't have all of those skills active simultaneously, however; you only get one slot per rank.

So how much does it cost to draw a particular mate five times from the gacha after you've acquired the mate?  Each draw has a 0.2% chance of giving you each particular S-grade or A-grade mate, among other possible outcomes.  A batch of 10 will also get you a random 1 of the 29 available A-grade mates as a bonus.  In total, on a pro-rated basis, you have about a 0.55% chance of drawing an A-rank mate per pull.  Thus, it takes an expected 2500 gacha draws to max an S-grade mate, or 909 for an A-grade mate.  That's about $11k for S-grade or $2k for A-grade.  That's very far into whale territory.

Do you actually need to max out your mates' ranks, though?  Probably not.  One lucky draw will get a mate to rank 3.  The gacha draws that you can get just by playing the game will get some A-grade mates there, and maybe even a few S-grade.  I'm inclined to say that you don't need it, but it's there to give the sort of whales who are willing to drop $10k on a game they like some reason to do so.  But I don't really know that, which is why it's potentially concerning.

cheyane

Is there PvP in this game where they destroy your ships?

Scot

I am not disputing Quizzical's analysis (haven't got the time) but this caught my eye:

"One problem is that even if you can see what is offered, it can be difficult to understand whether something is essential or irrelevant.  It can similarly be difficult to tell whether something comes only from the item mall or whether it is readily obtained by playing the game."

Isn't that the whole idea? That is what these sort of MMOs and increasingly all MMOs want to do, make it hard for the players to understand what is essential so they buy the irrelevant stuff as well? It is classic marketing technique.

cheyane

Scot said:

I am not disputing Quizzical's analysis (haven't got the time) but this caught my eye:

"One problem is that even if you can see what is offered, it can be difficult to understand whether something is essential or irrelevant.  It can similarly be difficult to tell whether something comes only from the item mall or whether it is readily obtained by playing the game."

Isn't that the whole idea? That is what these sort of MMOs and increasingly all MMOs want to do, make it hard for the players to understand what is essential so they buy the irrelevant stuff as well? It is classic marketing technique.

This is the same issue with Undecember. There was a lot of things people thought had to be bought through the shop when you could get it in game. I think it backfired on Undecember in the poor Steam ratings. 

The game is playable and you can earn the resources in the game by playing. It just takes longer. Of course people did progress by using their credit card but it was totally unnecessary. It's the ladders that is what caused competition to get on top.

Nowadays with these games you have to really do your research before you play otherwise from just looking at the game you will make all sorts of assumptions that are completely wrong.

It is not however like Diablo Immortal where they had some really nasty low percentages of drops. People have played Undecember totally free and still managed to get to the end game and beyond. However not getting an essence storage tab is bloody murder.

What I despised about Diablo Immortal was the terrible trickery in hidden percentages and the insanely low drop rates for essentials. This was a really bad design, Undecember is nowhere in that ball park and yet it seems to have triggered people's reviews to the point of falsehoods. After playing the game, watching videos and reading a lot about it I am now playing it and enjoying myself. I can tell you I am as surprised as you that I can say this at all.

Iselin

Scot said:

Isn't that the whole idea? That is what these sort of MMOs and increasingly all MMOs want to do, make it hard for the players to understand what is essential so they buy the irrelevant stuff as well? It is classic marketing technique.

That reminded me of the ESO werewolf and vampire skill lines which are both for sale in the cash shop.

They are also both very easy to get in-game either from just going to the right spots in the right zones at night where you can be bitten by WWs or vamps and get it that way for free or even from just asking in chat since someone who is already one of those can once a week infect another player with it.

But there's nothing readily available for new players that tells you how easy it is to get it without buying it so I'm sure they sell many of those to the unsuspecting.

Andemnon

No character creation, overly simplified graphics, not even retro, it looks like a mobile game, probably plays like one too, i uninstalled within 30 minutes of launching the game, a game without any kind of character creation is utterly pointless, POTBS is a much better game by default. I really do not understand what the point of the game even is.

Quizzical

cheyane said:

Is there PvP in this game where they destroy your ships?

There are two servers, one of which has PVP and the other of which does not.  On the PVP server, if you get defeated, you lose 20% of the trade goods that you were carrying and some of the ducats that you had on you (as opposed to stored in the bank), but that's it.  You never lose ships unless you choose to.

And, of course, if you object to that amount of PVP, you can just play on the PVE server and not have to worry about it.  You'll still have to worry about getting attacked by NPCs with similar losses if you lose, but people seem to think that that isn't really a major issue until you get to eastern Africa, and even then, only if you go in before you're strong enough to be ready.

Quizzical

Scot said:

I am not disputing Quizzical's analysis (haven't got the time) but this caught my eye:

"One problem is that even if you can see what is offered, it can be difficult to understand whether something is essential or irrelevant.  It can similarly be difficult to tell whether something comes only from the item mall or whether it is readily obtained by playing the game."

Isn't that the whole idea? That is what these sort of MMOs and increasingly all MMOs want to do, make it hard for the players to understand what is essential so they buy the irrelevant stuff as well? It is classic marketing technique.

Not really.  People who aren't sure if they need something will decline to buy it until they learn that they do need it.  What some companies do that is insidious is to make try to make it so that a game looks cheap to play, then once you're far into it, suddenly becomes really expensive to continue.  The way to catch that is to wait until others are far into it and see what they say.

Steam says that I have currently played for 79.2 hours.  I have spent $5 so far, and see no need to spend more anytime soon.  Buying additional admirals is the one big thing that I think I might purchase eventually, and even there, I'm not sure how much will be due to red gems as opposed to ducats or blue gems.

Quizzical

cheyane said:

Scot said:

I am not disputing Quizzical's analysis (haven't got the time) but this caught my eye:

"One problem is that even if you can see what is offered, it can be difficult to understand whether something is essential or irrelevant.  It can similarly be difficult to tell whether something comes only from the item mall or whether it is readily obtained by playing the game."

Isn't that the whole idea? That is what these sort of MMOs and increasingly all MMOs want to do, make it hard for the players to understand what is essential so they buy the irrelevant stuff as well? It is classic marketing technique.

This is the same issue with Undecember. There was a lot of things people thought had to be bought through the shop when you could get it in game. I think it backfired on Undecember in the poor Steam ratings. 

The game is playable and you can earn the resources in the game by playing. It just takes longer. Of course people did progress by using their credit card but it was totally unnecessary. It's the ladders that is what caused competition to get on top.

Nowadays with these games you have to really do your research before you play otherwise from just looking at the game you will make all sorts of assumptions that are completely wrong.

It is not however like Diablo Immortal where they had some really nasty low percentages of drops. People have played Undecember totally free and still managed to get to the end game and beyond. However not getting an essence storage tab is bloody murder.

What I despised about Diablo Immortal was the terrible trickery in hidden percentages and the insanely low drop rates for essentials. This was a really bad design, Undecember is nowhere in that ball park and yet it seems to have triggered people's reviews to the point of falsehoods. After playing the game, watching videos and reading a lot about it I am now playing it and enjoying myself. I can tell you I am as surprised as you that I can say this at all.

Undecember is made by the same company (Line Games) as Uncharted Waters Origin.  I'm not sure if that's a coincidence or if that's why you specifically cited that game.

I think that they're assuming that the overwhelming majority of the people who play the game will never spend a dime.  That's true of most "free to play" games, if only because the overwhelming majority quit almost immediately.  But they also seem to be assuming that even a majority of the players who put 100+ hours into the game will never spend a dime.

I have no problem with paying for a game that I like.  But if you're determined to play a game completely for free, then UWO has a much more generous business model than most "free to play" MMOs.

Quizzical

Andemnon said:

No character creation, overly simplified graphics, not even retro, it looks like a mobile game, probably plays like one too, i uninstalled within 30 minutes of launching the game, a game without any kind of character creation is utterly pointless, POTBS is a much better game by default. I really do not understand what the point of the game even is.

The game is also available on mobile.  There is cross-play with the PC and mobile players on the same servers.

If you want to evaluate the graphics, I think it's important to distinguish between four different parts of the game that have largely independent graphics.

First is when you're looking at the small character portraits.  This is mainly the case in town when outside of any building.  It's also the case during land exploration, hiring mates in inns, and equipping mate gear.  There, your description of "overly simplified graphics, not even retro" is fair enough.

Second is when you're talking to particular characters, especially in buildings in town.  These use large portraits that are almost certainly generated by Live 2D.  That looks good to my eyes, though as it's fundamentally 2D rendering, plenty of mobile games do the same thing.

Third is when you're sailing around at sea.  This has a "use mobile renderer" option that is turned on by default, effectively resulting in very low graphical settings being the default.  If you turn that off, the game looks pretty good.  Importantly, most of your time playing the game will be sailing around at sea.

Fourth is when you're in a naval battle.  To me, this looks more retro, and not so different from what a turn-based combat game might have looked like 15 or 20 years ago.

If you think that the first section is ugly, I don't disagree.  I will say that you barely spend any time looking at it, though.  When you're in town, you click on a building to run there, and you're looking at a text menu.  For land exploration, you start it, then tab out of the game and wait until it's done.  You probably saw a lot of the first section, as that's the first thing you see in the game, at least if you skip the Raul Franco flashback tutorial.  The reason why they didn't put a ton of work into the graphics for that part of the game is that it doesn't matter.

The game doesn't have a character creator.  Rather, you pick a character and play as that character.  If you don't like that, that's fine, but it's quite a common thing for games to do.  For example, if you play League of Legends, you don't start with a character creator to create your own custom champion.  You pick one that is already there.  A lot of games have just one protagonist that you must play the entire game as.

If all you want to do is combat, combat, and more combat, then yes, PotBS is a better game.  But PotBS is mostly about combat:  while PotBS does have a considerable crafting system, you ultimately craft stuff to make you better at combat.  UWO isn't mostly about combat, and it's important to understand that.

UWO does trading much better than PotBS, and if you're into gameplay that consists of buying goods in one place, then shipping them elsewhere to resell them for a profit, then UWO has a colorable case for being the best game ever at that.  It's not something that a lot of games focus on, but it's a major part of all of the Uncharted Waters games--and UW Origin has trading that is considerably better than UW Online.

Exploration is a major part of UWO, and PotBS basically doesn't do exploration at all.  If you don't like exploration, you might not see that as an advantage of UWO, or might even resent being pushed to go explore the world.  But people who want to kill things are very well catered to in MMOs, and plenty of other genres, for that matter.  There are far fewer games that cater to explorers, to the extent that some people who claim to enjoy exploration do it by wandering around in MMORPGs that have nothing really there to find and will punish you for wasting your time on it.  All of the Uncharted Waters games cater heavily to exploration as a major play style, to the extent that in the SNES game, as some admirals, the way to beat the game is to go explore the world.

Scot

Iselin said:

Scot said:

Isn't that the whole idea? That is what these sort of MMOs and increasingly all MMOs want to do, make it hard for the players to understand what is essential so they buy the irrelevant stuff as well? It is classic marketing technique.

That reminded me of the ESO werewolf and vampire skill lines which are both for sale in the cash shop.

They are also both very easy to get in-game either from just going to the right spots in the right zones at night where you can be bitten by WWs or vamps and get it that way for free or even from just asking in chat since someone who is already one of those can once a week infect another player with it.

But there's nothing readily available for new players that tells you how easy it is to get it without buying it so I'm sure they sell many of those to the unsuspecting.

I can remember deciding that Vampire had to go after getting my arse burnt in the first dungeon we did, the healers must have been so pissed of with me! Then I just did what I had seen others do before, mention in a guild thread and in guild chat I was binning it by Friday, did anyone want to be bittern before then? That's how we sorted it, I am sure you know you could just hang around the location and get it for a small sum or for free if you were patient enough.

Selling that in the chat shop, well what studio takes a stand against such shenanigans today? If they think someone will buy it, a studio will sell it. In fact it is not as bad as some of the abuses we have seen, you just become jaded by the greed.

cheyane

Quizzical said:

cheyane said:

Scot said:

I am not disputing Quizzical's analysis (haven't got the time) but this caught my eye:

"One problem is that even if you can see what is offered, it can be difficult to understand whether something is essential or irrelevant.  It can similarly be difficult to tell whether something comes only from the item mall or whether it is readily obtained by playing the game."

Isn't that the whole idea? That is what these sort of MMOs and increasingly all MMOs want to do, make it hard for the players to understand what is essential so they buy the irrelevant stuff as well? It is classic marketing technique.

This is the same issue with Undecember. There was a lot of things people thought had to be bought through the shop when you could get it in game. I think it backfired on Undecember in the poor Steam ratings. 

The game is playable and you can earn the resources in the game by playing. It just takes longer. Of course people did progress by using their credit card but it was totally unnecessary. It's the ladders that is what caused competition to get on top.

Nowadays with these games you have to really do your research before you play otherwise from just looking at the game you will make all sorts of assumptions that are completely wrong.

It is not however like Diablo Immortal where they had some really nasty low percentages of drops. People have played Undecember totally free and still managed to get to the end game and beyond. However not getting an essence storage tab is bloody murder.

What I despised about Diablo Immortal was the terrible trickery in hidden percentages and the insanely low drop rates for essentials. This was a really bad design, Undecember is nowhere in that ball park and yet it seems to have triggered people's reviews to the point of falsehoods. After playing the game, watching videos and reading a lot about it I am now playing it and enjoying myself. I can tell you I am as surprised as you that I can say this at all.

Undecember is made by the same company (Line Games) as Uncharted Waters Origin.  I'm not sure if that's a coincidence or if that's why you specifically cited that game.

I think that they're assuming that the overwhelming majority of the people who play the game will never spend a dime.  That's true of most "free to play" games, if only because the overwhelming majority quit almost immediately.  But they also seem to be assuming that even a majority of the players who put 100+ hours into the game will never spend a dime.

I have no problem with paying for a game that I like.  But if you're determined to play a game completely for free, then UWO has a much more generous business model than most "free to play" MMOs.

No it was a total coincidence I had no idea that this game was made by the same people. I am playing Undecember now you see.

Asm0deus

I will break it down easy for people, if you play on a pve server the way it's monetized is fine.

 If you play on a pvp server open your wallet and whale it up cause as a dolphin or f2p you're gonna get creamed as you wont be able to compete.

A 3 page expose isn't required to see this.

Quizzical

Asm0deus said:

I will break it down easy for people, if you play on a pve server the way it's monetized is fine.

 If you play on a pvp server open your wallet and whale it up cause as a dolphin or f2p you're gonna get creamed as you wont be able to compete.

A 3 page expose isn't required to see this.

For a PVP server, I'm really not sure.  UW Online had a lot of stuff that looked far more pay to win than anything in the UW Origin item mall.  They made it so that if you wanted to be a pirate and weren't a whale, you had no chance.

However, if you merely didn't want to defeated by pirates, being a whale was scarcely relevant.  Paying attention when pirates could potentially attack was the key to avoiding them.  If you were paying attention, pirates couldn't catch you.  If you weren't paying attention, no amount of whaling could save you.

I haven't played on a PVP server, so I have no idea how hard it is to avoid pirates in UW Origin.  But the oceans are huge, so it wouldn't shock me if, as with UW Online, merely avoiding a handful of heavily trafficked areas was nearly enough.

Slapshot1188

@Quizzical ;

That is a fantastic write up!

After reading it all I can say is that it seems to maybe not have the worst monetization but I also think that's more of a case of everyone else being so bad.  

For me, as soon as I see 3 different currency types and you start mixing that with RNG gatcha I am out. 
No good can come from that IMHO

Sandmanjw

UW on SNES was one of my first games.  Read up on this game and just said no. 

Went and downloaded the emulator and played the old game.  Good memories, good game.

 

Theocritus

Honestly I dont ever look in the cash shop to start with....That way there is no temptation and just play the game.