Honkai Star Rail, a free-to-play gacha game (basically, gambling game of chance) in which players spend anywhere from $5 to $10,000 to get characters, gear, equipment… is now releasing a disc version of their game on PlayStation 5. First issue with this is that many people don’t have a disk drive in their PlayStation, and the new PS5 pro won’t either. The game is also downloaded to the PlayStation store digitally anyway, so I’m not even sure what the heck the disk supposed to be for. Second, it doesn’t appear to be a steelbook, just a regular old plastic PS5 game case from what I have read from other sources. This is incredibly wasteful and frustrating because these always end up in a landfill anyway. Third and finally, it appears that the things that you get in game are silly little cosmetics. Spending money on this doesn’t actually get you any characters. It’s not like Apex Legends where you buy the starter bundle and you get several characters to start off with, no. You get nothing, absolutely nothing to help you in game. But if you take that $40 and go in game and spend it on rolling for overpowered characters, you could definitely get one of the best characters in the game right now.
Just seems very strange to me that a free to play pay to win game is going to come out with a physical copy that doesn’t provide any actual benefit to players in their gameplay.
The disc is 100% trash. People that buy this want the cards, keychains, and (especially) the exclusive in-game items.
I am surprised that it doesn’t also come with some in-game premium currency, though.
As for $40 in-game… That alone is going to net you some trash. You’ll pull a lot more on the free gems you get just for exploring and playing. Sure, you could get a great character, but the odds are back-loaded so that you generally won’t pull a 5-star in the first 70 pulls. $40 is like 40 pulls, maybe?
Yeah, but at that rate, why not just launch a store then and sell those items? Blizzard has their own store. Plenty of franchises do. It’s so weird to see a disc version of a free game. Can you imagine if fortnite did that? I don’t remember if they ever had a disc version of their game, but if they did launch one today, people would be scratching their heads