Mortal wombat.
Super Animal Royale is an animal-based, free-to-play, 2D, top-down, 64-player, crossplay battle royale with premium cosmetics. That’s a lot of concepts piled up on top of each other – and it shows how our gaming vocabulary has expanded over the last decade or so. There are notions here that you would have had to explain in detail in the early 2010s but which are now indispensable shorthand for core gaming fundamentals. These are familiar ideas but combined in a new way and the result is tons of fun.
If you nearly stopped reading at “free-to-play” then you won’t need telling about the low points in the history of that monetisation strategy. There’s the “free-to-play-at-first” model, the “pay-to-win” model, the “pay-not-to-wait” model and the concept of the “whale” – the problem overspender who ensures a game’s economic viability at the expense of their own. With all the psychological manipulation involved in loot box gambling and layered in-game currencies blurring with real ones, it’s understandable that “F2P” has become a scary term.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
