Jim Sterling did an episode on this today. Personally two things I hate in games are useless padding, and games not coming out as completed products. Warner Brothers is combining the two in an effort to milk as much money from Shadow of War customers as possible.
There are a lot of games that could be half the length and twice as fun, but certain developers tend to think they absolutely must have an 80 hour game. So what do they do? They give the player lots of useless chores to do, or add a thousand cutscenes, or make the player spend most of their time traveling. A few good examples of this: Windwaker for GameCube took forever sailing around the world. Dragon Quest VII has grinding and insanely long cutscenes that serve no purpose. Fighting the Condemned three times in Skyward Sword.
There are a lot of games these days that don't come out as completed products. I don't mind DLC if it's either free, or adds to an already complete game, ala the Witcher III. But when you've got paid DLC coming out just a month or two after your game comes out, it's obvious that developers cut content from the completed game, so they could make money on selling you the missing parts later. Injustice 2 did this pretty well, and so did Mass Effect 2.
Anyway Warner Brothers has taken it a step further. They're including DLC for an incomplete game, useless padding, and microtransaction to help skip over the useless padding. So you can either play Shadow of War as a grindfest, with things intentionally designed to take way too long, or you can pay for random lootboxes that speed up the game, at the expense of emtpying your wallet further.
I hope everyone boycotts this game, and I've already taken it off my buy list for the winter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TXWdyrqFP8 Edit: Mods could you make this playable in the thread? I'm not sure how to do it myself.
