I want to say up-front that I am, by no means, defending the choice to slap a bunch of microtransactions onto Dragon’s Dogma 2. I’m also not surprised by the current state of the game’s Steam reviews—sitting at “Mixed” at the time of writing, in the same way that I’m not surprised when kicking beehives gets your ankles stung.
Two important points of context: firstly, Dragon’s Dogma 2 came out recently, and despite some nasty performance issues it’s a smashingly fun and weird RPG—we gave it a solid 89 in our Dragon’s Dogma 2 review. Secondly, it came saddled with a host of very dumb microtransactions, a lot of which are just hacked off the Deluxe Edition “A Boon For New Adventurers – New Journey Pack” and sold piecemeal.
Cue a barrage of (understandably) negative …