This is a bummer, but as I have exhaustively mentioned in the past, until we stop supporting this bullshit, it is going to continue, and worse, flourish. There is simply no reason for a gaming studio to stop pushing a practice that makes them money if people are willing to shell out for it.
Devil May Cry has us all excited here at DLH, as we are fans of hack n slash titles almost to a man. Bringing Nero back is icing on the cake for sure, and we're always game to pick up Ebony and Ivory and start dealing out some retribution. Unfortunately, this BS is souring our excitement already. Gamestop initially saw that you could purchase red orbs with real world money when they were playing through the DMC 5 demo, and when they asked about the ability to spend real money, the DMC 5 game director Hideaki Itsuno had this to say:
"With giving people the ability to purchase Red Orbs, it’s something we want to give people as an option. If they want to save time and just want to get all the stuff at once, those people can do that. But on the other hand I don’t feel you have to get all the moves. You should be able to play it the way you want to play it."
If this sounds like a shit sandwich someone is trying to convince you is roast beef, you'd be right.
"It’s interesting because from a game design point of view there’s two different things we think about when we set the prices of the moves, skills, and abilities [which can be purchased with Red Orbs]. The first thing is the stuff that we feel people should want to get first is made cheaper. So people will think, ‘Oh this is cheap so I’m just going to buy this.’ But then for the stuff that’s going to be harder to use and master, we make that more expensive. Partly because of you save up for that you’re not going to be able to buy as many skills, so you’re going to have the time to learn it. So you have to make the decision between going for the cheaper stuff or saving up, getting the thing that has a lot of application but you’ll have to spend time learning and perfecting."
This is all a lot of fancy talk for "give me money". While it is possible the game will be "perfectly balanced", it makes less sense when you consider that perfectly balanced games don't need BS like this. Hopefully, if gamers make enough fuss about this crap, they can still change the system before release.
But I wouldn't count on it. Much like feeding a stray dog, if it looks like an easy meal is to be had, there's little incentive to stop it from coming back.
