4 ms·

Having never played gacha games but getting a good laugh out of this, is this really a thing people play? How different is the real gameplay?

• auszeph 5mo ago
  I think the idea is that many games in essence boil down to this. Gamified random number generators. It's really well done, and hilarious.
  • nkrisc 5mo ago
    Pretty much any game does (even the ones I enjoy). What I was wondering is what is the gameplay delta between this and a real gacha game. Some games, while basically a dressed up RNG, still give heavy weight to player input and decision-making in determining the outcome, whereas some games the player input essentially serves as the trigger to simply generate the next random number.
    • vunderba 5mo ago
      > Pretty much any game does (even the ones I enjoy) The idea of video games being the equivalent of coin pusher arcade garbage is a relatively new one. If games were just non-deterministic randomized RNG generators than the entire speed running community (and the associated hand-eye coordination) would be pointless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_pusher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_pusher
      • nkrisc 5mo ago
        What I meant is games being basically numbers dressed up in something more fun. Pretty much all games are just data manipulation GUIs. Though some do definitely incorporate game mechanics that strongly prioritize and reward good decision making and input by the player. Even many tabletop games are really just interesting ways to modify numbers. Though of course, it's the way you manipulate the numbers that makes it fun.
        • vunderba 5mo ago
          yeah, I ca see that. A lot of that (particularly for RPGs) is more that you’re trying to simulate a real-world experience. How do you represent how dextrous a player character is, or how hard someone can bludgeon you over the head with a morning star? So you create these gross oversimplifications as numerical values that can be discretely manipulated, then toss in some RNG to make things a bit more fun especially in games like Dungeons & Dragons. But I've also been DM'ing a D&D campaign for years, and I've found that the farther you can get away from needing to refer to the numbers, and instead rewarding player ingenuity is both more liberating and more fun.
• pynappo 5mo ago
  Generally speaking I think the allure of modern-day gachas is providing a near-premier gaming experience (like paid RPGs, open-world games, etc.) while being free-to-play, at the cost of slowly encouraging you to spend a lot of time and/or money to get better characters in order to actually keep up with the end-game content and/or PvP side of the game. If you commit to playing the gacha for an extended period of time, the system of: - daily rewards that encourages you to play for a couple minutes each day to get enough currency to get good characters from the gacha - newer characters being better than older ones (in visual design appeal and/or power-level) - harder end-game content requiring better rosters of characters (or more grind) - sales on the premium currency used to pull - the ol' sunk-cost fallacy all combine to encourage players to spend money over time In this regard, the game in the post obviously does not have the scope of a game that actually costs money, and doesn't have the goal of getting you to spend money, but it does cover the grind and gacha part of pulling for different rarity characters and such.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
  No, this is nothing like a real gacha game at all. Gacha games have a wide variety of mechanics, and can have significant depth to them. Trading card games were the original gacha games, and those have entire competitive scenes with tournaments, etc. (Magic the Gathering, Yugioh, Pokemon TCG). Digital gacha games are similar. In a real gacha game you aren't rolling for a static number, you're rolling for a package of numbers and modifiers and mechanics that feed into a complicated combat system, and there's tons of strategizing around how you combine different packages of numbers together in deckbuilding/teambuilding, plus the decision-making in the battles themselves. Gacha is really just a monetization approach. The mechanics that accompany it are the real draw, and you can have card games, RPGs, tactics games, action games, etc.
  • wordpad 5mo ago
    You have all that with Gacha pulls and battle system.
    • applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
      The battle system is too rudimentary to capture the essence of gacha. Insofar as gacha lends itself to gameplay mechanics and not just monetization, deck/teambuilding is absolutely integral. Obviously, the game is a parody, but even as a parody I think it does a poor job of capturing that aspect of building and experimenting with your deck/team. Which is fine, not a criticism of a silly little app, but the person I was responding to asked if this is what real gacha games play like and why people play them and I do not believe this is sufficiently representative. In fact, I would describe this as an idle game, not a gacha game. In other words, a gacha-themed Cookie Clicker reskin. The emphasis is on the gacha, but in a real gacha game, rolling gacha occupies <1% of the playtime, and this doesn't adequately capture how the gacha model intersects with real gameplay mechanics.
      • Supermancho 5mo ago
        > The battle system is too rudimentary to capture the essence of gacha Gacha is not related to battle systems at all. wordpad was referencing the random awards from the battle system as another funnel. Constantly trying to no-true-scotman what Gacha means, is not definitive or compelling.
• bsder 5mo ago
  RNGesus is far, far, far too nice on this game. :) In real gacha, the odds of pulling something good are generally super ridiculously low. The odds are generally so bad that they will implement a "pity" system to avoid the awful PR from the common case of spending a ton of money and getting absolute garbage.
• bcjdjsndon 5mo ago
  It's any game that has rng drops. Theyve been doing it years