Last week, Capcom released a video game called Mega Man X DiVE Offline on Steam. It’s a bit of a weird title, because… Offline?
The story behind that little oddity is simple: it used to be a mobile game, now it’s been released as a standalone PC game. All the monetization elements have been stripped out, and all of the game’s content is free to unlock for every player, no matter how often or when they play. Oh, and it’s $40 now instead of free-to-play.
I’m a huge fan of this model. I would say that I’d like to see more free-to-play games sold as complete packages like this, but in reality, a lot of the jank associated with mobile games still exists, so it’s still not really an ideal experience. You won’t ever have to pay for gacha pulls to get that character you want, but you will still have to grind for it.
Anyway, I could write more, but I already recorded and posted a whole video of the first 45 minutes of gameplay, so you can sort of see how it all works below. If I recall correctly, I was initially kind of on the fence about this one, but spoiler: it ends up being pretty fun once you get past the boring first couple of worlds.