Persona 5: The Phantom X’s saga of post-launch controversy continues, as Atlus and Black Wings Game Studio’s response to player backlash has only made some members of the game’s community more angry, as they don’t feel like their concerns are being heard.
To bring you up to speed, Persona 5: The Phantom X is the new gacha game set in a different timeline from the original RPG. Like most live-service games, it has events, content roadmaps, and microtransactions that bake FOMO into its design. The Phantom X originally launched last year in China, and finally came to the West last month. Atlus and Black Wings announced they would be speeding up the story content rollout in the West to catch everyone up, but when it became clear that the game’s in-game rewards weren’t being improved to compensate for the accelerated pace, fans started review bombing the game for what they called unfair treatment. The team acknowledged the feedback and said it would be responding to it, but stopped short of saying it would be making actual changes to address these problems. Now, the studio has held a livestream to talk about the game’s 1.2 update that goes live tomorrow, and players are saying the team hasn’t actually fixed anything, and in some cases, is only making things worse.
Some changes the patch brings about do acknowledge issues players have complained about; it adds more login rewards and gifts in response to players getting fewer rewards during their play time, for instance. However, while some rewards were rebalanced to be more in-line with the Chinese version, the patch doesn’t do anything on top of that to compensate for the accelerated schedule, nor does it implement higher chances to pull rare characters in the game’s gacha systems. A major point of contention is that characters are not being added to standard banner (basically the baseline pool of characters you can get when rolling for new Phantom Thieves to add to your party) until they have been in the game for six months. According to the stream, this is because the team wants to “act out of consideration for players” who use premium currency to acquire highly sought after characters, which fans have interpreted as the team saying they want to continue to incentivize players to pay up if they want a better chance of getting those characters.
“Straight up ‘we only care about people who spend money,’” nightoftheghouls wrote on Reddit. “You aren’t supposed to say the quiet part out loud guys.”
What remains to be seen is if this will be standard procedure for the game moving forward, or if it’s just being applied to some characters released in the game’s first month while the devs continue to adjust its monetization and release roadmap. Fans worry this might make the game a bigger money and time investment while the accelerated rollout is still in place, and create a grindier game with less payoff.
“So now not only do we have an insane release pace of new characters, we will not be able to get any of the ‘Standard’ characters going forward until at least 5 months from now?” N0tZekken wrote in another Reddit thread. “Keep in mind that they can actually pull it off for every new character, and they could actually make it worse. What’s preventing them from increasing this to a year if sales are not satisfactory? Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve been lied to in the face by Sega/Atlus.”
The comments on the live stream VOD are filled with similar disappointment, with several viewers expressing the idea that if the game were to just roll out exactly as it did in China, many of their issues would be fixed. But for now, non-Chinese players are dealing with an accelerated, FOMO-driven game that’s been changed in ways that offer no real benefit. Well, none for players, at least. Atlus stands to gain a lot by forcing players into situations where spending real-world money is the easiest fix.