A RPG Removed All Microtransactions For Their Fans and I Respect That - Inkbound

what's up guys and gals welcome back to the nerd Castle today in the world of inding games we're going to be taking a look at a title called ink bound you might be saying to yourself Splat why are you covering ink bound right now this is a game that came out a long time ago and suspiciously you never covered the game back then so why now well I'm covering the game for actually a very specific reason now and that reason is that these developers have done something that I have never before seen in my 11 years covering the gaming industry at large I've done AAA games I've done Indie Games I've done games that were made by teams of hundreds of people and I've played games on the channel that were developed by a singular person and once again I I've never seen this before uh these developers listen to feedback from their Community now you might be scratching your head and saying to yourself what do you mean there's a lot of developers out there that are listening to feedback right now I go on the steam forum all the time and I can see developers interacting with their Community what I mean is that the developers of this game interacted with their community in a way that specifically negatively affected the developer like it cost them something to do this and they did it anyways just to make their Community happy and what that thing is is actually fairly major they removed every single microtransaction from their game which will then bring us back to why I never covered this title I didn't cover this title when it first came came out because it was a particular time for me where games had lots and lots and lots of microtransactions in them it felt like every other game had some kind of like deluxe edition or something else going on shoehorned into the game in order to extract cash from their consumer and so I didn't cover the game because this was an online Rog likee uh with tactical trappings and RPG things going on and builds going on it looked like an interesting game but at the end of the day I'm just not interested in really any title that's going to happen have me paying for Cosmetics so that I can look different from other people I'm just not really interested in that whole deal I'm not interested in the season passes I'm not interested in the fomo you know what I mean the fear of missing out and these are things that are weaponized against modern gaming audiences all the time like we are just constantly browbeat with these industry decisions and I know it drives us all crazy like I know that we all don't like it and so even though I knew that this game was a little bit older and even though I knew that this game probably was not going to get the same view counts or the same general interest from my audience that other titles that kind of fit my audience and what we're into a little bit better I still wanted to go for it because this is such an unprecedented thing that I've never seen in my entire career that it deserved a video and so that long intro out of the way I can already smell the comments right now of people being like Oh my God 3 minutes of jabbering on just get to the game play for the love of God like I can hear those things happening right now but I did want to give you a tangible explanation for why this video is happening why this game is now awesome and in fact how the developers if they keep this up have earned me as a consumer and as a person that will buy their products probably for the rest of my gaming career so welcome to Ink bound what is ink bound ink bound is a tactical strategy online MMO not really like RPG I would actually consider it so instead of calling it an MMO I would call it something like what Warframe is like yes technically there's a lot of people running around doing things but there's no free roaming areas in this game uh this is a game that has a Lobby you could play alone if you want the game is perfectly balanced for Al looniness uh I have beaten the game alone I've been playing all morning actually for about 3 hours before I recorded this video and while that's obviously not going to be enough coverage uh for an online game that has like a crazy amount of content you can can play the game completely and totally solo and I have been and I've won runs completely and totally solo so that is entirely an option if you want to participate inside of it don't be offut by the fact that I said that this is an online game you can play it completely and totally solo as much as you want or you can grab groups with people it's got matchmaking and you can go in and you can do these fun little tactical battles uh with a group of friends and the enemies will be all boosted up and buffed and you'll have little synergies and your builds and you'll be able to play off of one another it's totally up to you the way that you want to play the game but at the end of the day it's a tactical strategy Rog likee with online capabilities uh where it's made by the developers of monster train and so this is a game that has loads of builds it has loads of things to do it has loads of items and it's a game about making yourself as overpowered as humanly possible by the end of your run you go from really struggling with some fights to like the runs for me that are going really well I basically board clear in a couple of button presses it's an incredibly Good Feeling to have a build come together like that the game is currently in Early Access so that's being worked on all the classes and everything are not inside the game but as of right now they do have a particularly beefy build that probably has aund a lot of hours of I'm not going to put a specific number on it but a ridiculous amount of content because I think as it sits right now there's like eight or nine characters that all have their own special abilities they all have their own special augments for all of their abilities they all have their own evolution of their abilities that will happen when you max them out and they can evolve in multiple different directions on top of that you've got Binding of Isaac style objects over here that allow you to make your build those also have an auto battler bent to them and there's no Auto battling portions of this game except for that but basically every single item that you pick up binding of ISAC style also has tags and if you stack those tags it will buff certain types of damage or give you more AP or allow you to move a lot further or give you Shield every single turn in varying amounts or increase the amount of bleed damage you do and so it's also it's a game that has a lot of moving parts for your builds and I'm very impressed by it so far for right now what I'm doing is I'm fighting my way through the beginning part of a campaign this game also has really good voice acting uh top tier voice acting and storytelling it's all quite good there is a storyline to this game although it does devolve into like doing daily tasks and stuff like that pretty quickly before it starts giving you you know little tidbits of Hades style storyline but the thing is the grind in this game is fun it's enjoyable like you're supposed to play these levels over and over and over again because the fun is in building and being like okay well this time I'm going to try this out I'm going to try this out uh I don't want any of these none of these look Super Rad to me uh these are actually abilities right here and so I'm trying to find something that'll fit in with the rest of my build because I've only got one slot left and I get the feeling we're probably going to have to go with a lot of rerolls here there we go that's kind of what I was looking for so we've got grasp right now now I can hook shot enemies towards me and it marks them which lets me do like double damage the next time I hit them and then we can stack that with the double damage we get off of here to make this guy deal just I think the last time I ran this build the final hit that I put on the final boss was like 6,900 damage it was so awesome and Rad but let's go ahead and talk about what you're looking at this is ink bound the goal of the game is to go through backtack rooms just like you would do in FTL or just like you would do in the Spire there's different rooms that do different things they give you different Buffs they give you different amounts of money shops fights Elites stuff like that and the goal of the game is to create a build that complement your party if you're playing with a team and also allows you all to succeed and make it all the way through the game there are two different game modes there short runs which took about an hour I guess my last short run took about an hour 45 minutes in there somewhere but I'm a new player and there are actually people speedrun running them too and some people have gotten it down to like 15 minutes when they do a short run uh there's also deep Dives which are exactly what you would expect if you play de rot Galactic they're a much larger much more expanded a much more profitable version of the game that if you've got a couple hours to kill you can sit down and do a long campaign instead after creating your build they're going to subject you to a number of bosses that are very challenging we'll talk about the combat when we get there in just a second I do actually kind of want another augment yeah that sounds really good there we go this guy is ready to evolve already I've got myself built up for a fire build right now my Bonk is putting like an absurd amount of burn on people already and I'm only inside like the third room and so I think it may very much be time to focus on burning this game has kind of like a hybrid realtime turn-based combat that I'm a big fan of I actually like little systems like this where this blue ring is your movement I can move anywhere I want inside that ring but the second I use an a ability it will reduce my ring down to that and lock in the movement points that I've utilized I like this combat system very very much and then we've got AP down here in the bottom right hand corner I have eight of them to do as I like on this turn all of your abilities use different amounts of AP because this is a game that's made by the monster train developers everything in this title is telegraphed flawlessly very very well it's very easy to figure out what's going to happen to you on your turn so to give you a rough idea of what's happening every single enemy here is doing something these guys are Auto attacking me there is no way to avoid that damage there is nowhere I can go if there's connected with an arrow that is damage that you are taking unless you kill these guys or you mitigate it somehow this guy is using an ability and you can see it telegraphed right there with a big giant charge this guy is doing nothing he's basically a treasure Goblin that's in the middle of combat that if we kill him we get a bunch of money these right here landmines that go off at the end of the turn and the number above our head is how much damage we're going to take if we were to end our turn right here right now there will also be a yellow number that will come up next to this uh that is the damage you will take if you take any action right now that means if you use any ability from where you're standing and that has to do with area of effect things like fire on the ground and stuff like that uh but that's basically the nomenclature that guy right there is a power orb there's entire play styles that generate power orbs and that's the entire point of them is to generate as large and as infinite of a turn as possible uh so I've had power orb turns where I've started out with 4 AP and I've probably used 10 or 11 AP because I was smart about how I leveraged my abilities to generate orbs and whatnot they're not going to let you infinite and clear the whole game by yourself but you can get darn close and have a really really cool Banger of a turn and since it's a team based game I don't think that any of your teammates are really going to care I'm going to pull this guy over to here and kill him oh look at you you moved huh that's unfortunate all right well then I'm going to jump over over to here and then from there I'm going to murder you and then oh so when I kill an enemy he targets me gotcha okay so I know how that works now I should have saved a little bit of my movement then I do have a power orb right there but it looks like I can't get outside of the movement radius unfortunately I'm going to use my big slam right here I think to whoop that guy and then I'm going to do that right there cuz like I'm going to get hit either way so I might as well kill some somebody and then I'm going to go ahead and use a barrier potion to put a shield on myself so that I take no damage from that hit because healing in this game it's not limited but I would call it trickle healing uh so most of the healing in this game is going to come in small drips and drabs of like three or four and so I would not recommend in my opinion anyways uh taking a lot of damage if you can help it if you take 25 damage in a fight it's going to take you a little while to get that 25 damage off of you it'll probably take you like three or four rooms unless you're specifically built to regenerate let's go aad and hit him right there he should burn to death on his turn cuz he's got 16 Stacks each stack does 10 damage right there I also have a class ability right here as I mentioned earlier this game has eight classes right now and they all play quite differently I think you'll enjoy it I was actually I've only played two or three of them at the moment but each one has played distinctively from others and each one has a varying grade of complexity for how hard it is to play that class as well so that's going to be another thing to keep in mind I don't know if I want to move to there I think I want to move to here uh there are characters that focus on controlling the battlefield locking down enemies so they can't move disabling them stunning them there's classes that focus on and and it's not even just like that Bare Bones basic level of MMO RPG development either it's actually a situation in which the classes have a different mechanic so like my mechanic is very simple cuz I'm playing the Newbie character right now that's basically a two-handed Berserker every time I hit an enemy I generate heat every five heat I generate a stack of uh well every so I generate a stack of heat whenever I hit an enemy that means that I get more damage when it gets to five Stacks it turns into a shield and I get a bunch of movement and then I max out at 10 Stacks that's effectively what the game has going on right now for this class and this class is very simple there was another class I played that was called I think the binder or something like that and the binder what he did is every attack he has connects your character to an enemy with a string and everything that he h all of his abilities do different stuff based on the amount of strings you have attached to people and so some abilities you can build him to have less strings attached you can build him to have more strings attached and he'll behave in different ways very creative stuff I haven't played all the classes yet but so far I've seen interest things from the builds that they allow you to have I have a big slam right now but we're not going to fully benefit from it I'm going to get that power orb to get some AP back I'm going to grab that guy right there we're going to stack up oh hey now hey hey hey hey hey oh I messed up I could have big slammed him and finished this off well let's big slam him right there anyways down he goes the game is chocka block you're going to see lots of quests popping up along the way this game is chocka block with activities and things and stuff to check off a list if you're into collectathon style gameplay you'll probably like it this is the season pass that you now just get for having the game there's no more fear of missing out I don't know if they're going to do the exact same thing that deot Galactic does where when the season is over it just adds all the Cosmetics from this season into the generalized loot pool I would prefer it be that way I would guess since they took all the monetization out of the game to appease Their audience uh that's probably the way they're going to have it work otherwise they're just wasting Dev time on things that don't make a richer gameplay experience but anyways this is the season pass the XP you see me getting that's what it's going towards uh and you unlock stuff it's pretty generous I've been playing for 3 hours I've unlocked a bunch of stuff it's not that big of a deal you also have Milestones when you complete Milestones it will also add things on in and you'll generate XP to unlock Cosmetics uh there's collections over here so as you get XP you'll also unlock new vestages which vestages are the items that allow you to make your build Binding of Isaac style uh you will unlock lock all kinds of things dude there there's so many things in this game to fool around with this is a game that's made by a team that knows what they're doing and I'm so so glad they decided to walk it back on monetization and just make it like you buy it one time you are good to go so we don't really have anything here that I want these are vestages which as I said are the relics that fill in these Seven slots down here I'm going to roll it we kind of want to look for stuff that gives us burn or gives us some kind of like big benefit basically and I have a lot of money right now so I'm not really too worried about kind of rrolling this for a little bit until I get what I want shield from picking up orbs is really good I do like that if we're below 50% HP we gain two shielding for the rest of combat that's pretty good too I'll probably go for this guy though right here shielding is like Perma Shield though let's go for this this guy cuz it gives us more stacks of stuff and it completes our inventor and it completes our Bastion right there there's also another mechanic that I know you guys are really going to like so you're probably thinking to yourself if you can only have seven relics like how do you make the gaml diverse and interesting this room right here the vestigial Shrine you can sacrifice these right here and Destroy them but you will keep the points that they've applied to your little build over here on the right and there's some shrines that will double the points they apply so for example if I don't care about steel Bella's ability I can go to this Shrine I can sacrifice it and it will give me another stack of Bastion and it will give me another stack of inventor which I'm absolutely going to do because I don't really care about this Relic so let's go ahead and do that that's actually a pretty solid idea right here for us to play around with so this is the vestage extractor we will take it we will throw the steel brella in there and as you can say that just gave me level two Bastion and level three inventor Isn't that cool and it freed up slots so that that is now not negatively affecting my build which is focused on Burn type abilities so I can stack up burn stuff in here while also still picking up other relics with the full intent of sacrificing them to keep developing out my build isn't that a great system right there don't you just love that uh this is a shop right here we've got to go talk to the Carver I think I unlocked some new mechanic here so got an eye for solid craftsmanship I'll give you that needless but the C CET is going to cost you like everything else around here uh so we get a discount though cool uh these are a new thing that I've unlocked so I want to check these out because it matters as to my first impressions appraisal of the game uh much appreciated you won't be regretting buying that piece of artistry all right like what is it purchase the cabinet of trinkets is it just like a new thing that can come up in my run I noticed I have an empty slot right here and it didn't give me anything maybe it goes into oh maybe it's that no never mind it's a consumable slot maybe it's a thing that you can activate that goes inside of here I figured it would give me one for unlocking it so that I could play around with it but I guess not by the way this is an after edit so apparently the thing that I unlocked is in the greater lobby area in the game and so it's a thing where you can unlock these little I guess perks that happen when certain things happen on a run and you can unlock more of them with keys you get from playing the game so there you go that's what it is it's not a consumable or anything else back to the normal programming edit over we can get an augment for our abilities and I think that's a really good idea I probably will yeah lowering the cool down on leap is a really good idea because it's a great utility to have lowering it on grasp as well would be a really good idea but since our character tends to suffer based on Movement we need ways to get to enemies and we need ways to bring enemies to us that's it since we're locked into melee range unlike the ranged characters we've got 150 bucks to play around with right now there's nothing in the store of value that I want right this second I'll roll it once and we'll see what comes up uh on our turn we have a 35% chance to gain a free AP and I already have one of those I wonder if it Stacks or I wonder if it rolls twice at 35% I'm already asking Binding of Isaac questions right now this one right here is not bad either though because there's a lot of damage you can't avoid in this game and building to reflect damage back at the enemy or at least do Thorns damage as an actual legitimate build my last run I was up to like I think a couple like 170 190 damage if you hit me and there are some enemies that like hit you for one damage a couple of times and it just shatters those nerds it's really great and so let's go ahead and get started on those two little guys right there we're going to jump over to here to avoid his AOE we're going to use the hook right here to grab this guy to give us double damage we're going to play invigorate on ourselves to double our damage again and then we're going to use our slam to do 91 damage right there what a hit you love to see it this early in the game that right there with this boss uh that's going to be a phase shift so this boss is going to change what he does uh right there something bad is going to happen when we get to that spot just fair warning we'll kill off these little dudes right here that doesn't leave me with a lot to play around with mostly just normal hits and it looks like we're going to take damage here no matter what anyways so let's get our burn Stacks up and on this guy we still haven't had very good luck on this run I'm thinking this run probably won't pan out into being like a big banger of a run I've just I've got a Vibe you know what I mean I've got a feeling that this is not going to work out for me because we want to have a bunch so there's a there's a little side thing you can get over here like a little attribute that has to do all with burn damage and the spreading of burn damage and we've gotten none of it yet and I've been using a lot of rolls and I've been using a lot of money to try to find it so I'm beginning to lose hope that it exists I don't know so for this turn what we need to do we need to come down here and get that power orb and then I think we need to jump out to the furthest ring yeah because he deals less damage the further we are away from him that's going to make our next turn a little bit of a headache but we did get a close power orb right here which is not the worst thing that I've ever seen can I bring him to me I can I wasn't positive that I could bring him to me well let's line him up for like another big slug right there there we go we'll take our free action point right there we'll move out of the AOE I'll probably just jump on him and there it is we phase shifted him so now he can't take any more damage uh for the rest of the turn but it does interrupt whatever he was going to be doing in the first place let's jump to there to get rid of the two little mukes I'm going to stack up some burn on this guy but I got to save an AP to get out of the AOE and then we'll wait and see what they do next we got a couple of these little guys over here 400 HP on each of them that's going to be a little bit more difficult to deal with we've got a lot of unavoidable damage going out right now which has me a tiny bit worried what I would maybe suggest is that we use grasp on him that'll Mark him for the double damage will'll invigorate we'll jump to like there I could have killed him I think if I had plotted that out a little bit better but I think that I didn't what does this do it puts vulnerable on all enemies I think we're just going to get whacked on this turn I don't think there's too much more that I can do about it I can kill him off which does reduce our damage a little [Music] bit let's go for it two of them are off the field I think once we deal with the ads life is going to be a lot simpler here but this game has seamless combat it's got a solid storyline intro the developers have done a tremendously moral thing that I've never before seen in my career this game was not a bad game when it came out I just don't like microtransaction I'm not into it I don't even like cosmetic microtransactions I don't like any of them I like what the game has right now which is where you can earn everything in the game from like chests that you get after beating bosses and from like unlocks that you get from filling up a level up meter and stuff like that like that's so much more satisfying completing an achievement and getting a cool cosmetic that other people don't have that's so much cooler than just going to the store and paying five bucks to get it you can still do that to support the Developers uh so I know somebody's going to after you know this is one of those videos that somebody was going to check you know what I mean they're going to go and check this game Steam page after I say that and they're going to be like uh Splat they definitely have things that you can pay for there and microtransactions on there yes but before in order to get that stuff you had to buy them there was like in-game cosmetics and there was out of game Cosmetics now you can get them all in game just by earning them or you can just pay the five bucks to to support the developer which is a thing that I do I don't even play Deep Rock Galactic anymore I've gotten what I wanted to get out of that game I don't play it anymore really um the fact of the matter is I still go and buy all of their Cosmetics whenever they release them just to support the developer because they've earned that loyalty as a customer from me to where even if I'm not really going to use the thing I personally want to incentivize that behavior so that more developers will do things like that see what I'm saying man this phase is not going well for us right now is it this is not a super great situation for us if that clenches a kill I'm okay with it but if it does not clench said kill I don't think it's going to be that helpful we're going to cut this one close but in my experience the first boss fight is often very close that's been kind of my experience with this game is that the first boss fight is usually the one that takes a little bit of Wheeling and dealing to clench and then later bosses are actually pretty easy because you've got a build going at that point U we've got a solid hit that we can get him with right there or we can wait till next turn and take it then I think I'll wait till next turn you may have noticed that the boundaries of the fight Arena are slowly getting smaller uh we're going to need to finish this guy and we're going to need to finish this guy now luckily we're in a great position to do it so this is what I was waiting for boom baby fights over uh at this point I highly recommend this game this is a unique product the likes of which does not exist on Steam outside of this game specifically it's a social experience it's a solo experience it's a great character building experience expence there's lots of things to unlock there's lots of things to collect and of course this is one of those beautiful days the only time I've ever gotten to say this in my entire career a developer went out of their way to undermine their bottom line in order to make their customer base happy at the expense of their own dollar to be a good moral person that is not optimizing their game sale and storefront for fear of missing out which is a very common thing that basically every microtransaction game does that's why they never sell you the exact amount of coins that you need to buy the thing you always have like 200 left over it's because it triggers your fear of missing out you don't want to waste that two bucks so you constantly try to use their store in order to buy just enough currency to get just the amount you want but mathematically they've designed it so that you can't do that like games are full of this crap nowadays this and I'm really really happy happy to see a developer do the right thing get rid of that and just make a really rad really fun game and they deserve to be rewarded for that and so I had a key to get this game for free it was in my inbox right now from a couple months ago when I didn't play the game I did not use that key I went and I purchased this game at full price because the developers even if I wasn't going to play this game I want to incentivize that behavior that's great uh good on you developers you made the right decision I applaud your decision for doing something that no developer has ever done that I'm aware of I'm proud of you that's a really good thing to do and you make me happy to be the kind of guy that covers indie games and that deserved a video so here you go this is your video my name is spatter cat I sip through the pile to find what's worthwhile so that you don't have to every single day up on the chopping block I take a look at an indie game and I give you my impressions of it today it was ink bound my Impressions from the first 3 hours are very very positive I really don't have too many complaints about this game it's a really really fundamentally great product that caters to a very very wide swath of people in all honesty I'll see y'all later thanks for hanging out and that's all I got for you

Channel: Splattercatgaming

Views: 80,751

Keywords: inkbound gameplay, inkbound walkthrough, inkbound playthrough, lets play inkbound, inkbound review, inkbound preview, inkbound impressions, inkbound download, inkbound trailer, inkbound guide, inkbound soundtrack, inkbound music, inkbound release

Id: MXPohOA4Phs

Length: 29min 21sec (1761 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2024