I feel like gear progression is massively underrated. I love to dress up with my muscley rpg man, and make him look cooler and more awesome as he gets stronger. I don’t want the best cosmetics locked behind a paywall. In MMOs it also just murders any respect/cred you get from having awesome gear that needed you to clear an epic raid or similar.
I get the whole cosmetics thing for “free to pay” e-sport-esc games though, where there’s not really any gear progression
Fully agree, I like gear progression in games, its been a bit since ive played one that relied on it but, it added stuff to do. I’m not saying that system shouldn’t exist as well. I also can’t think of any games that used that system that removed it when adding the store.
Assassin’s Creed is the best example I can think of. It added a store to literally buy gear. Also see like every MMO. This one is more of a reach, but I’d also say something like Hunt: Showdown falls victim to this, as it would be awesome if you could see a hunter and know their “power level” by the cosmetics.
Horizon, both ZD and FW, are a modern example of having gear progression that exists and isn’t ruined by microtransactions
