DLC for Dummies

[Porecomesis]

How did they spoil it? The DLC? As I, and everyone else has said, there's no reason for you to buy it. Did you buy the DLC and now you feel ripped off, so you're taking typed revenge against Valve, who are never going to find your post or care?

What are you, another Valve fanboy having to take a piss at everyone who looks at them funny?

Every sort of day-one DLC, is stupid. Games are expensive as it is, asking more money just shows that the current state of gaming is unproductive and the publishers are greedy. And yes, Valve is a full-blown publisher, not a small indie developing house like people want to believe.

And asking money for extra clothing? The example I've stated was, if you go to a doctor or a lawyer, you don't get charged extra for sitting instead of standing. Even ASKING money for something like that is INSULTING. Portal is a good game, it will sell well and earn tons of cash, is it seriously worth it to ask for more pennies while looking as an asshole?

(And yes, I DO my own business. Yes, I'm jealous at Valve and other devs that they can charge extra for shit. It's still not right.)

Nope. Not a Valve fanboy, and I don't take a piss at everyone who looks at them funny. I take a piss at everyone who looks at them funny for all the wrong reasons.

By chance, do you live in Australia? Because I do, and I had to spend $80 on my copy of Portal 2, and I'm not complaining about DLC.

And as I'm very certain someone as already said, you actually do to a degree need to sit in a doctor's waiting room, and I agree that charging you for it is just cruel. Valve are doing nothing of the sort that's similar; they're having an attitude that's basically "Just asking, but would you like to buy a hat?" And you don't need to. You NEVER need to. In that case, Valve will go "Okay then, have fun". I fail to see how connecting charging sick people for sitting for chairs is equivalent to buying hats that are very easily overlooked and do nothing. That's like saying that if gay marriage rights were granted, the next push will be for marriage to include polygamous relationships. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Christian_Lobby#Lobby_Against_Gay_Rights_in_Australia]

Yes, I do have a few issues with the Team Fortress 2 DLC, namely that having enough money means you can have absolutely every weapon and item ever in the first day, although no one in their right mind would do that. Portal 2 is giving you hats, and that's it.

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

Way to completely miss both the sarcasm and the point.

Way to completely miss your troll mark and my point.

I'm sorry, what? I'm trolling because I have enough reading comprehension skills to notice that his point was not to incite people to hate the game for meaningless reasons, but to stress the absolute ridiculousness of the 1 and 0 scores being given to Portal 2 when considering how original it is, and I thought I'd point out that you were getting worked up over an objective he doesn't have?

 

[warfjm]

I did a quick search and found out the review bomb came from 4chan.

 

[Vault boy Eddie]

People aren't objective, especially people over the internet. If something doesn't go down exactly the way they pictured it in their tiny little brains, it's instantly the most horrible thing to ever exist. You'll see someone that bought, say, a mouse over the internet, and it just so happens that that particular mouse was defective, well, X company is the worst thing that ever existed, the website I bought the mouse from must have ties to terrorism and i'm telling everyone I know not to buy from these pieces of shit ever again!

Oh freedom of speech, if you were a person you'd be in Law & Order Special Victims Unit every week, because no one gets raped on a daily basis as much as you do.

 

[Pandabearparade]

I expected to disagree with Shamus (anyone willing to bash New Vegas hasn't got much gamer cred in my books), but I actually agree with all of his points.

 

[BlackSaint09]

1: Wow how retarded some people are!(am ofcourse referring to the idiots)
2: I actually wouldnt mind Bruce Willis selling me a Coke XD(he was a bartender before he became an actor afterall)(dont know why i brought that up)
3:Awesome column! It was fun to read. Keep up the good work :3

 

[Auxiliary]

What does the author mean with start at Blizzard? Valve wants to charge people money for customizing their avatar and do emotes while Blizzard charges money for silly things such as mounts and companion pets. The main difference being that Blizzard provides hundres of other mounts and companion pets whereas Valve makes customization only possible if you want to spend money.

I personally find Valve being less tasteful here, but I do agree with the author that zero-bombing the game is retarded as well. I do think Valve should have realized that some people would get pissed at only being able to customize if you are willing to pay up. Customization is a lot of fun and if you implement the feature, you can be certain that people want to customize without having to pay for it.

My personal worst meeting with DLC has to be Dragon Age however. It took me several hours to find a way to actually play the game with DLC and after that I had to make use of my command prompt every time I wanted to play again.

 

[snagli]

to be perfectly honest, there should a system within metacritic, where you can't give a game a really low rating, if 75% of the other rating were really good.

i also have an idea where everyone who gives a game like portal 2 a bad review gets marked, and can expect termination within 4 weeks

 

[Treblaine]

BRAVO! BRRAAAAVO!

Excellent article, also another good reason why you should ignore metacritic, most notably:

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/kung-pow-enter-the-fist

14%... FOURTEEN PERCENT!! Reviewers, professional or amateurs are so unreliable in aggregate, they are NOTHING compared to a good specific recommendation.

 

[Lord Le Camembert]

Bravo, sir. I couldn't put it any better...

 

[windlenot]

I hate a lot of stupid DLC but it's all good that it gives me the option to buy it. People complaining, just don't buy it! Nobody's forcing you!

 

[WaysideMaze]

Well said Shamus. Couldn't agree more.

 

[smut]

Does every gaming site I go to have to have the same article? This is the third video gaming site where I see an article complaining about complainers. If the criticsm is so stupid, why is every gaming site publishing multiple page refutations of it?

 

[DaHero]

Yes Shamus, people are born idiots, and many people don't try to adapt, but there's nothing we can do about it I'm afraid. The people who bombed Portal 2 for 2$ DLC are the same people who pay $60 for Madden DLC.

 

[Rienen]

Does every gaming site I go to have to have the same article? This is the third video gaming site where I see an article complaining about complainers. If the criticsm is so stupid, why is every gaming site publishing multiple page refutations of it?

Sadly, this. Low hanging fruit, I guess.

 

[subtlefuge]

All I know is that I got a cool copy of my Fancy Fedora from TF2 and a companion cube hat for free, and that was infinitely more than I expected.

The "cash cow" aspect is for those who have more money than they know what to do with. People pay upwards of $2000 for some TF2 hats. You can't say that there isn't some justification in repeating the store.

Also, I managed to play through SP and Coop without seeing the store. How did all the review bombers find it so quickly and instantly decide that it ruined the game?

 

[Girlysprite]

Ok, here is some comment on the day on DLC's. A lot of people think that if a DLC is offered on day one, it could as well have been in the game itself, but the content was 'split' to be offerered in a DLC.
From my own experience I can tell you: It doesn't work like that.

When a game is developed, the game enters a beta period. In this period, nothing can be added anymore. No scripts, no code, no models. Only bugs can be fixed. It is a period in which a lot of testing happens. Testers, translators, level designers and coders can be quite busy in this period, to fix the bugs. Game designers and graphics people are not busy. They can no longer contribute to the current project. So two things can happens:

1: The people start working on a new game
2: The people start working on DLC stuff.

Even when the game is done, it takes a bit of time before it hits the (virtual) shelves.

Graphic content like a new model or a new animation takes not so much time to design, make and test. When working with a good schedule, visual DLC content can be made to be available at launch, without taking manhours away from the production of the coregame.

And yes, I've been there, done that, and got three tshirts

 

[John Funk]

Please read that post again. A game's disk is often content-locked many months before the game actually ships. And the disk itself starts printing probably a month before ship. That you think otherwise just demonstrates ignorance of the matter at hand.

Digital delivery allows them to deliver the content alongside the disk at launch, not on it.

The point is they do not 'lock' the content for shits and giggles. Disk printing is not the reason, the content itself is. In a development cycle, what you mention simply doesn't happen and I know this from first hand experience. They do not fire these people, they simply start working on the next project.

Well, sometimes they do get fired. In a best case scenario, they just move on.

And yes, I know how it works. I'm trying to simplify it for everyone else It's for testing, ironing out bugs, etc. The content is locked either way.

You can either fire them, start moving onto another project, or finish working on stuff that was cut.

 

[The Youth Counselor]

Hate it because protagonist Chell is just a boring analytical Latina woman instead of an awesome white Ex-Navy SEAL dude with short brown hair.

Actually she's not just Latina.


Snippets from Wikipedia Page: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al%C3%A9sia_Glidewell]

Alésia Toyoko Glidewell (born December 8, 1978) is an American voice actress and owner of a small film production company.

....

____________



Roles
____________

Sly 2: Band of Thieves ? Carmelita Fox, Constable Neyla, Clock-La
Star Fox: Assault ? Krystal, Aparoid Queen
Portal ? model for face and body of Chell
....


Personal Life
____________________

Glidewell is of Brazilian and Japanese descent. She speaks fluent English, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese and is an animal lover.[3] Alesia's Nickname in high school was Toy, a shortening of her middle name, Toyoko.

So there three kicks in the balls through a single character to the guy in marketing who believes that all video game protagonists should be 20-30 year old handsome white guys, with short brown hair, and clean shaven or with stubble.

 

[SandroTheMaster]

Yeah, I wouldn't snip any from the score of a game for a DLC but...

You were a whole lot less lenient on Bethesda for its Horse Armor DLC... which is pretty much the same thing. People just seem to be more lenient towards Valve.

And anyway, didn't you hate Steam some time ago?

All in all, I liked Portal but haven't bought Portal 2 yet, nor plan to buy it anytime soon. I'll wait till the price drops. Not because I have a vendetta against it but because that's what I do to games that are 8 or less hours long: I wait till their price reflects their duration. I don't know, I'm a Strategy and RPG nut, I guess I'm used for my games to just last more than a day.

Still, I find Portal to be massively overrated. It is a nice puzzler with amusing writing, but good Gods it has a lot of flaws that are allowed let slip just because it is Valve. When any other game is ludicrously linear to the point of being a straight line where you can only handle the situation the same way every time the game is called uninspired and lacking of replayability. Half-Life and Portal have a free pass however, for no apparent reason.

Portal only seems so good because our standards have lowered tremendous amounts, and it stands tall above any Call of Duty, Gears of Wars or Tough Guyson in Grayish Brown Land in writing, design and gameplay, but it shares length and variety with those.

Lastly, I've heard they pretty much skewed the freedom to place portals, as in, the valid surfaces where you can place portals (which was pretty much EVERY surface in Portal) are now few and far between. How did they compensate for that?