DLC for Dummies

[JonnWood]

Any dissenters are idiots?

The article doesn't say that.

Ok I object to portal 2 DLC. I am not an idiot. I gave it a chance.

That's fine.

But the fact is that the "sale items" were the things that you could unlock with achievements. And I mean these peaches were waved in your face once you clicked on "robotic enrichment." That means they suckered people into buying the only free things they could have. Gotta sell them first before people know how easy they are to get.

If someone is "suckered" by something like this, they probably shouldn't have access to a credit card. Why do people keep phrasing things like advertising is a trick of some sort? It's hype. If you're not mature enough to deal with it, caveat emptor.

 

[JonnWood]

I suspect the gaming public longs for the days when you would BUY a game and then you would OWN the game. All of it. Forever. Period. Now your money only buys a piece of the game. For the price of a few DLCs, you could have paid for the damn sequal instead of a handful of disjointed extra pieces.

Can you imagine if movies did something like this? Oh, right. They already do, it's called the Director's Cut, Special Edition, ect. Well that's just sad.

There's naught to be done for it but tell those corporate jackals what you think of their DLC schemes every time they dare show their faces and speak with your feet and wallet. Sick of being milked by the corporate machine? Quit. Forsake the brand. Play something else, check out the indie scene, only buy stuff from companies that DON'T DLC milk you. If you insist on grappling the big brand teat like a starving addict then you've earned your milking.

Reject the marketing. Curse the brand. Hell, go pirate if you need your AAA fix so badly. But not 1 coin for the bastards. Not a 1.

I like how you advocate piracy just because someone wants a game, and you use terms that compare it to a drug addiction, and you think you're being reasonable.

That's adorable.

Congratulations: you're the very person this article is talking about.

 

[JonnWood]

Seriously grow up. Game developers don't owe you squat and if they wanna charge you 10 bucks for a digital hat they can. If you feel it's a rip off then act like a regular person and just don't buy their product instead of whining like an entitled 10 year old.

Or maybe you should grow up and stop defending companies that don't care about you.

Seriously, what's the problem of Valve fans? Some people would defend Valve (or some other company of their choice) if they'd shit on their head and charge them for it.

If any of my favorite companies does something like this, not only I will NOT BUY that stuff but I'll also ***** about that behavior as much as I want.

I'm really looking forward other comments from other stupid people who will never ever ever understand that expressing own opinion is as much a human right as is 'not purchasing shit'.

If you express your opinion, you don't get to complain when people express their opinion of your opinion.

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.

Shamus actually likes NV. Go to his blog, check out the Spoiler Warning archive [http://shamusyoung.com/spoilerwarning/]. Watch a few random episodes of the Fallout 3 SW, then watch the ongoing episodes for New Vegas, which is a fair-haired boy by comparison.

 

[Dmitri Monro]

Off topic, but I had to say it - In New Vegas, the vault 13 canteen that comes with the classic pack isn't a particularly useful item. It does take a tiny bit off of your h2o bar, but not enough to keep you alive, not nearly enough.

Now, the winterized t-51b power armor that you get at the end of operation anchorage in fallout 3 was balance breaking - It doesn't deteriorate. Once you finish that particular dlc, and you can do it early (I usually start it between lvls 3 and 5), you never have to worry about repairing or replacing armor.

I think if we're gonna indict bethesda and obsidian for anything it should be that it seems every time they patch a game it breaks the game. But again, off-topic.

The idiots you are referring to are probably the same people who made homefront a big seller despite the fact that it got not one positive review, or even anything more positive than "admittedly, the set pieces looked nice" said about it. You nailed it on the murder-fanboyism aspect, methinks.

 

[Caligula_II]

No, I'm simply observing trends. I really have no motivation either way since it's not my type of game. I'm pretty much the closest thing your going to find to a neutral party on a subject like this.

Oh really? Try anybody who doesn't play video games.

Irregardless of whether it's fandom or something else, doesn't change the fact that a lot of people defending the ratings are in some serious denial. The entire arguement is that the ratings dropped because of metabombing from forces that have been out there for ages, take action frequently, and ultimatly don't amount to a hill of beans. Saying that they had a huge influance here in dropping the ratings all of a sudden is simply looking for a scapegoat.

So you think that reviews coming out an hour after the game release are totally legitimate? Okay, sure...

A sudden reversal of rating trends, especially given recently uncovered attempts at damage control by companies, shows that it was a reaction. A more legitimate reversal of fortunes would have happened gradually, over a period of time. The initial reaction on the ratings being what was probably the most accurate indicator of reception, despite disturbing people, because that was from people who had just picked up the game and tried it out. Most of both the sales and ratings taking place over the first day or so, that's when everyone is more active in regards to a game. If a couple months from now the ratings slowly, and painfully inched up, then I would buy a better reaction over time, but these sudden movements are a problem, especially the upward trend simply because of the timing where it happened.

Most people do not have the luxury of being able to stay up for two nights in a row after a game release to finish it. Reviews up to a few weeks after are a reasonable time for people who bought on release.

Listen. Writing an essay doesn't help your argument if you have literally no evidence to back it up. You're building your house on a a sand dune right now. One bad critical review? Absolutely everything gets reviewed badly somewhere, that really means nothing. Anybody taking a single damn statistics class would tell you that an anonymous review site which can easily be spammed with good and bad reviews regardless of actual merit is useless, so why back your whole argument against it? critical reviews are high,USER REVIEWS ARE HIGH, and sales remain high, word of mouth is profiting Valve, not hurting it.

You are absolutely biased. You are grasping at straws to support your theory. It's not working.

 

[JonnWood]

The idiots you are referring to are probably the same people who made homefront a big seller despite the fact that it got not one positive review, or even anything more positive than "admittedly, the set pieces looked nice" said about it.

http://www.gamingtarget.com/article.php?artid=12317
http://www.gamechronicles.com/reviews/ps3/homefront/homefront.htm
http://www.fragland.net/reviews/Homefront/1641/
http://www.futuregamez.net/ps3games/homefront/review.html

I like how you used this topic to start ranting about another game entirely on a flimsy connection that isn't even true.

 

[JonnWood]

You are absolutely biased. You are grasping at straws to support your theory. It's not working.

I always find that the people who start by declaring they aren't biased are the ones most likely to be biased. There are forums where people discuss conspiracy theories and how to debunk them. Every once in a while, someone comes in and goes "Now I'm not biased either way, but..." and about a dozen logical responses later they're throwing around "open-minded" and "believe everything the gov't says" just like the other nutjobs.

 

[dakorok]

I agree with this article 100%.

The valve store trend irritates me, yes, but I don't judge Portal 2 or the game where it originated, Team Fortress 2 any less because of it.

 

[JonnWood]

I've been talking about the downside of DLC for a while now, and I don't remember you guys showing up to review-bomb anyone back then

Dragon Age 2.

You can get your jollies by calling the opposition idiots, or trolls, which is the operative word for people who don't know what "trolling" means, but we were given $85 worth of DLC. On Day one.

You were offered $85 worth of DLC if you bought it all separately. It's $40 or so if you combo up.

That is unacceptable. I don't care if it's just cosmetics. This isn't a pre-order bonus; this is content deliberately withheld from the full game for extra money,

Uh, can't you just unlock this stuff via achievements?

and the store-bought taunts and dance moves won't show up if I were to use them with someone playing on the PS3. So yeah, I mad, and I'm going to give Portal 2 a mediocre score on Metacritic because of it. Deal with it.

Boo hoo. You're precisely the sort of person Shamus is talking about. The game was fine when you didn't know about DLC, but the second you learn that there's more stuff and you can't have it for the wanting, it instantly becomes worthless. That's the mentality of a child, not an adult. Extra content is precisely that: extra.