Kajin said:
That right there confirms every single one of the suspicions I've had, in that all of this is outrage is the direct result of horribly mismanaged marketing. Thanks, Prankman. I doubt anyone else here will listen to you, but thanks.
Whatever bonehead at 2K thought it was a good idea to announce pre-order DLC before any game footage was released needs to be "released" from their job.
In all honesty, and I know people will disagree with me on this, I don't mind if DLC is pre-planned. Its good to have a plan in place to keep your product/service/whatever afloat for the long term, and the devs clearly want to keep Evolve alive for an extended period rather than pushing out a sequel in a year's time. And with so many possibilities for big, destructive aliens and cool hunters with unique gear, it goes without saying that ideas will have to be left out of the final product and revisited.
Does everybody remember Pokemon Gold and Silver? You know, the supposed peak of the franchise to many? A huge chunk of the Pokemon in GSC were already around, and were cut from Red/Blue/Yellow for time. That's why the Pokemon anime had so many Johto mons running around, like Togepi, and Donphan, and even Ho-Oh in the very first episode! They all already existed. That's also why 2nd Gen was so remarkably similar to 1st Gen, and the only entire generation of Pokemon built on the same engine as its predecessor. A lot of the Johto stuff was already around, they just needed to redesign the region layout, fill up the remaining roster slots with a few truly new Mons, and there you go.
Now, GSC definitely had a lot of work put into it, and earned its place as one of the best games in the franchise. The improvements made to the system, as well as the re-balancing of types helped mold Pokemon into the competitive juggernaut is today. My point is less to make a direct comparison between Evolve and Pokemon (heh...evolving Pokemon), and more to make the point that it is absolutely nothing new for ideas in video games to be removed from the game (sometimes even in very late stages) and then re-used later on, either in a sequel, in an update, or whatever. This isn't some new, scummy practice that's only started with the emergence of the "big, bad DLC, ooooo", this is something that's been around for years, since the industry's infancy.
So, let's look at the options they've got. They could either not add any more characters at all, which will allow the game to eventually stagnate, and the time gone into previously concepted characters goes to waste. They could release those characters for free, and then risk losing their budget really quickly because new copies will no longer be able to sustain the cost of creating brand new content. This isn't a run of the mill shooter, its a very niche genre that isn't going to appeal to as wide of an audience as something like Call of Duty, and creating and balancing new characters in a competitive PvP environment is tough work even before factoring in the asymmetrical nature of the game. The last option they really have is to charge for the characters to ensure that that they get a return back on their new content.
I'd imagine that they settled on the latter fairly early on, realistically recognizing that they could not feasibly work in every single idea that they had into the base game, and somebody at 2K decided to market this aspect first and foremost, before anything else was even ready for public view.
I will admit, its a lot of conjecture on my part, assuming that TRS is as fair as they claim to be, and that my assumptions about the process of planning DLC is anywhere near how it actually happens. I could be wrong. I am only saying that it need not be automatically a scenario of "us poor, downtrodden gamers versus " theman", yo". Its more complicated than that.
...All of that being said, even factoring out the terribad marketing, the prices are too steep. Like, way too steep. I would've expected $5 for a Hunter and $10 for a Monster, maximum. I will not try and defend the pricing, only the model itself. Their DLC model is fine, and will prevent a community split, which is great, because it means nobody will be forced to buy the really overpriced characters until they go on sale. It's not quite as bad as Activision trying to sell Fall of Cybertron skin packs for $10* (pretty much all of which were skins pre-existing in the single player game, no less!), but its still way too high.
*No hate towards that awesome game, or towards its awesome devs, High Moon Studios, R.I.P.. Damn Activision liquidations...