Sean951 said:
RandV80 said:
Personally I bought the first one on a whim but don't like their business model here so sat out the Zerg expansion. With the advent of Steam and digital distribution I'm not paying $180 for Starcraft 2, I like it but I'm just not that big a fan.
Now while I usually approve of developers taking more time to get a game right I'm pretty skeptical on this one. Blizzard is massively profitable, should have buckets of money, and they're making a relatively low tech game here, no scratch that, an expansion to a low tech game, that is guaranteed to sell millions. I don't know what it is but something here isn't adding up. I mean what do they have like 5 people working on the game or something?
If you bought them all full priced at launch, it would cost $140. In the same time period, buying just the base game of CoD with each new release would run you a minimum of $240, with an additional $60 with each new year. But wait, there's more! Each of those also has map packs and DLC to buy, so to get the full game will cost you an additional... $60!
So while you may not like that the game is split (I'm fine, I like 30 missions to learn the new race and explore the characters, and yes, I do like the over the top story), it definitely doesn't qualify as greedy.
Well Call of Duty isn't exactly the best example here because non-MMO aside that's pretty much the most expensive game out there! And that's a console game, Starcraft is on PC. To use a better example of the high end I'm willing to go for, look at the Civilization series. New game comes out for $50, and they release 2 expansion packs for $30 each. And if you're short or don't want to pay full price, you can wait a while as the digital versions will always go on sale at some point like most other PC games. Personally I usually end up getting some part of it on sale, though my decision to not buy it now is more to do with "oh god I don't have the time to get addicted to Civ again right now!" Then I wait till Christmas or another slow period where I can throw a few weeks away! So basically my main complaint is that Blizzard hasn't followed other PC developers in depreciating the value of their games.
As for Wings of Liberty, I kind of wish it had more filler. I mean the campaign was pretty good, but it seems like they'd have a map that introduced a new toy, but then they'd take it away from you and hand you another toy for the next map. Like those cool hover car tank things, how often do you really have an opportunity to use them after the train mission? Interesting and unique maps are good, but sometimes you just want to have a base on your side, an enemy base (or 2 or 3) on the other, and leave you up to your own devices on how to beat them.