Zachary Amaranth said:
Lying would suggest malicious intent. EA's PR department isn't malicious - it's just fairly stupid and succumbs to the easiest and most damaging trends in PR, and for what? A few guaranteed pre-orders?
One of the problems we tend to have as a whole is that we consumers like to imagine publishers as Snidely Whiplash types who snicker in evil relish whenever a debacle like SimCity's happens. Maliciousness never enters the picture - it's just plain and simple stupidity and presenting a very limited tech framework as being able to do something it isn't.
After all, you have to remember that PR goons aren't necessarily gamers. They don't know they're fabricating info - their job is to paint a pretty picture so we order copies. Why else would every other Triple A publisher be concerned about making each and every new release seem like the Best Thing Ever?
In other words - honest representation wouldn't drive sales and, unfortunately, these companies depend on sales.
Can you imagine an entirely honest sales pitch about Mass Effect?
"So, uh, the big story we told you you'd significantly shape? Yeah, we're lacking the hardware and capability to take every single variable into account so, well... Let's just say Mass Effect 2's going to base itself off an approximation of what you did in the first game.
As for the third game? We had these insane ideas about the Thorian and the Rachni Queen, but we're lacking disc space - again! I know, right? Isn't it frustrating?! Look, we've had to half-ass it a bit, okay? Just so you know. Plus, EA's been riding our asses so we appeal to the CoD crowd, so just so you know, there's a Dudebro and a badly rendered Jess Chobot in the cast.
Oh, shit, I almost forgot - Yeah, sorry man, but we've been forced to add perfunctory multiplayer into the mix, so the single player's kinda... Well, let's just say we had to shoot for a really mean average of what you'd consider an ending. We wracked our brains for, like, three weeks trying to get the Collectors and the Reapers and Indoctrination to make sense and, honestly?
Yeap - the Star Child's the best thing we could come up with. Y'know, it's supposed to evoke the kid from the beginning of the game and Shepard's remorse and, well...
Oh, the Indoctrination Theory? Yeah, no. The execs couldn't wrap their brains around it. Star Child. Yeah man, I know it sucks.
So - anyway. Buy the games? Please?"
Not much of a sales pitch at all, is it?
Entitlement refers to the act of thinking you deserve something more than what's actually on offer. If you go by the fact that all three games have a beginning, a midpoint and an end, then we did get an ending. It wasn't great, but are you going to complain to the publisher because, say, a book you knowingly purchased sucks? Returning an unsatisfactory game is an option. Getting a refund is one, too. Angrily clamouring you had the right to this and that is not an option. I know the notion of the Demon Consumer gets some flak and that we're more or less pushed to consider that the customer is always right but - no. The customer isn't always right. The customer isn't an animator or a level designer or a scriptwriter. The customer is entitled to his opinion, but he should also accept that his opinion is not Word of God, no matter how rabid and passionate the fandom.
Entitlement refers to the act of thinking you're in control of things you have no real say over. The day we'll all have our personal game studio is the day pigs will fly, and it's also the day where we'll all be perfectly and utterly entitled to demand stories that end in specific ways. Right now, however, we don't. We never will, most likely.
Let's just tie this off quickly. Aliens: Colonial Marines isn't a case of entitlement. Evidence is there that you're not looking at a simple case of a developer putting too many eggs in the same basket; you're looking at Gearbox who probably realized the sheer mess they'd found themselves in, realized they couldn't back out, and took their chances with a doctored demo. It's dishonest, it's desperate. Mass Effect 3 was perhaps desperate in the way it ended, but I wouldn't call it dishonest. The story ended. Period. You could feel the narrative and technical constraints strangling the devs and forcing them to go for the three-way Space Magic ending, as there is no Earthly way they could have delivered on their *initial* vision.
Peter Molyneux has pipe dreams. BioWare bit off more than it could chew. That's all. It did chew some of it, so to speak, however - enough to constitute what does act as a mechanically decent ending. It sucks from a narrative point of view, of course, and the Extended Cut was sorely needed - but the original version was an adequate ending in that it did what endings are supposed to do. That is, end the story.
As for SimCity; I wouldn't call it fraud. In this case, however, I don't think those complaining are spoiled. I think it's justified, as EA has had the opportunity to watch and learn from Blizzard's difficult launch with Diablo III. It's had ample time to see what fans thought of always-online DRM measures and to adjust itself accordingly. Did it attempt anything? Nope. Why?
Because the Big Three are terrorized at the thought of losing money to pirates, they're desperately looking for a reason to inflate the starting asking price, and are willing to piss off their consumer base if that means an initial and sizable entry of hard cash. The copy I bought and that I'm starting to regret buying is sixty bucks in Electronic Arts' pockets. Plus, the fun thing about DRM of that nature is that it puts the game's obsolescence right in the publisher's hands. SimCity will become obsolete the day EA will decide Maxis needs to work on a sequel, and EA will gladly throw the current version's corpse out to the wolves.
In this case, we have every right to make noise; as I seriously doubt EA is going to give much of a damn. They'd need to suffer several successive awful always-online launches for them to go "You know what? Maybe that wasn't such a good idea after all..."
A single person can reason quickly enough. A group of people, especially large corporations driven by shareholders who don't know the first thing about their product, are generally fairly dumb.
