The Glade 4.0

All of the anger is placed at the companies. Which I feel is wrong. They are only doing this because people are willing to pay. Feel free to not buy them, but I am perfectly happy to continue playing and paying for optional content in the form of DLC. Hell, I even bought all of the appearance packs and weapon/armor packs for ME2 and DA2. And I did so gladly.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Raltar:

I don't think you quite get the criticism. I'm perfectly willing to pay for a complete game experience. I'm perfectly willing to pay for DLC. I'm perfectly willing for to pay Awakening or Knights of the Nine type DLC. It's not profit that bugs me. It's not even charging for new content that bugs me. It's charging me for development and withholding the paid for experience based on a micro-transaction monetary model.

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I can't recall anything being 100% complete(aside from Warden's Keep and Sebastian, I don't count Shale because Shale is free with new copies of the game) on the actual disc at launch. Everything else has a 500+ MB download. Some assets may have been on the disc(I know Kasumi's model and non-loyal power list was on the ME2 game disc, but pretty much everything else wasn't, same goes for all the rest of the DLC for that game).

A lot of it is simply content they originally had planned to be in the full game, but ran out of time and couldn't finish. Might as well finish it and release it at a later point down the line as DLC and make more money off of it.

_________________
Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Yeah, he keeps talking about Bring Down the Sky.

Bringing Down the Sky is free on the PC, so I don't understand what he's talking about. It certainly wasn't finished when the 360 version of ME1 launched. Some of it may have been on the disc, but if you think DA2 reused areas, ME1 is on a whole other level as far as reusing environments. Plus, the download is 253 mb. So it couldn't all be on the disc leading me to believe it wasn't finished at launch.

_________________
Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

You will never, ever win this argument Lenas! You should know this well from me arguing the exact same thing in depth on the FoH game forum.

It doesn't matter that games are relatively cheaper than ever (because game prices have never been adjusted up for inflation, dollar value, ect) while costing more than ever to produce. It doesn't matter that most DLC is made after a game goes for certification and is out of the developers hands and is purely extra non-disc content (Bring Down the Sky was *not* on the disc Khross).

DLC is not evil. Day 1 DLC that is made in the 3 months (yes it takes that long) between a game going for Certification and Release where a developer is no longer working on it and is making DLC for you instead of moving onto another project is not evil and is not ripping you off. It is not content that went to certification and gold status with the disc and has its entire own development cycle.

Anyone willing to pirate and steal from developers will never look at the actual facts of how the whole process work. They don't really care and nothing will convince them.

I don't pirate anything, by the by.

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Sean, you're not comparing apples to apples.

Video game sales figures are almost 100 times now what they were 10 years ago. Hell, Everquest was considered a phenomenal, absurd success with 500,000 peak subscribers. A few short years later, WoW hit 12,000,000. The same is true across the entire industry. A PC game in 1995 was considered a great success if it sold a paltry 50,000 units. Now a weak title sells millions. Yes, the industry has its ups and downs, highs and lows, but it's gone steadily uphill. And there's virtually no extra overhead for those sales numbers...the production cost of a game box and DVD ... or better still, a digital title, is less than a dollar.

So let's not pretend that somehow gaming has gotten "cheaper", or the studios have higher costs without increasing revenue. They do not.

In general, DLC has replaced "The expansion pack" for regular games. However, an expansion pack typically had as much content as, and often more than, the original game, and was sold for half the cost. Meanwhile, the total DLC for something like ME2 might add 2 or 3 hours of gameplay time, but cost as much as the original game or more. Game manufacturers used to release content the size of DLC as free downloads to encourage customer loyalty. And yet somehow, we've got a sense of entitlement if we complain that big game companies like EA and Activision don't give us the value for our dollar that game makers used to give.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

This is complete bullshit. They do because the base game is incredible. Most old school expansions barely added 5 hours of gameplay. The only ones I can really think of that gave more were those added on to Starcraft, Warcraft, the Baldur's Gate series and Neverwinter Nights.

_________________
Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Well, you just named pretty much the best games of all time.

But lets look at expansion packs individually:
Star Craft Brood War
Warcraft 2x: Beyond The Dark Portal
Warcraft 3x: The Frozen Throne
Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction
The Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles
Baldur's Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal
NWN: SoU
NWN: HotU
NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer
Homeworld: Cataclysm
Star Wars Dark Forces 2 - Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith
Jedi Academy (priced as an expansion for Jedi Outcast, using the same engine, but amazingly, would play standalone)
Half-Life: Blue Shift
Half-Life 2: Episode 1
Half-Life 2: Episode 2


It's easy to keep going, except a lot of well rated expansion packs are from series I don't play. All of these had hours and hours of gameplay, some of them as long or longer than the title they were based on.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

You get far more for your dollar value than you got in the past. Games are longer, deeper, more complex, and better than ever. That is complete rubbish and just a bullshit excuse to steal, Taly.

It's not an excuse for piracy. Piracy needs no excuse other than "Because I can." I've been an unapologetic pirate since the days of my Commodore Vic 20. I'm not talking about piracy. I'm supporting Khross's assertion that their business model is anti-consumer.

Games are most certainly NOT longer, deeper, or more complex than before. RPGs used to run 150+ hours (Ultima III, IV, V, VI, VII, Star Control 2, etc), rather than the 20-25 hours of something like ME1/ME2/DAO/DA2. (More like Skyrim. Which isn't as big or long as Daggerfall was.) As far as complexity goes, those games required keeping detailed paper notes to have any chance of every finishing them (this isn't a good thing, but don't claim new games are more complex. I'll say the simplicity of newer games is a good thing, however.)

I excuse this, because they are, generally, better, but that's as silly as saying a 2012 car should be more expensive --apart from inflation-- than a 2010 car was when it was new because it's better. It shouldn't be. Progress is included in the original cost. It's part of where the profits go.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Such bullshit. You can't compare games made with a hundred people, years worth of time and millions of dollars to games like Ultima that was probably made by 10 people in their spare time. Your justifications for complexity are based on bad design decisions or lack of technology. RPG's have always only been long affairs because of things needed like grinding. Ultima III certainly did not have hundreds of hours of unique content.

They're called time sinks. Time sinks do not make a good game.

20-25 hours for those games? That's false. You can do that if you speed through them, but the average is far, far above that and you are massively inflating the numbers for those older games you listed. Those numbers aren't even remotely close to accurate.

I also completely disagree with any of those games being complex or close to the quality of pure gameplay of any of the newer games. They might have a bunch of superfluous junk in them that requires you keep track of absurd things, but that's about it.

The Mass Effect series is leagues above the quality of any of those series on every level.

Without time sinks (read: every non-storyline planet and non-essential quest), Mass Effect 1 is about 4 hours long.

Improved games? Absolutely games are better now than they were - by exactly the amount you'd expect them to be based on the capabilities of the hardware they run on and the sales numbers they are getting. Certainly not enough to warrant costing twice as much for far less content.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

No, it is not.

There's a difference between side quests and time sinks. Hint: grinding exp on random battles for 10 hours is a time sink; tracking down an alliance admiral and finding him killed by Rachni in a test facility is not.

ME1 can easily be completed in 4 hours. People did it lots on consoles to get a savegame they liked to import into ME2.

BTW, Star Control 2 had very little filler, and remains one of my favorite RPGs to this day. Graphics sucked (it was a DOS game! Although Star Control 1 looked better on my old Commodore Amiga), but damn was it fun.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Still trying to understand how something like SMRPG, a game with maybe two chapters worth of dialogue, very limited audio/visual assets and a play time of under 3 hours was justifiable at $85 in 1992, but ME2 isn't worth $60 in 2012.

Seriously.

First of all, you overpaid.

Games for C64/Amiga/PC cost $30-60 tops prior to 2000. Consoles are another matter, with their captive audience and massive licensing fees, but consoles gaming always was, and always will be, lame compared to PC.

Secondly, ME2 is worth $60. It's not worth $150, which is about what you paid if you got it at release and bought all the DLC and therefore have the complete game.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Uh, ME2 does not have 150 dollars worth of DLC.

http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Mass_Effect_2#Paid_DLC

You're right in that it is worth $60. You get $60 worth of content on its disc. The DLC is not part of that disc and something separate. Whether those things are worth their cost is up to you (Kasumi, Shadow Broker, and Arrival certainly are to me), but they are not something you can just add to ME2's cost like you are doing.

I bought ME2 at release for $50 and paid $17 for DLC (Kasumi, Shadow Broker) afterwards. Arrival would have added on another $7. That makes $74 for the entire game. Everything other than that was weapons and appearance packs.

Neither of these are even a fourth as big as the games they are attached to.



Again, these aren't even an 1/8th as long as the main game individually(beaten in about an hour each, where the main game takes around 8ish hours, less if you've been through it before).

_________________
Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

I didn't say it did. I said the total cost of all the DLC and the game was probably about $150.

There are 10 paid DLCs. Assuming they average $8, that's an extra $80. With a $60 base retail price, that's $140. Okay, so I may have overestimated by $10.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Games aren't deeper or more complex.

X-COM: UFO Defense was made over the span of 4 years by a team that never exceeded like 20 guys, and was, for the first 2 years or so, 2 brothers coding on their own.

It did things that modern games still won't touch with a 10 foot pole because they're "too expensive, and too hard." Things like AI that will take advantage of destructible terrain, pathfind around destructible terrain on *randomly generated maps*, destructible terrain, the fact that it was basically two entire games smashed into one, tracing line of sight through destructible 2-D environments accurately, balancing a semi-randomized research tree into the game...

And that's a tiny title compared to today's AAA dev teams.

FPS AI hasn't improved since the late 90's.

The Wing Commander series contained branching plotlines that had an effect on story events more than 5 minutes down the road or the turn-in of the current quest, and still managed to be a game that the majority of players could log a solid 30 hours of time into to complete the campaign.

Mechwarrior II featured configurable mechs with complex weight, location, and power considerations. Most mech games today let you switch weapons and chassis.


The bulk of the increase in game design has been improving art quality and the resolution engines can handle. That's not depth or complexity. That's shiny window dressing for lazy game designers to coast on for a decade.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades