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.....Am I like the only person to have never disliked DLC? However I'll have to wait until after exams to see Portal 2 and it's glorious DLC :P | |
Yeah, that's the one thing I kinda won't forgive Valve for. What kind of timing was that, Valve? I have finals in two weeks, you know. Goddamnit. | |
I don't understand why you think that the contents of the caravan pack are overpowered cheat items. considering the fact that you can just drop the items at the begging of the game there isn't really a problem | |
Blizzard has been charging $55-60 for every one of their games (minus WoW) since Diablo II and WC3, long before the Activision merger. And judging by that, HotS and LotV are going to probably be about $40, which is fine pricing for an expansion pack. They haven't announced pricing yet. You can't seriously be comparing GTA4 and RDR's "multiplayer" to SC2's. Whatever changes the two SC2 xpacs make to the multiplayer will likely be significant and further enhance the game, like how Brood War and Frozen Throne became standard for SC1 and WC3 multiplayer. | |
Kudos! My problem with day one DLC is that if they developed it for synchronized release of the game there is no reason it shouldn't come with the game already. Maybe i am wrong, but i think that on a sub-conscious level has less to do with people wanting the cosmetics, and more to do with the game developer mentality that they don't need to put their all into the game. sure its just hats here, but its the same line of thinking that leads to games not being playable because they decided not to glitch test it and instead wait for the players to find all the problems then patch it a month later. | |
Guhhhh. | |
Here here, you said it Shamus. I vouch my support for your views whole-heartedly as they are my own as well in response to this ridiculous misplaced overreaction. These types of people who don't think about what there posting or doing before they've already done it can be infuriatingly frustrating to put up with but anyone with any sense would not give them the slightest bit serious amount of attention other than to a) point out why they are so unarguably wrong and b) point it out again in case the message failed to penetrate their dull, slow-minded thick skulls just as you have so admirably done here. Now specifically regarding Portal 2 I don't really care for such cosmetics frivolities such as those in dispute but there existence should not impact your enjoyment of the game or 'spoil' it in anyway as I have seen a few people on this forum call it. I played the full game without ever knowing they even existed because, as Shamus rightfully points out, they were never advertised in anyway in-game. Now lets say I had known of their existence beforehand, would that have ruined the absolutely fantastic, whimsical, witty inventive and fresh gaming experience that is Portal? Simply put, no, because unlike these idiots who express their outrage in largely incoherent ramblings I don't take myself so seriously or, as Shamus so pointedly writes, consider myself so self-important that this is somehow a betrayal by Valve. I mean, it's not like they delivered an incredibly brilliant follow-up to one of their most beloved games is it? Case in point: those who've made a big furor over this, essentially need to shed their pathetic delusions of self-grandeur and recognise that for once in their lives, they may actually have over-reacted and been wrong; then do us all a favour and slap yourself repeatedly. You need it. | |
i just timed my self with a stop watch. | |
DLC haters, please oh please oh please start with Bioware. Their DLC is getting on my nerves. Ever since someone like Shale was DLC I've weeped about DLC. DLC is for putting in new stories and new ideas into a game after it's been published. It's for putting in those final touches of a game the the publisher didn't allow you time to do. It's not meant to take holes out of a game and then sell them back to you. That being said I have no problem with Portal 2 Day one DLC. It's purely aesthetic. I for one LOVE aesthetics. A game where I can customize my character and make them look awesome is something that I can't get enough of. But I mean I know that extra aesthetics don't really have any hold on how good a game is. Portal 2 shouldn't suffer for a few extra aesthetics that you have to buy. | |
I have yet to recieve my copy of Portal 2 but I've been looking at the store thanks to a friend. When I saw some basic gestures being for sale I wondered how many there really are to begin with. Sure some of the advanced ones look really fun, but why buy them and then show them to others in-game instead of just the pre-view in the store? :P At any rate it has a whole bunch of gestures already as two friends showed me (not spoiling anything, mind you, they are very sincere that way). So far what I've seen with Valve's games is that they only have cosmetic buyable DLC. Stuff like maps and whatnot are always free, always! Also, one friend of mine says he managed to get through the game in 6 hours and the other portal 2 playing friends of mine managed in 7-8 and were looking suspiciously on him for that statement. Then again he did play some of those hours off-line but accordingly to him steam still tracks game time while off-line. At any rate, I didn't even know that P2 got that low score bombed. Funny thing is that while activision sells overpriced crap that segregates players Valve sells overpriced "crap" that makes stuff look silly and doesn't affect gameplay. | |
Technically, cosmetic items are still DLC, but they don't feel that way to me because they add nothing to a game other than "I look cooler now" or "I look funnier now". "Real" DLC to me means additional gameplay or items that affect your performance. So if Valve wants to sell cosmetic stuff on day 1, then I don't care. I agree that having "Real" DLC content available on day 1 would persuade me NOT to buy the game (hello Bioshock 2). But no one is getting more of a game by buying cosmetics. Now IF the cosmetic items can be unlocked by playing the game and the store does not tell you this, then I'd be a little angry too. But I have no idea if this is the case since I don't own Portal 2. I agree that there are much worse DLC practices out there to complain about, such as Dragon Age or my previous example of Bioshock 2. But it makes you wonder what companies will do if this continues to be a sore spot. They'll have the DLC completed at launch but will sit on it for 30 days or so. Many companies are probably doing that now. That's just as bad because its content that could have been sold with the game but you just don't know about it. | |
Way to completely miss your troll mark and my point. | |
Wait, what has Blizzard done that's considered bad DLC wise? Nothing I can think of actually does anything, just non combat pets and sparkle mounts. I just thought that was an odd statement. | |
I liked this article until this part. Then suddenly it felt like he was trying to say "Portal 2 is PROVABLY awesome, and if you don't like it then you must be-" yeah errrh... as I said, agreed with him until this point. Then he lost me. I don't like portal because, in my honest opinion, it's a puzzle game that's being held to shooter standards. Yes, for shooter standards, it's longer, more creative, less grimdark, less brown'n'bloom, more politically correct... but it isn't a shooter so those points are all completely irrelevant; I think it's a bad game because, for a puzzle game where you're supposed to figure out where to put portals and how to move through them, there are way way too many Gray Walls, making the actual puzzle solving far too linear. I didn't enjoy that in the first game, and it's back with a vengeance in the second. Oh look, the co-op section has an obvious gravity loop spot... oh look, another one... I'll watch a lets play of this one, and spend my money somewhere else. | |
I said Realm Transfer not Faction Change. You know when one of your characters is moved from one realm/server to another realm/server. | |
Blizzard DLC? Possibly I'm just ignorant, but I have and play all their games, and the only DLC I know of is that stupid sparkly horse in WoW, which is purely cosmetic. | |
A common misconception for some reason. An opinion can easily be idiotic and that is precisely what these are. I do not know where this idea started that an opinion is always ok, but it has to stop. Idiots need to be called out for what they are, they do not get to hide behind "it is just an opinion". | |
I agree with you, Shamus, on this one. But bear in mind that a person who gives a great game like Portal 2 0% is either an obvious troll or with an IQ struggling to reach double digits so, depending which of the two it is, it's either pointless or rude to make fun of them. Yeah they're aggravating but what you gonna do. | |
This makes very little sense. They stop working on the content for a very good reason, primarily because they want to start ironing out the bugs. But the reason isn't even that important for my argument; if you keep working on the content, and it is releasable by the first day, it could still have been on the disk. Bar a few days for printing the discs this is undeniably true. The DLC and the normal content is indistinguishable, it is a cosmetic difference. | |
I haven't played Portal 2, but Killing Floor handled it properly, and it came out in the past few years. New weapons, maps, enemies, etc. were in free updates. Character packs you could buy in the Steam store for $2 and then play as those characters. Any limited time events (such as the Christmas event) or other exclusives (preordering The Ball) only unlocked new character models. Which I still don't see why so many people complain about not being able to get those now. It is an FPS, you never see your character until you're dead. | |
Here's the thing. It's true that Portal 2 hasn't done anything terribly evil with their DLC, and they're a lot better than some other game developers out there. But you didn't address the point that the DLC was available from day 1. Here's the problem some of us have with that. If the content was ready on the game's launch, there's no reason they couldn't have included the DLC in the game. It's like they withheld some content to make extra money off of it. It's almost like Bioshock 2, how the content was literally on the disk but they locked it off unless you paid extra. Portal 2 is not quite THAT bad, but has a similar principal. Now it's true that the DLC isn't important to experience the game. But it was still finished with the game. Remember the old days? Some of your favorite games probably had little bonus items you could unlock with enough game play. In fact, some more recent games do too. The Cobra gun in Saints Row 2, the gold Desert Eagle in CoD4, the ninja armor in Halo 3. Well if every new game behaves like Portal 2 did, we may see the end of bonus items like that. (Except those of us who have large amounts of disposable income.) If the content is finished on the day the game is finished, it shouldn't be DLC. It should come with the game. Charging people extra money for add-ons is only an acceptable practice if you didn't have time to finish that content by the release date, or if you didn't think to make that content until after the game came out. But you should never finish content during game development, and then withhold it to make extra money. | |
I still think it's stupid to charge for this stuff. I guess if Valve makes good money off it though, then fair play to them. It's not like the DLC actually affects gameplay at all in any way. Day-one-DLC is always a bit dicey though since it feels like the content (however trivial that content is) has been purposely excluded from the main game just to make a quick buck. In this particular case though, I could totally believe that they made these cosmetic enhancements after the game was finished, but they're still cutting it a bit fine. | |
At least the Starcraft players will be ABLE to buy it. If you remember HL2Episodes was split into 3 parts too, people are still waiting for the ending. | |
Why do people think Valve is some sort of philanthropic giant? They're a corporation. Their goal is to make money: no different to any other publisher. It just seems to me a lot of the people on these forums and site are Valve-zealots who like to believe it is a gleaming saint; where all of its decisions are the right ones and all of its games are good. | |
The problem here is that you're assuming that development can essentially run right up to printing, and that printing can happen a few days before release. While this may be true to an extent with digital delivery such as Steam, with console markets it's most definitely not. Everything has to be checked and certified by external sources, and for quite some time you're beholden to someone else's timeframe. What's really happened with the arrival of regular day one DLC is that developers have got better at handling DLC. A few years ago the concept didn't exist, and as Virgil pointed out, most developers would just fire the content designers at content-lock time. Now it's understood that when content-lock is reached, those writers can be moved, with minimum of fuss, onto creating extra stuff. Granted, some companies still then charge ludicrous amounts for it or put references to it in the main game, and those companies should know better. They're the ones that need to be warned about it by community outcries, not the ones that understand what it is about day one DLC that actually bothers people in general and act accordingly. | |
You do realize Shale was free right? So was the Cerberus network fluff like Zaieed and Firewalker for Mass Effect 2. So were the map updates for Bad Company 2. None of which were included on the disc. | |
Whether or not content that is cut from a game becomes DLC or not doesn't have anything to do with people getting paid. If someone's paid to model a hat and it's later cut from the game. He's still paid for it. Now if someone takes those cast offs, and tries to market them as DLC, and people are dumb enough to buy them then that's another matter. The P2 situation as I understand it, is that they're basically selling in-game achievements for the most part because a lot of this stuff was available in released game. Now wasn't there some hullabaloo a while ago because some hacker or some exploiter got a bunch of free achievements they shouldn't have, and those were later taken away because people value that sort of thing? Like the XBL gamer score, or general achievements. And if you're selling stuff to give gamers an in-game advantage, isn't that what you were arguing about in your article? Are cosmetic advantages okay to sell off while gameplay advantages are not? That depends on the gamer I suspect, I mean people play a dozen games in a sitting, they win some and they lose some but what doesn't change is how they present themselves in that gaming environment. It's purely a matter of perspective. Point is, if some gamers have to work their butts off to get an in-game item, and other gamers can just buy it off the store, then whether that item is beneficial gameplay-wise or not is irrelevant, at the end it's still giving someone an advantage by them paying for it. Because the individual gamer is going to value different things. | |
Having played TF2 for what seems like an awful long time now, and watched the item drop situation develop from a couple of new weapons into full-blown insanity, I genuinely get the feeling that the reason Valve is choosing to sell items that can be attained through play anyway is because there's a market for these things. Just check out the number of TF2 trading servers online, or the number of people who willingly throw huge amounts of money at the Mann Co. store so that they can trade those items to people who are unwilling to spend the money themselves, or go achievement-hunting. I know a few people personally who knowingly and willingly spend all sorts of money on cosmetic items so that they can supply them to friends who are unable to, or simply because they like being able to flash them about. It's not like this just happened overnight; they tested the waters with TF2, and it turns out that overall, people who like to spend money on cosmetic crap do so, and the rest just don't care either way. Perhaps they misjudged their market, or perhaps they released this just as a large-scale anti-DLC wave was beginning to crest, but either way, the market does exist now. It exists not just to rip people off, but so that people who enjoy spending money on micro-transactions or like to trade with their friends for mutual benefit can do so. And before it sounds too much like I'm a rabid Valve fanboy: yes, well maybe I am, but even I'm willing to accept that Portal 2 had its faults, and I wouldn't personally score it higher than 8/10. I just genuinely don't think the DLC situation was one of them. It didn't affect my enjoyment of the game in any way whatsoever, so I'm simply unable to judge the game on the basis that it had DLC that I didn't care about. | |
Completely agreed. I wrote something very similar on my blog. Honestly, I probably could've done without the DLC content at all, but I don't understand why this, of all things, was where DLC crossed the line. I'm pretty sure people were just sore about the whole Valve ARG thing and were looking for something to complain about, but I can't be sure. Yeah. Well-written article, Shamus, and completely agreed. | |
I have to agree with you, I don't often buy DLC cuz 1. I don't use credit cards so I cant order it unless I give someone else the money, and 2. I dont think investing in something that can be gone when the servers are down is the best Idea. But they did it perfectly in portal 2, what I cant stand is when they shove it down your throat with ingame advertisements for it (Dragon Age)or constantly telling you there is something new to buy! DOnt you want it!? HUH HUH HUH? (Fable 3). Worst of all (And I HATE that they do this) Are the project ten dollar crap where if you buy it used you dont get the entire game because I cant often afford new games and the percent off for used games helps immensely and the games that actually lock out features of the ORIGINAL game until you purchase the DLC (Halo 3 with the game types being locked GRRRR) Hopefully others can learn from this and fix it | |
I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned this yet but the timer DOESN'T count the time after you die or before you die. | |
Please read that post again. A game's disk is often content-locked many months before the game actually ships. And the disk itself starts printing probably a month before ship. That you think otherwise just demonstrates ignorance of the matter at hand. Digital delivery allows them to deliver the content alongside the disk at launch, not on it.
Are you confusing me with Shamus? This article was his, not mine. And I'm referring to the further development of unfinished content. If a mission is cut from the game when half-finished because it won't be done/it isn't up to par, should the developers not get paid for the work to finish it? | |
The way I see it is, if you have nothing better to do with your life than play video games, you'll play a lot of video games, so games companies release their major titles around exams to weed out the addicts and make them fail and succumb to the routine of new game addiction. But I'm not falling for that, oh no, not this year...with the exception of Dynasty Warriors 7, which has lost a lot of appeal now I've unlocked Lu Bu and all the Halbard weapons | |
Ah, Lu Bu, Mr. Easy Mode himself. Man, I have an urge to find Dynasty Warriors 3 again now. | |
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I pretty much agree with what's being said here. In an extreme case where everyone else is running around in loincloths and dlc allows you to sport a tux, then I might be a bit upset. But clothing additions thus far have been nothing mind blowing. All the dlc armor in bioware games seems if anything sillier than in-game clothes.
I do wonder at games with DLC making them easier/harder. In Dragon Age (1) most of the DLC I got didn't affect me until the latter half of the game, at which point everything was easy anyway. But in DA2 they give you the dog, and perhaps more if you sprang for the Simon Veil character. Some of those fights were made drastically easier due to the dog. His damage is pathetic but enemies are quite content to beat on him, which makes him essentially a multi target CC for many fights.