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I hope subscriptions kill “paid DLC”. Enough of this trend of shipping crippled-by-default games that require you to pay extra in order to have what should fra

I hope subscriptions kill “paid DLC”. Enough of this trend of shipping crippled-by-default games that require you to pay extra in order to have what should frankly be called “the finished game”. Once you’re paying a monthly fee, the games had better be complete, offering all available content as the games were meant to be played. Otherwise, it would be just another scam to seem “cheap” until you add up all the extra charges to download more.

kevingadd 10y ago
Define "complete". The vast majority of day-1 and post-release DLC is content that was created by the development team after the gold master (the thing burned to retail discs) was complete, so that the studio doesn't have to lay them off. There is the question of how this interacts with digital-only releases, but you don't see it as much there. Also: Why is it your business to say whether somebody can sell expansion content for a game or not? Are premium services somehow immoral?
- makecheck 10y ago
  The problem is that what passes for a finished game these days has diminished compared to years ago, for the same base price. It is easy to see for instance that an older RPG easily had 100-150 hours or more of play, while modern ones top out at 40-50 “unless” you pay more for extra “chapters” (read: stuff that should have been there when you bought the game). They release HALF a game for the same $60-$80 or whatever they would have charged years ago, except now they know full well that they will demand another $5-$20 or more to obtain the rest of the game. It is a racket that rewards crippleware over quality.
  - kevingadd 10y ago
    I can empathize with your displeasure here but this argument represents a complete misunderstanding of games and how they're constructed. '100-150 hours or more of play' is completely meaningless. A game can be 150 hours because it's completely padded out with awful grind (i.e. WoW's widely reviled kill 10 rats formula, widely disliked formulaic Ubisoft Open World Games with repetitive side-quests), or a 5-hour experience with adjustable difficulty, optional objectives and high replayability (multiplayer!) You simply can't judge the value of a game based on play time, no more than you can judge the quality of a piece of software by the length of its features list or the quality of a film by its running time. I would make arguments that the quality of the experience you get out of retail games is much higher than a decade ago, due to increased budgets, better technology and general design refinement: * Almost universally better tutorials * More widespread access to options like control remapping and sensitivity adjustments * Access to patches that fix obscure bugs and performance issues found after launch * More consistent UI and narrative feedback telling you where to go in a game (so you don't get lost if you take a break) * More consistent availability of adjustable difficulty levels and 'gimme' help in response to multiple retries * More games that offer alternative paths and solutions * Cloud saves * Automated checkpointing You can view some of these things as steps back from what you liked in (picking random examples here) Final Fantasy 7 or even Final Fantasy 12, but for the vast majority of game players (now a HUGE audience compared to a decade ago) these changes make games more accessible and are generally steps forward, despite some weak points. I'm the sort of person who happily dumps 100+ hours into a JRPG, but I still find that things have generally moved forward. Most of the high-profile 'short' games I purchase are stellar experiences, some of them are genuinely on par with movies. Others are cheap enough that the short duration is not a weakness - I didn't spend much on Life is Strange or Firewatch but they were very memorable and delivered exactly what I paid for. If you want a big sprawling RPG those are still out there, and they're great - Witcher 3 and Final Fantasy 15 and Xenoblade X are 3 recent titles that I thought stacked up well here for a lower cost (considering inflation) than you would have paid in the past (especially if you use Amazon prime to buy games below retail!)
    - makecheck 10y ago
      I don’t have a problem with making games more accessible. The problem is that game companies aren’t being honest: they are charging prices AS IF the game were complete, when what they should be doing is stating up front is that what’s shipped on Day 1 is worth FIVE dollars, not much more. They should state clearly that DLC is not just “extras” but virtually half the game, for additional charge, withheld from the start. Similarly, I agree that patches to fix bugs are useful. Unfortunately, game companies have realized two things: (1) apparently it is now “OK” to ship games on Day 1 that ARE BROKEN, especially if you reach a certain point in the content where major breaking bugs are revealed or maps are practically empty or areas have been cut off, etc.; and of course, (2) is that companies realized updates don’t have to be just for bugs, they can be used to siphon more money out of people for the content that belonged in the game from the start.
- freehunter 10y ago
  It's a really bad experience to be playing a game and encounter a quest that asks you to pay for and download an expansion. This actually happened with Dragon Age 2, one of the fairly early quests shows up just like any other quest, but requires a paid download to complete. Very frustrating. Another example is Rocksmith. Paid DLC songs show up in the song browser in-game in the same list as songs that you already own, but when you pick them to play it takes you to a screen where you have to put in your credit card and download them. It makes it seem like the game has more songs than it actually came with out of the box. A really egregious example is Bioshock 2, where the paid DLC is actually on the disc already. So it was created and added to the gold master, but they still charge you extra money in order to access the content that's on the disc you already paid for.
Cypher 10y ago
Mankind divided wasn't finished and had 1 month DLC $12 and then another $12 recently. Game is rumoured never to be finished.

kevingadd 10y ago

Define "complete". The vast majority of day-1 and post-release DLC is content that was created by the development team after the gold master (the thing burned to retail discs) was complete, so that the studio doesn't have to lay them off. There is the question of how this interacts with digital-only releases, but you don't see it as much there. Also: Why is it your business to say whether somebody can sell expansion content for a game or not? Are premium services somehow immoral?

makecheck 10y ago
The problem is that what passes for a finished game these days has diminished compared to years ago, for the same base price. It is easy to see for instance that an older RPG easily had 100-150 hours or more of play, while modern ones top out at 40-50 “unless” you pay more for extra “chapters” (read: stuff that should have been there when you bought the game). They release HALF a game for the same $60-$80 or whatever they would have charged years ago, except now they know full well that they will demand another $5-$20 or more to obtain the rest of the game. It is a racket that rewards crippleware over quality.
- kevingadd 10y ago
  I can empathize with your displeasure here but this argument represents a complete misunderstanding of games and how they're constructed. '100-150 hours or more of play' is completely meaningless. A game can be 150 hours because it's completely padded out with awful grind (i.e. WoW's widely reviled kill 10 rats formula, widely disliked formulaic Ubisoft Open World Games with repetitive side-quests), or a 5-hour experience with adjustable difficulty, optional objectives and high replayability (multiplayer!) You simply can't judge the value of a game based on play time, no more than you can judge the quality of a piece of software by the length of its features list or the quality of a film by its running time. I would make arguments that the quality of the experience you get out of retail games is much higher than a decade ago, due to increased budgets, better technology and general design refinement: * Almost universally better tutorials * More widespread access to options like control remapping and sensitivity adjustments * Access to patches that fix obscure bugs and performance issues found after launch * More consistent UI and narrative feedback telling you where to go in a game (so you don't get lost if you take a break) * More consistent availability of adjustable difficulty levels and 'gimme' help in response to multiple retries * More games that offer alternative paths and solutions * Cloud saves * Automated checkpointing You can view some of these things as steps back from what you liked in (picking random examples here) Final Fantasy 7 or even Final Fantasy 12, but for the vast majority of game players (now a HUGE audience compared to a decade ago) these changes make games more accessible and are generally steps forward, despite some weak points. I'm the sort of person who happily dumps 100+ hours into a JRPG, but I still find that things have generally moved forward. Most of the high-profile 'short' games I purchase are stellar experiences, some of them are genuinely on par with movies. Others are cheap enough that the short duration is not a weakness - I didn't spend much on Life is Strange or Firewatch but they were very memorable and delivered exactly what I paid for. If you want a big sprawling RPG those are still out there, and they're great - Witcher 3 and Final Fantasy 15 and Xenoblade X are 3 recent titles that I thought stacked up well here for a lower cost (considering inflation) than you would have paid in the past (especially if you use Amazon prime to buy games below retail!)
  - makecheck 10y ago
    I don’t have a problem with making games more accessible. The problem is that game companies aren’t being honest: they are charging prices AS IF the game were complete, when what they should be doing is stating up front is that what’s shipped on Day 1 is worth FIVE dollars, not much more. They should state clearly that DLC is not just “extras” but virtually half the game, for additional charge, withheld from the start. Similarly, I agree that patches to fix bugs are useful. Unfortunately, game companies have realized two things: (1) apparently it is now “OK” to ship games on Day 1 that ARE BROKEN, especially if you reach a certain point in the content where major breaking bugs are revealed or maps are practically empty or areas have been cut off, etc.; and of course, (2) is that companies realized updates don’t have to be just for bugs, they can be used to siphon more money out of people for the content that belonged in the game from the start.
freehunter 10y ago
It's a really bad experience to be playing a game and encounter a quest that asks you to pay for and download an expansion. This actually happened with Dragon Age 2, one of the fairly early quests shows up just like any other quest, but requires a paid download to complete. Very frustrating. Another example is Rocksmith. Paid DLC songs show up in the song browser in-game in the same list as songs that you already own, but when you pick them to play it takes you to a screen where you have to put in your credit card and download them. It makes it seem like the game has more songs than it actually came with out of the box. A really egregious example is Bioshock 2, where the paid DLC is actually on the disc already. So it was created and added to the gold master, but they still charge you extra money in order to access the content that's on the disc you already paid for.

Cypher 10y ago

Mankind divided wasn't finished and had 1 month DLC $12 and then another $12 recently. Game is rumoured never to be finished.