I just felt an overwhelming urge to say that.
I don't think you are sorry, and there is no "if" about it. You were rude, and you know it. I think that you are frustrated that you can't convert everyone to your line of thinking and resorted to name calling as a result. It doesn't matter what the devs say at this point. The fact is there is release day DLC for an additional charge. Some people take issue with that, and it's not because our reading skills are inferior to yours. I also think you know that as well. You just wanted to be petty and immature about these opposing views. Congratulations, you succeeded.
You know what: I am sorry that I offended you. I freely admit the post was borne of frustration. For that I apologize - and apologies to DethAdder as well. But you're wrong about the reason why I'm frustrated with this. It's not because I can't convince people to convert to my line of thinking. It's the repeated posts of 'they should have included it on the disc' when it's been clearly explained they couldn't. And it's also been clearly explained why Warden's Keep isn't free. What I don't understand is the complete dismissal of the dev explanations. If they were mum about it, I'd certainly understand the outrage, but when they've decided to actually explain the situation, I don't see why people just choose to believe they're lying instead of giving them the benefit of the doubt. Especially with the track record BioWare seems to have.
If you still want to think I'm petty and immature, that's your prerogative. I likely won't change your mind. And I guess I'll bow out of this discussion, as it appears it's not going to lead to any kind of accord. Again, apologies.
Lots of companies have had great track records until they were bought-out by EA. I hope BioWare continues to have a great track record even after being purchased by EA.
Actually I thought your support of this game was fine, and your arguments were logical and mostly strong enough to overcome your bias as a winner of a trip to an event involved with the game. Here's the thing. There is no PR or marketing firm in the world that would ever allow a company to come out and say, look we wanted more money than this 50-60 dollar barrier we, as an industry, implemented allowed so we decide to work on DLC for a charge instead of packing as much quality content into a game as possible and expect the sales of the said game to pad our pockets and warrant the creation of more content that we just couldn't fit into the game under said time constraints. At this point, we don't even know if this is going to be a clean release or not.
Personally, I am sick and tired of games falling short, of lacking features that are often time written on the box, on the official website, of botched releases, broken content, and all these other things that show that this industry is still banking on die-hard fans to get them through the first few weeks of release. My unwillingness to fork out money for DLC, for this stupid little micro-trans, and my general unwillingness to pre-order games doesn't stem from this distrust of a particular developer, it's from often ill experiences from the gaming industry as a whole. I enjoy gaming, so I am not leaving the industry in any fashion, but these companies are not entitled to my money, they have to earn it. Microtrans, half-ass products, and heavy DRM is not a way to "win" me over. This game as far as I know, is not a half-ass product, is not implementing heavy DRM (although it is continuing a traditional campaign against used PC games) but it's got micro-trans stacking up before the game is even released.
Hey, enjoy your trip. Enjoy your game, but don't treat people who disagree with you like a bunch of kids who don't know better. We made our decisions, most of us, for rational reasons, just like you did.
No need to apologize to me, I have my internet skin . Besides I admit I am not as privy to the situation in this particular instance as others here. Not necessarily a knock on Bioware if their explaination and intentions are legitimate. I just am seeing this as a trend among quite a few Publishers(devs sometimes being forced into it) and it isn't going to stop anytime soon as long as people keep buying it. EA being one of the most notorious for this causes products they publish to be scrutinized even more. Everyone knows how overbearing they are on both their Dev houses and their own employees, so I would look at them as the cause of most of this.
Ditto - I'll use Lord of the Rings Online for example. Sure the community has it's share of end game Raid and PvP complainers (not all of them that do this, but they as a group seem to be the most vocal), however the majority of their players are more interested in the story given the ties to the book. Because of this the player base is considerably older than most MMO's I would think, and the chat channels, forums, etc. are a bit more mature in tone. You can solo up to the level cap if so inclined, although I don't recommend it since that is one aspect of online gaming I do enjoy, if you have a good guild (or Kinship as it's called in LotRO). MMO doesn't mean "group" however - it's one aspect of attitudes/stereotypes of MMO players in general that do the most complaining about solo content that drives me a bit nuts.
The story is the only reason I am playing an MMO and LotRO in particular. I've yet to find another where I can really *care* about the world. Aion is pretty but I cannot really get my head around the Lore, story, etc. It also at it's core feels like every other Korean MMO (which perhaps the comments above were referring to).
So it's possible to enjoy MMO's. I do so coming from an RPG/Lore perspective. If the game is right I don't care the technology of delivering it to me.
Ue_Carbon is correct that MMO's ARE a time sink!
For those interested, I've compiled a list on the official forums. We're at 16 items and counting.So I again raise the question. When does "extra" or "optional" become just that? Is it when it's 20 items? 30? 40 or more?
Only thing I'll say is that it's very common, especially in large productions, to have separate teams working on things in parellel. Heck, I wouldn't doubt there has been a team working on an expansion for a couple months now, assuming they are planning on an expansion. Even Stardock with their small production have separate teams working at the same time on things.
So I don't know why people don't think it's possible to have a separate team working on the Warden's Keep DLC while the game itself is being finished. Especially since the game was *supposed* to be out nearly 8 months ago. Given that, the Warden's Keep DLC coming out now would be about right, correct? Like I said before, would we rather have them just hold back Warden's Keep for 3 months or something and then release it and all would be ok? Funny. Info like this come straight from the Bioware devs on the official forum. Again, if you believe them of course.
Anyway, buy the game or not. I will and will enjoy hundreds of hours of gameplay over the next half decade just like I did with Baulders Gate, Morrowind (which I still play from time to time) and Oblivion. If you don't get that kind of replayability out of these games then perhaps this game isn't for you.
Good luck and have fun!
It's more the principle of the thing that cheeses people off. It's like releasing an expansion for the game the same day the core game released. It looks like it should have been part of the main game, but they decided to be bastards about it.
In essence, yes, it would have been a good move to move the day 1 DLC back a couple months. At least then it wouldn't feel like you're being milked for more money already.
Not only that, but what happened to actually finding out what fan's want, getting you know, a reaction to your completed product and improving on it based on feedback. They don't even care what would make a game better in this case, they're just going to assume that all the decisions they made was spot on and if fan's want more of something specific, or a change, tough, they've got their two year milking plan already down.
I wish they'd just go the expansion route like they used to and like everyone else does. The whole DLC model makes it seems cheap and unneeded. It makes the game itself feel cheap and useless also.
DLC if used correctly is a fantastic idea, at least in theory. DLC is really just an extension of the Episodic content idea - which is basically standalone expansion packs as it is - which again, in theory, works fine. Dragon Age is a brillant game; having a tab listed in your journal labelled 'Premium Content' in a brand new, full priced retail game and in-game NPCs offering you said content is over the line, at least for me.
One of the big problems is greed. While this sounds like a 'duh' statement, I actually wouldn't mind minor and vanity DLC if they were priced sanely. I'd pay a dollar or two for alternate costumes if they looked really cool. I'd pay $5 for an extra, well-made dungeon or two that added at least several hours of gameplay. But it isn't working this way. Instead you're seeing $10 vanity packs and $15-20 add-on levels that might add a couple hours of gameplay. Microsoft is, unsurprisingly, a large part of the blame as they have minimum values publishers can charge for their stuff, and actually force what might of been free content patches to be DLC if they think it's giving away too much (see: Team Fortress 2 on the 360).
Instead of taking a golden opportunity to give MS the finger and offer cheaper or even free DLC, making MS publicly look like greedy scum, Sony and Nintendo jumped on the money train. And since nearly everything these days is a multi-platform release, even PC patches that might have once been free are now being charged for.
So do I...DLC makes me think small and thus less immersive, though I freely admit that this is a potential failure of my own imagination. As long as they compile it all for a single sale in the end I'm happy, just cbf keeping track of multiple instances of content...
Wait....wait wait wait. Are you telling me, that you guys actually PURCHASE videogames? With your own money? Thats just insane.
What's worrisome is that NwN had an extensive online multiplayer component filled with custom content and persistent worlds servers. In contrast, as I understand it, Dragon Age is single player only. Consequently, I don't have any intention of purchasing Dragon Age unless its price drops to around $10 which is what a single player only game is worth to me.
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