#oneaday Day 784: Playing a dead game

People in Steam reviews like to declare a game "dead" when the author of said game hasn't updated it for more than about two weeks, but we all know that's just entitled little shits who don't understand that sometimes a creative work is actually finished. However, there absolutely are "dead" games out there, by varying definitions — some are impossible to play any more (I weep for Darkspore, which I bought on sale once, never got around to playing, and it was made completely unplayable before I even had a chance to try it at all) while some are just delisted from digital storefronts. It's the latter I want to talk about today — specifically, the first Forza Horizon.

My first — and, prior to last night, last — encounter with Forza Horizon was with Forza Horizon 4, which I had extremely mixed feelings about. Sure, it was cool to have an open-world driving game set somewhere that looked and felt a bit like the UK, but the way it was structured to have all the hard edges completely smoothed off, lest some player somewhere felt any "friction", made the whole thing feel utterly meaningless. We're talking about a game where you can come last in every event you enter and still make progress. Not what I'm looking for in a driving game, so after getting frustrated with that, I pretty much swore off the subsequent entries in the series.

However, I was aware that earlier entries in the series were very well-regarded, and in the absence of owning an Xbox One or Series Whateverthefuck, the only one accessible to me was the first one for Xbox 360. This has apparently been delisted from everywhere for some time now, but you can still get second-hand physical copies, and indeed, that's what I did on a trip to CEX some time ago.

I booted it up last night for the first time and found it quite enjoyable. However, one thing became increasingly apparent the longer I played: the fact it, plus all its DLC and microtransactions, had been delisted from sale made it well and truly "dead" — to such a degree that there are certain functions in the game you just flat-out can't access any more, despite the menu options still being there.

This is apparent right from the game's title screen, where you have the option to play "Horizon Rally"… except you don't, because you need the Horizon Rally DLC for that, and you can't get that any more, leaving you with a completely useless menu option, plus a number of loading screen tips informing you that you can buy it from the Xbox Marketplace… which, as previously noted, you cannot.

I thought I was going to have a real problem when I opened the map screen and there were button prompts for "Treasure Map" and "Fast Travel Anywhere". Now, you see a button prompt in a game, and it's reasonable to think that it's a built-in function of the game, right? You press the button indicated, and the thing happens. That's how it usually works, right? Not in Forza Horizon land. Pressing either of these buttons gives you a pop-up informing you that you can buy those two pieces of functionality — which, respectively, allow you to immediately teleport anywhere on the map, and reveal the location of hidden items on the map — using "Tokens", which you can, of course, get from the Xbox Marketplace. Except you can't do that because everything about Forza Horizon has been delisted.

I was concerned in the former case that this meant the entire fast travel feature would be unusable because you couldn't buy a fucking microtransaction any more, but thankfully progressing a little further revealed that there is still a built-in fast travel facility — it's just a bit more inconvenient, since you can only fast travel to specific landmarks that you've previously visited and not, like, the various race events that appear across the map. I wasn't so concerned about the treasure map, meanwhile, since all it is, basically, is a cheat code that you have to pay for.

Little remnants of Forza Horizon really, really wanting you to pay up for microtransactions that no longer exist are riddled throughout the entire game. At least one load screen tip for every loading break will have some sort of exhortation to buy something. Those broken Fast Travel Anywhere and Treasure Map buttons don't go away. If you want to buy a new car in the game, you can do so with the credits you earn through gameplay or "Tokens" that you can no longer purchase with real money.

I guess I should be thankful that Forza Horizon is, at least, still playable, even with all its online functionality and purchasable bullshit inaccessible. If anything, I prefer the fact that there's now no means of simply paying money to not play the game, which is what at least some of these options amounted to. You'd just think they'd, you know, turn all that shit off in a patch if they knew it was no longer going to be available. I mean, presumably they added in the "Horizon Rally" option at some point when it was actually available — why not just remove it again in a final update when the servers and DLC went offline?

We're going to start running into this more and more as time goes on, and it's not always going to be optional DLC and microtransactions that are affected. Thankfully, we have not yet reached a point where patch servers are no longer available for console games that require them, but at some point we are going to have to reckon with the fact that a lot of today's physical releases ship either broken or incomplete, and I'm not sure the work has been adequately done to prepare for that time when the "official" patch servers are no longer available.

This, of course, is a big part of what the whole "Stop Killing Games" movement is about — and I know that certain parts of the gaming history and preservation communities are at least starting to have a think about the best way of handling all this. I'm just concerned that it's going to be too late by the time we find a solution; how many more games out there are technically functional, like Forza Horizon, but have elements that are now completely inaccessible?

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#oneaday Day 182: Unpopular gaming opinions

As a veritable old fart of video games, I am, of course, fairly set in my ways, as older folks are wont to be. And as such, I have come to hold certain opinions that appear to deviate from "the norm" among younger folks. You are not "wrong" to think differently to what I am about to describe below, but know that you are not going to convince me to change my viewpoint, because I have felt this way about all these things for years now.

So why am I writing this? I dunno. Something to write about, innit? Plus there might be some of you out there who actually agree with some of these. It doesn't really matter. Let's just start, shall we?

Games don't "need" updates for months or years after their release

Baldur's Gate 3 happened to drift across some form of feed that I was looking at the other day, and the thumbnail image that came with it proudly boasted something along the lines of "Community update 30".

Now, whether this was just the 30th blog post for the community or the 30th actual update for the game I don't actually know, but both are equally offputting to me. I haven't even considered touching Baldur's Gate 3 yet because it launched unfinished and apparently is still getting bits and pieces bolted onto it after the fact.

I hear it's very good. I believe that it's very good, as Larian has a good track record. But I have precisely zero desire to play it until it's finished, because when a game as big as this gets significant updates after I've already ploughed a significant number of hours into it, I feel a bit hard done by. Worse, if I've already finished it by the time a significant update shows up, I feel very hard done by, because I should just have waited to play it.

Unfortunately, regular updates to games are expected by a certain class of The Gamers™, particularly those on PC. Look at the Steam reviews for any game that hasn't had an update for a month or two and you'll see people complaining about "devs abandoning the game" and it being a "dead game".

No. Sometimes it's just finished, and sometimes the devs would like either 1) a break or 2) to go and work on something else. I am, sadly, in the minority on this, but few things make me lose interest in a game faster than if it launches with a "roadmap". Just delay the thing a few months and finish the fucking thing. Then I will play it.

DLC is worthless

As an extension to the above, if a game releases and then immediately announces that it is getting a bunch of DLC, I will also immediately lose interest. Not only does it make me feel like stuff has been cut out of the base game to make the DLC — and don't throw the "well actually it's developed at a different rate to the main game" argument at me, that is an easy problem to solve — but I am struggling to think of a piece of DLC that I have genuinely thought was actually worth the money.

I remember being particularly disappointed with the DLC chapters for stuff like Dragon Age and Mass Effect back in the day, and I haven't seen much to change my opinion ever since those days. And, at the other end of the spectrum, you have games like Stellaris, where there is now so much DLC that it's impossible to know what the "best" way to get started with the game is. So I just… don't.

Mods are vandalism

"You should play games on PC!" the PC gamers say. "Because of mods!"

Fuck mods. I hate mods. A significant portion of them are outright vandalism to both the artistic and mechanical design of the teams that worked on a game. I saw someone on Bluesky earlier sharing an image of someone who had installed a "QoL" ("Quality of Life") mod to STALKER 2 to remove all encumbrance mechanics from the game. STALKER 2 is a game about survival in difficult circumstances, and the encumbrance mechanics force you to determine whether you really need to carry various things around with you. By removing it, you're stripping out part of the game.

Likewise, graphical mods can get in the bin, too. Games are designed with both a particular artistic vision in mind and are a reflection of the era in which they were designed, and I don't really give a toss if you can add ray-tracing to something that didn't have it before, or if you can make a game look like Generic Photorealistic Open World Game #927.

And I'm sure I don't need to say anything about nude mods. I say this as someone who enjoys a good sexy game.

"But I need 357 mods to make Skyrim fun!" Then Skyrim isn't a very good game, is it? Maybe play something else.

My only begrudging exception to this is in the case of games where extensibility is designed to be part of the game — stuff like Doom/Quake/Duke/whatever levels are fine with me, because those games were designed to be extendible. Although I must confess, when I play any of those games, I tend to stick to their official campaigns. And in some cases, mods for a game specifically designed to be mod-friendly inevitably remain perpetually unfinished and not as good as the stuff built-in to the game: most stuff for the excellent driving sim BeamNG.drive falls into this category, to name just one example.

I don't want to join your Discord

I use Discord when I absolutely have to, for work and for the few groups of friends who are only reachable there. But I do not want to join a fucking Discord for every single game I play, and I don't want to be bugged to join your Discord on the title screen for your game. Go away, leave me alone, and if I decide I want to engage in the official community for your game, I will seek out your Discord myself.

I absolutely do not want to have to join your Discord to read documentation or download helpful files. Host that shit on your website like a normal person.

I want your game to end

It's all very well offering "potentially limitless replayability", but I do actually want to be able to finish your game. If I can't finish your game, I almost certainly won't start it, because the way my brain works means that I will get annoyed by the fact I'm playing something that doesn't have a "point".

This is one of numerous reasons I think idle games and incremental games are dumb. Sure, numbers get big to a point that they become largely meaningless… but that's it. There's no sense of having achieved anything there. And I strongly suspect that a significant number of idle game fans have no idea that the genre largely stems from a pisstake at the expense of people who grind their way through mobile games with no conclusion.

Anyway, that'll do for now, because I'm sure I've pissed someone off with at least one of the above. As noted at the beginning, though, I don't care. I am an old man, I have things I like and things I dislike. And all of the above can get in the bin. A good evening to you!

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1980: A Right Way and A Wrong Way

I know I said I wouldn't write about Heavensward again today and I'm not going to focus on it too much, but it will enter into the discussion a little, for reasons that will shortly become apparent.

The separately-sold "expansion pack" as it existed in the '90s and early '00s is something of a rarity these days, typically confined to the MMORPG subgenre, while other types of games tend to leverage the high-speed Internet connections most people have these days by offering lots of smaller bits of piecemeal downloadable content.

In some ways, this works well; the "a la carte" approach of piecemeal DLC means that you can pick and choose the things you want to bolt onto your game for a lower price without potentially being stuck with some things you don't want. On the flip side, however, in my experience, a lot of DLC — though not all — is significantly less substantial in terms of content and value for money than your average expansion pack. There are exceptions, of course — Oblivion's Shivering Isles DLC springs to mind, as does Burnout Paradise's additional island whose name escapes me right now — but those are actually both getting back into "expansion pack" territory again, and thus are outliers to a certain degree.

Bungie's MMO shooter and "thing that isn't Halo" Destiny had its new expansion announced recently, and it's kicked up a bit of a fuss, specifically over its pricing. The base game of Destiny has plummeted in price since its original launch, meaning that the new expansion — which costs the same as a full game at £40/$60ish — will, in most cases, be more expensive than the main game. But that's not what's got people riled up: the problem is that there's a super-expensive "Collector's Edition" coming that features some exclusive content that can only be acquired through this special edition.

Nothing unusual, you might think, until you hear that the Collector's Edition is only available as a bundle deal including Destiny, its expansion and the pieces of DLC that have been released to date. This means that fans of Destiny who want to get their hands on the exclusive content pretty much have to buy the game and DLC again just to play the expansion. And the alternative means of buying the game for new players — a bundle including Destiny and its expansion for around the £55 mark — effectively means that new players are getting the expansion for considerably less than veterans.

I can't say I care a whole lot personally because Destiny simply isn't my type of game, but what surprised and dismayed me a bit about the whole situation was this interview on Eurogamer with creative director Luke Smith — a guy I don't know that well myself, but who used to work with my brother and was, as I recall, part of the 1up crew. Smith was, to my recollection, always rather outspoken about things, particularly when it came to companies doing shitty things, so it was a tad disappointing to read his responses to Eurogamer coming out as little more than PR-fed "we can't talk about this" nonsense. And if it was PR-fed, the PR company wants sacking, because Smith's responses did nothing to alleviate the concerns of players who are upset over all this, and more than likely infuriated them further.

The reason I brought up Heavensward at the beginning is because it's actually in a similar position to Destiny's expansion. Final Fantasy XIV itself can be picked up for a pretty low price these days, but Heavensward is not-quite-full-price-but-nearly. The difference, however, is that both existing and prospective players have plenty of choices of how they pick it up. They can buy A Realm Reborn and Heavensward separately. They can buy a bundle including both A Realm Reborn and Heavensward. They can buy Heavensward by itself, in standard and special editions. And they can buy most of these options in both physical and digital formats.

As such, even though Heavensward might seem expensive for an expansion pack — though it's worth noting that in terms of content, it's seriously rivalling A Realm Reborn's base game, at least in terms of story length, sidequests and open-world areas — the player base has had absolutely no objections to how it's been positioned and sold. In fact, I've seen more new players in the game in the last week or so than I have for a very long time — and those new players won't even be able to touch any of the Heavensward content until they complete A Realm Reborn and its five subsequent content patches.

But they don't mind, because they've been given options, and those options have been made clear. Where Bungie is falling down with Destiny — and where they're going to lose a lot of previously loyal players if they're not careful — is this communication side of things. Smith's responses suggested that Bungie was either unwilling or unable to listen to player concerns on these matters; it may well be a matter of the company's hands being tied by publisher Activision, but still. That's not how you build loyalty. That's how you destroy loyalty.

P.S. Heavensward is amazing. (Sorry.)

#oneaday Day 687: E for Exploitative, A for Arseholes

EA and I are done. I will not be purchasing any of their future titles (with the possible exception of BioWare titles — though even those are becoming prone to the problem I'm about to describe) and I think the world should pay attention to what they're up to, rather than simply letting them get away with it.

What, then, is their sin?

Exploitation of consumers, to put it in simple, general terms. This accusation covers a variety of unpleasant behaviour, and none of it is good for people who like playing games and holding on to their money. Let's delve into these things one at a time.

Origin

Let's start with EA's digital distribution platform Origin. I don't have a problem with digital distribution platforms which aren't Steam, but EA needs to accept that I, along with many other gamers out there, choose to rely on Steam for the vast majority of our PC gaming needs.

There are a variety of reasons for this, not least of which is Steam's ubiquity and social functionality. If you want to see what your friends are up to in an Xbox Live style, chances are, you'll be able to see via Steam. Most people even add their non-Steam games to their Steam library, so you'll always be able to see what they're up to.

Origin has designs on this too, with its own integrated social functionality, but no facility to add non-Origin games. And given that the platform launched with only EA titles, few people are going to want to switch to Origin as their primary means of communicating with friends during gameplay. It's just silly to try. Steam works, no pun intended. It works well. That's why it's popular.

Alongside this, there's the shady business of EA removing its titles from Steam on the grounds of mysterious, non-specific "policies" that supposedly no other digital distribution services impose on poor little EA. Funny how these objections only arose shortly after Origin showed up.

And then there's the fact that increasing numbers of people are reporting that they're losing access to their games — even single-player titles — following often wrongful bans from the EA forums. Granted, some people who have been in touch deserved a forum ban (come on, do you really think making your username "TheGreatRapist" is really going to depict you as a fine, upstanding member of the community?) but even then, there is no way that behaviour on forums should prevent people from accessing the content they have paid for. Rock, Paper, Shotgun is running a good investigation into the matter at present.

And then there's EA's stubbornness even when it comes to online games. In their recent mobile releases (which we'll come on to shortly) all online functionality is handled not through Game Center which is, let's not forget, built in to iOS, but instead through Origin. This has the ridiculous side-effect of meaning that you can't use the Game Center app to do things like check high scores or compare games — something which it is designed for.

Anyway. Enough about Origin — except for the fact that EA's adoption of that particular name is like rubbing dirt into the good name of Origin Systems, who produced some of the finest games ever created.

Project Ten Dollar

This is all the rage now, and not just with EA. I blame EA for introducing it, however, since it was they who talked about it first. But it is not cool to lock off content from full-price games, whether it's single player or multiplayer. If I pay £40/$60 for a new game, I damn well expect to get what I paid for on the disc without having to enter a selection of alphanumeric codes. And if I buy a used copy of the game, I likewise expect to get full access to the game. People don't tear out the last five chapters of a second-hand book, people don't erase five random scenes from a second-hand DVD. So why should a game be gutted for those of us who didn't want to buy it new, whether that's due to financial constraints or simply being unable to find a new copy?

An episode of Extra Credits had a good solution for this which would be perfectly palatable to me. If they must lock off content, then charge less for the game in the first place. Sell me a disc with the single player gameplay on for considerably less than $60 and charge me an additional $15-20 for the multiplayer mode — a $15 to $20 that I don't feel obliged to pay, largely because I rarely play multiplayer modes, anyway — particularly in games that don't need them.

As it is, Online Passes are a transparent method of fleecing more money out of consumers. They are indefensible.

Drip-Feed DLC

This largely relates to BioWare games. I would much rather have a full-on expansion pack for $15-20 than drip-fed DLC which often adds very little to the experience. The few pieces of Dragon Age DLC I've played really weren't worth the money — they didn't even integrate with the main campaign — and they've put me off checking out Mass Effect 2's offerings.

Part of this is for pricing reasons. But part of it is, again, due to the fact that I'd much rather have the whole game up front. In the case of Mass Effect 2, why not hold the release back and include the content in the game? Answer: because it makes more money, which is kind of the root of all these problems. Money-making trumps consumer convenience and goodwill every time.

Thar Be Whales!

By far the most obnoxious behaviour that EA has been indulging in recently relates to its mobile games. First of all, they updated their iOS version of Tetris. This is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. All iOS developers update their games fairly regularly, whether that's with bugfixes or additional content. And, for the most part, buying that app in the first place means that developer is happy to provide additional content to you for free throughout the product's active development lifecycle.

Not so with EA. They removed the original version of Tetris from the App Store before replacing it with the new version, meaning that even people who had already bought the original and wanted to take advantage of the new features had to pay again. Dishonest.

Couple that with the fact that the game has added compulsive, manipulative social game features such as an utterly meaningless "rank bar" and virtual currency — both of which you can pay real money to jack up at a higher rate — as well as a subscription option (for Tetris! Seriously!) and you get something altogether unpleasant.

Then there's Theme Park. Theme Park was a brilliant strategy/building game which many people would love to play again today in its original form. It doesn't need anything changing. But no — EA decided that it really needs to be a gameplay-free social game, complete with aforementioned compulsive, manipulative mechanics such as an XP bar and purchasable virtual currency. Not only that, though, but some of the rides in the game cost up to $100 of real money to purchase. Let that sink in for a moment. To buy certain attractions in Theme Park, you need to pay more than the cost of one and a half full-price console titles.

The trouble is, there are just enough idiots out there who have more money than sense who will pay these ludicrous prices just to be "the best". These people are unaffectionately known as "whales", for obvious reasons — and it only takes a few of them to make such a business strategy worthwhile.

In all, I'm pretty ashamed of EA right now, and have no desire to give them any of my money for the foreseeable future. The trouble I have is that they're swallowing up otherwise reputable companies like BioWare and forcing them to fit in with their shady business practices. I have no doubt that Mass Effect 3 will be a great game, but I also know that it will have an Online Pass, it will doubtless have a "robust post-release DLC strategy", it will surely cut out content from the main game to sell back to me at a later date, and it will almost certainly only be available on Origin for PC.

I long for the days when EA were the ones with the funny logo that looked like EOA, and they make games like M.U.L.E. and Racing Destruction Set. I know you can't go back, but you can move in a direction which doesn't make you look like you just want to squeeze your customers for every penny they've got, rather than provide them with quality entertainment.

In summary: sod off, EA. Get back to me when you've had some humble pie.

Talking Point: What do you do when a favourite developer (BioWare) is an cahoots with an organisation like EA? I like BioWare games, as I've said above. But I'm strongly tempted to not buy any more for the reasons outlined above. I certainly won't be purchasing anything from Origin and especially if it's an Origin exclusive. Competition is good. Removing your products from the competition (Steam) is not.

#oneaday Day 548: Capcommotion

I'm a bit surprised by the way Capcom have been acting recently. I always used to figure them for a company that had their collective heads screwed on pretty well, and with their Capcom Unity (geddit?) site showing a much greater effort than many publishers to engage with fans, it looked like they were getting 21st century marketing right.

Then came the Mega Man Legends 3 project, where the community would be able to play an active role in the making of the game. The Capcom Dev Room page allowed users to submit ideas — many of which would end up in the final game — as well as see how the development of a game progressed from start to finish, complete with all the trials and tribulations it faced along the way.

The other day, the project got cancelled on the grounds that its transparency was proving to be "quite concerning" for the rest of the company. This, to me, is somewhat worrying, and suggests that Capcom has something to hide. It could be something as simple as the fact that they actually haven't done any real work on Mega Man Legends 3 since Keiji Inafune left last year, or it could be something altogether more sinister along the lines of the Team Bondi fiasco.

This isn't the only mis-step Capcom have made recently, either. The Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D save game issue stank from start to finish. To say that it's "not possible" to erase a save file on a 3DS game card is absolute nonsense — erasing a file involves writing to the card, and in order for the save to be on there in the first place the card must be written to. So there is absolutely no way that it would not be possible to reset the save data, yet Capcom persisted in perpetuating a lie to the community.

And today we learn that there's an "Ultimate" edition of Marvel vs. Capcom 3 on the way, featuring 12 new characters, 8 new stages and a spectator mode. But existing DLC characters aren't included in the package, naturally. And the "Ultimate" edition is a standalone retail product for $40, not a DLC expansion, which it really should be. I should be excited by the fact that Capcom have finally added Phoenix Wright to the game after a considerable amount of fan requesting, but instead I'm left with a bitter taste in my mouth due to them re-releasing a slightly-enhanced version of a game which only came out in February.

Sadly, this practice is becoming more and more common with this generation of consoles. And while I perhaps wouldn't go quite as far as my friend Mr Peter Skerritt in saying that this generation "sucks" — there's a lot to like, after all — I do believe that the obnoxious business practices that more and more publishers are starting to adopt are going to come back and bite both game companies and consumers in the ass at some point in the very near future.

I mentioned something along these lines on Twitter the other day in reference to Rockstar's comments that L.A. Noire still isn't finished despite having released its "final" piece of DLC. The response I got was surprising; the practice was defended on the grounds of it making good business sense. If we're at this stage already where blatant money-grabbing and the cutting of content from games in order to hold it back for subsequent DLC or new retail editions is defended by the community because it makes good business sense, it's a sad situation indeed. We gamers are supposed to be giving money to the software companies we want to support because we like their products, not bending over and asking in what ways they can violate us next. I'm quite happy to buy a game and never resort to piracy, but with more and more early adopters being punished by having to pay full whack for a product and then being stung for DLC down the line, it's understandable if people feel disillusioned by the whole thing.

That said, not all hope is lost — since picking up a gaming PC I've been using the consoles far less. And while there is DLC for PC titles, many PC gamers are a lot less patient with this sort of bullshit — largely because there's an enormous and active modding community out there more than willing to provide content of a higher quality than Activision's $15 map packs for free. And there aren't many PC games I've played recently where there's a big hole for some DLC — I intend on going back through Mass Effect 2 at some point, so I may feel differently after that, though.

The most frustrating thing I find is that people don't seem to realise or care that they are being taken advantage of. We can complain all we like about Capcom releasing the same game twice in the space of nine months, but we all know that there are enough people out there who will happily part with their cash and give Capcom the sales figures they need to justify rolling out this obnoxious business practice again and again. We can bitch all we like about paying $15 for Call of Duty map packs, but people pay it, again showing Activision that it's Okay to Do This. And we can point our fingers and say L.A. Noire's add-on cases should have been in the game in the first place, but I bet most players picked them all up just out of curiosity if anything, giving Rockstar the green light to do more in the future.

It's refreshing to see that not all of the industry is operating in this way, though. Indie developers are flourishing — and the community is taking to them. Indie RPGs Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World along with awesome roguelike Dungeons of Dredmor topped the Steam sales charts on their day of release, and in less than a week on sale BoD/CStW has equalled its sales from a year and a half on Xbox Live Indie Games. Minecraft continues to go from strength to strength. And Frozen Synapse proves more popular than its developers could have ever dreamed.

Right now, I'm thankful that the indies exist, because with every day that passes, each new "teaser reveal", each new embargo, I'm losing more and more respect for the big publishers.

#oneaday Day 55: DLC is only two letters from "DICK"

Nostalgia and rose-tinted spectacles are rife in all walks of life, but there are few places where it happens more so than in the video games industry. This is perhaps due to the fact that it's such a fast-moving industry that you can be in your twenties and still feel nostalgic for "the good old days" and how much better they supposedly were.

Nine times out of ten, of course, nostalgia is proven wrong when you actually go back and play the things you were so nostalgic about. Things move on for a reason.

But I'm firmly of the opinion that the previous console generation is always going to be looked back on as a "golden age" that is going to be very difficult to top, however good the games might be, and however beautiful the HD graphics of today's games might be.

The reason for this, to me, that games from then were finished. Now we have the blight that is DLC. Now, the arguments in favour of downloadable add-ons for games are many—extra content adds life to a game and keeps it relevant long after release. It gives developers the opportunity to show that they're still "supporting" a product. And it allows for other, smaller developers to use an existing base as the means for some creative risk-taking—see Bioshock 2's "Minerva's Den" as an example.

But at its worst, DLC is a cynical money-making exercise designed to get people to pay for their games twice—once to buy the thing in the first place and once again to purchase all the "premium content" that should have been included with the game. Premium content, let's not forget, that very often is actually on the game disc and is simply "unlocked" by purchasing an access code.

This isn't the only negative side to DLC, either. Narrative games suffer considerably from this whole "oh, let's add a bit here, add a bit there" structure. There was a time when you would start playing a game, go through its story, beat it and be satisfied. Now, it seems, there always has to be "a little bit more". There always has to be an "exclusive epilogue chapter", or some "side missions" or "the shock return of a beloved character!"

Rather than seeing this as a good opportunity to get more of the games I love, I see this as reason to not pick up a copy of a hotly-anticipated game on its original release, because it's almost inevitable that there will be some "extra bits" sold separately down the road, and that these will be bundled into a "Game of the Year Edition" or similar even further down the road.

This is what was supposed to happen with the PS3 version of Mass Effect 2. I was quite keen to wait for this rather than picking up any of the DLC for the Xbox version, so that I could play the "definitive version". Sure enough, the PS3 version was announced as having "all" the DLC included with it. Nice. Except now they've announced some more, because Mass Effect 2 is big business and people will keep funnelling money into it.

ARGH. What this means in practice is that when you buy a game these days you're essentially purchasing an unfinished product. With the speed at which some of this DLC magically appears, it's clear it's been worked on alongside the "main" game and so it would have been very easy for it to simply be included in the price of admission. And with some publishers like EA already withholding content from those who have purchased a game pre-owned, the whole situation just strikes me as more than a little objectionable. Games are too expensive anyway, and to start charging even more for them is just… well, wrong.

Unfortunately, there are too many people out there invested in the DLC debacle to mean we can ever go back. Are you happy with that?

#oneaday, Day 191: Pay To Play

I wrote a news post relating to this subject earlier tonight, but I thought I'd expand on the thoughts I alluded to in there in a proper blog post. It's a matter of some debate, and the post itself provoked some discussion. This is good, as it's an issue in the games industry that needs talking about.

I'm referring to DLC. But not just any DLC. DLC that you get a little voucher for in a sparkly new copy of a game, like it's some "free bonus" and not at all something that's there to squeeze a bit of extra cash out of purchasers of a pre-owned copy of the game.

It's happened a few times recently. The most recognisable examples are probably Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2, both of which provided "free bonus" content for those who purchased the game new. Dragon Age included a new character who integrated into the storyline and had a bunch of quests associated. Mass Effect included the "Cerberus Network", a ticket to a whole bunch of free DLC. They've since started charging for new packs, but the first bunch of additional content available for Mass Effect 2 players was gratis. So long as you had access to the "Cerberus Network".

Most recently, we've had Alan Wake. Now, I will hold my hands up here and say I haven't yet played Alan Wake. I understand it's rather good. However, one recurring comment that I've heard from a number of friends is that the story comes to a somewhat unsatisfying conclusion. Perhaps "unsatisfying" is the wrong word; the game sets itself up for a sequel, apparently. Fair enough; plenty of games have done that. Did anyone play Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance? Worst. Cliffhanger. Ever.

But for purchasers of the game to be teased with the fact that there is some DLC coming "soon" that will continue the story beyond the cliffhanger ending and bridge the gap between this and the semi-inevitable sequel? That sounds awfully like leaving a game unfinished and withholding the true ending to me. Now, granted, Remedy haven't said they've deliberately withheld content. But something stinks about this. Think back to the days of the PS2; if you purchased a narrative-based game, you'd expect it to come to some sort of conclusion, whether that's a cliffhanger ending designed to set up a sequel, or a definite finale. Very occasionally expansion packs made an appearance, but these were, for the most part, confined to home computers with the ability to install data.

What we have now is effectively a game which says "Here's the game. Here's a cliffhanger. BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!"—but only for people who either bought the game new or who are willing to pony up 560 Microsoft Points for the privilege of continuing a story which should have been finished in the main game.

I find this sort of thing more objectionable than EA's approach with Dragon Age and Mass Effect's DLC. At least in those games, all the DLC takes the form of optional sidequests. Sure, some of them impact the main plot. But they don't strip out what appears to be an important part of the core narrative of the game.

Alan Wake, being a more linear game by nature, doesn't have the luxury of sidequests to insert into its structure. As such, I know I personally would much rather they had either left this content out altogether and put it into the sequel, or included it in the game in the first place. To do it in this manner seems rather unnecessary, not to mention a sharp poke in the eye to those who typically purchase pre-owned games because they're cheaper. (cf. me)

Still, this looks like becoming something of a standard business practice for large developers at the moment, so we should probably get used to it. At least the independent and smaller developers haven't jumped on the bandwagon yet.

DLC is all very well and good—it hearkens back to the old days of going to the shops to buy an "expansion pack" for a favourite game—but when the "extra" content feels like it probably should have been in there in the first place? Hmm. I start to think it's not such a good idea for people with money and power to get their claws into.

What do you think?