Tag: mass effect 2

#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?

One A Day, Day 15: Blips

Blips today. Nothing that interesting to say, so I’ll go with the snippet approach.

Back to work today. Boo. But at least I could get away with making them all do a writing test this morning, so I didn’t have to do very much for the first hour or so. Hooray! I also tidied my classroom and filed the bajillion bits of paper that were littering the top of my desk… some (well, most) into the bin and others into actual files with dividers and everything. Suddenly, by doing that, I feel a bit less incompetent. Still doesn’t make me want to carry on though – teaching’s had its chance.

Took me two hours to get to work this morning. It’s usually an hour’s drive. The last hour was taken up by the last three miles of the journey. It was one of those annoying traffic jams where it wasn’t at all obvious what the problem was – and there probably wasn’t anything at the front of it. It had snowed a little bit, but not enough to make the roads perilous, so I’m not sure that could be an excuse. I could be wrong though.

Currently installing Mass Effect 2. I’ve been replaying the prequel as a Renegade (went as a Paragon on my first playthrough) but overenthusiastic tweets from friends have made me want to jump on board and import my old Paragon character.

Also found one of the best apps out there for iPhone 1st gen/3G owners – iVideoCamera. It’s 59p and is a fully-functional video camera with export to camera roll, Twitter, YouTube and Wi-Fi. The quality isn’t quite as good as with a proper 3GS, but it’s certainly acceptable. You can use it in either 160xsomething mode at full frame rate for unlimited recording, or 320xsomething at 10fps for “high quality” mode. Both look just fine, and are certainly enough to shoot a quick video and post to Twitter or something. So if you still have a 3G like me, then it’s a great app. And cheap.

Well, that’s about that for today. Sorry I don’t have more to say. But the whole thing with “one a day” is that not every day is vastly interesting. Go and look at my photos from yesterday if you haven’t already. The low-level pebbly beach shot with the nice depth of field is currently my desktop background.