- No text -

Ok... What you said above doesn't add up at all. How do you reconcile supporting someone who calls a franchise ruined while you at the same time acknowledge that the game in question is receiving widespread praise?

Because that's exactly my point. Cody's opinion is his own--the fact that the game is praised doesn't have to affect it, and he's voicing his opinion in the only way that really matters by not purchasing it. You're doing the same thing by putting your money on the table for it. Cody's opinion in this case may not be nuanced, but he's taking a stand against microtransactions, which is more that can be said for most people.

Everyone likes to bitch about day one patches, crappy DLC, and microtransactions, but every game that you buy that has those things is you giving your approval to those practices. It's like complaining about politics without going out and voting at the polls. Actually, it's like voting for someone because of his stance on a single issue and then bitching about his actions regarding a dozen other issues, even though he didn't hide his stance on those issues before he was elected.

I'm not talking about you, specifically, but the general "you" of the internet and gaming audience at large.

Cody may see things in black and white and use hyperbole in ways that most here don't like, but he's definitely not wrong on this issue if he thinks microtransactions in general are egregious enough to fight against.

I dislike the trend of microtransactions, but not strongly enough to vote against them by refusing to purchase a game I want because of their mere inclusion. At the end of the day, that's effectively me telling publishers and developers that I like and want microtransactions.

1. Id take any claim that the game was balanced entirely without microtransactions in mind with a bug heap of salt. Just about everyone says this now and I dont believe any of them. They didn't put them in there with the intention of you not using them now did they?

(I like Cody's avocado better). Well, depends on when they went in and who wanted them in. The marketing and business folks may have wanted it, but the real game makers didn't, so the latter could've ignored the inclusion and designed the game as if they weren't used.

2. Any feature in a game that needs to be excused with "Well you don't need it, and in fact you wont lose out at all by ignoring it. Actually you'll get an experience truer to our original vision if you don't use it" (as so many devs claim) hardly seems like a worthwhile feature in the first place.

And that's probably their argument to the internal business folks, too, but moneys.

Yeah, it's not worthwhile, and wasn't designed to be worthwhile. Much the same could be said about most of the Destiny playstation exclusives, but Bungie can't say that.

1. Id take any claim that the game was balanced entirely without microtransactions in mind with a big heap of salt. Just about everyone says this now and I dont believe any of them. They didn't put them in there with the intention of you not using them now did they?

It's usually a big publisher thing, and many games have had Micro$ tacked on at the last minute, or pushed onto the game long after release (Payday 2, for example). Games from certain publishers will almost undoubtedly include Microtransactions from here on out forever (EA, Ubisoft, and now Activision), and will indeed have them affect development.

I like Naughty Dog's approach. They shipped Uncharted 4 with Microtransactions (with no charge for any MP DLC), and afterwards gave you numerous ways to earn packages faster (including adding a leveling system for the MP that pretty much guarantees lots of loot just for playing). Heck, they just throw loot packages at you periodically for no reason!

2. Any feature in a game that needs to be excused with "Well you don't need it, and in fact you wont lose out at all by ignoring it. Actually you'll get an experience truer to our original vision if you don't use it" (as so many devs claim) hardly seems like a worthwhile feature in the first place.

I don't believe you.

If Raga's articles are to be believed, buying Praxis is basically just paying to cheat over the game, as opposed to paying to play a fair game when it is more punishing than acceptable without it.

The original Deus Ex had several ways to cheat XP points and items built into the game (you might call them bugs, but IIRC we had lots of discussions about cheesing Crota and how it was legitimate since it was built into the game), so cheating is arguably not something new to the series.

Would you opt to make a great book easier to read by using third grade vocab? Or maybe pay a little extra for a cosmetic change to a different font?

I mean, maybe Wingdings. But otherwise I doubt it.

Reader's Digest condensed books exist, and you can use a variety of fonts with ereaders.

Doesn't affect the integrity of the great book for those who read it in its original form.

(I totally get the concern that microtransactions can negatively affect the design of a game, but I don't think they necessarily do.)

I admire the purity of principle on display, but there's an ongoing problem with AAA games. They're very expensive to make and the margins for profit seem to be getting thinner.

This right here is the problem, honestly. The AAA industry is horribly bloated and thinks just throwing obscene amounts of money at things will make the product better. Look at Hitman and Tomb Raider (both Square Enix, unsurprisingly). They both sold several million copies, but were considered a failure because so much money had been spent on sodding HairFX and what-have-you. It's reached the point now where you have to sell your game to everyone if you want to make any money. Hardly surprising then that so many AAA games are so homogenous now - they're trying to appeal to everybody, doing everything passably rather than doing any one thing well (Ubisoft springs to mind as the biggest example here).

Compare and contrast with Demon and Dark Souls from From Software. Lower budget titles with reasonable expectations from a studio that put all their focus on making games that would have a large appeal to a very specific audience. They sold far fewer copies and still made a profit, because they didn't let their budget balloon over the vain assumption that they'd make it all back.

It's complicated. Graphics help to sell games. Big games cost big bucks. I think Cody has said as much. 90% of the games I've finished since Destiny came out have been indie or psuedo-indie. It's one reason I probably won't buy Deux Ex for a while. Don't know if I want to pay full price for a game I don't end up finishing. I bet players like me are part of the issue of thinning profit margins.

I've been calling for one since pre-Destiny. The AAA market is so bogged down by bloat, short-sightedness, design-by-committee, publishers who don't care about the product etc. etc.

Course, with the indie scene looking like it is I doubt we'll see an ET-level crash so much as a shift in emphasis. I could certainly live in a world of Devolver Digitals and self-publishers rather than Ubisofts and Warner Brothers.

Remember the huge video game crash of whenever-ET-the-game-released? I wonder if anything similar will happen in the AAA scene in the near future...

I know your not saying it did, but it wasn't the sole cause. I just have this urge to point this out when this topic comes up. It was the one-two punch of the failure of this game plus the market being absolutely flooded with crap games by 3rd publishers who couldn't financially handle returns of unsold stock from retailers. This ended up driving prices down and giving retailers a bad taste in their mouth in regards to video games.

I remember being pretty stoked that games were now cheap enough that *I* could buy them as a 6-7 yo, or if I were short on funds convince my mom to. Little did I know that it would lead to a couple years of video game famine.

Let a crash occur. Microsoft's plans for "no more generations of consoles" and such already has me rolling my eyes. Microsoft as a whole has me entirely turned off, though. The entire treatment regarding Windows 10 upgrades and privacy on that thing are enough to make me want to never purchase their products again. And it might very well end up that way in the next few years. Not yet, though. But that's a different discussion.

A crash. Yes. Frankly, I'd place most of the blame on the publishers rather than the actual developers. That definitely does not excuse all developers, though. I'd like to believe that the video game industry would come out better after the fact. Some AAA devs will make it through, I'm sure.