@Blackarrow1020 I expect people are giving you the thumbs-down because that's the whole point of this article - the writer is encouraging people to think more critically about their purchasing decisions, and to present a public warning to the publishers. The comments are filling up with support for this, and that's going to be important. It winds me up a bit when I've tried to do the same thing and I've had the "nobody's forcing you to buy it" response (which is effectively "shut up and don't complain"). That's what got us into this mess, since the companies know there are enough mugs who will support this and a silent mass who don't.
@Xenrathe - When it's becoming normal to snip a section out of the single player story to call it DLC, I think that's definitely a problem. I don't think it's reasonable to charge for MP maps, because those shut people out of the same game depending on whether or not they made the purchase. If it was really important to profits, maybe I'd have less of an issue with it if they stuck to charging for MP skins/characters. Given the huge revenues of the big companies who do this routinely, I don't think it's ever really justified, and I have trouble believing it really gives more games. Every dollar that's squeezed from a game's fan for more of one game is a dollar they can't spend on another title.
Your last sentence is the problem right now. There are too many docile customers. They don't remember these extras used to come for free, and they're blind to the cases in which it still happens. Point out the blatant price-gouging, and they'll bleat back at you that "nobody's forcing you to buy it", or "CoD is even worse" or (my personal favourite) "the companies have bills to pay and mouths to feed". They'll preorder DLC rather than wait for reviews, as though DLC was in finite supply. Publishers must be laughing their arses off at the bovine public response to these price hikes.
@GT_APE Weeeell... I wouldn't go that far, but I get what you mean. The next consoles will presumably have the top (or near top) GPU, and two or more of them. You should still care about the next-gen even if you won't be buying a console, because console technology is holding back your superpowered PC. Until there's a next gen, you're not going to get a real idea of what your beast system can really do.
When you see the next gen, I doubt many of the naysayers are going to complain about it then. Saying the current gen is all you need is kind of true; it's all you need if you're happy with low framerates, terrible draw distance and eye strain. These are not problems you can get around with more elegant programming anymore, since the machines are still limited by what they can output per second. And please cut it out with the hackneyed "movies are 24fps!" argument. Firstly, you're wrong - that's a very old TV standard, not a movie standard - and secondly low framerates ruin panning shots in films (and therefore strafing in games). Sure, maybe your current TV doesn't show you the difference but nobody with a TV or monitor with a fast refresh rate who's experienced 60fps and above would agree with you. Ideally games studios would be limited only by their imaginations, but what we have right now is a very low ceiling. Anything that raises it is good, and it doesn't mean every game necessarily needs to exploit that. You'll still have your homely simple games too.
@LEALR - I like the 100% sync, as long as it's a restriction that makes you breathe a sigh of relief when you achieve it. It's all the ones in Revelations that add nothing to the fun that annoyed me, or don't fit the reason that the protagonist is exceptionally heroic and therefore did it *this* way. Too many in ACR were just token conditions, like they'd forgotten what the justification and design ideas behind the sync were. They were more of a memory test, to see if you'd recall the shopping list of 5 guys you had to kill with [weapon x].
@TommyT456 - It's true that they kind of made a rod for their own backs with ACII, but would you not agree that other things have slipped? I've played every game more than once, and until Revelations I could spend a little time examining the architecture to figure out better ways to approach a mission, with a different strategy each time. There were occasions during some missions (tomb missions especially) where I'd have to think for a while to figure out the next move. Revelations is significantly dumbed down: no puzzles, no politics, no difficulty. I take your point - "they've made a lot of money, so who can blame them?" - but they made a lot of money out of a brave, well-crafted series. If, as I suspect, Revelations does poorly then I hope they take note of this and remember that games should provide exhilaration and a sense of accomplishment, not an easy route to the end of a story.
@Mariner32 - I think there's still scope beyond that, as long as they put to bed the whole business about Those Who Came Before. It's gone from being an intriguing alternative history about "real" figures lurking behind the identities of mythological gods into a glossy nonsense halfway between bad 90s sci-fi and Scientology lore. ACII set up the idea of there being dozens of artefacts left to be found, so it can either carry on with that (slightly tired) motivation or come up with new reasons why it's necessary to visit the past to uncover secrets. I, for one, will always love the opportunity to run around cities from history if the game is good and provides a good plot in those settings, but I couldn't give a monkey's about Desmond being the Chosen One (or any other beige Messiah they plan to throw my way). I quite like the theme of a team of historians and tech experts assisting with the adventure though.
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