Tag Archives: DLC

Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut. Fan Service and Midi-Chlorians

5 Apr

Merely a day after my ramblings about Mass Effect 3′s conclusion, it seems that the folks at BioWare are going to release a post-game DLC entitled Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut to explain the rather bleak and abrupt ending.

While rabid, vocal, rage-prone fans would consider this a win, I’m beginning to wonder when the hell did the industry devolve into fan service? Rather, would I be wrong to use the word “devolve” in the first place? Reason being, games were first products sold off the shelf, then the business model evolved to sell them as a service, keeping you engaged over the initial “OMG I HAZ NEW GAME TO PLAY” phase what with post-launch DLC and enhanced rosters (FIFA, NBA) among other things.

And then we have this step from BioWare thrown into the mix. A combination of some rather vibrant feedback and developers responding publicly. Though they aren’t going to change the ending, they’re offering more insight into what happened which should keep most if not all fans in check. A sort of collaborative post-game DLC if you will, squarely purposed around giving fans what they want, even if it isn’t exactly all of it.

Considering that consoles have long development cycles (compared to other devices) and sky high development costs, it isn’t such a bad thing to keep your existing audience happy. After all it’s easier to keep an already receptive gamer buying your new iterations (such as the rumoured Mass Shift game that takes elements from The Lost Guardian) with minimal marketing effort.

I do wonder though, what kind of precedent this sets.Since the smaller publishers don’t have the budgets of an EA and there are costs involved in hosting DLC on platforms such as Xbox Live and PSN as well as royalties, it becomes tougher to justify creating content on platforms that isn’t as open as say, Steam.

Most of all though, it smirks in the face of even considering games as art and puts it in the same category as cheesy anime and manga which is obviously anything but. Not that it matters though. If anything, this move will ensure sales of the next Mass Effect game are robust.

As for me, I’m curious to see what direction BioWare takes with the franchise though I believe that some mysteries, no matter how bleak and abrupt, should be kept as mysteries. The last thing I want, is another midi-chlorian moment. That’s what spoiled Star Wars for me. I don’t want the video game equivalent of Star Wars going down the same path.

Oh The Drama: Mass Effect 3 Edition (Spoiler-free)

5 Apr

It was Friday night. Or Saturday morning. Depending which side of the clock you’re more active.

But for me, it was the culmination of a five year journey. An epic adventure that consumed over 300 hours of my life. And at 3AM that day it was all over. Mass Effect 3′s end credits flashed across the screen and that was it. The first thing I did was delete all the 35-odd GB of game installs lying on my Xbox 360 hard drive since the first game’s debut in 2007. Unlike many a fan I didn’t feel the need to rage, troll, throw a bitch fit, fight for a refund or start a petition. Rather, I was overcome with a sense of relief.

You see, being a big RPG fan and by extension, an admirer of BioWare’s work, I was naturally pumped when I first read about this space-faring odyssey in the September 2006 issue of EGM (acquired second hand nonetheless) but over time, I’ve learned that things are never what they’re meant to be. There’s always some form of compromise at the end of it all. In this case, it was BioWare forsaking deeper narrative, culling out characters central to the game to package off as DLC and slap multiplayer on it in order to sell more units. Having been on the business side of things in the industry, I can understand where they were coming from and I guess they weren’t given much of a choice either.

Given that BioWare got bought over by the same company who thought it was a cool idea to turn what was arguably the greatest strategy franchise into an FPS (that too, after buying the studio responsible for said franchise) I was expecting far, far worse. And sure, it was diabolical enough that the game mechanics forced me to play the multiplayer mode for over 20 hours, it was better than expected and even grew on me.

After all, it’s not everyday you get a semi-decent game from the same developers who gave you the steaming pile of turd that was Dragon Age 2. Craptacular characters, bugs galore, recycled dungeons and lame plot, it seemed like a pre-alpha build on release. Keeping that in mind as well, Mass Effect 3 wasn’t that bad a game.

Yes, a little more exposition would have been nice as would a greater emphasis on your choices throughout the trilogy but if a next to negligible portion of my 300 hours of gameplay ended up being rubbish, it would be stupid to hold it against the developers. Considering that we live in an age of disposable, 5-10 minute games, a mammoth, interweaving trilogy in itself is a tremendous feat.

So what I’m getting at is this, after all that has happened in the past what with the debauchery of the Dragon Age series and their parent company’s reputation, now unfairly voted as the worst in America, we could have been treated to something a lot more distasteful than a brief slipshod ending. An Angry Birds mini-game perhaps? Or maybe a mineral management simulation?  The possibilities to mess this up were endless. And as gamers we could have been a little classier about our response. I’d like to believe we’re a better breed than disgrunted Instagram using iPhone fanboys.

Online Passes: The Death of Single-Player

30 Dec

Distributors and retailers refer to games as products. Publishers on the other hand, like to believe games are services, supported by a torrent of content to ensure that you’re hooked for as long as possible. They’re both wrong. To me, games are moments. They’re those events that make you wet your pants in fear, cry like a little girl or just simply smile. Be it the obtuse humour of Fable, the wide-eyed whimsy of Kirby’s adventures or the sheer adrenaline rush of Vanquish, there’s a lot that make games worth playing. And now, access to newer experiences and feelings that games can elicit are dependent on:

1. How fat your internet pipe is.
2. How often you’re willing to stretch your electric bill in the name of grabbing those levels that should have shipped with the game in the first place.
3. Your willingness to spend $10 for a scrap of paper over and above your used game purchase.

There’s been a lot of drama around publishers and their online policies to curb used games. Be it locking out campaign levels, multiplayer modes or just modern day horse armour, it’s become a bit of a nuisance we’ve grown to tolerate. Gone is the time when you could just boot up a game and play it, there’s an install, patches, and of course, some varying chunks of megabytes of content that you’d to download before you can even think of playing your game. Add the obligatory driver downloads, config file edits and swearing if you’re a PC gamer. You’re spending less time experiencing the thrills of Arkham City and wasting more time waiting for the damn content that should have been on the disc to be downloaded.

I’m worried about is how this would affect single-player only experiences. Now, not all of us (read: me) are big multiplayer gamers. I like my solo fun be it mining for minerals in Mass Effect 2 (I actually liked that, true story) or flirting with fellow classmates in Persona 3, single-player games, particularly RPGS, are, for the lack of a better term, my jam.

Which is why this entire debacle of locking out single-player content in the name of protecting first hand purchases is preposterous. Even more so when a triple-A title like Arkham City does it simply because it sets precedent. But if we’re to be historically accurate, I do believe precedent was set with Dragon Age: Origins’ Shale DLC which punished gamers who didn’t pre-order or buy day one by missing out on the coolest character and her side-quest in the game. To be honest, I don’t think the game would be quite the same without having a big hulking stone golem with a psychotic dislike for pigeons and a disdain for humanity by my side. But I digress…

My major issue with this wholesale adoption of online passes is that it corrupts the design process. It dilutes the impact that a title would have. Imagine how FFVII would have been if you were asked to pay to access the death of Aeris? Or if Modern Warfare’s All Ghillied Up mission was an optional download? Would these have the same effect as they did when you saw them for the first time? I highly doubt it. You’d end up with thinking a little lesser of the game than you should. And you can’t be blamed either.

After all, it’s not like the developers and business folk have the best idea of what should be listed as an online pass what shouldn’t. There are some moments in a game that everyone should be able to access regardless of their type of purchase be it day one or two years hence, new or used.

Hell, it was quite tragic that the Naked City case in LA Noire was a download-only affair in certain territories. Reason being it was, in my opinion one of the cases that the game should have shipped with. It did a good job of fleshing out the details of 1940s Los Angeles’, it deserved more than being bunged in with the rest of Rockstar’s dismal online pass offerings.

Another caveat of restricting content to a digital code is the actual gameplay duration you get out of a single-player game. Fundamentally it means that you’re never going to get all the hours the game promises you unless you connect to the Internet and download the data as soon as you purchase it.

I wonder if any of the executives at publishers have ever thought how stupid it is to keep content out from a paying customer just because of his or her Internet reliability (Warner Bros and Rocksteady, I’m looking at you). It’s not like everyone has access to a blistering fast broadband connection or is comfortable with downloading a ton of data. Mass Effect 2 comes to mind where the collective wisdom of EA and Bioware thought it was a good idea to let us download close to a gig worth of content (Normandy crash mission, Zaeed Massani’s quests) after purchasing the game instead of dumping it on the disc.

Though the US figures show a different picture, it’s not exactly true for the rest of the world. Especially when some countries have ISPs that think it’s cool to have a fair usage policy restricted to 25GB. Sometimes I feel that the publishers are in bed with Internet providers and electric companies in order to make us spend more than we should on electricity and Internet to get something we’ve already paid $60 for.

To sum it up, online passes would, in my opinion result developers create half-assed single-player campaigns that make a mockery of your hard-earned money. After all, it’s not like you make it a habit buy a used car without wheels, or a used book without half its pages. Some might argue that games are not products, they’re services. I believe that games are neither. Games are moments.

And for this reason alone that this entire online pass hoopla is a complete clusterfuck in the making.We’re not far from the time when what could be classic moments that make video games special get sliced and diced as pre-order or day one add-ons. So go ahead, do your bit and don’t support titles that are making a making a mockery of the very core of gaming because as gamers, we deserve better treatment.