Modern video games are too focused on being realistic. The age of the 3D game has become too concerned with making the video game an expression of the first person point of view. The whole point of a video game though is to get away from reality as it currently exists and enter into other modes of being, like 2nd, and 3rd person points of view when playing the game.
Unfinished, released games with infinite patches in the first weeks of release. Beta test the damn thing, and when its ready, release it. Looking at you, Halo:MCC
Intrusive IAP's and on-disc DLC are a no-no. Download services (Origin, U-Play, etc.) aren't going away, but hopefully there won't be more of them. Day one updates seem to be a problem that gets worse with time, but mainly on consoles. Probably the number one offender for me would be games like The Sims that require expansion packs in order to be fun*, or games that feel like expansion packs themselves.
*I was fine with it in 1 and 2, but from 3 onwards you can tell they were just being greedy. Now nobody even wants TS4 since we all know what's coming next.
Last edited by Dr. BaconStein; 01-22-2015 at 12:49 AM.
Knowing EA they'd handle The Sims 4 like their Tiger Woods exploitation wrap. Back when they did the 2013 game they changed how they handled it. Before you got the game with the golfers and courses. They caught hell, and why? They sold a game for full price, kept back a lot of content, and ended up piecing out many of the formerly included courses for a charge in packs. Suddenly that $60 game was $110 or $127 depending which edition you bought, and all the while you'd get nagged online if you didn't buy the stuff because other people would have and you'd get excluded from stuff that was included in the 2012 release. That's EA for you, they take IAP style bitchery and puts it on a full blown console/computer game instead of on your phone.
Imagine the Sims 4, you buy it for $60, and you end up allowed maybe 2 character slots/houses, but any addition person/house is a fee. And then of course you have a game let's say with a 1000 items, but only 400 of them are included, the other 600 items will come in theme packages for $10 here $15 there. Suddenly to be able to play the sims with others online without punishment/exclusion it'll set you back a few hundred dollars.
The modern trend spearheaded by EA is to sell you $60 storefront software from which the user must buy DLC and microtransaction "consumables" to get the whole game.
Yup that's what I broke down and it's the sleaziest form of selling video games (console, computer, handheld) pulling that crap. It takes big balls charging full price for 1/2 of less of a game to then charge maybe double or more that cost to get it all. Stuff like Tiger Woods where just the year before was all there shows clear malice, not like they later figured, wow the Augusta course would be awesome.
I really don't buy EA games anymore at all, the WiiU was the last of it in how they burned WiiU owners with their grossly delayed Mass Effect 3 for $10 more than the Trilogy others got, then the bungled NFS game and so on. They're entirely untrustworthy and if you really wanted to dig, we could rip into how shitty ORIGIN is they force on all their consumers too. I'd love to play Dead Space again, but that's Origin saddled filth on PC so I won't buy it.
Paid DLC and micro transactions.
Last edited by duffmanth; 02-04-2015 at 08:55 AM.
A limited amount of letters for your characters name.
Dragon's Crown and Fantasy Life are good games, but one thing they have in common is that I have to limit my character's name. On Dragon's Crown it's eight letters and Fantasy Life it's six I think. The size that games are right now and you can't afford the space for players to have a longer name? It's an annoyance when I play but there aren't enough spaces for kupomogli, etc.
*edit*
Also now that I think about it. Theatrhythm Final Fantasy Curtain Call limits your name to four letters.
Last edited by kupomogli; 02-04-2015 at 07:44 AM.
Everything in the above post is opinion unless stated otherwise.
omg yes!Originally Posted by kupomogli
Something I've had an issue with for the last couple of gens is game series that were previously known for exploration going linear for the sake of "story." However, this trend seems to be reversing with the upcoming Legend of Zelda U and Final Fantasy XV.
QTE - Nothing breaks my immersion in a game more than button prompts flashing on screen.
May 19, 1998
"Fever gone but itchy. Hungry and eat doggy food. Itchy. Itchy. Scott came. Ugly face so killed him. Tasty."
~ Keeper's Diary
I've hated QTEs since Dragon's Lair, and only more recently with God of War on PS3 and a few others have they been made only slightly less insufferable at least showing you what to push instead of just some flicker on screen. I'd love to know what they were boiling in their bong at Square-Enix when they put those in the boss fights on FF13-2 I've seen so far.
Save Points. As if it was not a big enough pain in the rump before, you would think developers these would have figured out that, when the player dies we DO NOT like starting the entire fracking level over. I can think of many games that have done it right. PS2 God of War at least the game auto-saved at the tough parts and you can try your hand as many times needed to get through it without losing progression and without being diverted back to your last save point. Often too many times you get 3 lives and have to back track. I'm too old and impatient for that crap anymore.
ZP3 pretty much the same here, that was the final straw. I was considering Dragon Age, but again that would be giving them money so it's not happening. I can find just as nice stuff they didn't make on PC or PS4 still.
Speaking of Dragon Age, I don't think I've ever been as angry as when I found the NPC DLC Salesman in Dragon Age Origins.
Early in the game, some guy asked me to do a quest to save his family's tower, I accepted the quest, then the Xbox Live Marketplace purchase content window popped up, asking for $9.99.
I shut the game off and never played it again.
Wow I've never heard of something like that before. That's totally scummy, a new low I haven't heard of before in a console game. You get a thing that's in no way branded as 'extra' and you bother wanting to do a quest and then it asks for ten bucks. That's awful. I would have never played it again either. You really have to draw the line somewhere. I get it on mobile the games are like free or a dollar or two, and they do lay out the DLC charges everywhere clearly between the download site it came from to boxes in the menus of the game. But to do that on a full price console game and bump into like a standard event to panhandle goes too far.
OMG! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Dude, that's HILARIOUS!
Thank you for posting this, I was going to get the game but if that's how they do business then my money will be spent elsewhere.
Penny Arcade did a comic on Dragon Age Origins
I should add I bought the game the month it came out on sale at Best Buy, before any DLC announcements or major title updates. In other words, the game shipped with an in-game DLC Salesman.
You know one thing has been very clear I've noticed with EA games, the big ones that are franchises or franchises to be, they all end up getting game of the year editions like a year after the fact and they have a $20 price reduction and include all the DLC within the disc itself. It's a shame so many people don't catch onto that or are so damned impatient they just have to get online and lengthen their e-peen with instant gratification combat. I say stick to the screwballs whoever they are and wait, then you win. EA does it (Dragon Age, Mass Effect), Sony does it (Uncharted, Little Big Planet), Microsoft with Halo among things. Lots of the big name titles bake the gamer on purpose. So unless you really don't give a damn about DLC at all and it's a franchise where they don't gimp the game for it (Little Big Planet and Uncharted) it's not a problem. But when you get into EA pulling the crap they do with Dragon Age and Mass Effect for instance, that's a problem, and a really big problem for Tiger woods fans who buy less than half a game for $60 to buy the rest for over twice the cost.
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