Therumancer said:
Elijin said:
Im going to go with a reserved 'Dont hate change for the sake of it RJ' on this one.
Reserved because the change might be terrible. It also might be great. Hate the end results, not the fact change happened.
The problem of course being is that it costs like $60 for people to find out. If you buy something like this and it turns out to be garbage EA already has your money and chalks it up as a success and keeps doing the same thing.
With the track record of EA/Bioware recently they aren't exactly worthy of the benefit of the doubt your espousing, as they seem to have learned very little, and continue to develop along lines that most people seem to hate, but which they feel are okay, in part because of all the people who "gave them the benefit of the doubt" spending money and making those choices successful.
To me the thing that disturbs me about this is that EA seems to be using this same "pay for resources" strategy in most of their games, basically forcing you to endure a horrible grind, or go without things, or pay them money for unlocks. It's not just the multiplayer games they have been doing it with either. One of my big problems with "Dead Space 3" is that the game is designed so there is no way you can possibly get enough resources to complete a set of the game's best weapons and upgrades unless you want to spend hours abusing a respawn glitch, or sending out scavenger bots. Their solution to this is to sell you resource packs, which can be purchased with either "Ration Seals" uncovered in game, which is one of the rarer things to collect, and mostly comes from sending out scavenger bots, or you can pay them real money for materials to buy gear.... and this is for the single player campaign. The fact that ME3 and now DA3 seem to be doing it in their multiplayer actually doesn't make me feel much better about it. Basically your looking at micro transactions attached to a paid product that isn't even a true MMO despite involving multiplayer.
At the end of the day, how open minded should one be with EA/Bioware? There is a point at which you need to take the approach that it shouldn't be about you giving them a chance, but them needing to prove themselves to you and regain your trust and respect.
I'm pretty much undecided on DA3, but I'm not rushing out to buy it, I'll probably wind up waiting to see what the consensus is once the game comes out, and if its a satisfying product with a decent ending. I want to like it, but if it's more like DA2 than Origins except with micro-transaction involved multiplayer I'll probably pass, especially if the ending is a "do nothing" cliffhanger or some "Starchild" type event. I'll also be blunt that I have some concerns that the game will involve micro transactions in the single player as well, given what they did with "Dead Space 3" I could easily see them making it so you need to gather stuff to do item crafting and/or enchantments, but there isn't enough stuff in the game to obtain it all by just regularly playing, but every crafting bench conveniently takes credit cards to solve that problem for you....
I'm not saying I know anything here, just that I don't think EA deserves any kind of benefit of the doubt based on past behavior.
I take issue with this because the flipside is 'Never change anything ever, keep doing the same thing' because then you know what you're getting for your money.
Or you could be an educated consumer (shock horror, also sort of hard to do if you actually buy into the EA hate as much as you seem to) and not be a sucker. Even if you want to make the argument someone has to buy it for you see footage for yourself, I call bullshit. There are plenty of gaming outlets who put up footage of their staff playing games, many of which are totally based on that concept.
Also as much as its popular to hate on EA and Bioware at the Escapist, I dont buy it. Most of their games are solid. The ones I can think of which I dont enjoy, its because they dont appeal to me, not because they're some horrible game. In fact 99% of my problems with EA can be boiled down to 'I dont live in America, and their server structure assumes everyone does, and doesnt care if you dont.' Most of the things people hate on EA total crap. Either games that just dont appeal to the person complaining, or trumped up claims of microtransactions killing the game/destroying immersion (I've played several of the games purported to do this, and am yet to find it true.)
In fact you specifically mentioned Dead Space 3, and how it was 'impossible to play the game without abusing it or grinding' due to microtransactions (extra points for being one of the 'immersion breaking games previously mentioned), thats odd to me. Since you know, I purchased and played through it quite a few times on the varying modes and difficulties, and didnt once encounter this issue. In every playthrough, I found organically to be encountering the loot I needed to make the things I wanted, by progressing forward through the game. And its not a 'cumulative effect', I found this on my first playthrough, and if you did play it you'd know the modes are separated, so I didnt have my resource pools on my later playthroughs. And lets touch on the 'immerssion breaking' bit. It took going through 2-3 dedicated menus to get to the ability to buy things with real money, which not only did I never do, but the game never once prompted me to do so.
Gambling system in ME3MP and DA MP is fine too. It was totally incidental, didnt need to be used, and facilitated free DLC for the life of the game in the former's case. But then I've never understood the current hate on convenience taxing people with the income to do so, but the time lacking. They want to short cut their progress in BF, or ME3MP or whatever other game? Fine by me. I wouldnt use it, but I know people who between 60 hour a week jobs and having kids, want to sit down and play, and to them a 5-10 dollar microtransaction to leap right in, is waaaaaaaaaaay more reasonable to them than their limited time. (And dont even get me started on any 'If you dont have time, you shouldnt be playing' arguments. That attitude can go right to hell. How dare people think they have the right to comment on how others spend their leisure time, as frequent or short as it may be. Especially when half the people who make those comments turn around later and get offended at others telling them they spend too much time gaming, hah! Imagine that, being judged on how you use your free time!)
Actually I got half way through this rant and gave up, because no doubt given where Im posting it, I will be labelled an apologist or a chump, and people will make striking examples of how games they personally didnt like were bad and made by EA, or concepts like companies being purchased and eventually going out of business under EA being brandished as evidence of their total evil, rather than say I dont know, business. I mean, MOST of the gaming companies from my childhood went out of business too, and they werent owned by EA. In fact only big publishers like EA have held on. Its almost like historically there is a trend of develeopers creating games we love, making them for a while, and then falling into the trap of either not innovating and falling out of relevance, or innovating in the wrong directions, and self destructing. But lets ignore all this and say EA is the devil? Right? Right.
Anyway that got super ranty. Oh well.
), you'll just be standing in the back shooting off arrows or rattling off spells. DA's combat has never been nearly as actiony as ME's, and if I'm going to be playing multiplayer I'd rather not be bored while doing so.