The other day I had my attention drawn to Hitman Sniper Challenge, a pre-order bonus for Hitman Absolution. Like pretty much every other pre-order bonus ever, you get a gun which you can use in the main game. Unlike pretty much every other pre-order bonus ever, you get to play with it now in a little mini downloadable mission and earn yourself upgrades for it that'll carry over into the main game.
I downloaded it a couple of hours ago and it's defintely worth chucking down a pre-order (even if just do so long enough to get a code before cancelling) as it's quite a fun little diversion for all the time it took to get hold of. To get all the upgrade levels takes a ridiculous amount of grinding (around 50 million points) but I think it's quite a nice change from the norm. It may not be anything more than a tiny slice of what's to come, but there's something rather satisfying about trying to beat your own top score while at the same time trying to do so in a way that won't get your presence noticed.
To be honest, if more games did something like this for pre-order bonuses I might consider pre-ordering more often. Say Dragon Age 3 was going to come with a couple of pre-order weapons. Rather than just giving them to me, why not give me a mini quest where I can go and find them myself and try them out beforehand? One could argue that this would be diverting the developers time away from actually designing the game, but at the same time you easily cobble together something like this in tandem and if it manages to snare you some more pre-orders for your trouble, then why not?
So yeah, in conclusion: Pre-order bonuses that I can play around with now = Yay. Pre-order bonuses that just get dumped into my inventory = A bit naff.
I downloaded it a couple of hours ago and it's defintely worth chucking down a pre-order (even if just do so long enough to get a code before cancelling) as it's quite a fun little diversion for all the time it took to get hold of. To get all the upgrade levels takes a ridiculous amount of grinding (around 50 million points) but I think it's quite a nice change from the norm. It may not be anything more than a tiny slice of what's to come, but there's something rather satisfying about trying to beat your own top score while at the same time trying to do so in a way that won't get your presence noticed.
To be honest, if more games did something like this for pre-order bonuses I might consider pre-ordering more often. Say Dragon Age 3 was going to come with a couple of pre-order weapons. Rather than just giving them to me, why not give me a mini quest where I can go and find them myself and try them out beforehand? One could argue that this would be diverting the developers time away from actually designing the game, but at the same time you easily cobble together something like this in tandem and if it manages to snare you some more pre-orders for your trouble, then why not?
So yeah, in conclusion: Pre-order bonuses that I can play around with now = Yay. Pre-order bonuses that just get dumped into my inventory = A bit naff.
