Not The Bees said:
But making you pay for a game, then making you pay more is ridiculous. I know most people say that MMOs are exempt from this, but I actually find myself a little wary of MMOs for this reason. I can't see myself forever paying a subscription monthly for a game that I already spent money on. I can have something of a similar experience playing Skyrim. Not exact, of course, but similar. I feel that there is just only so much money that you can wring out of people before you have to step back and say enough is enough.
Oh yes, definitely. I've never supported the idea of subscription MMOs for the same reasons. Making you pay over and over again for the content you already purchased and then locking you out if you refuse to pay more is just greed on their part, there's no excuse for it. It's like if someone sold you a bike paid in full and then came around demanding more money just for privilege of having it and if you didn't pay they stole it from you while getting away with it. It's basically just a way for them to cheat us out of our money while sitting on their asses and doing nothing, certainly nothing to justify it.
The justifications for subscription MMOs never hold water anyway. What I usually hear is:
1."They need to pay people to bugfix the game!" They wouldn't if they had done testing right the first time and rooted out most if not all the bugs. Therefore it's their fault those bugs exist and their responsibility, free of charge, to fix.
2. "Servers cost money to maintain!" No they don't, otherwise F2P MMOs couldn't exist. That, and even if that was true there's other ways to pay for it other than making us shell out money every month like advertisements, and besides, the answer is simple, block access to the social content to everybody who doesn't pay while still letting them play the game in general.
3. Developers need to be paid to develop more content!" Yes, but they can easily get that money by making a bunch of content, putting it in an expansion pack, and selling it to us. There's no reason everybody has to pay $15 dollars every month (way too much to charge BTW, $5 would be plenty) for that content whether they even WANT it or not. Some MMOs like WoW are particularly bad about this, not only charging $15 a month but then charging for the expansions on top of that.
Johnny Novgorod said:
Seriously though? I know this is supposed to be all subjective opinion and everything, but every time I ever see anyone say that the english voice acting most every game in the Tales series is bad (Phantasia, Destiny, and Eternia are pretty terrible though, though that tends to be because of cheap crappy sound editing more than the performance) it's just... ugh!
As I said, the Tales voice actors easily the best voice actors I've ever heard in anything, video games or not, even live action performances, and I've seen a hell of a lot. That there's anyone out there that doesn't like them is the kind of an opinion that's so off, so beyond bizarre that I feel like my brain gets trapped in a feedback loop or something because I find it impossible to even begin to conceive the train of thought that could lead anyone anywhere to think such a thing despite my best efforts. It's even worse when I hear people actually like the Japanese voice acting BETTER. Even the best of Japanese voice acting is easily some of the worst voice acting I've heard, even inferior to the worst of the english voice acting I've heard, and again, I've heard a lot of both unfortunately. I'd rather have NO voice acting than Japanese voice acting.
Sorry about the rant, but I couldn't stop myself.