Video games have come a long way since the days of Pong. No longer are we bound by pixelated blocks that could maybe be a person if you close one eye and squint with the other. Games now have stories that can equal or even surpass their Hollywood brethren. We can even play a game with someone who is on the other side of the world.
Yet with all of these improvements, there are some downsides too.
1. Required DLC
This is aimed mostly at Batman: Arkham City. Many games have been trying to eliminate their poorer fan-base by making it more difficult to resell games. It’s pretty much standard with new, big name titles to include a one-time use code to download some aspect of the game, whether it be extra characters, missions or maps. It’s not very nice, but you’re not actually missing any integral gameplay if you buy the game used.
Looks pretty integral to me...
Batman: Arkham City did this with Catwoman. If you bought the game new, you could enter the code that came with the game and download and play missions as Catwoman. If you bought the game used however, you had to pay for Catwoman. And unlike almost every other game that’s done this, Catwoman’s story is pretty major in the game. Sure, in Dragon’s Age you had to buy unlimited storage for your gear, but you really didn’t need to keep everything.
Of course, some people disagree
While game companies are worried about lost profits from used game sales, this is not the way to garner loyalty from your fans.
2. Monthly Multiplayer Fees
A lot of people give Microsoft hell for charging for Xbox Live, when in fact, they should be thanking them. The yearly fee kept game companies from charging their own fee to play multiplayer on consoles. But Activision seems to be bucking the system. Modern Warfare 3 introduced us to Elite, which I still haven’t quite figured out the point of, but it’s pretty obviously a testing ground. If it sells well, paying for multiplayer will likely be in the next game.
There will also be kittens disguised as frogs
While I understand that servers cost money, they make enough to defray that cost. The average cost of a Modern Warfare game is close to $100 after you buy all the DLC that is made available for it. And then they want to charge you for multiplayer on top of that.
Seriously, how much should one game cost?
This much!
3. DLC Map
Speaking of DLC, paying for extra maps is bullshit too. This doesn’t exist on the PC where gamers pretty much make their own maps. But those that only use consoles to game, don’t have that luxury. So instead we have to pay almost as much as the game cost initially to get a handful of maps that were likely recycled from the last game.
Recycling:Good for the environment, bad for gaming.
This needs to stop. If you pay for DLC, there should be some quantitative content involved. Ideally, it should continue the story for single player and multiplayer content should just be included with it.
Or boobs.
But we keep buying it, so they keep making it.
4. Patches
At first glance, you might think “But wait, patches make games better! If the game releases and they find a glitch, they can fix it now!” And that’s true. The problem is their reliance on it.
This was caused by a patch!
Prior to this generation of consoles, only PC gamers had to worry about patching games. And even then, it was generally just compatibility issues and minor bugs. Multiplatform games had to be right the first time, since you couldn’t go back and patch a console version. A glitch was permanent.
Remember Minus World?
Now though, game developers have a mulligan in the patch. Game makers are sending out games with obvious problems to meet deadlines, because they know they can just patch it. It’s laziness, and we’re getting flawed games because of it.
MGS4's flaw? They forgot the gameplay.
And as much as we love Bethesda, they are the most grievous sinners here. Over at Just Press Start, they have an article about Skyrim patch 1.3. The author seems impressed that Bethesda has released three patches for Skyrim in less than a month, one of which was a Day 1 patch. While I’m glad they’re supporting Skyrim, it would have been more impressive if the damn game had worked without needing any patches.
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