And the verdict on the new Destiny is?

Well, see for yourself

I sincerely hope that this serves as a wake up call for console players. Who in their moronic millions slavishly buy COD after COD, and pay exorbitant amounts for half baked DLC. There are some big publishers, it seems, who seem intent on treating triple A title games a bit like candy crush. If it isnt play to win, then they lock off a whole load of content that should have been in there from the start. As much as this is a criticism of their marketing strategy, it is also a criticism of those gamers who repeatedly buy those types of games.

I would like to say that the market should sort it out, but it seems as though Activision have paid for the market. Seen most glaringly in their "victory" in game of the year last year. Thats the gaming equivalent of WaterWorld being voted the best film of the 90s, or Die another Day being voted the best Bond film, or Ringo Star being voted the best member of the Beatles.

So, for the sake of human decency, if you own a console, please dont buy Destiny. We should shun all companies that have huge amounts of paid for DLC from day one and who also have a clear marketing strategy to milk as much as they can from their fan base without any real reason.

I should make a brief mention of examples where this marketing strategy can work. One example is Elite Dangerous (IMO). Their marketing model is to release a game once a year, which you pay £40 for, and then you get all updates throughout the year in staged patches. Based upon last year, then that equals a significant amount of content. The game is also massive. Another example could be WOW, which has been good enough to justify its subscription style service. And another could be the micro transaction system in TF2. But the point is that these examples are an exception to the rule, they are not the rule in and of themselves.

What's going on here? It's getting excellent reviews. I'm confused about what exactly you're trying to say.

A lot of people aren't buying Elite Dangerous partly because of that model, people bought it, played it for a while until they found there really wasn't much to actually do in the game and got bored. Others like myself heard about that and decided to wait until it was "finished" or get it cheap on a sale. Which it doesn't seem to be and is just getting more expensive.

I only know a few people who still play Destiny, one because he is a huge Halo fan but is super disappointed in Destiny, another loves grinding and MMOs so it's poor design is right up his alley, and the other is a complete and utter moron in almost every way.

TKK seems like a good expansion but it doesn't make up for the main game being kind of crap content wise. I think that's what Sherbz' point is.

It has really poor user score.

I think part of the issue really is games have gotten too big and fancy and expensive to produce. It's kind of like cars, though a lot of the stuff on cars is mandatory safety features, they all come with bluetooth and nav and power everything now and it makes them expensive compared to cars 20 years ago.

Games same way, so much graphics to produce now that hardware is plenty capable, they cost way more to develop. That's why standard game prices have gone from $40 to $50 to $60 and I think the market wouldn't bear $70+, sales would decline too much, and thus they try to sneak in hidden costs like dlc. Personally I think they should focus more on gameplay and less on graphics and try to keep production costs down, but that will never happen, graphics and cool trailers sell games.

Or I could be totally wrong and it's a big money grab.

It greatly depends on where you make the game, how large of a team you have, and the skill and ability of whoever is in charge of managing it. Also how big the game is plays a part too.

While it is true costs have gone up, there are also more people buying games now too.

A lot of games also seem to come with fewer features sometimes... AAA games generally seem to remove what made the series great originally and fail to really build on to and deepen features and mechanics most of the time.

Owen Glyndwr said:

What's going on here? It's getting excellent reviews. I'm confused about what exactly you're trying to say.

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Basically what Maniacal said.

The subscription style game is a controversial method of selling your game. There are very few that can be deemed a total success. WOW and TF2 being about the only ones.

As for Elite, i think its not bad. Its not great either though. But the point is that for the full price that you do pay, you do get about 3 or 4 big updates to the base game, and thats the model they seem to be continuing for horizons. And teh base game itself is a worthy game (not a 9 or 10 out of 10, but certainly an 8 IMO). Last year we got:

The base game (duh)
Powerplay
Wings
Close Quarters Combat
Capital ships
An assortment of other new ships
An assortment of new weapons and modules
Various large patches and updates

Thats not bad for £40. And as its the universe, theres a whole lot more they can do in the coming year. I think as a minimum it will probably be:

Flying on planets
Landing on planets
Walking on starports

And then whatever else they come up with.

The main drawback with this model, as Maniacal points out, is that you will never get it on the dirt cheap sales we are all so used to. Modding is also a problem (you cant Mod Elite).

Its not all bad news though. Some developers wont follow this model out of principle. I think thats why you have seen a surge in kickstarter. Before if a developer wanted to make a game they would have to persuade a publisher to release the funds. Now they just ask the community. Its not a great model, i grant you. But it is a sort of democratisation of the gaming market.

I should also add that i dont trust a game that has wildly differing meta scores from official reviews and user scores. You usually expect user scores to be lower. And generally the better the game the closer it will be to the official score. There is something wrong though when there is a huge gap. Look at scores for EVOLVE and ROME 2 for examples. And then contrast this to genuinely good games like Bioshock Infinite, Alien Isolation and South Park Stick of truth (Alien Isolation scores better than the review score). This might be down to developers buying review scores, which is what the cynic in me says. Thats also why metacritic is a valuable tool in the arsenal of any gamer.

Owen Glyndwr said:

What's going on here? It's getting excellent reviews. I'm confused about what exactly you're trying to say.

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Because people paid full retail price for Destiny, then paid for DLC and then paid for DLC again.
They got shafted up the rear hole three time already. Each shaft up the rear hole was more expensive and with less content then the last.

Its no doubt a great game, for those buying it for the first time.

Maniacal said:

another loves grinding and MMOs so it's poor design is right up his alley

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I assume he is Korean ?

Maniacal said:

and the other is a complete and utter moron in almost every way.

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American Republican ?

No and no again (that would be an improvement).

You also need to account for the raw effects of inflation. $60 in 1995 is about $90 today, and $50 then is $75 today. Notice how the 'Gold edition' or the game plus season pass tends to be $80-90 nowadays? It isn't a coincidence.

I suspect that while it may not be a total coincidence, it has little to do with inflation and more that's approximately the price it would cost to buy all of those DLCs individually anyway and they simply want to make more money NOW and not piece meal as the DLCs come out. Plus people are probably much less likely to buy DLCs later on as most of them are finished with the game after the first month anyway.

ls612 said:

You also need to account for the raw effects of inflation. $60 in 1995 is about $90 today, and $50 then is $75 today. Notice how the 'Gold edition' or the game plus season pass tends to be $80-90 nowadays? It isn't a coincidence.

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Yeah but new n64 and sega genesis games still cost $40-$50 if I am remembering correctly, so games haven't exactly kept up.

Anyway I don't think publishers buy scores, I think what happens to inflate reviewer scores is three fold, they don't play a ton of the game so they miss a lot of bugs or lack of content. Game might be sweet for first 5 hours for the review then completely suck after. And they don't try out enough multiplayer usually, and finally they seem to have little brand loyalty/nostalgia so they'll totally overrate a game like civ5 (release version which was pretty horrible) or dragon age 2. In some ways this is good, but it's kind of like eating hamburger all the time thinking it's awesome and not having perspective cus you've never tried steak. You're probably going to overrate the hamburger.

Fans probably go too far the other direction, though gripes about bugs and multiplayer are totally warranted. I think they go too far with stuff like this game just isn't as good as previous one, or this drm sucks since drm doesn't usually have anything to do with game quality.

civvver said:

Yeah but new n64 and sega genesis games still cost $40-$50 if I am remembering correctly, so games haven't exactly kept up.

Anyway I don't think publishers buy scores, I think what happens to inflate reviewer scores is three fold, they don't play a ton of the game so they miss a lot of bugs or lack of content. Game might be sweet for first 5 hours for the review then completely suck after. And they don't try out enough multiplayer usually, and finally they seem to have little brand loyalty/nostalgia so they'll totally overrate a game like civ5 (release version which was pretty horrible) or dragon age 2. In some ways this is good, but it's kind of like eating hamburger all the time thinking it's awesome and not having perspective cus you've never tried steak. You're probably going to overrate the hamburger.

Fans probably go too far the other direction, though gripes about bugs and multiplayer are totally warranted. I think they go too far with stuff like this game just isn't as good as previous one, or this drm sucks since drm doesn't usually have anything to do with game quality.

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Whats your take on Destiny winning game of the year for 2014 then? I cannot honestly fathom how this was possible. It got average to good official reviews and terrible user reviews. Anyone with a sane mind should have been able to decide that clearly it was not game of the year.

Video game awards aren't anything to be taken seriously.

There seems to often be a tipping point for companies, as they become more and more successful, and larger... A point where they go from trying to respond to the market and listen to customers, to suddenly becoming all pompous and trying to convince the customers that they, the company, know what's good for them.

"Why are you guys doing this?"
"We believe people will love this!".

Yeah Bungie definitely reached that point. Most of the old guard and innovative talent left Bungie during the development due to Activision's interference and then something happened with whoever was left in charge scrapping the entire story and redoing it (really badly) 1 year before release.

Rub'Rum said:

There seems to often be a tipping point for companies, as they become more and more successful, and larger... A point where they go from trying to respond to the market and listen to customers, to suddenly becoming all pompous and trying to convince the customers that they, the company, know what's good for them.

"Why are you guys doing this?"
"We believe people will love this!".

Click to expand...

Yea - although some large companies actually manage to keep the ethos. I know Valve is much maligned in some quarters, but they do actually listen to their consumers (apart from their refusal to make half life 3). Take the paid for mods controversy. They canned it when they saw how unpopular it was. They have also made source 3 open to people. And in general have a good track record on similar sorts of things.

And yet they still don't have an even remotely capable customer support, one of the largest complaints for years.