Back to World of Warcraft
It had to happen eventually.. I’m back playing WoW! I’ve also signed up for the Annual Pass, which will allow me to play with the beta for MoP as well as granting me a copy of Diablo III. I suspect I won’t be playing a lot of WoW when I get my hands on Diablo III, but still.. I think it’s a good deal 🙂
I’m levelling a Troll Hunter alongside a friend’s Priest, at a somewhat relaxed pace.. enjoying the quests, especially when they involve explosions 😉
Amazon Refunds on Mass Effect 3
Mass Effect 3’s ending has apparently disappointed so many people that Amazon have apparently decided to offer full refunds on the game.. gamers have been reporting that they’ve had refunds on their games, at least. I think this is the start of a slippery slope.
Now.. I’ve not seen this ending yet. I understand that it isn’t quite what people expected, and that people are disappointed. Mass Effect 3 is, however, not broken, and people should not be expecting a refund because they didn’t like how the story turned out. It’s pathetic.
If you played the game through to the end, you’ve had what you paid for. What’s next? Demanding refunds because you didn’t like the ending of a film? A book? Can I order a three-course meal at a restaurant, but then complain that I didn’t like the sauce on my dessert, and so refuse to pay for any of the meal?
Our right to a refund is supposed to be there to protect us from shoddy goods and services, not to allow ridiculously self-entitled people to use products and then end up not paying for them by claiming they were dissatisfied. It isn’t there to allow people to cheat their way out of paying for things.
If Amazon are offering a full refund on ME3 now, they are just encouraging people to buy the game, play it through, and then claim they didn’t like it and ask for their money back. If you claim a refund for a game you have played all the way through to the end, you are worse than a pirate, because not only are you a “lost sale”, you are costing people money in handling the order in the first place; shipping, dealing with your emails and refunding you. You would be less of a burden on the gaming industry if you just downloaded it, played it and deleted it.
And what does this mean for writers? Write the ending that fans want, or risk the potential that they can cheat you out of your pay?
If writers suddenly have to start making the ending the fans want, then we all lose. There’ll be no more creativity; only the same tired storylines that have ‘proven’ themselves satisfactory in the past. Or maybe no story at all. Or we’ll have fan-fiction.. and well.. that doesn’t have a great reputation for quality, does it?
DLC Quest and Lair of the Evildoer
The latest Indie Royale bundle is The St. Patricks Day Bundle: pay what you want for five games: Hard Reset, Jolly Rover, Vertex Dispenser, DLC Quest and Lair of the Evildoer! Hard Reset, Jolly Rover and Vertex Dispenser came with Steam keys, while DLC Quest and Lair of the Evildoer were available through Desura or via download.
I played Going Loud Studios‘ DLC Quest first, a platform action game which takes a rather amusing swipe at the games industry and the increasing use of DLC, as well as gamers’ fears that we’re being exploited by DLC.
Avoiding The Indie Face Kick
Another indie bundle is due to launch soon: the Indie Face Kick, which has been put together by the guys at Gaming: All The Time. This bundle contains eight games: Booster Trooper, Dead Horde, Sol Survivor, Avencast, Runespell, Still Life 2, PAM and Greed Black Border.
I wouldn’t mind looking at the games.. but this bundle, or more specifically, the organisation of this bundle, feels far too unprofessional.. I’m unimpressed with the organisers’ attitude towards customers’ concerns and criticism.
Update: BacklogJourney has done a little more digging.. the organisers are, or were, more heavily involved with their Russian Steam Key advertiser than they were letting on, with this advertiser providing keys for their competitions, too. (more…)
Borderlands Completed!
I’ve had many false starts with Borderlands.. starting way back around Sept 2010, when we picked up a four-pack in a Steam sale, when I felt I was holding friends back and being confused by the guns.. a later attempt with a friend which I think ended in a lost savegame due to a Windows reinstall.. an attempt to play on lunchbreaks at work.. and finally, this one!
Seeing details coming out for Borderlands 2 gave me another nudge to get back to it.. it’s been a few months since we played last. This isn’t to do with the quality of the game.. the game is great.. it’s to do with a variety of distractions, including the arrival of Skyrim 😉
When we played last time, we’d got ourselves killed over and over again in the Circle of Slaughter.
We returned to this after completing another mission or two, with a bit more determination to beat it. We were killed again.. you really do need to use cover.. but went back in and beat it seemingly by glitch: far fewer enemies spawned and it seemed that it had just carried on from the point we’d reached in our last attempt, instead of returning to the start.
There were more ..interesting-looking enemies to fight.. the Rakk Hive in particular. She spawned Rakks as well as poisonous clouds, so we had to move around a little while shooting.. we both had a sniper rifle, so aimed for the eyes to cause most damage!
I was glad my friend had recommended taking the left path on the approach to this fight, because it made aiming easier.. and we’d have been standing underneath it.. the Rakk Hive’s body remained as a solid object when it died, blocking us from getting at the chests! I guess if we’d been fighting from underneath, it might have landed on us and trapped or killed us.
The last big fight of the game was at the Vault.. the contents of the Vault not being weapons or loot, but a huge beast called The Destroyer, which was imprisoned here! Ammo was a bit of a problem, as The Destroyer has quite a lot of health.. and again, co-op wins out as there were a few instances where we needed to revive each other. In single-player, this would have meant starting again, making a much harder fight!
Some of the DLC was on offer a while ago, so I still have that to play through.. but as the main story is done, I’m putting this one down as another game completed! 🙂
Minecraft – Super Pirate Battle Royale
A friend linked me to Rock Paper Shotgun’s article about Super Pirate Battle Royale for Minecraft.. two huge battleships with working cannons firing TNT!
I thought this was some kind of a mod, but it’s actually a map, which you can download from Planet Minecraft. If, like me, you wanted to take a look around but don’t have access to a server, it does work in singleplayer! To add the map into your game, just copy the folder into your .minecraftsaves folder (mine is C:UsersKristineAppDataRoaming.minecraftsaves).
Used Vs New
The Mass Effect Day 1 DLC debate got me thinking about some of the issues in the games industry. Are customers being exploited? Are customers losing out while stuck in the middle of the publishers’ fight against used games? My thoughts on DLC can be found here.
I can see why publishers and developers might not like used games.
New games go into the shops, with the retailer paying a fee for the product and then selling it on, making the initial outlay back plus profits. That in itself, is fair. However, when it comes to used games, the retailer pays the customer a small trade in fee and then re-sells the game, keeping all the income from that sale to themselves. Although multiple customers will buy the game, often exchanging the same copy, the developer only receives payment on the first sale. (more…)
Metacritic Drama with Mass Effect 3
Mass Effect 3 launched today in the US with UK gamers forced to wait until Friday. The game has scored high ratings from the press, as expected, and has a Metacritic score of 93, but the user score is currently down at 2.5, based on 562 votes.
Sounds familiar.. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 also took an initial battering on their user score: one of the devs asked for help on Twitter, noting that the score was “suspiciously low”. Indeed, there were a large number of 0 ratings across the three platforms.
While I’m sure there are plenty of honest ratings being submitted for the game, and here for Mass Effect 3, the political voters have certainly been out in force. Are people downvoting the game out of spite at the Day 1 DLC? Or is it rage at the latest revelation that the multiplayer will have an effect on the ending of your singleplayer game? (more…)
A Weekend’s Gaming
Most of the weekend was spent playing games (Mass Effect 3 multiplayer and Orcs Must Die!), with a little spent outside in the sun, and some TV time thrown in as well. I’d call that a good weekend 🙂
We had decided to get together and try out the multiplayer demo for Mass Effect 3.
Are we being exploited by DLC?
Spurred on by the debate around the Mass Effect 3 DLC, I started writing some thoughts down.. but it quickly turned into a definite TL;DR with DLC, online passes, pre-order bonuses, retailer exclusives and the fight against used games.. as well as the all-too-common cry that customers are being exploited.
So.. I’ve split it all up, with this part mainly being about DLC, in-game purchases and other bonuses, and another part to come about the fight against used games. I’ve mentioned a few games or companies in my examples here.. either because they were the first or best example to come to mind, or because I know that product better. I’m sure I’ve missed some great examples, and although I’ve checked my facts, I may have something wrong or out of date in here.. so feel free to let me know in the comments 🙂
The first Mass Effect 3 DLC pack appeared briefly on the Xbox Live Marketplace last week, and stirred up quite a debate about exploitation.
One complaint against DLC is that it provides an incentive for developers to withhold part of the game to charge more for it later.. or even on the same day, in the case of Day 1 or unlocks of content from the game disk itself. You can’t return DLC if you don’t enjoy it, nor can you sell it on as it’s usually tied to your game account. Other complaints are about price (Modern Warfare 2’s ‘Stimulus Package’: £10 for 5 maps, two of which were re-releases), or the worth of the DLC (Oblivion’s Horse Armour), and then there’s the idea that it’s only being produced to milk consumers for every last penny. (more…)