With the advent of DLC’s game publishers are getting more and more ridiculous with content and how its presented to its user base. I hate microtransactions with games and they are becoming mainstream to the point they are worthless to what they add to the game and making the games themselves worthless.
As publishers tap this as a primary income source games loose alot of there content because the game release often is hobbled to the point of being a few hours long and content running out in the first 5 hours. Often now you see unfinished games released with Day 1 DLC’s that fill in holes in the game that were made by short cutting the game and putting these pieces of a game behind a pay wall.
My friend picked up call of duty MW3 and i noticed that right on the box they were pushing for picking up something called Call of Duty elite premium and I wondered. What is it? its basically a $50 dollar limited license to the future content and a bunch of crap that was either free or was in games in the past.
Looking quickly over what you get with this “service”
3. Analyze & Improve Your Performance
Access Guides to Maps, Weapons, Killstreaks, Perks, and Equipment
Most games before COD ussaully have some sort of stats tracking , Hell Unreal tournament had this kind of stat tracking back in December 1999 . That 11 years before COD, Sure this is still on the free end of the elite but, what the hell, I know they are going to say but this costs money to track on a server etc etc etc. Not really since it takes all of ten miliseconds and a few lines of code to say l33tk4lla killed soandso.
4. Customize your load outs & sync DIRECTLY to the game
WHY? if you at work trying to think about how to kill someone in a game and you’re bored shitless likely its not going to work.
onwards to ..
7. THEATER
Free Premium
- Upload & Share 30 Second HD Videos Online
10. MW3 DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT*, INCLUDING ALL THE MW3 MAPS
Premium
- More Content than Ever, with 20 Pieces of New MW3 DLC Premium
- New monthly DLC released over 9 months, so you Always have Something New to Play Premium
- More Variety than Ever, with New MP Maps, Spec Ops, Missions, Game Modes & More Premium
- You get to keep all the DLC even if your membership expires. Premium
This is what is annoying. Likely all this material was fleshed out waaaay before the release of the game so they will keep dropping it on players to keep the “interest of players” up, there’s a tell tale sign that this content is either done or was near done when Call of Duty was released.
Read it carefully ….. 20 pieces of …. New monthly DLC over 9 months… new game modes. basically they announced they have this DONE and set to be dripped out to the user base as slow as possible to keep interest in the game rather than have a finished product. Since the announcement is in finite numbers rather than speculative, which means they either cut this from the game or made a decision to leave this from the game.
DLC type content is an excuse to release a half finished game and get 3x the money for it. If you look at the cost of MW3 its pretty much over a 100$ for a complete game since the shelf life for these games are limited to about 12 months at most.
In the past games were given free content to keep interest or letting people mod the games to their hearts content . Now if you mod a game to have more fun its pretty much going to get you banned from the game. These games now come with FREE planned obsolescence .
What happened with games we could play to our hearts content and Not worry if EA or someone will shut down an aspect of the game or software that therefor makes the product unusable , They Should be forced to put some sort of patch into games that have to connect to servers that multiplayer still works on a connection without the need for servers in the middle. Direct connect games used to be common but they are hard to find these days without some sort of hoops to jump through.
Basically if this gets ground… game will continue down this bad path and players will suffer at the hands of the producers of this crap.
My guess is when COD 10 is release and you want to play COD MW3 for old time sake you will try to play and get “CONNECTION REFUSED” and be stuck with the Disc that now serves as your coffee cup coaster.