Dragon Age -- BOYCOTT THIS GAME

[Tessera]

I understand where people like Will and Steeal are coming from.
They are afraid that a boycott against Dragon Age (and all other
games that strong-arm you into buying DLC right off the bat)
will send the wrong message to the industry. They fear that a
boycott will be misinterpreted as a sign that people dislike the
game itself... which in turn might diminish the importance of
quality developers in the eyes of nasty publishers like EA.

Well, I disagree. Especially with all of the outrage being expressed
all over the web regarding this greedy and amoral DLC scheme.
I don't see how EA could interpret a boycott as being anything
other than a big "NO..!!!" vote to DLC scams.

I like Dragon Age, for the most part. But I won't pay to be exploited
by EA or anyone else. I would rather see the game die, than to willingly
encourage the industry to continue with this wretched practice. I felt
the same way about Hellgate: London, too. And they got what they
deserved... in spite of the fact that the game had a lot of promise.

If you rip people off, then you deserve to fail. 

[GameOn]

My prediction:  It's only going to get worse.  They have already tested out a scheme where you pay to play each level, or chapter, of a game.  I think you are going to basically buy a portal in which you add on whatever features and quests you want. 

These companies are not stupid.  They will sell you just enough of the "package" to get all hot and bothered at a price point that will seem reasonable (barely), then roll out the rest of the shit. They will promote the whole ball of wax, with a little asterisk saying that "additional content sold separately".  It's just like when you bought the GI Joe thinking it came with the whole army base like you saw on TV.

Ultimately, it will swing around.  Once the consumer is so fucking fed up with it all, and is so big that they comprise a whole consumer base, and a "revolutionary" company will re-emerge to sell games, "like they used to be... Complete at the point of sale!!!"  No fucking DLC.  Instead the team starts to work on the next game.

[Recon Ranger]

The biggest problem for the gaming industry was the success of games like TESIII. Why? because it was engineered to be modable and the modders went nuts and churned out a SHITLOAD of mods of all different types enabling you to completely customize YOUR game YOUR WAY; as well as adding a great many quests; NONE OF WHICH the gaming industry got to capitilze on! However, having seen the possibilities they are now making moves to exploit those POSSIBILTIES to the MAX! I'm with you on this part of it GO; I too think it will probably get MUCH worse before it gets better. The only hope I can see is for ENOUGH gamers to stop worrying about the industry realize that your choices are two and simple; reward the companies that treat you right with your business and let the rest either learn from it or fail. 

[anariel]

The biggest problem for the gaming industry was the success of games like TESIII. Why? because it was engineered to be modable and the modders went nuts and churned out a SHITLOAD of mods of all different types enabling you to completely customize YOUR game YOUR WAY; as well as adding a great many quests; NONE OF WHICH the gaming industry got to capitilze on! However, having seen the possibilities they are now making moves to exploit those POSSIBILTIES to the MAX! I'm with you on this part of it GO; I too think it will probably get MUCH worse before it gets better. The only hope I can see is for ENOUGH gamers to stop worrying about the industry realize that your choices are two and simple; reward the companies that treat you right with your business and let the rest either learn from it or fail. 

Actually, I think NeverWinter Nights was even more critical than TESIII for that. Granted they both have great moddability, but NWN's editor was, plainly, easier to work with. Morrowind and Oblivion, aside from the "official" expansions, got both some unofficial expansions, but mainly modded items (cloth, armor, spells, houses...); meanwhile, NWN got a lot of extra work, tons of additional great modules (strangely, however, the best scripted mods and some of the very best written ones were strongly sex-based, like "A Dance with Rogues" parts 1 & 2), and even complete rehauls (both PRC -Player's Resource Compendium, with extra base classes and advanced classes-, CEP -Community Expansion Pack, with thousands of items and models-, and even a D20 modern conversion!!). Also, TESIII didn't got DLC, but NWN did, in the form of a couple of standalone extra mods you had to buy directly to Bioware and who required internet verification to be played.

As for my opinion in DLC, I think we have shit for a couple of years at the least. That and more incursions in MMORPG, or at least online games with monthly fee (with the less monthly investment as possibly).

[Tessera]

There are more mods for Oblivion on the web than for any other PC game in history.   

[perez007usa]

Whoa! When did NWN have DLC?  Play the game and all with WrathChild, mods (my apologies if I didn't spell it right) with no DLC, I have the Diamond issue, Morrowind the same, played them with the Total Conversion also. Duke Nukum had mods also.
  
    These modders and conversionest, gave out their work for nothing, like Tess's True Patch. They gave the "How To's" for us to make them.
Now, these greedy bastards of the gaming industry want to charge us for add-ons and what nut, while a whole lot of FREE stuff is on the web, for your gaming pleasure. If they are trying to put a stop to our FREE add-ons , ,, Then their games are not worth buying, no matter how good it is, which surprises me with all these bad games coming out. (Charging you a fee to fix a broken piece of shit when they sold it that way, is not a good way to do business( maybe it is, in their feeble minds).

    But it is happening. You guys are shelling out lots of MONEY to get these games, even when you know its broken( I learn that mistake when I got "DURRUA". That's another story). Your just telling the industries that's it all right, Hell NO !! it's not alright, I don't have that kind of MONEY to spend on something that's broken from the get-go. I'm just one of those Consumers that the industries HATE,,, being smart in what I do with my HARD EARN CASH.
  

[anariel]

Perez: NWN had about three modules made by Bioware you had to pay for to be able to play. They were cheap (no more than 10$ the three, I think), and completely unrelated to the main campaings. Just like a fan-made module, made by the Bioware people (and heavily scripted), but with a prize tag. I bought them, but since I couldn't make them work with the PRC and I didn't want to start again with a Lv1 character, I never really played them (what I loved from the PRC was the spells, by the way. A D&D mage in the NWN gains a ton with the Lv7 spell "Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion").

Tessera: Yep, Oblivion have more mods than any other game. But NwN was made so anyone could make his own "expansion pack", like the old strategy games with the map editor (Starcraft comes to my mind for all the possibilities it had), so you could have, literally, thousands of gameplay hours with the same character. That were not really mods, but entirely new adventures... more like Oblivion's Knights of the Nine expansion, if you like.

[Tessera]

Tessera: Yep, Oblivion have more mods than any other game. But NwN was made so anyone could make his own "expansion pack"

Yah... and so was Oblivion. Hence the TES Construction Kit, which was created by Bethesda. Anybody with the skills, creativity and motivation could create anything up to an including an entire full-game conversion for Oblivion, if they wanted to. And there are many people who have one exactly that. There are almost no limits to what you can do to that game.

[perez007usa]

Perez: NWN had about three modules made by Bioware you had to pay for to be able to play.

  I beg to differ, my NWN Diamond has all 3 modules. It only cost me $9.00 for the  three in one game. where do you get this idea that I had to pay for them, I have been playing ALL THREE games on my old puter, just like Morrowind, Tribunal and Bloodstone. I did not pay any cost what so ever. I had a beef with Half-Life 2 about downloading the rest of the game from Steam, and I play them all OFFLINE, I don't like paying for something I all ready pay for. If thats the way you like it, doing  that way, then by all means go for it.

[GameOn]

I can't help but see public modding dying a slow death.  At least of the sort we saw in Oblivion.  Too much money to be had.  Sad.   

[Tessera]

Publishers hate modders. We interfere with their profiteering, by releasing mods for free that are often more entertaining than their pay-to-play content is.

Developers are not all that crazy about us, either... especially if some of our mods make their "professional" work look like shit in comparison. We embarrass them.

[Cat]

Publishers hate modders. We interfere with their profiteering, by releasing mods for free that are often more entertaining than their pay-to-play content is.

Developers are not all that crazy about us, either... especially if some of our mods make their "professional" work look like shit in comparison. We embarrass them.

Like the gameplay mods for oblivion and fallout 3.

Don't forget the unofficial patches too.

[Tessera]

Yah... or clothing mods, body mods, re-skins... you name it. I've seen player-made mods that make the original versions look totally amateurish in comparison. Granted, most player-made mods are really awful (most are created by wet-behind-the-ears teenagers, who barely know what the fuck they are doing). But every once in awhile, a modder with real talent will release some especially tasty stuff that absolutely puts the the original developers to shame. It is the -talented- modders that the industry really hates.

Have you ever seen the comments made by developers on the forum board for a particular game..? They'll say all sorts of glowing things about modders and tell us how much they value our efforts. Well let me tell you something: they are LYING THROUGH THEIR TEETH. It would be bad PR for them to be honest about their feelings towards us, so they strategically tell lies in order to avoid alienating their customer base.

But if you wanna know the truth about how they feel, then don't judge their attitudes by what they say on their own boards... judge them by their -actions- instead. Each new game that comes out seems to be increasingly modder-unfriendly these days. Let's take Fallout 3, for example: that game was created by the same company that created the highly mod-able Elder Scrolls games. But when they got around to making Fallout 3, Bethesda held off on releasing a construction set for months and months longer than they had originally promised. Furthermore, they concocted an entirely new type of NIF mesh for that game, so as to deliberately make it incompatible with existing versions of NifSkope (that's why it took several months before any decent body mods appeared for F3). They acted as if they were facing root canal surgery when they finally did release a CS. Or... think about Hellgate: London. Flagship Studios actually went to great pains to make Hellgate VERY difficult to modify. All of the core files are encrypted... all of the textures are of a proprietary nature... all of the working directories were compacted using a proprietary compression method... you name it, and they found a way to lock it away from most modders. And I am sure that you can think of some other recent games which are likewise modder-unfriendly by design.

So as they say... actions speak louder than words. The industry would like nothing better than for modders like me to disappear. We help them to sell their games, yes... but we also interfere with their sales of add-on content and on top of all that, we make their developers look like untalented and lazy buffoons sometimes. That's the bottom line, so far as my own experience in modding has been concerned. And if this forced serialization of games like Dragon Age and others continues unabated, then you can expect the publishers to start cracking down even harder upon modders everywhere. We hurt their pockets... and their pockets are the only part of those parasites that still function.  

[Cat]

Yah... or clothing mods, body mods, re-skins... you name it. I've seen player-made mods that make the original versions look totally amateurish in comparison. Granted, most player-made mods are really awful (most are created by wet-behind-the-ears teenagers, who barely know what the fuck they are doing). But every once in awhile, a modder with real talent will release some especially tasty stuff that absolutely puts the the original developers to shame. It is the -talented- modders that the industry really hates.

Have you ever seen the comments made by developers on the forum board for a particular game..? They'll say all sorts of glowing things about modders and tell us how much they value our efforts. Well let me tell you something: they are LYING THROUGH THEIR TEETH. It would be bad PR for them to be honest about their feelings towards us, so they strategically tell lies in order to avoid alienating their customer base.

But if you wanna know the truth about how they feel, then don't judge their attitudes by what they say on their own boards... judge them by their -actions- instead. Each new game that comes out seems to be increasingly modder-unfriendly these days. Let's take Fallout 3, for example: that game was created by the same company that created the highly mod-able Elder Scrolls games. But when they got around to making Fallout 3, Bethesda held off on releasing a construction set for months and months longer than they had originally promised. Furthermore, they concocted an entirely new type of NIF mesh for that game, so as to deliberately make it incompatible with existing versions of NifSkope (that's why it took several months before any decent body mods appeared for F3). They acted as if they were facing root canal surgery when they finally did release a CS. Or... think about Hellgate: London. Flagship Studios actually went to great pains to make Hellgate VERY difficult to modify. All of the core files are encrypted... all of the textures are of a proprietary nature... all of the working directories were compacted using a proprietary compression method... you name it, and they found a way to lock it away from most modders. And I am sure that you can think of some other recent games which are likewise modder-unfriendly by design.

So as they say... actions speak louder than words. The industry would like nothing better than for modders like me to disappear. We help them to sell their games, yes... but we also interfere with their sales of add-on content and on top of all that, we make their developers look like untalented and lazy buffoons sometimes. That's the bottom line, so far as my own experience in modding has been concerned. And if this forced serialization of games like Dragon Age and others continues unabated, then you can expect the publishers to start cracking down even harder upon modders everywhere. We hurt their pockets... and their pockets are the only part of those parasites that still function.  

Fallout 3 crashes more often too.

[perez007usa]

You guys keep on saying, hit their pockets,,,well,, why don't we,. The prices of games are going to the roof, both consoles and PC's. The only way is NOT TO BUY, plain and simple, can we do that. I have, I hadn't brought a single game, in the past 2 years, because of all the crap that is out there.  Hea! I have been playing new games, TimeShift, all of the Unreal series, that's because I have been game swapping with my friends here. Maybe we should do that, that should put a crimp in the developers ways of thinking.

  I wouldn't put it past them, to try to stop this. Like more CD Keys, more partial installing, the rest form their site, Play with CD in tray( NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!!). and so on and so on.

   I believe in what Tess said, hit them in their pockets. But as long we keep buying games "DOA" and others like it, they will win, and we  will lose.

[Cat]

You guys keep on saying, hit their pockets,,,well,, why don't we,. The prices of games are going to the roof, both consoles and PC's. The only way is NOT TO BUY, plain and simple, can we do that. I have, I hadn't brought a single game, in the past 2 years, because of all the crap that is out there.  Hea! I have been playing new games, TimeShift, all of the Unreal series, that's because I have been game swapping with my friends here. Maybe we should do that, that should put a crimp in the developers ways of thinking.

  I wouldn't put it past them, to try to stop this. Like more CD Keys, more partial installing, the rest form their site, Play with CD in tray( NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!!). and so on and so on.

   I believe in what Tess said, hit them in their pockets. But as long we keep buying games "DOA" and others like it, they will win, and we  will lose.

With the way the economy going down hill, people porb won't be able to buy this shit much longer.

[anariel]

I think the best way to "kill" their selling mood is to buy the games only when they go down in prize a lot. For example, there exists the Orange series in EA+Valve, and the white series in Ubisoft. I bought Mass Effect that way paying 10 bucks only, instead of the 50 the game asked for upon release (of course, I "tested" the game with a pirate version...). That way I think we are sending quite a clear message: we will buy certain games at a certain prize; give higher prizes, and we will wait or pirate the games.

[vanno]

I definitely raged after I purchasing a used copy of this game only to find an unabashed sales pitch for a DLC about 1.5 hours into it (the first camp). Thankfully, I didn't pay rack rate, nor did EA get any of my money; unfortunately, I hadn't come across this noble cause until after that nominal purchase.