Tale

There's also a customer base that looks at them and thinks that the products with them are shoddy and exploitative. Brand is about public image, after all. There's a market for fast food burgers, but you shouldn't offer them at your restaurant if you want to be seen as high class. I think microtransactions are losing lots of that low class stigma, but that's only because of a push from people like Valve and the MOBA front with the free-to-play model. The "$60 with microtransaction" model doesn't seem like something EA has the popular backing to make people reassess. It's all about the brand, still. Reboots feed off the popularity of the old titles. It's going to be harder to maintain that brand the more often you put it out there. Exceptions occur, but for every Call of Duty there's two Guitar Heroes. And even Call of Duty is reportedly on the decline. There wouldn't be nearly as big a push for the next Longest Journey game if it was TLJ 8, instead of simply TLJ 3. But of course it applies to games. If it didn't, Lara Croft and Thief wouldn't have been rebooted, just given sequels. Tales of the Sword Coast and Awakening aren't the kind of story baggage creating DLC I'm talking about. Dragon Age 2 and Baldur's Gate 2 have zero reason to care about those expansions. I'm talking Lair of the Shadow Broker, Arrival, and that Dead Space 3 DLC. In fairness, Ubisoft Montreal has been absolutely terrible about this going back to Prince of Persia 2008, far worse than any EA studio. It doesn't kill franchises, but it's intimidating to newcomers. Have you never seen someone ask "do I need to play the older games first to understand it?" When the answer is "yeah, but you also need to play the DLC" that's going to be offputting to some people. That's going to limit people coming in and also negatively effect the older fans who already are in but missed it. There's lots of complaints about not knowing what was going on with ME3's opening because that was split into a DLC and a comic book. And Kai Leng because he's from books, as well.

I don't know how people think they were all that similar. The pacing and tone are completely different. The advanced skills and loadout change kill the need for specialization. The Earth tutorial is probably the worst level in the franchise, with overdone and transparent scripting. I'm sorry, I guess that turned from "they're different" to "some of the things I hate about ME3."

More of Tale's running commentary.

I'm against microtransactions. I absolutely love DLC done right. Quality DLC is good! DLC that only exists because they needed to push out DLC, so they put the B-team on it is bad. I think there needs to be more brand consciousness. Microtransactions don't strengthen the brand. DLCs that use recycled maps, or that are simply guns and armor don't strengthen the brand. They don't promote confidence from the audience, they won't bring in new audience members. And confidence from the audience is a very big issue, especially for EA at the moment. If enough crap gets put out there, people will start avoiding the quality as well. That was the crash of 83 in a nutshell. What they do is shift the conversation from what is being done right to what is being done wrong. And that conversation seems to be why Lucas left Star Wars. There's an audience for low quality, admittedly. That's how Seltzer and Freidburg make their living. That's why the Resident Evil movies refuse to die. But I don't think EA wants to be them. Though their Direct-To-DVD tie-in movies give me cause to doubt. Aside from quality, there's also the saturation issue. Why are so many franchises being rebooted? Because the developers/publisher doubt they'll be able to grow the audience with all the old baggage behind them. Lots of DLC is just adding to that baggage that hurts growth. This is a problem for comic books at the moment. And games are seeing it too. The audience is not growing, it's becoming very isolated, because it's only the people who have all this knowledge of backstory that have been following or are willing to follow. The biggest part of this for DLC is story critical DLC (and tie-in books). It's adding on a whole other layer of backstory that people could be missing, and even some of them the regular recurring fans. And the resulting reboots are retcons are doing nothing for confidence either. How many people do you think Marvel and DC has lost to their "never stay dead" problem? Probably a little less than if they kept those characters dead. They've trapped themselves in a no-win situation where they struggle to grow because what they need to grow will alienate their core. And that's poisonous. Because they're adding all this baggage that their core feels needs to be honored, and those are the very people they rely on to aid growth.

He was good for turning EA around from a shovelware producer. He's supposed to be the reason they stopped doing movie licenses. Remember those Lord of the Ring and Harry Potter games? It's taken Activision until recently to see the problem there. There are quality licensed titles, granted, EA had a few good LOTR games and Activision has the Transformer titles. I'm not intimate with all the problems, but like I said, Activision is coming to the same conclusion EA had several years ago. He pushed for fewer games, higher quality. But then we started getting more, low quality DLC, and the recent moves to microtransactions in AAA titles. Which is sort of like dating your abusive ex because she changed her hair color and calls herself Star. Yeah, they're not paying licensing fees anymore, but they're saturating their brands and devaluing them. I also suspect some level of undermanagement in his tenure. But I'm not in a position to say that with any credibility.

I heard about that. I hate tie in novels that insert themselves into game plots. I hate cross-media stories in general. Fine if they want books for Starcraft, that's cool. Why do they have to be in the middle of the stories from the games and about the same characters? Make whole new stories instead.

Now for Tale's running commentary on Heart of the Swarm. Those are nitpicks, especially number 3. Though I do hate retcons. By the second mission outtro I had already gotten past all three. Kerrigan herself is well characterized, though may be falling into the "women are defined by relationships" trap.

I really doubt that's a strictly DRM thing. It wouldn't have been so easy to cut out if it were. My benefit of the doubt suspicion is that they are simply very strongly attached to the idea of SimCity Social to the point they have no regard for non-social play. On the other end, and in-line with the DRM idea, is that always online enables them to verify integrity for DLC and microtransaction purposes.

Finished Game of Thrones season 2, so I'm back to being focused on Wings of Liberty. Also checked out the first map of Heart of the Swarm. Jim's gone creepy on us. Kerrigan a bit too. The drama is too much for me.

There's a couple of positions I see on Saint's Row as a franchise that dislike 3 and, by extension, 4. 1) Saint's Row 3 didn't put enough effort into its world as compared to Saint's Row 2. And they forsee 4 continuing that trend. 2) Saint's Row 3 wasn't serious enough gangsters. I'm on the fence with 4. I'm not in those camps, I rather liked 3, but I'm worried 4 may be rushed.

When I actually play a game lately, it's Starcraft 2 Wings of Liberty. I expect Heart of the Swarm to arrive tomorrow. I won't have completed my Wings of Liberty replay by then, sadly, as I keep getting distracted by the GoT blu-rays.

I've always wondered how those discount places got their keys. Figured them more for grey market than black. And unlike Prell, I'd definitely call products bought with stolen cards then resold "black."

I think he would have been fine if the moment he shows up, Shepard kicks his ass, and then dies. He deserves about as good a treatment as Jack-Phantom.

I've heard good things about FTL, but haven't played it myself.

Is Project Awakened not the game Midway was working on right before it closed down?

Reduced weight is what I remember, don't recall if they do more damage.

I wanted Legion. He is the most neglected companion in the franchise.

So does it have Legion and Mordin or not?

Bored of Mass Effect 3 multiplayer again. Gold is still the antithesis of fun. I like that they mixed it up, added new enemies, added weather conditions. Some of the new classes are fun, but the balance is terrible. And others are so boring, it seems like they just slapped powers on a model to fill out the list.

Hohohohoho, but you can't play the new classes without paying Bioware/EA for the privelige! Unless you want to play 6-10 20 minute horde mode (as if there's any other kind in ME3,) matches to accrue enough in-game currency to buy a Booster Pack that may or may not have a new class in it. It probably won't, and if it does, it'll be a garbage one you didn't want. Or one you already had. Best part about the ME3 MP Collectible Card Game? The cards are untradable! See, I would actually buy a DLC (so long as it wasn't above $10 in price,) for the main game if it added a bunch of the new classes for single player, because a lot of the new MP classes actually play differently from the vanilla ME1 class set that has gone unchanged. Also wouldn't mind getting some of that armor, mixing and matching the standard armor parts starts to look like ass (in the bad way) in the normal game. I'm mostly with you. I think that if they did this as DLC instead of microtransactions, I'd be far more comfortable with it and definitely more interested. I decided to give it another chance and some of the new classes are actually interesting. Though terrible configured. Like the Volus Adept has two extra powers, a cloak and a shield. Yeah, they're configured to the melee button.

World of Warcraft and Team Fortress also combine random items with token systems so you can buy what you want, crafting so you can buy what you want with an alternate currency, and some form of trading so you can trade for what you want. They're proven mechanics to make people feel like they have power over their progression and that it's not all a grind that exists solely to keep them playing.

I doubt Sony would follow suit. They would crush Microsoft if Microsoft goes through with it and they don't.

NWN holds a special place in my heart as one of the only games I can't really discuss without slipping into an incomprehensible rant. Which is why this will be brief. Dragon Age 2 has far more redeeming qualities in my eyes.

So I reinstalled Mass Effect 3. Thought I'd check out all the new classes for multiplayer and see if they may get me interested in it again. Right after it was done installing, I looked up the new classes on the wiki. "Oh... so the juggernaut's just another soldier. That's just a... nevermind." And uninstalled it before actually playing again. Good thing I don't have download caps.

I just did CTRL+F for "evil" on all three pages of this thread. Page 1: Not found. Page 2: 1 instance. Someone mentioning that EA is singled out because everyone else thinks EA is evil. Page 3: You. So here we have a three page discussion that includes people disliking what EA is doing and not one of them is calling EA an evil empire for it. What seems silly to me is that you're either misrepresenting those who disagree with it, or you're cherry picking parts of the audience that aren't even present in order to dismiss the discussion. Who are you arguing with here? Similar to "evil," nobody in this thread has said that EA needs to die. What point are you making by pointing at people that aren't even involved in our discussion? That's not far removed from bringing up the developers that fell under EA's management. It strikes me as simply trying to win over sympathies with off-topic commentary.