Quote from: RagingDragon on Feb 16, 2013, 05:13:29 PM
Quote from: Elicas on Feb 16, 2013, 04:55:00 PM
Those days are (generally) long behind us because of DLC. If you can make or mod the changes you want, they wont be able to sell you as much DLC. There are a few games who allow modding next to their DLC (notably Skyrim) but they're an ever decreasing minority.
Blame people like the fans who bought the season pass the day A:CM came out before playing to see how bad the game was, or those who pre-ordered the game before reading any reviews.
You can't accuse the developers of lying with one hand and then blame the customers with the other. There were plenty of good reasons to buy the season pass and/or pre-order, if that's your thing, and they give you incentives for both. The odds were good that this would at least be an average game, and the anticipation was so great that a lot of people wanted to buy and play it just on principle of how long it's taken.
If you say they lied about the game, you can't blame people for believing their lies and taking someone's repeated word as the truth when they have little reason to think otherwise.
And I don't feel that something like DNF was a good reason to think that Pitchford was just selling us all a pile of bull. They had different circumstances, and if anything I personally would think the DNF mess would make Gearbox more likely to be honest this time around and avoid a repeat scenario.
Guess not.
Actually, in my honest opinion, anyone buying the game on pre-order is entirely to blame for the abundance of pre-order shenanigans going on nowadays, the quality of the product doesn't come into the equation. My issue isn't with people falling for Gearbox/Randy's lies, the issue is people buying a game before having tried it or waited for a decent spectrum of reviews to arrive and allow them to make an informed decision.
The issue is: The more people pre-order a game and the more money devs make from day one purchases, the more likely they are to enforce release date review embargoes and produce sham marketing ploys to sucker in more pre-orders.
A:CM is a prime example, though not only shitty games are guilty of this, put out lots of bonuses as a 'reward' for pre-ordering a game that you have no real knowledge about in order to boost sales. And no, no matter how much controlled footage you watch, you can never know 100% how a game is until it has either been reviewed by a wide range of unbiased sources or released a demo and you can try the damn game yourself.
Even games that released to critical acclaim and financial success is guilty of this, take Dishonoured and it's 11 different release versions for example (I can't remember the exact number, but nearly every different store had it's own pre-order bonus of an exclusive in game ability).
Every time you pre-order a game, you're setting yourself up for a disappointment, and studios will continue to put out sub-standard products they can get away with on the back of those pre-orders. Look at the sheep who constantly bemoan CODs lack of improvement year on year, yet still fall foul of the pre-order marketing hype and buy the game before a substantial review or demo is released.
Gearbox made a shit game, I'm not deflecting away from that. Everyone who pre-ordered it and paid for the DLC season pass has basically said "Yeah, I'll buy it, it's got Aliens on it!". What they'll take away from this is that Aliens is hugely popular and will sell pretty much anything, the outrage and poor review scores only work in our favour if the game is a financial failure as well as a critical failure.
Stop pre-ordering games, waiting an extra day or two won't f**king kill you, but it could have saved you all £40/$60 and
really made an impact on what SEGA/Gearbox do in the future.