BWprowl wrote:Onslaught Six wrote: I know we don't need to have this argument but I'm going to do it anyway:
Whatevs, let’s rumble.
I’m gonna preface this by admitting that I don’t actually own any current-gen consoles. I’ve experienced all these issues either playing with friends or borrowing consoles for a time to play particular games. Which may say either more or less about the prevalence of said issues.
See, this is interesting, because I had a lot of these similar complaints before I ever actually owned my 360! It's more like these things are tiny niggling incidents in the overall larger picture.
MGS4 had those ridiculous wait times for data install between game portions. It was like a loading screen to the millionth power. That aside, this sentiment mainly came from my friends’ attempts to play MAG, which saw them buy the game, then spend over a day installing the data and then downloading patches and updates before they were even allowed to jump in and play.
Did MGS4 *require* you to install the game to the hard drive? Or did you optionally do this? Because like I said, I've never had a game that required me to install it to the hard drive beyond downloading some miniscule (we're talking 500k) updates, and I've basically seen the results of installing a game in action--it loads a teeny tiny bit faster. Striderneko has Left 4 Dead 2 installed on his hard drive, and we play it online semi-frequently--he gets about an extra second or two of time inside the safe room before mine loads. Woooo isn't that extra boost great? Besiding that, I don't even have a hard drive, just the flash drives, so I don't even think the boost would do that much.
FAKE EDIT: I lied. Halo 3 requires you to have a hard drive (not just flash drives, an actual Xbox 360 hard drive) to play online co-op. But even then, you can play the single player just fine.
I’m more complaining about the updates rather than the bugs themselves. I was cruising along, enjoying myself on Heavy Rain a while back, when the game just *stops* me in the middle of my session and says “No, you can’t keep playing, we have to spend two hours downloading and installing an update for shit you probably wouldn’t have noticed anyway.” I didn’t even get a choice in the matter, it just kicked me out and told me to wait. Trying to get around the matter by going offline just resulted in the game telling me that it couldn’t play because it *knew* there was an update out there for it, and to get back online so it could get it.
That's really weird! It must be a PS3 thing--my Xbox 360 has never done that, only ever asking me to update when I boot the console or a game. And even then, I can just decline and then continue to play the game normally. Also, how big are these updates man? I've never downloaded one that was more than a meg or two.
Maps and such are kind of a whatever, but I’m mainly talking about stuff like fighting games like BlazBlue Continuum Shift or MvC3. Both put out DLC characters barely months after the games shipped. Of course I want all the characters in a fighting game, you assholes! That’s not ‘expanding the game’, that’s holding the full game hostage. I could’ve waited a few more months, if those characters weren’t ready for when the game was due to be released, then the game shouldn’t have been released before it was ready!
I don't get it, though. It's like when they made Super Street Fighter 2 or whatever and added Deejay and T. Hawk and Cammy. They're just 'additional' characters. New ones that weren't done. Whereas back in the day you'd have to pay full price for that, now you just get them as DLC. Of course, Capcom doesn't understand this, so we get shit like Super Street Fighter 4 and Ultimate MVC3, so you end up paying $40-60 for the addition of, what, four new characters, rather than $15?
You could also just wait those few more months, pick the game up for far less money to begin with, and then pay for the DLC to make it even out. Nothing says you *have* to buy the latest game right now right now gotta go fast and buy it when it comes out; especially when we all have such huge backlogs anyway.
See MAG again, and MGS4’s online mode, which required TWO accounts to be set up, and was a nightmare to navigate in general.
I never played MAG, nor MGS4, so I can only really comment on my own experiences. From what I've heard though, things like this are the exception rather than the rule.
Like I said, I’m mainly playing with my friends here, who all have wireless controllers that are in a perpetual state of powerlessness, letting us play that fun battery-pack juggling game as we desperately try to extend our play time. (Can I also add a side note here that the Xbox360’s controllers powered by disposable batteries is one of the dumbest fucking ideas I’ve encountered in a long time?)
They are, but there also exist charge packs for the 360 controllers. Mostly a way to get more money out of you by having to buy that as well as a controller.
This mainly comes from the 360, which’ll start on the home screen on my friend’s account with everything loaded and good, then we’ll pop in the game disc and hit play, then it’ll pop up and ask me if I want to sign in, and I think it’s just asking me if I want to sign in and it will, but SURPRISE it was actually asking if I wanted to be the primary-account-data-to-load-whatever for this particular game, and of course as a visiting Player 2 I don’t have any data, so we get in and nothing’s unlocked or available, so we have to back out and try again.
Sign in on the guide screen before you load the game. Or don't turn the controller on until after the game is loaded. I do these and I never have a problem.
I admit that I am, but you know what? Look at all these little niggles and annoyances and inconveniences that I’ve just listed as experiencing. It’s hardly the portrait of convenience that used to define console gaming. The damn things are practically PCs themselves now. I just want to pop in a game and play it without having to put batteries in a controller, or having to synch it, or having to sign into an account, or install a disc, or download a patch, or realize that I’m playing a glorified demo disc because I don’t have all the DLC. All the “old” consoles were able to pull this off, why is it the new, more technologically advanced consoles are apparently incapable of doing so?
And I understand the concerns! I had them too. It's part of why I didn't buy a 360 (or Wii or PS3) when they first game out. Part of me was really let down by the Wii in general (diehard Nintendo fanboy here) and the original Xbox didn't exactly have the best reputation so I first started just waiting them out. Then I heard about all this general stuff. Then I went to college, started hanging out with my new college friends, played Left 4 Dead a couple times, and had pretty much all of them go "Get a 360, get a 360, get a 360 so we can play games, get a 360." (So of course I waited until I dropped out to get one.)
But once I had the console I realized most of my concerns weren't that bad, and only a handful of games 'ever' had problems like this, and when they did it was never all of the problems at once. I own something like 20 games and none of them has ever made me register a new account to do anything; it all just uses my Xbox Live account. (To be fair: This might be a PS3 issue more than a 360 one because the PS3 doesn't, or at least didn't until semi-recently, have a console-wide online architecture like the 360.) I've never had to wait more than a few seconds to download a miniscule ~500k update. And the DLC issue; I usually buy games several months later anyway so I can see if the DLC is even worth it or even wait for a price drop for it. (The War for Cybertron DLC is now $10 total, for example.) And on top of that, the DLC is usually not totally needed. I played through and beat both Mass Effect 2 and LA Noire without buying any of the DLC, for example, and don't feel as though I was gypped at all. I bought some of Resident Evil 5's DLC and was vastly disappointed; but it was an extra prequel side story to the main game and, as I've been playing through the main game, everything has been generally cool without worrying about it.
You can't condemn the modern consoles for this; you can only condemn individual games. I can condemn RE5 for having shitty DLC that I paid too much for, but I can't do the same for any other game without knowing what the DLC is--and there's several games whose DLC were entirely worth their price, like the Scott Pilgrim DLC which was a whole $2 for Knives Chau and a few extra bonus modes.
And I know you're thinking, "Well if all the characters weren't done, why even release it?" Because I had a bunch of fun just with the original four characters and fifth unlockable (Nega Scott)--in fact, I didn't even unlock Nega Scott until after Knives came out. Plus, the game *was* rushed so it could meet the theater deadline for the movie--TONS of stuff was cut from it. But I enjoyed the game just fine *without* the extra character; so paying the extra $2 to extend the life of my game a little was fine.
Fact is, games have deadlines, and DLC actually allows them to extend the life of the game and give us some of that extra stuff that, previously, would just get cut. For example, let's look at Metroid Prime. Did you know Kraid was going to be in it? He was, for real. But they didn't have enough time to finish him and his area, so they cut it. If Metroid Prime was released on a console now (let's pretend the Wii has DLC), then they might have been able to have, like, "Kraid's Lair" DLC, giving you a whole new area of cut content to explore. You might say, "Why not just delay the game until Kraid was done?"
Because you can only delay a game for so long. LA Noire was in development since at least 2004--that's over 'seven years' of development, and the game still had things cut from it. You can't just infinitely work on a game, because developing games is a business, and if you don't deliver product on a decent enough timetable, you lose money. Team Bondi developed LA Noire for seven years, and the costs of developing it over that amount of time were so great that
even with the massive financial success of that game, they had to go bankrupt and close down the studio. You can't just work on a game forever--at some point, somebody has to say,
Okay, that's enough, no more. DLC lets us get some of that stuff that wasn't finished.
REAL EDIT: Some of this sounds more inflammatory than it's supposed to be. I think I'm in a mood today; I just got into an argument with someone else over something unrelated on Twitter. I think the main thing here is that I'm hearing you bring up things that are directly counter to my own experiences. It's a bit of Matrix shock, you know, someone whose opinion I trust telling me that the sky really is green when all this time I've thought it was blue. So I'm rather violently going "The fuck it is!"
