The practice of retailer-specific pre-order bonuses for video games needs to end.

[kane_magus]

No ifs, ands, or buts.

Of course, sadly, it only seems to be becoming ever more prevalent.

Comments

[hikarugenji.livejournal.com]

Probably not. Japan has been doing it for many years now, the US just recently caught on to the practice, it seems.

(Although I guess it doesn't bother me all that much because I don't like preorder bonuses in general, given that I don't preorder games that much and it's hard to get import preorder bonuses.)

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

When it was just one preorder bonus that was common among a bunch of retailers (or even just one.) I didn't mind it so much.

I'm a Limited Edition fan anyway I suppose, so I like getting copies that have extra stuff. But I do agree with Kane on how it's being done, regardless of who did it first or where it came from.

This is all the more annoying when it comes to "bonus DLC", which amounts to "We ripped this out of the game and we're giving it ONLY to you fine shoppers of Gamestop. Meanwhile you fine shoppers of Wal-mart can have THIS portion of the game instead. The rest of you, bugger off."

At least for a few months anyway, at which point it becomes "Oh we were kidding about that free DLC being for just those customers. You guys can have it too, for a small payment of 10 dollars."

But then everyone should know how anti-DLC I am, regardless of price or method of delivery. (At least the current implementation of it. Something I don't see as changing to be more favorable to my priorities however.)

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

I miss the days when you just bought a game and... that was it. No DLC. No pre-order bonuses. None of that bullshit.

Also, remember the days when DLC used to be called "expansion packs" and were much more substantial than the current "pay $5-$10 for maybe an extra hour or two worth of content" crap we have today? And were released maybe 6 months to a year or more after a game was out (rather than the same fucking day the game itself is released in many cases now), so that it was at least mostly clear that it wasn't just shit that was ripped out of the original game and was actually new content? I miss those days as well. But then, I miss it even more when they just worked on making an actual sequel to a game (or even better, a new game altogether) rather than wasting time making crap to tack on to the old game.

Hell, it's to the point now where they're even releasing these so-called "full" sequels (and by "full" I of course mean "half-assed, rushed, and chock full of bugs and design flaws") within a year of the original game. I miss the days when sequels were actually sequels and not just a complete redo of the previous game again with maybe a new coat of paint slapped on.

Okay. I could go on about this all day. Rant mode off for now.

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

"Hell, it's to the point now where they're even releasing these so-called "full" sequels (and by "full" I of course mean "half-assed, rushed, and chock full of bugs and design flaws") within a year of the original game."

I was going to bring up Dragon Age II, but I see you beat me to it.

You should have gone for the jugular though and mentioned that the rush job was done after spending a lot of time on DLC for the original game (Which felt like patching back in material they originally hacked out to sell separately) - instead of working on the sequel proper.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Aside from the DLC that was released on day 1 (Shale and Warden's Keep) or just a couple months later (Return to Ostagar)*, all of the DLC for Dragon Age Origins were stand alone mini-campaigns.

My problem with that however was that none of them took more than maybe 2 hours to complete, at most. And this is me, who puttered around exploring every nook and cranny, saying that. They could probably be beaten in less than an hour each, if someone flew through it.

The only thing that was really even kind of worthwhile was Awakening, and that was technically an actual expansion pack rather than just DLC. It took me maybe 30 hours to beat. A pretty decent size, for a <$20 thing. Except, of course, it was also half-assed, rushed, and chock full of bugs and design flaws.

Dragon Age Origins released on November 3, 2009 (after being announced, five years earlier, during E3 2004**), along with Stone Prisoner and Warden's Keep. Return to Ostagar was released on January 29, 2010. Awakening, the expansion pack, was released on March 16, 2010. That lame Feastday bullshit that I didn't even buy was released on April 1, 2010. The Darkspawn Chronicles was released on May 5, 2010. Leliana's Song was released on July 6, 2010. The Golems of Whatever was released on August 10, 2010. Witch Hunt was released on September 7, 2010. And, lastly, Dragon Age II was released on March 8, 2011 (after being first announced in July 2010). You can't tell me that something didn't suffer under that ridiculous "let's milk this shit for all it's worth" release schedule. I would have to say that all of it suffered for it.

* - All of which most definitely did feel like stuff that was cut out of the game for DLC purposes. I mean, they explicitly said that was the case for Shale. It wasn't "finished" they said (similar to how Jill and Shuma Gorath for MvC3 weren't "finished" even though both of them were on the disc and just had to be unlocked with a 100KB file), which was their excuse for cutting it out and charging $7 for it (assuming you didn't pay $10 extra for the limited edition like I did, to get that and the Warden's Keep DLC for "free", and it was still DLC even if it was "free").

** - Note that this was three years before EA bought Bioware, so the game was already in production before that. All of the shit that came out after Origins was EA pulling the strings though, I'm sure. I'm just going to go ahead and say it now: Bioware is dead. Whatever it is that's using the name now is just the barest shadow, a dessicated husk, of what Bioware used to be. I give it another year or two at most before EA shuts them down completely and rolls all of their franchises into EA Games, just as EA has done with every. single. one. of the other companies they've swallowed in the past. I hope I'm wrong, but...