You'd think it may be due to the increasing complexity of modern games, but in concept, they're not that much more complex at all (or good for that matter).

I get pretty fucked off about this beta release shit. It's lazy and money-grabbing but I suppose natural. Back in ye olde day, perhaps the industry was full of honest Joe's with a passion for game design. Nowadays, it seems entrepreneurs have caught on the fact you can make a lot of money from them, and therefore it's their time.

Yeah, it would appear that indie games and smaller companies distributing their games themselves (over platforms like steam, gog, d2d, gamersgate) is the future. People who actually still care about making games and taking risks, instead of so many AAA games these days which come out unfinished and are utterly bland and uninspired.

That's not to say there aren't really good AAA games, though. Just that the juggernauts pushing out stuff for max profit/min effort may be getting obsolete.

A very true article. A lot of it doesn't bother me but the following do.

I hate PS3 for the install reason. Testing them at work before trading in and pick the wrong game? You've just made that customer, and every one behind them, wait an extra pointless 15 minutes before they can get served. Xbox at least is a choice of install... but then again every time Xbox updates its dashboard you also have to update EVERY game you put in after that. But those are small, usually 30s updates. Still irritating though!

I also get pissed off about "online pass" codes. Ok, fine, I'm used to codes being a pc gamer, but that's a piracy thing at least. That I can deal with and understand. Code already used? Usually simply showing proof of purchase/ownership will get you a new code. The greedy bastards now moaning that "oh but stores make so much profit on preowned and we see none of it so we'll charge you £10 for online play..." sorry but you don't get book publishers, or car manufacturers or ANY OTHER INDUSTRY bitching about second hand sales.

I also hate day one dlc. If it exists on day one it should be in the game. Yes, I'm aware that the discs are printed from a master copy at least a month before release date. All I'm asking is you delay your dlc by another month to at least give me the illusion you didn't cut things out of it. I like the fact Bioware made Shale free for all who bought DA:O on day one because it was pushed back to coincide with consoles, and therefore the originally planned release of Shale. I dislike the fact they made The Exiled Prince for DA2 day one DLC that had to be paid for. Of course, as I love the game, I bought it, but there are very few I'd do that for. Or crappy DLC like Street Fighter which is just costumes.

I'm gonna stop my ranting now coz it's late but you get the picture

I agree wholeheartedly. BTW, Ars has another article up on DRM, this one about how DA:O got broken because Bioware's DRM servers blew up or something. It's pretty much a full on rant.


http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011 ... ht-now.ars

It's about time gamers stand up against this shit. It would never fly in other industries.

What wouldn't fly in other industries? A company abusing the consumer?

Never!







... I'll stop here. The list is seriously never-ending.

I'm with Satis. Every industry will screw us over some way. Some are just less obvious than others. They're there to make money. Easiest way? Fuck over the people who need the service, they'll pay anyway.

I do have to say though, the guy who wrote about the DA:O DRM errors... he sounds like he's not a technical retard. So seriously, why the hell was his response to the error message to google and hack? Anyone with common sense would a) try a few more times over varying time periods in case there was a problem with the connection (your end or Bioware/EAs) and b) contact customer services/at least look at the official site before randomly googling. Admittedly EA is usually total shit and he'd probably have still ended up googling/hacking but you know. The normal point of call should be customer services.

From the latter half of the article, it's obvious his troubleshooting (installing it on a Windows VM) made it entirely obvious the problem was with EA. Why he didn't stop I don't know. He probably falls into "knows enough to be dangerous" category of PC user. Like Ox.

You mean dangerous to EA and their servers with my 1337 h4ck3r skillz right? ...right?

yes. that's exactly what I meant.

Aftermath of my n00bquake, EA HQ: