Community Chronicle: 26/04/15

I have one thing to say to you all today: I like crumpets.

That is all.

Swiftly moving on to more important matters, the big discussion point of the week has been the slightly controversial statements made by Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai, who accused publishers of abusing DLC and the development process.

However, since the latest Smash Bros. game features DLC, this naturally caused a bit of a furore. A regular voice in the Chronicle, MrYd was happy to step up to the plate:

So leaving out characters that were in the previous 37 versions of your game (or however many it is in this case) and then making them afterwards to sell as DLC is “authentic”? And not selling an “unfinished product”?

And to make things worse, Nintendo tie the DLC to the hardware and not an account that you can move to new hardware when the old one dies or gets exploded by some sort of freak weather or whatever happens to Nintendo hardware. Small children maybe? They happen?

He makes good points, but however much he denies it, people in glass houses should always wear pants. Or whatever the expression is. It’s not anything to do with pants, is it?

Starman was similarly damning of the practice in general, saying, “DLC got out of hand years ago and I can’t see it ever being what it was supposed to be.” However, beeje13 was somewhat more understand of capitalism in general, as he noted, “Publishers are testing the market with new business models, it will hopefully settle to a situation where both sides are happy.”

Naturally it’s a difficult balancing act, but I would say that while some companies do go overboard, most do focus first and foremost on developing the base game before moving on to DLC for it. There’s a big difference between saying there will be DLC and getting a plan in place, and diverting resources from the main thrust of development.

Following on from last week’s big Star Wars celebration and the reveal of Battlefront, further details about the game slipped out over the weekend and into the start of the week. Split screen, for example, is offline only, single player is restricted to “missions”, etc. etc.

Immediately, some of the bullet points had people thinking twice. Kennykazey wrote, “No online splitscreen has me reconsidering an early purchase. Will probably wait and see how many of my friends pick it up now.”

In response to Lt. Fatman‘s concerns about a lack of true gameplay footage, Eldave0 said, “I can only assume they have been saving it up for E3 this year. First gameplay footage released, major hype and the game then releases just a few months later. I’d prefer it if more companies did that, to be honest, instead of showing off a game and then not releasing it for 3+ years.”

And then JustTaylorNow has to go and say, “I must be the only person who thinks Star Wars are just a bunch of boring films that got overhyped through the years. Even the new film trailer was meh.”

Well, now…

Finally, our virtual reality futures stayed out in the distance this week, as Oculus and Facebook said that their VR headsets are very much still in development and that they’re not talking about any volume shipments for this year. In other words, it’ll be done when it’s done!

Severn2j found this rather concerning:

Thats a real shame. I’ve been holding off buying an Oculus DK2 because they’ve always been saying the consumer version was around the corner, but since Facebook bought them, its almost like development has stopped. Coupled with Valve’s offering looking like its going to be a much better headset and the Rift is starting to look a bit weak.

Considering the apparent good quality of the DK2, I think Facebook/Oculus need to release something soon, even if they then release a 2.0 version later. Just so they an stay relevant, if nothing else.

Additionally, Mark Zuckerberg has also said that they need to aim for 50-100 million units to be sold in the next decade for it to be meaningful, to which Dazbobaby responded, “50-100 million units of any single item is a lot of units, even over 10 years. Especially when the end user has to have some big hefty CPU/GPU’s to do the heavy lifting.”

Let’s not forget just how fast technology has been advancing this past decade though, and it’s hardly unimaginable to see common CPU/GPU chips more than able to deliver current high quality graphics at the speed and consistency required for VR.

Either way, the VR wars are going to be mightily interesting to see pan out over the next few years…

What We Played hit another major milestone, as we had our 200th edition this week, but alas, the number of community achievements was on the slower side of things this time around. Plenty of games have been played, with Youles diving back into Dying Light, Avenger testing his mettle with GT Academy (currently sat just outside the to 1000), and JustTaylorNow still enjoying Bloodborne, but the number of major trophies has slowed.

R1MJAW finished his first run through of Titan Souls, killin 19 bosses in 2 hours and 30 minutes with 158 deaths, but might be ruling out going for the platinum. No such troubles with Tower of Guns, however, as he grabbed 100% of the trophies.

Carrot381 earnt himself the The Wolf Among Us platinum, thanks to the PSNow beta, while a inferior race stuck to the current generation for his first platinum of the year with inFamous: First Light.

You can almost always rely on Crazy_Del to manage something special, and this time around he brought home the Mortal Komabt X platinum, while BadBoyBoogie passed the 150 platinum mark with Borderlands 2 and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel on PS4. A huge milestone, and hearty congratulations, BBB!

A inferior race is back this week with the latest update to the 2015 trophy leaderboard. Head over to page 2 to see what it’s all about and how you can be counted.

Aside from that, I leave you on this page with the usual submission form.