I hope you’re all stocked up on ice cream, sun cream and batteries for little electric fans, because this week is going to be damned hot!
Enjoy the Great British Summer while it last.
The story with the biggest fallout for its developers has to be that of Bungie’s Luke Smith inciting the rage of Destiny’s community over DLC pricing and exclusive content.
Aside from Luke Smith’s flashpoint, DJ Judas endeavoured to sum up the situation as a whole:
They are in a position where their userbase consists of people who play the game daily, and those that haven’t given up or got bored of it yet at this point are not likely to. It’s probably their go-to game and have lots of friends who do the same, and are part of a community. It’s easy to exploit this because there will be an all or nothing response from the userbase, and the price has been pushed as far as they dare so as to not illicit the “nothing” response.
What’s unfortunate is that the exploitation is of a loyal userbase who, if they want to keep up with and maintain their part in the game’s community due to the way these expansions are structured through levels and loot, need to pony up the cash.
Destiny feels like the spoilt and deeply cynical grandchild of a classic MMORPG: We’ll remove the monthly fee, but instead craft a much smaller world and entice people to play the same thing again and again, and drop continual repetitive content at a high price until we release the sequel. In this way the whole ting is actually very clever, but that doesn’t make it any less disappointing.
Bungie did apologise a couple of days later, but their promises of something better for first year players haven’t quite come to fruition just yet. Of letting you buy the Collector’s Edition exclusive content separately, ashw92 said, “In this case you’d still be better buying the Collector’s Edition for £80 and selling the game because you’d probably get more than £20 for it with the expansion pass 1. How on earth do they think this fixes the problem. I certainly won’t be wasting my money on shaders and class items that they haven’t provided the vault space to store.”
Looking on Amazon, bladesew (AKA razordude) found a catalogue of games and DLC packs “Which tells me that you can sell a major expansion for less than The Taken King, sell an actual brand new AAA title for less than The Taken King, sell an expansion (along with 16 FREE pieces of dlc) for less than half of the price of The Taken King.”
Needless to say, there’s not many people who are happy with Bungie this past week…
At least Destiny isn’t a horrifying technical mess, like Batman: Arkham Knight’s PC version is. It’s a port that is to bad that Warner Bros. have actually recalled the game on the platform until such a point that it’s actually fit for purpose.
Duke asked, “How does the games industry keep getting away with kind of performance? It’s almost becoming the norm now for a game to be unfinished (a bit strong, I know) on release. It wouldn’t wash with other products or in other industries.”
Lanselta managed to find a workaround, which is worth trying if you’re stuck with performance issues:
My experience: the game will not run in fullscreen mode at all! It flickers and stutters all the time right from the load up screens. Mashing Alt-Enter brought me out of this, and I was able to actually work it in windowed mode. I went into the options and set borderless windowed mode at 1080p, and it now works wonderfully. It is absolutely gorgeous!
Severn2j also seems to have a relatively playable experience. “I only seem to be getting some stuttering when cutscenes begin,” he said, “but settle down pretty quickly, so I appear to be luckier than some. Although, I’m using a Nvidia 980 with a G-Sync monitor, so it may be counteracting a lot of the performance issues through sheer grunt.”
I’d say that one of the best graphics cards on the market combined with a screen that helps to eliminate the effects of a variable frame rate would be the perfect set up to play Batman right now!
Finally, Driveclub’s PlayStation Plus Edition launched this week – twice, actually – after the ludicrously long wait for Evolution Studios to completely re-engineer their server technology to better cope for the potential load.
But is it all too little too late? Homerjnick asks, “But they have missed the boat? You can buy the game pretty cheaply now anyway and most people have moved on. Those who used to play it online probably don’t as much…”
To which bunimomike replied “Yes and no, if you ask me. They’ve missed the bigger boat (Jaws!) but a smaller boat will still turn up. It’ll just have less people on it. Either way, they’ve most certainly learnt from all of this as the initial launch was a clusterf**k of epic proportions.”
It was here that things took a strange turn, as GTOWN admitted that he “had a boat once. It sank. I’m fairly sure it wasn’t my fault.”
“That’s not what the police report says,” Tuffcub replied.
What did happen on that boat? Was GTOWN responsible for the catastrophe? How does Tuffcub have access to police records?
For all this and more, tune in next week!
We’ll start off with one of our most regular achievement hunters, as Youles has been playing through Black Ops 2 multiple times, to try and see all the story endings. He’s now on a Veteran run, but he’s finding it rather boring and visually poor, but it’s also managed to land him in a timeless purgatory, where he cannot remember if it was this week or last week when he managed to get all the DLC trophies for Dying Light.
While vjmwilliams is close to finishing Wolfenstein: The New Order, hornet1990 has managed to do so on Uber difficulty, with just a few collectibles and upgrades to get on a super-easy run through of the game.
Perhaps a seemingly insurmountable task, given the side of the world, Carrot381 has completed The Witcher 3, and though he still has plenty of trophies to collect, that the story is over has left him in a somewhat melancholy mood.
MrYd said, with an air of utter inevitability, that he’s played through Tales from the Borderlands Episode 3, alongside spending time with games from one of the PSN’s regular sales, while R1MJAW filled the jungles with the roar of dinosaurs, as he raced to a platinum of LEGO Jurassic World.
Finally, blast71 has joined us in the future, having bought himself a PS4 this week. Of course, the future is one defined by the download speeds of PSN, and so he’s not actually played any games yet, as he waits for his COD Advanced Warfare, Killzone Shadow Fall and Resogun downloads to complete.
A inferior race has been busily tapping your latest trophies into his tables, and you can head over to page 2 to view the latest trophy leaderboard. Meanwhile, I leave you with the usual submissions form below:
MrYd
By my calculations, I just need to quickly go and knock out another 992 bronze trophies to move up to number 4 on the leaderboard. (I’ve already gained another 21 trophies since that list was updated, before anyone accuses me of not being able to count)
Oh well, that’ll never happen.
blast71
Finally downloaded all the games as well as most of Driveclub, playing Killzone at the mo & after not being struck on it at 1st, it’s growing on me.
ron_mcphatty
Killzone was a grower for me too, I found the early levels prettier but didn’t quite know what I was doing the open environment on the dam so felt lost. The narrower levels after that felt more like what I expected and the multiplayer is really, really good.
blast71
It’s more enjoyable now I’ve got the hang of the owl with the touchpad. I’ll give the multi-player a go after I’ve finished the single-player.