If you promise not to do something and then end up doing it, getting called a liar is fair, imo.
Promises that you later break are just broken promises. You don’t get credit for not breaking them immediately.
“Sure I promised not to cheat on you honey and I didn’t for like 3 months!”
It needs to or their monetization schemes wouldn’t work.
edit: apologies if the tone there was snarky, that was unintentional. This stuff just gets my goat, and it’s a battle we (as gamers) lost eons ago.
When I call someone a liar, I take intent into account. Did they know they were lying? Did they intend to mislead? In this case, no.
Really though, why do companies (not people) make games? To make money. People may have an artistic vision, and be committed to a great player experience. Companies, specifically corporations, exist solely to make money. Games as services is, right now, theoretically the best way to make money selling games. Can you make better games selling them as one-time purchases for complete, well-balanced products? Hell yes. Can you make more money doing it that way? Hell no.
The nature of the connected always-on world we have now makes it very very hard to justify treating digital products like physical products. There’s simply no reason to view a software purchase as a distinct “thing” rather than as “access,” from the perspective of the people selling that software.
At some point they made the decision to break that promise. Did they intend to lie? Maybe not, but I’ve never seen a dev/pub proactively say, “Hey back in June when we said we weren’t gonna blah blah, well we’re coming to you, hat in hand, head bowed, to say that the reality of the game’s revenue performance means we need to try something that you may not love…” etc.
Right, they didn’t explain why they did it but I mean, obviously F76 is not a successful product.
So…
I’m going to just sadly sit in the corner and mourn Dragon Age 4.
I have followed, sort of, Dragon Age since Origins, and each time I just sadly watch them take the magic of Origins and just like, abandon it for some new unknown flavor of the month.
Well yes there is, because if the game is crap, it doesn’t always help that you have online access to it. It won’t make money that way because no one cares enough to pay for it, not in one lump sum or continuously. If physical products usually have to make a good product before they expect to sell endless accessories for it.
But how can you be sure of that? You can’t. You can only take their word. I want to believe in them too, but the reality is they may well have always planned to get more and more predatory as time went by.
I see your point, but really, it doesn’t change mine–you still have to make access worth buying, of course, so quality at some level is still necessary. But with equal quality, why would a company not do GaaS? I can’t see any business reason to just sell a stand-alone, one-time purchase (assuming development costs were comparable, etc.). From a consumer POV, well, that’s different.
I am not 100% sure what the full plan is, but RDR2 has a online component in beta. It doesn’t offer anything I want, not the experience, and they’re not addressing the problems really but it’s free online at the moment. I believe they already monetize it but… the base game is great, doesn’t feel like it’s lacking, to me, at all. If GaAS was something like make a great base game, have everyone enjoy it as if it were standalone and then use those assets as and team to make an ongoing MP experience it probably wouldn’t be such an issue. The way it often plays out though is, strip the base game, force online play, the game feels lacking now tack on this weird MP thing and ask why everything suffered.
Maybe if they had started with GaAS they MP would be more what I want and the SP game suffered… I don’t know. I am a huge coop player, so I am not opposed to great online play… I just can kind of feel when something isn’t wright, it’s not a great experience from the get go then they didn’t just miss out on a GaAS opportunity, they blew the whole thing. I don’t see how that improves… anything.
What can I say, I like to look for the good in people. I’m an eternal optimist, that’s what everybody always says about me.
What’s the basic summary for DA4 at this point? It was cancelled in 2017, ending what the team thought would be a great sequel, doing everything right, etc. And now it’s being brought back as a cash grab, possibly a large focus on MP, with lots of monetized bits included as part of the basic game experience?
The Kotaku article linked in the OP addresses these questions pretty directly.
According to them. The people who broke the promise. That’s like abusive relationship shit imo.
Again, they broke the promise. They never had to make the promise, but they did, so they deserve all the shit they get for breaking it. To do otherwise means nothing matters and is a free pass for them to do or say anything and never be held accountable for it.
“I keep my promises until it became inconvenient to do so,” is someone who’s word is meaningless.
Edit: Especially when the reason they broke it was: “I wanted more money.”
Thanks, will check later. Wasn’t able to get it to load here for some reason.
Yes they broke their promise, I was just drawing the distinction between that and intentionally lying.
And again, more nuanced than “we want more money”. More like “we’re going to have to fire Fred, and his wife is pregnant.”
It’s cool. Fred’s wife was probably “incentivized” to use a pregnancy tracking app.
I agree. I loved DA1 and still enjoyed DA2. DAI was okay but it had lost something, but I would have still played DA4.
I was so in love with DA1, I was like 10/15% through another play through before 2 because I thought I could like import the finishing details into 2, and I wanted another POV… then I heard things about DA2 I really didn’t like. I haven’t even finished it yet. Like, not installed on the new computer. I have DA:I, but didn’t start.
DA:O was one of the best CRPGs of all time. DA2 had major core design and implementation issues. DA:I had its problems, but it’s absolutely worth playing. Just don’t do the side missions.