I don’t know about you chaps but I absolutely detest the modern approach companies have with their franchises and games.
I remember you’d get the game on disc and that was it. Or maybe a expansion to go with it which improved it 100%
An example would be say the mortal kombat games, you used to be able to have all the characters or Unlock them. But now you gotta pay up to 100% the game if you want everything.
What rustles your jimmies lads?
Thank you!
If you go by standard inflation, games purchased in 1998 would now cost over $100. And, given reduced visuals, those games needed much fewer people to finish.
Selling games for $100 is one idea, and some publishers have even shifted that way. But, that’s not so fair for low income gamers (especially since even since 1998, the minimum wage hasn’t really gone up).
The solution they came up with is changing the entry fee, and giving semi-pointless extras on top. What I’ve generally seen is that the things games sell within them are in no way “Half the game’s content”; usually things more like skins and cosmetics. Levels, story, and gameplay items are very commonly accessible to everyone. There are expansion packs, just as there were in 1998, that usually represent significant development efforts, new voice acting, and new levels.
Skins are not “nothing”, so I understand the frustration of having them unavailable, compared to old days when they were unlockable by doing a kickflip between the schools in Tony Hawk or something. But in those old days, games effectively cost $100. Which would you prefer?
Street Fighter 6 recently came out, to pretty high praise from reviewers and the general public.
The game has a “Year 1 character pass” that adds 4 new characters. Eventually, there will be a year 2 character pass that will add more characters. If you’re not buying these, you’re literally not getting the entire game. When you play online, you will face opponents playing characters that you can’t even play yourself.
There are lots of games that have similar features where not spending the extra cash means you’re literally not getting as much content as everyone else. It’s not just about cosmetics anymore and hasn’t been for years now.
That’s actually a very fair point. I don’t play fighting games, but this is a common theme for many multiplayer games now. A lot of developers have worked to make the newer character options “fair”, but even when they work to balance new with old, just having confusing tactical options that some players can’t play as is enough to mess with someone’s strategic skill development.
So for fighting games, character passes are a good thing(overall).
If you bought SF4 at launch and continued to play the game throughout it’s life, you ended up buying the same game multiple times. This was essentially a few characters and a balance patch(had new mechanics as well). This the fragmented the player base a lot, so if you were playing the base game you couldn’t play with someone on the latest version.
Street Fighter 5 however, switched to character passes and even being able to unlock characters with in-game currency(difficult if you came to the game later but possible). This means everyone got the balance patches and major system updates, so the player base stayed as a single entity.
For a niche genre, this is significantly better than multiple purchases of the same game, and allows for a game to get more updates over a longer time.
However I do wish they kept in more unlockable content like costumes, colours and stages.
Specific to Street Fighter 6 though, they have a battlepass(which is not good, but isn’t terrible either) which the free version gave/gives out a bunch of character rental tokens, so you can play with DLC characters you haven’t purchased.
$100 games. I know I’m the minority in this as I have the income for it, but I subscribe to the “buy once, cry once” mentality where I’d rather pay a large up-front cost for something and just have it be mine with all the bells and whistles it comes with. I detest this nickle and dime bullshit modern gaming has become.
Which is why I’ve also given up on “AAA” games from corporate publishers and stick to indie games from indie developers. I’m sure even if the AAA publishers started charging $100 for games, they’d still nickle and dime you just because they can.
That’s definitely a fair opinion - just unfortunate that enough people wouldn’t agree, or wouldn’t be able to afford $100 games, that that will probably never happen.
The other issue is that developers these days keep working on games after their release - often using information gained related to launch reception.
One other thing I think people forget about older games is that they made a lot of sequels. They have the assets for a mid-sized game and a lot of unused ideas, so to put out more content they remix what they have in new ways for a shorter development cycle. That kind of thing now becomes more suitable for an expansion pack; but whichever way it’s sold, the timeline for its release would never have made it to the first game’s production deadline.
There are a lot of benefits to the sequel model in some circumstances. You get to have every permutation of a game and its versions rather than overwriting previous versions of a game that arguably might be better for their own reasons.