Total War and it's Bad Pre-Order Practices

To me, pre-ordering is something no one should do. Really though, why would you ever pay for a product you have no real knowledge of? It's a concept never made any sense to me personally. That's why most companies will give a small incentive for pre-ordering because they know a pre-order is a guaranteed purchase by the consumer.

At least it used to be small.

The incentives for pre-ordering games is getting so out-of-hand that these pre-order incentives are now even ruining the core gameplay experience. These pre-order incentives now consist of large chunks of the game originally developed as a full complete package, that when separated, create a less fulfilling core experience than the original vision of the game, and the latest game to hop on this train(wreck) is the new Total War game.

I'm not going to even bother talking about the horrible state of Total War: Rome II in this article, let's for a minute let bygones be bygones. The newest Total War, Total War: Warhammer, set to release in 2016, has given a pre-order incentive in which an entire race will be given to the consumer as a pre-order incentive. The base game without a pre-order will include 4 races, and a 5th "Chaos Warrior" race is included with copies of the game that pre-ordered the game. Non pre-order copies will be able to buy the race at a later date, the price of which is not known at the moment.

I actually referenced this on my twitter as Total War locking off an entire race at launch and ended up actually getting a response from Total War themselves, stating:

Interesting, so it's apparently not "locking off" something to have it in the game at launch and not give it to people who didn't toss money at you before the game comes out. You're not locking off content Total War? Because it's available Day One, is it not?

Look, just because you don't tell people that there would be a 5th race at launch, doesn't mean you can classify it as DLC. DLC is known as Downloadable Content, and is supposed to extend the life of the game by adding extra content after launch to keep the game going. It keeps developers working on a particular project for a longer time, generates revenue for said developers, and keeps people on the game longer. It's supposed to be a win-win situation, extra content produced by the developers after launch for a small fee that's supposed to enhance an already content-filled game.

However, this idea doesn't apply to content that is ripped out of the main game and is either resold later or given away as an incentive for pre-ordering, or let's just face what it really is, guaranteed sales of the game.

Now you might say, how do I know it's content that was part of the original game? Well, consider it for a minute: why is Total War announcing DLC months and months before launch, and even worse, why is it available Day One? Because it isn't DLC. It's not content that you download after launch. It's content that's available on Day One that is in fact locked off to people who didn't pre-order. If I don't pre-order your game Total War, I can't use the 5th Race. If I do pre-order, I can use the 5th Race. That's locking off content, and there's no getting around it, even if you think you can classify it as DLC and not tell people there would be 5 races months in advance to try and justify the act.

You may also claim; 'Why am I freaking out, there's still four races to choose from'? Well if I remember correctly Total War is a strategy game similar to Sid Meier's Civilization franchise where you pick a race and start playing strategically until you beat all the other empires. In these kind of games, every play session is going to be different depending on what race you choose. I've never actually played a Total War game but I'm going to assume that each race has its own strength and weaknesses. Thus, players would have to change their play styles to accommodate these changes and it builds to the strategy aspect of the game. Removing a race and limiting the player's choice to four races would limit the variety of the game.

You know that DLC unlocker files exist for these type of situations? They're generally less than 1mb files that you literally shove into the main game folder, and boom, all the locked off content becomes unlocked. I actually saw a lot of these files circulating around when Alien Isolation released back in 2014, where this DLC unlocker file would unlock Day One content locked off to people (extra 2 missions in Alien: Isolation) who didn't pre-order before launch. Obviously, a one megabyte file can't hold an extra 2 mission's worth of content, so what did that company do? They locked off content to people who didn't pre-order, but people got around it, and I fully expect there to be a DLC Unlocker file floating around the internet when Total War: Warhammer comes out next year.

I said this last article and I'm going to say it again: we need some damn reform in this industry. As it stands, any company can pretty much do whatever they want without any repercussions. The thought process of a single company is most likely that they think they can slightly push the boundary of what can and can't be done and think it's okay, but when almost EVERY single company is doing something, to the point where I have something to write about every week, that's poor quality control. Continue the fight for good games, gamers. Because no one else will.

Payday 2 is Slowly Killing Their Fanbase

You know, I go into every week thinking 'what the hell am I gonna write about this week on the blog?'. Then there's always something that pops up or I find out about something and then think 'welp, there it is. My topic of the week.'

This week is pretty much no different. So it's been publicly known that the developers of Payday 2 have made it clear in the past that they do not want microtransactions in their game. In 2013, one of the producers of the game, Almir, stated in the Steam forums that: "We've made it clear that PAYDAY 2 will have no micro-transactions whatsoever (shame on you if you thought otherwise!)". On another occasion before the launch in 2013, Overkill Software stated "No. No. God, I hope not. Never. No."

Welp, I'm sad to say that Payday 2 has introduced microtransactions into their game as part of their annual free-to-play Crimefest event going on. This led to a complete backlash by the community, rightfully so since they just broke their promise they made 2 years ago about the game.

Now, let's talk about microtransactions for a bit. Most games tend to use microtransactions as a way to boost revenue, and with the growing trend of AAA games using microtransactions, many of these companies tend to only use microtransactions for cosmetic purposes, in-game items that would not at all affect the core gameplay. Of course not all games tend to do this (Evolve's level 3 skip, anyone?) and free-to-play games definitely add a few "pay to win" aspects of the game to keep their game afloat, but regard AAA gaming, that's generally how things are done.

Welp (again), I'm sad to say that not only was this the worst way to implement microtransactions into the game, but they made it so that it would alter the core gameplay in a terrible, terrible way. You essentially get safe drops in the game now, and buy a drill from Steam to open them (essentially the case and key system of Counter Strike). The safes will contain a random cosmetic skin, or you would think they would just be cosmetic.

Unfortunately, a lot of these skins, when slapped onto the guns, have stat boosters. Here's a picture of one scenario I literally ripped off the Overkill Software site.

As you can see, this specific skin increases stability of your this weapon by +4. Don't forget that there are plenty of mods in this game to customize stats the way you want, so essentially with the right "Legendary" skin and right combination of mods you can essentially have a tank gun and break the game from its original design.

And as if THAT isn't bad enough, the final nail to the coffin in all of this is that if you open up a case and it's a skin for a gun that's part of a DLC pack, you will not be able to use that skin until you purchase that specific DLC pack to use the gun in the first place. Wow.

I don't think I've ever seen a company punch its fans in the gut so hard in a single update. The entire community is just infuriated with this system to the point where the Payday 2 subreddit tried to gather enough people together to bring its Steam and Metacritic ratings down. That's really, really bad.

So after a few days, Overkill Software actually did respond to all this controversy, and around Day 6 of the annual Crimefest, they added the special drills into drop tables into the game. Essentially, you can get some of these drills in-game without having to spend any money, which I guess is nice. I guess you could just stack up drills and open up a bunch of cases every now and again, I'm not exactly sure how the drop tables work as I don't own Payday 2.

BUT the 2 other points still stand; the fact that Overkill Software broke their promise and the fact that you'll still have to buy DLC packs for skins that you get for weapons you don't have access to with just the base game. I've also read up a lot on the whole Payday 2 situation, and it seems that the company is reluctant in ironing out the bugs that its still had for months now, yet keeps pushing out DLC for people to buy. I can't exactly confirm that this actually happens myself as I don't own the game but I've seen A LOT of people complain about it.

All in all, I'm just sad that companies are able to just get away with this. Like what's to stop Destiny from not including their newest expansion to season pass holders? (Oh wait, that happened). We need some quality control in this industry. Any company, any individual, any content creator can do whatever the hell they want, and essentially that means any and all our purchases have no buyer protection. Tread carefully, gamers.

Hitman Pieces the Game at their Customers? (Accidental Repost from September)

How do you guys buy games? Through Steam? Through the Xbox Live or PSN Market? In a store? Other means of digital download that are inferior to Steam? In any case, it's usually the same. You buy the game, pay once, and that's it. If you're getting it Day One it'll most likely be a $60 purchase, but you get whatever they give you in that price.

Well, can't really say the same for Hitman.

One of the strangest things I've ever seen, the new Hitman scheduled to release next year is planning a system where they piece-by-piece sell you the game. This chart will help you understand what I'm talking about.

Well for one thing, I can't believe I have to read up on how to buy a game, but anyways, this basically states you pay $35 as a "try before you buy" (even though you just dropped $35 on it... do these guys realize Cities: Skylines is only $30?) and you essentially have half the game right there, 3 geographical zones. The other three zones will come out later, one zone per month at a time for the next three months. Then you can drop another $30 on it to upgrade to the full version, or bypass all that and drop $60 at launch for the "full experience".

Now before I begin I'm gonna point out right here that the whole "let me try it out" reason to getting the intro pack is a terrible, thinly-veiled attempt at hiding an unfinished game. If the creators, or publishers, or whoever came up with this terrible system actually wanted us to do a sort-of try before you buy scenario, they would release a zone either for free or for a small fee like $5 for you to actually try the game and all of its mechanics. Dropping $35 is not a good price in the least bit for a "try before you buy" run. Even EA, voted worst company in America two years in a row, would let you try games like Battlefield and Titanfall for 48 hours completely free before asking if you wanted to buy them.

So now that we've established that the game is going to be unfinished at start, we need to look at what'll happen in both situations.

If you go with the $35 "let me try it out" package, you get your 3 zones at launch, and as time progresses and new content releases, you'll be locked out of that content until you drop an extra $30 on it. The zones are being released a month at a time, and there's no way to buy a zone at a time, it's either 3 zones for $35 or 6 zones for $65 ($60 if you go for the six right away). So essentially when a month's time has passed and a new zone comes out, you'll have to pay the price of three zones (the $30 upgrade package) to only access one zone while the others get ready to come out in the coming months. There's no increment system, it's either you get half the game or the full game. Then when the full game is released, you'll be stuck until you drop that money, and essentially customers will get a butchered experience of what the original vision of the game was by having content locked off behind this paywall.

If you go with the $60 full package, then you're essentially paying full price for half a game at launch, then just waiting around for things to come out as time goes by. That's not something you want to do to someone who just dropped a full price on your game, piece them the game as time goes by until three months afterward when they have the full content.

We also have no idea the sizing of these zones at all. While information about the 'base' $35 half game has been released, nothing, and I mean NO INFORMATION has been released about what will be in the other three zones. Are we actually going to get the other 50%? Or is 75% of the content in the original three zones and that the later three will have lacking content? We as the consumer have no idea at all what they're going to do. There could be a severe lack of content in these next three zones, and if the developers packed the first three with content, it would have the consumer assume that the same amount of content would exist in the upcoming content, which it easily can lack. It's a terrible system because they can bait the gamer with a good amount of content in the first three zones and then just give up once they get the gamer to upgrade on faith alone.

Whether you think this is an alright idea or a terrible idea, the entire situation reeks of pushing the game out the door before it's ready. Whether the developer studio wanted this to happen, or if the publisher of the game is making this decision, we probably won't know. The best bet is to just wait to see if the content will be worth the money or not. This kind of stupid iffy bullshit is the reason I don't preorder games, and if you were looking forward to this game, well, all I can say is I'm sorry companies care more about money and the business side than the actual piece of art they're creating.

Does Anyone Need Antivirus Anymore?

I'm not sure about you, but none of my computers have any sort of active antivirus on them. That doesn't mean I'm in the dark, though, I do keep a program like Malwarebytes on my computer and run it whenever I'm bored. But a very important question can be asked regarding this situation. Do we need antivirus anymore?

Now before I really get into it I want to make it clear that Antivirus, Anti-Malware, and Internet Security programs are very important and serve a purpose whether we use them or not. They're there for all around protection for your system and important files, and that will always be important, especially to people who work on computers and workstations for a living, and if your field of work lies somewhere in the realm of working on a computer a few hours a day, antivirus and internet security should be a priority.

However, for us enthusiasts who use our computers for gaming and know our internal file system and operating systems in and out, is it even necessary?

Like I said, none of my computers have active antivirus running on them, and I have Windows Defender and Windows Update disabled on all of my PCs. At any time something weird's going on with my computer, like a random program popped up in my taskbar and won't close out, it's time to go to good ol' Task Manager, find the exe, kill the process and delete the exe. Simple as that.

Of course sometimes that's not enough, and that's where Hitman Pro comes into play. This crazy program can kill off the virus if you're not able to do it yourself no problem, and has a nice feature where it can scan an unknown file through its cloud system across five different antivirus databases to find out whether its safe or not. Pretty dank.

Then there's the sort-of rare experiences where you get the chain of viruses on your PC, where a single virus or malware will start putting other viruses on your computer. Again, Hitman Pro or something like Malwarebytes works perfectly in these type of situations.

And, well to be honest, that's pretty much it. There's very few system-killing viruses anymore to the point where the chance of you coming across them is pretty much nil, and as long as you have a good idea of what your filesystem generally looks like you should be able to spot something fishy pretty quickly.

With the popularity of Adblockers in the past few years using those while browsing the web will keep a large amount of popup ads off your computer that viruses generally come from. If you need to access a certain site and are unfamiliar with whether it's safe or not, you can use the site webutation.net to find out whether it's safe or not. Also, surprisingly, the new Windows 8 and 10 version of Windows Defender works a lot better than the Windows 7 version and can actually detect viruses on your computer, and that comes default with every Windows install.

So do we need antivirus anymore? Well, not really, as the tools to combat viruses have significantly increased in the past few years to the point where they're pretty much integrated already whether you realized it or not. Again, I must stress, if you have important data on your PC or use a PC for work, antivirus and internet security should be a must have, and there exist many free antivirus and internet security programs out there for you. Comodo Internet Security (Firewall + Antivirus) and AVG Antivirus are both completely free and can serve you well in your battles.

Now for the enthusiasts who would rather not have antivirus eating up RAM in the background, here's some tips and tricks on how to combat these bastards.

1. Viruses almost always hide in temp folders. Both your Windows/Temp and your Local Temp folders are favorable places for viruses to hide. An easy solution is to clear them out every once in a while, or use a program like CCleaner to do that for you.

2. If you can't close an intrusive program, use task manager. Open it up, go to the processes tab, and find it in the list and close it there. If you've never seen it before and want it removed from your PC, before you remove it, right click it in the list and open the file location, then kill the process in task manager and just delete the exe.

3. Keep a backup program. Whether it's Hitman Pro, MalwareBytes Anti-Malware, or something else of your choosing, keeping a backup on your PC is something everyone should do. It doesn't have to be a full-fledged antivirus program, but something light that you can run whenever to quickly scan your PC and remove that garbage is a generally good idea.

And that'll pretty much cover most problems nowadays! We made it guys, you pretty much never have to worry about 'em anymore. (for the most part)

Destiny is Single-Handedly the Worst of the Gaming Industry

If there was ever a game I could pin all my problems on, a single game I could ever blame for DLC, Season Passes, unfinished at launch, unplayable, every single unbearable part of this damn industry, it would have to be Destiny. Just thinking about this game makes me sick, and I gotta write a blog post about it! So, let's dig right into this.

If you live under a rock, you at least know that Destiny was extremely underwhelming at launch, with an extreme lack of story content, multiplayer content, locked-off and unfinished on-disc DLC, the works. So weren't the DLC going to fix all that and continue off of the story? Well, I guess they did, but that in no way forgives for the travesty that was Destiny at launch last year.

But that's not what I'm mad about.

I'm mad about how bullshit Bungie and Activision's marketing and pricing tactics are on people who purchased Destiny. With the release of the new Taken King expansion/revamp of the game, you'd think that things would be a lot better from here on out, right? Welp, I can pretty much say no to that, at least from a pricing standpoint.

Let's take a look at the pricing of Destiny. The base game at launch was $60, and the game with the Season Pass was priced at launch as $90. That's standard (unfortunate, but standard) with most games at this point. Their first expansion, The Dark Below, cost $20 to those who didn't have the season pass. Their 2nd expansion, House of Wolves, followed the same suit, $20, covered by the season pass. HOWEVER, this new Taken King expansion is not only double the price of the earlier expansions at $40, but it isn't included in the Season Pass. Essentially, anyone who dropped extra on the Season Pass would have no choice but to purchase The Taken King. On top of that, to even access the new content of the Taken King, you HAVE to have both previous expansions. So let's do a bit of calculating if you can't follow so far:

Without the Season Pass:

$60 + $20 + $20 + $40 = $140 to access the Taken King from the base game

With the Season Pass:

$90 + $40 = $130 to access the Taken King

Now this only applies to those who already purchased the game. For someone who doesn't own the game such as myself there is a Destiny Legendary Edition that includes the base game, all the previous DLC, and the Taken King for a flat $60. So it's not exactly bad if you don't have Destiny.

However, if you just have the base Destiny game you'll find that literally scrapping your current copy for a Legendary Taken King Edition of the game is actually CHEAPER than buying all the expansions seperately. Seriously, do the math. If you dropped $60 on the base game, and drop $60 for the new Legendary Edition, you only dropped $120. If you drop money separately for all the content you end up paying $140 total.

Is this what you want us to think of your game Activision and Bungie? That your base game is so worthless that it's actually more worth it to re-buy the game? That's terrible! You essentially beta tested everyone who made up that $500 million profit revenue on Day One of your damn game, and then expect them to at least drop the same price again for the expansions.

And yeah, there's a story floating around that originally Bungie had planned around 5 games to launch within 2 year time windows starting at 2013 for around 10 years. I believe the writer quitting or something like that impacted the game significantly to the point where they had to scrap their entire plans and start with a new plan and push a game out within a year. But that DOESN'T EXCUSE this. It doesn't excuse continually charging your customers for the same game over and over again. There are companies like CD Projekt Red that actually know how to treat their customers. There is no value in this game from a company, whether Bungie, Activision, or even both, that doesn't know how to treat its customers and expects you to keep throwing money at them over and over.

With how messed up this industry is, I originally found it hard to pinpoint a single game as the worst of the industry, but after this whole Taken King fiasco, it takes the cake as the worst of the industry.