Yep, there was a day where I balked at the idea of digital download. There is something to be had about owning and holding a physical box and disc in your hand, as well as a manual in the cases where a printed one is furnished. But then... something happened... Then *benefits* of digital distribution started to become clearer and clearer as well as all of the features that surround that such as social networking with other gamers (much like we are doing now), and decluttering the house to name but only a few. It was GOG that got me to seriously consider digital download games and once I embraced that and saw all of the benefits I embraced digital download games wider and started using Steam as well. Nowadays my thoughts are about 180 degrees from 10 years ago with regards to physical copies versus digital downloads. Mainly because what was important to me changed, and the online option only improved more and more over time overall. There's also just something awesome about clicking the mouse a few times and then downloading a game and actually playing it in less than anywhere from a minute to an hour or a few hours from seeing the ad without leaving your house.


I can understand how some people are a little over-cautious per se. My recollection from a video CDPR made a year or so ago was that TW3 was going to have 100 hours of gameplay, but now they're saying it has 200 hours of gameplay. This suggests the game being delivered contains twice the gameplay content than originally planned/anticipated just in the base game. That's pretty impressive to me personally even at just 100hrs. Skyrim completionist time is clocked at 215 hours or so on howlongtobeat.com and I'm about 500 hours in so far and still haven't finished it. So if TW3 has 200 hours, I'll probably take double that. :) So they're announcing an additional 30 hours of optional addon content and that's fine with me. I know some people consider pre-announced content to be something designed for part of a game and lopped off to charge extra and that some companies appear to do that, but I can't see how that is the case with TW3 when they announced 100 hours of gameplay and now are claiming 200 hours of gameplay. Another thing people need to realize is that when you look at the planning stages for an epic project of the proportions of a game of this size, you don't finish the game and ship it, then some months pass by and all of a sudden the developers or CEO says "hey, I got an idea, why don't we do an expansion pack with addon content?"... It's something that requires a lot of pre-planning really and is almost certainly going to be planned a year or more in advance, possibly even from the beginning of the project. This is especially true for projects that take multiple years to complete, you have to plan it all in advance in order to make things happen. Plus, just like when they film movies and know they're going to do sequels or a trilogy such as Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit for example - it is easier to plan out all 3 in advance and can cut down on resources to do them all at once or within a short timeframe in sequence etc. Same is true for things like games and their extra content. It's the sensible way to do it economically and requires less context switching overhead in developer's minds as well.

So pretty much every game out there knows if they're going to do expansions or not way in advance, the only thing new is whether they let the customer know ahead of time or not, and whether they give the customer the option to buy it early on or not. There are potential benefits to the customer of knowing early and also of being able to buy early, and it can be a good experience if the company is honest and treats its customers well. It can be a bad one if they're douchebags about it too, but it is really how the company intends to do things and how they execute it rather than it being inherent in just offering something.

There are benefits to the company though too, by offering up the extra content for purchase in advance they can benefit from the initial excitement for the game also as a lot of people would prefer to buy the whole experience at once than in bits and pieces over time and are probably more likely to do that in advance than later on, and marketing around a game release probably reaches more people than a separate marketing effort after the fact.

The real problem as I see it is not anything CDPR is doing right now, but rather the fact that the rest of the industry has handled this stuff so terrible now that gamers are automatically on the defensive with almost every new announcement they hear with any and every game from every publisher. Gamers are starting to expect to get ripped off or sleighted because they seem to have an increasing distrust for the entire industry based on past experience with a number of companies that don't really care about their customers. It's sad that it's come to that really and it makes actual trustworthy companies have a much more difficult time having to prove themselves to their customers over and over and over again to still not be trusted.

Another complexity to that is that for any given thing a company does, there are many customers that love it and go apeshit happy over it, and others that hate it and want to set them on fire. A company can easily get themselves in a situation where they can please group A and have group B hate them, or please group B and have group A hate them with no solution that makes both groups happy when what the two groups are asking for are mutually exclusive. One example of this behaviour/phenomenon that illustrates it very clearly is:

Group A: GOG, please make a full featured optional gaming client for your platform!
Group B: GOG, don't ever make a gaming client ever for any reason, I don't care if it is optional or not.

You can not do both A and B above, you can choose one of the two only if you're GOG so no matter how pure GOG's intentions are to be pro-consumer in a decision like this, they are in a losing situation to some degree no matter what.

Companies will always find themselves in situations like that for that very reason - groups of people end up violently wanting opposite things, as well as one group of people opposing something that may not even affect them at all in any way if they choose to not want or use or care about it. But emotions run rampant anyway about everything regardless in the end.


Well.... Wikileaks published all the Sony archives the other day so there might be a possibility to glimpse inside at their internal data there for that. :)


Yep, Rockstar is one of those few companies that are so successful that they have a lot of padding and their failures are virtually non-existant for all intents and purposes. Hell, even if everything they did sucked EXCEPT GTA, they'd still be wildly successful and not give a shit. Like you say - because they can. Very few companies out there IMHO have that level of power. Some use it a bit more responsibly and customer friendly than others mind you.

"Story of my life". Well, not really. :)
Digital distribution's main drawback is that instead of physical goods, you tied to network - cut it, and you lose all access to your stuff. Until really compact and lightweight portable storage be created, situation won't change much. We really need a SSD breakthrough.:)
Another drawback of digital distribution, is dependency of network's bandwidth. Not many people do have broadband. I still travel to areas of the world where dial-up and similar (in terms of performance) connections are the only type of access available. This makes all "always on-line" requirements to be very, very bad policy. Big patches (and I don't mean games, I mean work software) will make you grind your teeth - even if your employer covers the expenses (though they sometimes have their eyes bigger than this O_O), time needed to download the patch won't get shorter. Since everybody is gone mad with thin client, cloud and similar stuff, old ways patches are rarer too, so app goes online, and, well, ever tried to download several hundreds MB over 14.4 kbps?
Third, and most annoying issue of digital distribution are various forms of regional restrictions. At times you simply cannot buy certain thing at certain language. Even if you're willing to pay higher price - providers simply do not offer you an option to do so. So, you want English version of arsechipping greed: droolity? Well, call your friends from overseas or order physical goods. True, that's not problem of DD per se, but it is the problem of DD as we have it now. I don't mind to pay for certain things on Netflix, but I can't - there is no Netflix. Their loss. :)
Tying physical goods to digital control is also big disappointment, because you may have all problems mentioned above.

It all depends on methodology and the way person is playing, including input devices, player's skills, and similar things. I completed Mass Effect on insanity for 25 hours, haven't skipped a thing, completed all quests (not necessarily the "right" way, but missed none, re-checked via wikias and guides, later, when guides appear:)). I really do not see how you can spend more time there. All of my friends, most of whom played it on a consoles, at lower difficulties, spend at least 40 hours. I understand, a couple of hours could be lost should one admire the view (not that with that graphics), but 15? How, where? Mass Effect is not a series known for complicated maps where people tend to get lost.
Games with "open" world are a bit different, of course, as you free to roam the way you wish, but IIRC Fallout New Vegas (plain, no DLCs) took me around 80 hours to complete, there is simply nothing else left to do, I explore the map, complete most quests (without last storyline fork), been everywhere, done everything. Simple roaming, killing stuff that respawn by clock is not a "walkthrough" in my book. It's like playing endless games, like, Euro Truck Simulator 2, I opened the entire map, but I haven't delivered all goods! :D Games like Gothic 1-3 are a bit easier to control, as nothing respawns there - if you clear it, it remains empty.
So measuring time needed to complete game "completely" is very difficult, IMHO.

Of course developers plan to prolong game's life, adding expansions and so on, that's normal course of events and I don't think anybody blames CDPR for that. But don't forget - game is not yet released, no Ultra proofs, promises about no shitty DLCs (and confusion over the terminology". So I'd say it's pretty much expected. I'm sure CDPR will deliver both here and there, in content, but I'm not going to pay for it till I see the original game. I have impression they just took Witcher 2 and spread it thin layer over new map (though I'd prefer Witcher 1 spread, IMHO offered deeper story:)). Not necessarily bad, even if W2 chapter 2, and especially 3 felt a bit hastened, even knowing they offered 2 storylines. :)

Sadly we, the few, the proud, the day one gamers, aware, that buying early is generally bad thing, as you actually can't buy everything from the start, in proverbial one click. Moreover, it's less economical - those who came later, for GOTY or "all shit inside" editions actually get more for less (I don't mean "wait for bundles and sales with at least 75% off"). One more reason to look on this "expansion" policy with scepticism.
In this particular situation CDPR met additional resistance:), due to factors I mentioned earlier. This is mainly PC resource, so we need a) PC Ultra footage, b) PC controls footage. Hard to imagine lack of latter when game already gone wild. I mean gold. /grin

Well, the Internet does what it always did better - DRAMAH! And overreacting.
As for people's wishes, well, some say you shouldn't listen to your customers and follow your way, as customers have no idea what they want. If only we didn't have CnC4, I'd agree with that. :)

I'm no wizard, so "Time Stop" spell is unknown to me.
But brief moments of those news, some of them are quite interesting, if not ironic .

Judging by those rumours I've heard and read about R*, "with power comes responsibility" is not about them.

Hard disks, SSDs, flash drives and system RAM are about to become obsolete within 3-5 years when Hewlett Packard's memristor technology becomes available assuming it lives up to their expectations. The timeframe might shift slightly if there are further delays on the tech. If it does live up to expectations it will revolutionize the entire computing industry probably in a bigger way than any other single achievement we've seen in computing for decades. Speculation until it hits store shelves though. Currently slated for some of the usage cases for 2018 barring delays.


That is of course unfortunate, but if a great divide exists and persists companies will respond with multi-tier offerings because it'd be ultimately a multi-tier marketplace. You'd have one tier of people with cutting edge computers and modern broadband wanting to get the maximum benefit from their system and network capabilities and some companies will make games that match that market segment's capabilities and desires, and another tier of people with limited network/systems and a different set of offerings for them with the capabilities of their own hardware/network. To some degree we have that now although it'll be more prominent if the divide increases between service quality offerings and both tiers are significant enough to justify targeting both with products (which is likely the case).

Sure, it's always an estimate as different people will play differently. That's why I use howlongtobeat.com, it gives averages based off of user supplied info. That doesn't give an exact time, but a ballpark idea of the average. I tend to take longer than average with games as I play them with a rather curious and observant mindset and play style. For example I watched my buddy start playing Skyrim just last week and he more or less walks around the world with tunnel vision. He sees only what is directly in front of him and does not look off to the sides practically ever. I walk along and freely turn my head around to look around like you would in the real world, spot something then wander off to go investigate it, check out a new thing that popped up on the compass, etc. He walks right past all sorts of things just out of his vision to the left or right without the slightest thought he's missing anything. I walk around making sure I look at every corner, nook and cranny in every room, and in large swathes of the outdoors as well. I can't say I don't miss anything but I'm very thorough and it's not just for completionism but also for situational awareness, which is important in games as much as in life. When I go in an area, I'm scouting for cover, for things to investigate more closely, looking for enemies, for attack positions, for an exit path should something bad occur, etc.

He plays the game more like it's a game of Team Fortress where you just run around and shoot everything aimlessly and respawn if you get killed. Different strokes... I'm more into full immersion and I suppose you could say I play such games as if I was actually right there in the game world myself - what would I do? One aspect of his tunnel vision is that it appears the idea of strafing doesn't occur to him or is not part of his game movement vocabulary. I independently move in one direction while independently turning my head in another direction like a real human, as I turn my head 45 degrees to the left, I hit W+D to walk 45 degrees to the right, and I naturally shift my movement direction as my head turns around in any direction, keeping my body moving in a consistent direction if desired. He on the other hand has his head welded to his character's body facing frontwards and only sees what is in the direction of travel, likewise if he wants to see something in another direction while moving, turns his whole body in that direction and moves that way now. Essentially he presses W and S to move around and steer with the mouse, while the A and D keys are virtually never pressed. I dunno how anyone could play any first person or third person game without using A and D to strafe but he seems to do it.

I keep pointing out all sorts of things he totally misses with this limited style of play and he is surprised he missed things. :) The more curious and observant one is though, the longer it takes to finish any game and I'm definitely on the higher end of the scale for both curious and observant. Add to that the fact I am a little meticulous and a game loot hoarder and have to manage my lootings which take a lot more time, and other similar factors and I pretty much am looking at 1.5-3 times to finish a game compared to the average hehehe.

One thing I do wonder though, is how common it is to have 700000 gold in a game of Skyrim... I have no friggen idea what to do with it all but I'm RICH! Hopefully they put out another expansion pack for Skyrim that lets you just buy the entire province. Buy everyone's home in every city and own everything, then everyone works for you and you can end the war and bring peace to Tamriel, then go spend your gold buying up cities in Hammerfell, Morrowind etc. Before you know it, Tamriel is unified under King Skeletonbow...

:)

May we end this discussion please. I want this thread to end. I learned my lesson already :(