Other Sides of the Dagger

Monday, March 10, 2014

Pre-ordering video games, should we do it?

Hello everyone,

I am writing this on the basis of most AAA titles these days exclaiming that you should preorder there great new game and not miss out. Not sure what you're going to miss out on apart from playing the game earlier than if you bought it later, perhaps miss out on playing it with your friends on day one launch?... meh. What am I getting at here?, Battlefield 4. I rarely preorder anything as sometimes it's just not worth it, unless you're a collector and have to have a special boxed edition to grace your shelves, I'll happily wait til after the fact to get the game.

Battlefield 4 had me so excited like a 10 year old boy going to a friends birthday party, I could hear all the banter between friends, smell all the party pies, sausage rolls, tomato sauce, cold coke, sweets and cake... especially cake... only to be taken back of the mower shed and molested by said friends shady uncle on the proviso of even better sweets that were somehow back behind the shed. And like Battlefield 4 and its botched launch and numerous patches of "closing one door, opening three hundred others" it has left me feeling the same way... confused, angry and cold.

All the signs of an epic title were there, its predecessor Battlfield 3 absolutely rocked even though it had its relatively small problems, gimmicky as hell Levelution, FrostFUGGINbite3!, new weapons, assignments and the list goes on... say no more, you had my money upon announcement of the new game. It certainly seemed like EA had such a hard-on for money that all of the blood literally left there brain to pump up a voracious cash boner to get this game out as soon as possible and poor old DICE just had to follow suit or as the saying goes "shape up, or ship out". This has hurt gamers no doubt, I surmise this has hurt EA/DICES' bottom line (speculation of course, compared to say a fully functioning release they would've had to make more money right? good vs bad publicity and all that.) and just going by apparent court cases that EA are facing, they have not been fully upfront with the true on the state of the game to investors which can only really point to them not being truthful across the board on anything, but we knew that already didn't we?.

So, is it really worth preordering anything? If there is going to be day one DLC packaged as some wanky special edition with a tin case that you'll never look at again. Then comes the premium content which includes all the expansions and you get them 2 weeks earlier plus priority queuing for servers just to get you in for the hard sell. By the end of the day you've shelled out $120.00 plus bucks for a broken game and promises of it getting better... so no, it's not really worth it.

What does it mean? It all means drek if the spine of the game is broken which Battlefield 4 currently is and it's sad... it doesn't stop me from playing it, it just stops me from playing the absolute fucking hell out of it and enjoying it immensely. Rather, I play a few sessions and get the shits with it and do something else.

This brings me to Titanfall dropping very soon, did I play the beta? yes. Did I enjoy the beta? yes. Have I pre ordered it? No.

Because once bitten, twice shy.


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