Day-One DLC, is it right?

As many people will be aware, Mass Effect 3 shipped today in Europe. It has already had some huge success over in the States, selling 890,000 copies on its first day. However one thing I have seen a lot of talk over in these past few days, is the topic of DLC being released for sale on the first day.

Publishers today are starting to move their attention towards DLC as a means to bring in more revenue after the release of the game. I personally have no issue with this itself, I am more than happy to support the developers of games that I love and in the past have purchased a huge amount of DLC content. However it's the downsides to this DLC frenzy that is slowly starting to take over the industry. With the shift towards DLC as a source of revenue, developers are starting to cut support for custom content in games. I have heard many reasons for this from developers including the comment from EA about fans being unable to use Frostbite 2, which as someone who has toyed around with creating content I was deeply offended by. What is starting to irritate me more though is that fact that we are seeing games released on much shorter life cycles, which are actually lacking content because developers want to shift DLC later on down the line.

Console games especially suffer from this problem, while PC is starting to move towards free to play to avoid this problem. One of the reasons that people are complaining about is the fact that single player games are now increasing in price, and having less content resulting in shorter completion times. RPG's such as Skyrim and Mass Effect don't really suffer from this, but shooter games such as Call of Duty and Battlefield can easily be completed in just a few hours. If you have no intentions of playing the multiplayer, this works out at around £10+ per hour of game play. That's a story for another day, as I am here to talk about day one DLC.

Releasing content on the first day is something I don't agree with if it is for a fully comercialised game retailing at £40+ R.R.P. DLC packs are usually around £6.99-11.99 on the Xbox, a price which usually translates on to the PS3 and PC releases. There is no reason that this content shouldn't already be on the disc come release, but even worse than that is developers pulling content out of the game to release as day one DLC. This is something that we are starting to see a trend with, which developers usually use the fact that the DLC comes with the collectors edition as an excuse for this. I wouldn't mind but it usually costs more to get the standard game and DLC than it would for the collectors editions which usually sell out fairly quickly. Battlefield 3 actually did this fine for me, as the content wasn't ready on release so they allowed you to download it for free in the future if you had the collectors edition.

Mass Effect 3 has however had its disc data mined, which has resulted in people finding half of the day one DLC already on the disc. This is yet another kick in the customers teeth from EA, who are very rapidly starting to show the industry that they actually don't care at all and are more interested in the short term than long term financial gains. It's the equivilant of buying a directors cut edition of a DVD, only to get home and find out that while the content is on the disc you need to pay extra to view it. I hope this is a practice that we see disappear very soon, but I sadly doubt that is the case.

With the rise of free to play games, and the rapid increase of mobile gaming on smart phones and tablets, big companies like EA will start to lose out a huge chunk of the market. It's not like the graphical quality or drive space of these devices is behind, the rumored iPad 3 specs is looking likely to be more powerful than the PS3. Big companies like EA and Activision could lose the huge share of the market they currently monopolise. When you look at the PC market, they don't seem to have even close to as big an impact at the minute and companies such as Valve and Riot are leading the way. The only foothold they have is Battlefield 3, which disappointed a lot of PC gamers who felt like they had been ignored for the console players, and Starcraft 2 which is currently a phenomon thanks to e-sport scene exploding has seen huge success.

Sadly it looks like day one DLC is here to stay. It's becoming more common and I can only see it being an expected feature in the future. With Microsoft and Sony trying to lock down their consoles even more and not allowing free to play becoming a feature, it seems to be a bleak future for console gamers. The casual players most likely won't stand for stuff like this and have no brand loyalties, they just play games because they are fun. The only people getting hurt here are the long term fans that put EA and Activision on the map, something neither company seems overly bothered about.

Battlefield 3 expansions revealed

EA have just announced information on the next two Battlefield 3 expansions. Battlefield 3 Close Quarters is to be the first released, followed this fall by Battlefield 3 Armored Kill. While I am excited for Armored Kill as it contains lots more of the typical Battlefield arsenal, (vehicle combat, large maps and so forth), Close Quarters actually fills me with a bit of worry.

When Battlefield 3 came out, one of the biggest complaints that I saw was about the maps. People complained that they were too enclosed, and there just wasn't enough space for proper vehicular combat. The levels Metro and Seine Crossing were commonly complained about due to their urban setting, something people felt belonged more in Call of Duty. I personally agreed with such comments at the time, and still do. What Battlefield has always had is its own niche of combining infantry and vehicular combat almost flawlessly.

In todays current gaming selection, modern combat is taking over. Nearly every game is either modern combat, or bases itself very closely to the Call of Duty formula. What Battlefield 3 did was push itself away from this by giving people the option of vast environments, which they could happily destroy with tanks, jets and other forms of armored weaponry. With the release of BF3CQ they are planning on moving more towards that CoD formula, which is something they really don't need to do. On the BF3CQ preview page they mention the word competitive. This is something that most likely won't exist in Battlefield.

Battlefield has struggled to make a huge impact in the past at events, and I believe that it will continue to struggle. The problem is that while Battlefield 3 is a great game, it requires far to many players to actually form a team, so organisations aren't willing to sponsor teams as often. By reducing it to Close Quarters they are now allowing for making teams smaller (Something we could have already done anyway with Squad Deathmatch and Rush), which makes it easier for teams to form and organisations to send teams to events. However by doing this they are now losing the niche and entering the 4v4 or 5v5 area of competitive FPS, a scene dominated by Counter Strike and Call of Duty 4 on the PC and Halo and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 on the Xbox, and personally I don't think that it can compete.

Battlefield 3 was never made with competition in mind, it was made for the huge maps and 32-64 player games. Trying to bring that formula down to 8-10 player servers is only going to ruin the experience. They would be best leaving Battlefield as it is, and actually do something with Medal of Honor if competition is where they want to go. The last iteration of Medal of Honor was forgotten in just a few weeks, and failed to make a big impact on the gaming world at all. Battlefield Expansions are gaining far more discussion than Medal of Honor is, which is something EA need to change if they want to continue spending money on the series. Now personally I would love to see them go to Medal of Honor with competition in mind, and take it back to WW2 and it's Allied Assault roots on the PC. Even today MoH:AA is still one of the finest PC games made, and still has quite a healthy community.

EA has the money, and certainly the talent, within their company if they wish to make a truly incredible competitive game. Turning Battlefield into EAs flagship competitive game, and moving it towards CQC will only upset the hardcore Battlefield players and be yet another question to the long list of "Why does MoH actually exist?".

Indepth Nexuiz weapon information.

Illfonic have released the damage and fire rates of all the weapon so far. They have also explained what they are and aren't able to change server side. This is a good piece of information for player's and we can now help point them in the right direction as to where something needs nerfing or buffing.

Official Post

As well as this FellipeMariano has put together a quick guide on each weapon. While most players will have caught up on a lot of what is mentioned, if you are a newer player I would certainly recommend taking a look at this guide as it could help you out.

FellipeMarianos weapon guide

Over the next few weeks I will be making a few guides for SMNC and Nexuiz. I can't do much Nexuiz content right now due to a problem with my Xbox however I will help keep people up to date on the scene as it progresses. As soon as the PC version is released I will be making quite a few weapon and map guides for the game.