From the mists of time

Gather around and let me tell you a tale from gaming yore!

I am old enough to remember what gaming used to be like. You went to the store and chose your game from the shelf. The games came in big cardboard boxes and included manuals.

Maybe you read an article in a gaming magazine, maybe you went on faith and box art alone, but you had to make a choice and if you chose poorly, well you didn't age into a skeleton, but you wasted your money.

Then you installed the game from disks. You know, the save icon... Disks! In the case of Doom 2 it was five disks! (Imagine I'm holding a flashlight under my face here).

One day the disks were replaced by CD-ROM and it was easier. As an aside, is there a more 90's word than CD-ROM? I don't think so. Anyway, Phantasmagoria came on 5 CD-ROM’s, and that blew my mind.

The CD gave way to DVD and now, we magically turn invisible signals that flow through the air into a game that we can play.

Back in those days of floppy disks, the game had to be complete, there was no way to fix it later. A broken game was a broken game forever. With the advent of the Internet, a studio could patch a game after release, but you had to find it and figure out how to get the patch to work, which could be a complete pain in the you-know-what.

Back in them there ancient days, an add-on to a game was called an expansion. But in 2006 Bethesda invented Horse Armor and sold it separately from the expansions as DLC! (The flashlight is back).

Horse armor was widely scorned as ridiculous but enough people must have bought it as the idea stayed on. And why not? Small extras that were too insignificant to be called expansions that you could buy if they appealed to you. Not so bad, right?

But then... then the gray men and women in their gray suits saw the possibilities and things changed forever. Suddenly games were released unfinished, broken even, only to “be fixed later”. Day one patches that desperately tried to fix buggy messes became the norm. Sometimes the patch was bigger than the game, even.

DLC grew from a small add-on to full expansions and the very word: expansion vanished from the gaming thesaurus. In some extreme cases, the DLC was announced before anyone really knew what the game was about, though this was rare.

Many were worried, but the darkness only grew. Content was cut out of games and sold as day one DLC, games wasted away unfinished until the developer gave up. Content was cut and sold as pre-order bonuses. The gray suits smiled, rubbed their hands and invented Live Services. Now a game could be stretched out and monetized forever! Cruel demons with names like Micro-transactions, Loot-boxes and Gambling-mechanics arrived and danced across the gaming sphere, spreading ill will and problems where ever they went.

A few plucky heroes fought back, but the tide of darkness seemed unstoppable. Then, a miracle:

Electronic Arts (EA) announces and releases Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order, and it is:

1. A single player game.
2. Feature complete.
3. Apparently really good!

Now don't go thinking that EA has suddenly become the good guys, but in all fairness, Fallen Order seems like a cool game. I'm as surprised as you are. I haven't played it myself, but apart from a couple of small issues of personal taste, I can find no fault with it.

That was my somewhat roundabout way of saying that Fallen Order seems cool and not to discard it just because it is EA. Just don't let them use this game as a smoke screen for more unethical nonsense.

That's it for this time, so until next we meet, have a great week!