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:
A
single player game.
Feature
complete.
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!
