On Disc DLC - A fast(food) example

[owsf2000]

Against my better judgement, I was reading Kotaku comments today.

Yes, I know.

The comments of course were under the article about the whole finding of entire levels (unpopulated of course, except for 3 ghost objects you can apparently pick up) on the disc of Destiny. And the whole DLC shitstorm started again.

My bitching won't be about that in particular, I'm sure I've already bitched about it before and will do so again at a later date. I'm already formulating a way to describe all the DLC methods used with games I end up reviewing in the future. :P It's taking a long time to compile.

Anyway, one commenter made this very stupid remark. "Here's a shocker for people who hate On-Disc DLC: When you go to McDonalds and you buy french fries, there's actually a whole cooker full of fries that they AREN'T giving you. it's RIGHT THERE and they are deliberately not giving all of it to you."

I mean.... what? This isn't just off the mark, it's completely irrelevant to the situation. That cooker full of fries behind them are extra copies of the game that other people will be buying. Unless of course you actually ordered a cooker's worth of fries.

So instead, I'll give you the real comparison. Let's say you order a Big Mac. Inside a small plastic box you receive a 3-piece bun with 2 burger patties. Next to that, you are also given a locked glass jar that contains a few pickles, some lettuce, a cheese slice, and a small cup of sauce. You are not given a key to this jar. But you may purchase one for a few extra dollars. Have a nice day.

Comments

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

The reason why people have such a hard time understanding the basic concepts here is because for the last half decade at least, the developers and publishers have been doing everything in their power to distort, confuse, and muddy the meanings.

They know DLC is a curse word when it's hacking out content, and on-disc DLC is the prime example of this. There's no way for them to defend themselves if it's completely on the disc but locked out. It's like the movie/music industry's laughable attempt to declare they weren't infesting their media with the hated DRM (Digital Rights Management) that everyone so hated - instead they were using the much more enlightened DCE! (Digital Content Enablement)

Anyone with even 2 braincells to rub together knew the two were one and the same.

Japanese companies still do on-disc DLC fairly regularly - just look at most of the DLC for various JRPGs. You'll find most of them are simple 100kb-200kb files. Yet in that 1/10 of a megabyte there could be anything from a few items to full 3d meshes of "new characters" or entire levels! Yeah, or it could just be the required bytes for the unlock code.

American companies seem to be realizing how hated it is to have either Day 1 DLC, or on-disc content so they've "adapted". And what you see is what's happening in Destiny. They throw as much as they can on the disc, and deliberately leave scripts/enemies/etc so they can hide behind the excuse "oh it's locked out because it isn't done!" The reason it isn't done is because they deliberately did not give themselves enough time to finish their product. And why should they? When they can simply ship it unfinished (And I hear a lot of people seem to be displeased with what's in Destiny, calling it unpolished/unfinished/barren/etc) for full price, then charge even more to finish it afterwards.

Oh, naturally I didn't post my reply on kotaku. That'd require posting on kotaku, which sickens me as much as it sickens you. ^_^

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

It's funny because "it wasn't finished yet" was the lame excuse they were giving when this shit first started as to why it was Day 1 DLC. E.g., shit at least as far back as Dragon Age: Origins such as the "Stone Prisoner" DLC was claimed to "need some tweaking" before release because Shale apparently couldn't fit through doors or some stupid shit (which they "fixed" by simply shrinking the character model, iirc), and so, they "had to" cut it out to be sold extra on the day the game launched.

And now it's "not done" simply because they've gotten smart enough not to include everything, just most of it. E.g. that Prothean ally shit (http://kane-magus.livejournal.com/567624.html) from Mass Effect 3 (http://kane-magus.livejournal.com/562339.html). The character itself was already in the game and fully playable via a simple twoone line change in the script files. But BioWare claimed that it wasn't really on-disc DLC because you still had to download the shit for the story and whatever. This here with Destiny is the same sort of shit, too. Except that is for the "convenience" of players, so that they don't have to download so much when they buy the DLC. No shit they don't have to download so much if it's already on the fucking disc (and thus should be included in the base game and not be fucking sold separately as "DLC").

It's only going to get even more egregious as time goes on, and people like the dumbasses we've been talking about here are still going to stupidly eat it up and defend it.