Dragon Age Ultimate Edition

[owsf2000]

This

This kind of shows exactly how game publishers are suckerpunching gamers this generation in order to make them pay more for a Full Game. DAUE has all the DLC and stuff wrapped up into it. I'm not entirely sure how the DLC is added, if it's pre-installed on the discs (You'd think that'd be the smart thing to do right? I honestly don't know.) or if they're just going to include a free coupon the way some Game of the Year editions have started to take.

The Ultimate Edition is going to retail the same as a normal New Release I believe. So about 60 dollars. To have bought all the content in this package before this it would have cost you approximately $114. One hundred, fourteen dollars. Those nickels and dimes sure add up. That's what you get for buying "beta-ware". ;)

Oh I like that term. I'm going to use it from now on for current games. >:)

For my part, I obviously don't have the game yet. (Don't have a PS3/360/Wii, and only buying cheap titles for now so I have lots to play by the time I do get them)

If the DLC is pre-installed - no download necessary - then I will likely add the game to my To Buy list. I would have been seriously pissed however if I had previously bought the game full price, regardless of if I had also bought the DLC separately.

Comments

[hikarugenji.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, that's not so different from what PC gamers have experienced for a long time -- releasing expansion packs and then later bundling them with the original game for reduced price.

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

Just because PC devs have been doing it for years doesn't make it right. It just makes it a long standing shitty practice that is being applied to a larger audience.

[hikarugenji.livejournal.com]

Well...I guess I agree in a way but if the alternative is that it always costs $114 and never goes down in price, that's not that much better. I think it really depends on how long the compilation is released (and it also depends on how complete the original game feels without the DLC/expansion packs). I haven't played Dragon Age so I don't know how it works with that.

If the original game feels complete in itself, and the cheaper compilation is released long enough after the original game, it's not that bad to me. The first one is the big potential problem, of course.

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

Eh, another alternative is that they would simply NOT release a game until it's actually finished. Just because they decide to take the path that gouges the most money out of customers doesn't mean it's the only possible way for them to have done it.

I don't buy all the excuses about it being too expensive to develop requiring them to pull all the crap they've been pulling. They've been pulling it simply because with built in harddrives it's been -possible- to do it. That is all.

For Dragon Age itself however, the base game from what I've heard doesn't feel complete. In fact it had built in advertisements for it's gutted out DLC from day 1 iirc. So it wasn't an issue of going to the Sony store or booting up Live and seeing there were DLC bundles for the game. It was a matter of having some annoying character in the game pointing out to you that you were missing all these parts of the game, complete with notifying you that you were missing various achievements associated with them.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

You know, for someone who bought the original game but hadn't bought any of the DLC yet, it would actually be almost the same amount of money (including what was already paid to buy the original game) to just buy this "ultimate" edition (i.e. buy whole game again, plus the DLC) as it would be to buy just the DLC by itself. Which is ridiculous. Bethesda did the same thing with Fallout 3 not too long ago as well. Makes me kind of glad that I didn't buy any of the DLC for Fallout yet. As it stands now, if I ever want to go back and play Fallout with all of the DLC, it'll cost me about the same if I just buy the bundle that has all of the DLC and the full game, or just the DLC by itself. (Then again, given that I never even finished vanilla FO3... >_>)

But, as you say, for anyone who has already bought the original game and all of the DLC, or even just some of it, this is indeed a complete rip-off. Early adopters almost always get burned, in the end.

This is why, for example, I'm holding out on Starcraft 2 and will wait and get it when all three parts of the whole game are released and bundled together into a single package, which will likely end up costing the same as a normal full game (i.e. one-third of what it will cost now, if you get each part separately, as soon as they are released). I don't need to play Starcraft 2 that badly at the moment.

It was the same with the Orange Box. They released Half-Life 2, for the price of a full game. Then they released Episode 1 for almost the price of a full game. Then they released the Orange Box, which contained Half-Life 2, Episode 1, Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2, all for the price of a single full game. Anyone who already had Half-Life 2 and Episode 1 were screwed over, given that they cancelled the Black Box (http://pc.ign.com/articles/790/790013p1.html), which was to have only contained the new content, but at a smaller price. I'm glad I didn't jump on the Half-Life 2 bandwagon when it first came out. The only thing is that you'd be missing out on playing a game like that when it first comes out, and in many cases that just doesn't matter all that much to me. Some games I am willing to go ahead and pay full price for just the base game, even knowing that I'll probably get burned later on*, but most of the time I don't care if I get to play the game right on release day or not.

Oh and wait, didn't a lot of publishers/devs and forum-retards say something along the lines of games never degrading in value, which was part of their argument for why used games are so evil? Hmmmmm....

* - I'm looking at you, Fable and Jade Empire (http://kane-magus.livejournal.com/82647.html). Hell, Morrowind as well, for that matter, given that I (re)bought the Game of the Year edition in order to get the Tribunal and Bloodmoon expansions, even though I already had the original Morrowind. So yeah, as Kern said, this has already been going on for quite a long time. But, as you said, it has always sucked (unless you were one of the "lucky" ones who didn't buy the game when it launched). I guess the way to go is to wait until the "Game of the Year Super-dandy Ultimate Edition" of a given game is released, and then wait some more until that hits bargain bin price.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Wait...

From that link I posted in the previous comment concerning the Black Box...

"This way a PC Orange Box owner can give away their Half-Life 2 or Episode One unused Steam product codes if they don't need a copy of those games."

Can you imagine a publisher/dev ever saying anything like that in this day and age of "Oh noes resales are baaaaad!!!" Hell, they're talking about giving them away. Oh, the times, how they have changed.

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

Oh and wait, didn't a lot of publishers/devs and forum-retards say something along the lines of games never degrading in value, which was part of their argument for why used games are so evil? Hmmmmm....

You don't even have to look that far for degrading value given you can buy a lot of games at retail stores like Wal-mart for under 20 bucks when they use to cost 60 new. And then you have the whole "Greatest Hits" angle.