I've been playing SnowRunner for nearly six hundred hours and I'm only into season four of the game. Let that sink in a minute. Five hundred and eighty-ish hours of driving around in the mud, snow, through and over ice covered lakes and rivers at around eight miles an hour. It sounds boring AF but man I love this game. Read more
I spent a lot of good time playing Spitires: MudRunner and I regret nothing. It's slow pacing and punishing mud mechanics made it pretty enthralling to sit behind my XBONE controller and haul lumber in the Siberian wilderness. Not to mention that once that bit started feeling a little stale there was always map exploration and rock crawling to do with the many and varied vehicles. Modders have also added a ton of longevity to MudRunner by creating maps and vehicles galore. It's a good experience and I recommended it in my review here.
Saber has very recently added an inexpensive expansion that brings the challenge to the U.S. and I've been enjoying it a lot. Click that Read More button and I'll tell you how I'm getting east bound and down on PC. Read more
Fatshark has released a quick thirty second teaser trailer for the first DLC to come to the Grimdark Fanatsy world of Vermintide 2. Not much is shown but if I had to speculate I would say that what we'll see is up to three maps, one of which will contain a new boss. Read more
Okay so we've all heard a ton about this Shadow of War "Forthog" DLC and the really backhanded way WB decided to honor late executive producer Michael Forgey. I'll sum up real quick. The DLC is meant to honor Mr. Forgey by creating an allied Orc character with his visage that will show up and save the player from death here and there. WB originally set the DLC price at $4.99 with a portion of the money from sales going to the family of Mr. Forgey.
That sounded great on it's face and was probably actually a well intentioned move by the folks who genuinely loved the man. The problem is that the money from sales was only going to be donated from 43 of the 50 states in the U.S. and nowhere overseas while the rest just went into the already cavernous pockets of Warner. WB themselves had said that they would in no way profit from the sales of this DLC but that made no sense at all since the money collected for donation was going to be very limited. Where would the rest of that money go? That DLC couldn't have been prohibitively expensive to make, at least not so much that WB wouldn't make their money back on the numerous sales taking place outside the donation areas. Of course this knowledge sparked a fair amount of outrage including here in our own team space where much eye rolling and fist waving has taken place.
Well according to Polygon, WB has now decided to provide the Forthog DLC for free to everyone now and just make a donation to Mr. Forgey's family directly. Those who already purchased the DLC will receive a refund for the cost. Finally some good news from this whole thing. In all fairness, WB has owned up the mistake.
What do you guys think though? Was this a moment of realization for WB? Or was it just enough pressure and bad PR to make them shift their decision? Either way a pretty flawed and seemingly greedy move to make sales on the loss of a beloved producer and actual human person has been corrected. Whether it was intentionally designed that way or not.
This is long and ranty. But I feel that it is important.
You guys absolutely got the industry you wanted.
We got here through slow degrees. Like the proverbial frog in the pot - although, it didn't actually seem that way to begin with. So, very quickly, let's talk about the divide between modern games and how they monetize and older games and how those raked in the money.
In the bad old days, a game was a once-off experience - for the most part. You bought the game, it had absolutely all the content on the disk and off you went. This wasn't absolutely universal, of course - even back then we had what were known as "Scenario Disks" and added content through content builders - Things like the Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures construction kit.
But if you bought a game you would be assured of ALL the content. At least until a scenario disk/expansion pack rolled around. There was no messing around with day one DLC [a misnomer, but we'll get there] or very many "added content exclusives." The game you took home was - generally - the same game your European friends took home on the day of release.
Then, Bethesda cracked open the door through Horse Armor and everything changed.
But it's important to realize an important thing about this whole fiasco: we can't go back. We can't stuff the genie back into the bottle. But we can maybe make executives think twice about fleecing us.
