One group of people is represented on the forums by several threads lashing out in anger at one or many leaked, confirmed, or demonstrated properties of the game. One week, it was pay-for Day 1 DLC. The next, it's the endings. Some people are bringing up the loss of film grain, the shoddy AI in the demo. Glitches, balances, propositions, tweaks, cutscenes...the list goes on for those who've gotten fed up and shouted, with all the fervor of Harbinger: "PREORDER CANCELLED".
The other group is responding to this first group with the mantra, "Do not judge an unreleased product."
Here's the truth. I plan on buying Mass Effect 3. I've invested too many hours into the story to not see it through to its completion. I wouldn't watch A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back and then hear that Vader dies in Return of the Jedi and instantly vow to never watch it. But getting back to Mass Effect, the arguments to cancel pre-orders go well beyond a few storytelling decisions. EA/BW knew they were taking a production risk by putting their game in a new engine, and not all of the kinks were worked out by the time that they launched their space edition, which is, effectively, a finished product. However, for those of us who did reserve copies, we are now hesitating for various reasons, mostly I would speculate are related to the advertising of the game.
Let me make something clear: we're not boycotting Mass Effect 3, or attempting to convince anyone of the same. Rather, I'd say we need to combat advertisement by saying, "If you're going to promise x, you'd better not give us y wearing x's costume." Advertising is a promise. Pre-orders are purchases on faith that those promises will be upheld, and it's not like you have any legal grounds to sue if you were a sucker to a company's advertisements. Here's the thing: Bioware would never say, "Sorry, guys, our writers ran out of ideas." or "We had a schedule and so we had to make compromises." or "We would've liked to test this some more." They can't. That's death for a company, and despite it possibly being honest, the amount of people who would respect that are drowned by the sea of people who would lift them on to a cross at the first chance they had. So instead, we're given advertising. We're given hype. Bioware's going to say this is the best game they've ever made, because that's how they want the consumer to feel. And they're going to quote every source that says anything that holds up that illusion. They want your preorders, they want the sale. They want, frankly, your money.
But the power is in the hands of the consumer. And we have reliable assistants on our side that we should be making more use of: professional critics, particularly ones that the consumers can trust (which is not always the major ones. Remember, what they do is a job, too).
The situation as I see it has two outcomes:
1) Mass Effect 3 delivers on all or most of its promises, and becomes a great way to close out Shepard's story. Perhaps the majority of players will have minor quibbles here and there, but on a whole, it's an exciting, engaging game that absorbs hundreds of player hours through multiple playthroughs and a multiplayer facet that keeps the game living for years after its release...or until the next game comes out. Maybe things will appear in the game that weren't in the demo. Maybe Bioware will bring back the film grain, maybe the AI will be tweaked or improved, or was dumbed down to save space on the download for the demo. Maybe some things were left out for technical reasons that will be in the full game. If this is the case, I'm sure all of us with cancelled preorders or holding on to our reservations won't mind waiting an extra week, because we're willing to wait instead of chase for instant gratification. And so we'll wait, and when the critics confirm that the fears, the anger, and the bitterness on these forums was unfounded and premature, we'll happily then pay the $60 everyone else did for the experience, and maybe even drop deserved and earned money on whatever amounts of DLC we so choose.
2) Mass Effect 3 falls short of its creative and executive goals, full of retcons and plot holes which it must then wrap up with excuses and cheesy dialogue, sitting in a new engine with animations that won't get tuned out until the next release. The multiplayer will perhaps grow stale after a week of playing, and the fans cry out for a patch which takes over a month to release before, instead of balancing, it just reworks the imbalance to another sector. If this happens, believe it or not, many of us who are holding out on our reservations or cancelling our pre-orders will probably still buy the game. But we'll pay a price we feel it deserves. For example, if, in two months after release, the game's retail price goes from $60 to $50, well, then with From Ashes, now many of us who argued against the pay-for day 1 DLC will be able to argue that we got a complete game, the complete game we felt entitled to, and from there we can make our own criticisms.
Now, not unlike the Mass Effect trilogy's endings, these endings each have their minor variations: who appears in the cut-scenes, what the face of your Love Interest looks like, and what not (see what I did there?). It's possible that the critics laud the game in its first week and then its popularity severely declines (we'll call this the Dragon Age II Effect). It's also possible that, despite its leaked endings, the players instead laud the game as being an epic work of storytelling, and sales continue well into the second or even third month after release.
In brief, we're not saying don't buy the game. We're saying don't buy the advertising. We, the consumer, have the power and the right to demand a fair price for a company's work. They of course have a right to offer a price, but who in the world of intelligent marketing offers a fair price? You always offer high. If I had a call to action, it would be: wait. And wait patiently. Decline the offer, and wait for the reviews. Wait for the release. If the game is worth what Bioware is offering, I'm absolutely willing to wait a week, maybe even a few weeks, for that to become realized, and then I'll gladly pay what they're asking, and I'll be happier for being assured of my investment. And if it turns out that it isn't worth it, then I'll have saved a margin of money that people who were hasty have lost out on, which often makes a person quite bitter.
Wait. It's a win-win situation for the smart consumer. Don't buy the advertising. Buy the game you want to buy, not the quotes from the people who want you to buy the game they want to sell, at the price they want to sell it at.
Modifié par The Makatak, 02 mars 2012 - 05:56 .
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