I wish you people would stop disparaging CDPR's good name by suggesting that there's some level of self-interest in the way they treat their add-on content. They're just a few miracles away from being the first living entity to be canonized as a saint.
Even with Herren the "crafting" still required one to kill a dragon after all - and you used the soils of that specific victory to have an armour created for you. And like Baldurs Gate with finding the pieces of Crom Fayer and stuff - it felt more like an achievment and reward, not like Tim Taylor threw some pieces together for you...
The problem is this MMO-influence, I see it that way. Look at Witcher 3 and DAI and other games...Items are only defined anymore by their DPS-Value. then some random precentages are added (2% Freezing on Witcher swords, 12% flanking damage on DAI-Weapons - damn, that's sexy .. NOT!) Just makes me picture some scene in my mind...
I think it's even more insulting that W3 for example actually has these legendary weapons with a backstory.
Like when the freaking king of vikings gives you his ancestral sword of mythical qualities believing you to be a worthy wielder to smite evil with it.
Turns out his own blacksmith made me a better one five minutes ago from a schematic I bought from a tavern so I sold his ancestral birthright to a drunk herbalist for couple of silvers.
Imagine if King Arthur sold Excalibur to a village idiot because he bought a Persian saber with better stats from a local brothel. 
Bioware would charge a simple outfit DLC, TW3 didn't, and that's just an example. So no, there aren't many studios like CDPR out there.
Well Bioware did give us some excellent multiplayer DLCs for ME3 free of charge. I think both of these companies are on the light side of this whole DLC cesspit.
Bioware would charge a simple outfit DLC, TW3 didn't, and that's just an example. So no, there aren't many studios like CDPR out there.
Bioware is just one studio which in owned by EA, a company that is notorious for their lack of game friendly attitudes.
Even so, if we look at all Bioware games under EA, their DLC policy varied and there were some free DLC that surpass all the free DLC CDPR released for TW3. In Mass Effect 2 for example (although we could argue about the Cerberus Network thing) there were several pieces of DLC that for those who bought the game cost nothing more: Zaeed, The Hammerhead and a few missions, new weapons and a few more things. Recently, in DAI, the Black Emporium was a free DLC and there were updates to the game that add things that are certainly comprable with those very minor free stuff released for TW3.
So if we consider everything, CDPR is a very peculiar developer, but when it comes to the DLC for TW3, they "lied" about what they were doing because they knew many people would fall for it and think their DLC policy was something extraordinary. It's not. The only thing different about it, is that it calls itself something else to deceive players.
In their defense, their first major DLC seems to be extraordinary. Just one more reasons that says they didn't need such shallow attitudes concerning paid content.
I loved Feastday Gifts.
In all honesty in threads like these it always ends up in people defending what they like and bashing what they don't like. It's very subjective.
However I would like to point out a few facts about TW3 and DA:I or ME3 DLCs. I'm not dwelling in the issue of quality as (unless a game is terrible) it is highly subjective. However here a few facts that make CDPR loved by its fans:
1) CDPR DLCs are significantly cheaper. Two expansions for 25$ is cheaper than the usual BW 15$ for each single DLC. I'm not saying that the price isn't worth for BW content just that CDPR DLCs are cheaper. The fact they develop the game in Poland and BW in Canada is not my concern as a customer. Price tags talks
2) The 18 or so initial free DLC that CDPR released were probably already in the game and most likely were a marketing strategy to sweenten the customers into purchasing their season passes considering how TW2 instead offered additional missions for free. However since these initial contents were given for free no harm was done.
3) BW still charges us separately for weapon/armor packs instead of putting the damn things inside the story DLCs. Why they didn't put spoils of the Avaar inside JoH? and spoils of the Qunari inside Traspasser? In CDPR DLCs those things are included with the story.
4) The fact ME3 had Javik as D1 DLC is something I haven't forgot though I recognize BW is getting better as DA:I had no companion/story D1 DLC. So kudos to them. Though BW also had that annoying timed exclusive deal with Microsoft for Jaws of Hakkon. I'm not even touching the entire retailer exclusives madness for ME2.
5) If put in relation to point 4 CDPR for now is totally alien to these concepts.
6) The worst offender here in my opinion. BW developed DA:I for Xbox360 and PS3 but dropped these platform for the DLC development. This is bad if you sell a game to all these platforms a professional behaviour would be to support these versions as well with the full experience. The money-grabbing here is loud and clear. Either you fully support all your game versions equally or you drop the platforms you don't want to work with. This is a matter of principle. CDPR dropped PS3 and Xbox360 entirely for TW3
CDPR like BW wants to turn a profit and no one is a saint here. CDPR is just smarter in appearing not greedy while doing so. That's how I see it.
In case you wonder I'm more of a BW fan than CDPR. BW made Mass Effect and I will always support this franchise.
As far as I'm concerned the only game with good DLC was Mass Effect 2 because it felt like each DLC was another episode of a TV show or something, advancing the overall plot.
DA:I was just more open-world BS (no, I didn't like Jaws of Hakkon that much) and SWTOR-cave and then Trespasser which I did not care for but I guess it was okay.
ME3 had the Citadel DLC and that is all it had. No, I don't care what you say. Extended Cut is part of the main game. No, Leviathan doesn't matter and no, Omega was a flop. The reason none of those mattered to me was because it was all retroactive additions that exist outside the main narrative but they act like they were always part of it because of the war-context. One is a shameless and patronizing justification of the controversial ending and the other was a cut idea from the main game that feels far removed anyway, and what's the point of re-visiting Omega if we don't get anything but combat and a brand new character that dies and then don't get to explore Afterlife again?
I probably won't care for ME:A's DLC unless it's one-offs like the Citadel where the context is completely different. Heck, I'd even take a cue from the awful Mass Effect Infiltrator game where the DLC was a short single-player campaign where you control a Turian dude assaulting Cerberus. Just make DLC packs where we get to be another character in another story. Witcher 1 and DA:O did that too, and it would be perfect if ME:A is a one-off story anyway.
The reason none of those mattered to me was because it was all retroactive additions that exist outside the main narrative but they act like they were always part of it because of the war-context.
I don't get why this is necessarily a bad thing. Like, take Arrival. Without it, Shepard's incarceration makes no sense whatsoever.
Is it worse over in Poland?
Everytime you ask "what's the best game you've ever played/best game of 2015/best game made on planet Earth" 90% will tell you "Witcher 3". Don't get me wrong - I still think it's amazing game and deserves most of the awards. But come on, there are way better games out there (but ofc not all of them have brutality, brothels, sex scenes and super sexy chicks)
Day one story DLC is complete BS.
DLC should take me 10 hours or more if I pay 10 dollars to 14.99
I think it's even more insulting that W3 for example actually has these legendary weapons with a backstory.
Like when the freaking king of vikings gives you his ancestral sword of mythical qualities believing you to be a worthy wielder to smite evil with it.
Turns out his own blacksmith made me a better one five minutes ago from a schematic I bought from a tavern so I sold his ancestral birthright to a drunk herbalist for couple of silvers.
Imagine if King Arthur sold Excalibur to a village idiot because he bought a Persian saber with better stats from a local brothel.
Gotta admit - the "awesome" reward weapons you get in TW3 are often rather lacklustre... I imagine Geralt having a display wall at Kaer Morhen of legendary junk swords maybe having the Winter's Blade crossed with Hjalmar's Steel Sword for an an Craite display.
Still, I'll forgive that for just for having the Cheese Wizard's sword Emmentaler 
I think it's even more insulting that W3 for example actually has these legendary weapons with a backstory.
Like when the freaking king of vikings gives you his ancestral sword of mythical qualities believing you to be a worthy wielder to smite evil with it.
Turns out his own blacksmith made me a better one five minutes ago from a schematic I bought from a tavern so I sold his ancestral birthright to a drunk herbalist for couple of silvers.
Imagine if King Arthur sold Excalibur to a village idiot because he bought a Persian saber with better stats from a local brothel.
This is exactly what I felt as well. First time I got that sword I was excited and felt so grand until I took a look at its stats. I think I even had a Scoia'tael sword I took off a random bandit that did more damage. No thanks Crach, you keep the bloody thing!
Gotta admit - the "awesome" reward weapons you get in TW3 are often rather lacklustre... I imagine Geralt having a display wall at Kaer Morhen of legendary junk swords maybe having the Winter's Blade crossed with Hjalmar's Steel Sword for an an Craite display.
Still, I'll forgive that for just for having the Cheese Wizard's sword Emmentaler
Emmentaler actually was (aside from the awesome name) one of the better swords.
At least if you found it early on...
I think it's even more insulting that W3 for example actually has these legendary weapons with a backstory.
Like when the freaking king of vikings gives you his ancestral sword of mythical qualities believing you to be a worthy wielder to smite evil with it.
Turns out his own blacksmith made me a better one five minutes ago from a schematic I bought from a tavern so I sold his ancestral birthright to a drunk herbalist for couple of silvers.
Imagine if King Arthur sold Excalibur to a village idiot because he bought a Persian saber with better stats from a local brothel.
Well Bioware did give us some excellent multiplayer DLCs for ME3 free of charge. I think both of these companies are on the light side of this whole DLC cesspit.
Bioware is just one studio which in owned by EA, a company that is notorious for their lack of game friendly attitudes.
Even so, if we look at all Bioware games under EA, their DLC policy varied and there were some free DLC that surpass all the free DLC CDPR released for TW3. In Mass Effect 2 for example (although we could argue about the Cerberus Network thing) there were several pieces of DLC that for those who bought the game cost nothing more: Zaeed, The Hammerhead and a few missions, new weapons and a few more things. Recently, in DAI, the Black Emporium was a free DLC and there were updates to the game that add things that are certainly comprable with those very minor free stuff released for TW3.
So if we consider everything, CDPR is a very peculiar developer, but when it comes to the DLC for TW3, they "lied" about what they were doing because they knew many people would fall for it and think their DLC policy was something extraordinary. It's not. The only thing different about it, is that it calls itself something else to deceive players.
In their defense, their first major DLC seems to be extraordinary. Just one more reasons that says they didn't need such shallow attitudes concerning paid content.
Bioware didn't give more than 3 ME2 add- ons for "free", which wasn't for some people. There's more than 15 for TW3.
And people complain when Bioware choose quantity over quality in many aspects of DAI... most of those DLCs for TW3 were very small, a single alternate outfit for a character, different hairstyles, an armor set, etc. I can't say for sure because as I got the game only latter, but it's certainly nothing you could call major. Not to mention, it's easy to argue some of them should have been in the game in the first place, like new game+, so they feel like somethign that was taken out from the game and released latter just for show.
If we compare it with the Cerberus Network (of course, remembering that's only free if you bought the game new) I doubt the combined value of main game + DLCs would be much different.
The unlocking component limits the consumer's freedom to enjoy the content as he sees fit.It's a design decision you disagree with. You're misusing the word anti-consumer.
I don't understand the point of keeping pets in real life. I certainly don't understand it in the ME games.I once deleted a save file because I regretted the fish I had.
And yeah, I'm increasingly wary of the CD Projeckt worship as if they were some sort of super special underdog messiah of gaming. They are a AAA developper under a AAA publisher and AAA budget now, and their actions don't follow up their words of being generous and oh so gamer friendly anymore. The free content given with TW1, and TW2 to a lesser extent, was extensive. TW3 received nowhere near it, and while HoS had a healthy amount of content, it's still not close to, say, the Enhanced Edition of Divinity Original Sin, and the White March add-ons for Pillars of Eternity offer just as much bang for your buck if not moreso if we wanna talk value.
The difference being these companies don't shout up and down when they do stuff like that, and thus don't have legions of fans tripping over themselves to tell everyone how amazingly beneficial to humanity this group of people they give money to in exchange for video games are. I mean, they're better than the EAs and Ubisofts of this world, sure, but the self-righteous posturing by both them and their fans is starting to be annoying. They are a good gaming company that make good games. To me that makes them people I will buy games from so long as they can convince me to. It doesn't make them shining paragons that I must defend and compare everything else to ad nauseum. And they sure as hell aren't my friends.
Given that they've only released three games, all of which were well-received (although I can't for the life of me understand the love for the first game), they haven't had enough time to garner a real hate base. That'll come with time, regardless of the quality of their work. I imagine after another couple of games and another decade of petty gamer nonsense, the picture will look a bit different. I'm rooting for them, though. And it's not hard to be better than the EAs and Ubisofts.
I've always thought Activision was the team to beat in this particular race to the bottom, but they've recently been supplanted by Konami (and I don't even like Kojima).
The unlocking component limits the consumer's freedom to enjoy the content as he sees fit.
The goal should be to empower the consumer. Offering limits instead of empowerment is anti-consumer.
Except it doesn't always work like that. We see this kind of thing all the time in game design, especially RPG design. You take a look at something like World of Warcraft - the experience is designed around the unlocking component- and while that might be the extreme end, other games still implement this type of approach. I'm not exactly a WoW advocate, but calling unlockable content anti-consumer is a pretty narrow approach to what gamers might want from the experience.
Oh, yes - MP, stuff that half the fanbase doesn't care about, and a time where everyone wanted their butts inside a stove. Free MP content is obligatory, but we're talking about a game that is focused on its SP, and Bioware can overprice the stupidest things they come up with.
Well I do care about MP and since I can't speak for anyone else, I'll just post how I felt about it.
You OK with that?
Given that they've only released three games, all of which were well-received (although I can't for the life of me understand the love for the first game), they haven't had enough time to garner a real hate base. That'll come with time, regardless of the quality of their work. I imagine after another couple of games and a decade of petty gamer nonsense, the picture will look a bit different. I'm rooting for them, though. And it's not hard to be better than the EAs and Ubisofts.
I've always thought Activision was the team to beat in this particular race to the bottom, but they've recently been supplanted by Konami (and I don't even like Kojima).
yeah lol this year we have 2 hate companies competing one is BSG and the other is Konami.
But u are right no meter the quality of the games they make over time the hate fanbase will become bigger and bigger.
Besides Trespasser, all the DAI DLCs are pretty short and overpriced. That's typical EA policy though.
I only played Jaws of Hakkon but yeah, it should've been like six or seven dollars, not $14.99
I prefer FromSoftware's way of doing DLC.
Depends how much you mod it. As you well know, the power of modding is such that we can change almost anything about the game. Any aspect we dislike can be altered.A highly moddable turd is still a turd, nonetheless.
If they're already bettrr than everyone else, what incentive is there to improve?BGS games are no more interactive than they were 14 years ago, so I fail to see your point.
Moddability is the most important aspect of their games. A new engine would need to do that at least as well as Creation does in order to be considered an improvement.BGS is also one of the most successful developers in the industry, so claiming they don't have the budget to create an entirely new engine is laughable.
For a game that's "getting panned", it's selling awfully well.I am a PC gamer, for the record. I was merely making the point that Fallout 4 was getting panned on consoles because the engine is a piece of crap and BGS can barely maintain a playable frame rate.
The only thing that makes FO4's voiced protagonist even vaguely acceptable is that we can mod the game to remove the voice.What you are saying isn't even intelligible anymore. It's just rambling and nonsense. TW3 was GotY and won far more awards than FO4. It was much deserved too, as FO4 was barely an upgrade from F03 (better gun play, settlements, better crafting, voiced protagonist).
Look how pretty mods have made Skyrim now, more than 4 years after its release. The engine can do that, and without relying on proprietary middleware that prevents modding.Anyways, this discussion is pointless since you are just a raving fanboy and can't be reasoned. I want BGS to learn from CDPR and not fall into mediocrity because diehard fans can't tell when a crap engine is crap.
Gamers can unlock content through play if they way. I'm not taking that away from them.Except it doesn't always work like that. We see this kind of thing all the time in game design, especially RPG design. You take a look at something like World of Warcraft - the experience is designed around the unlocking component- and while that might be the extreme end, other games still implement this type of approach. I'm not exactly a WoW advocate, but calling unlockable content anti-consumer is a pretty narrow approach to what gamers might want from the experience.
Depends how much you mod it. As you well know, the power of modding is such that we can change almost anything about the game. Any aspect we dislike can be altered.
If they're already bettrr than everyone else, what incentive is there to improve?
Moddability is the most important aspect of their games. A new engine would need to do that at least as well as Creation does in order to be considered an improvement.
For a game that's "getting panned", it's selling awfully well.
The only thing that makes FO4's voiced protagonist even vaguely acceptable is that we can mod the game to remove the voice.
Look how pretty mods have made Skyrim now, more than 4 years after its release. The engine can do that, and without relying on proprietary middleware that prevents modding.
A moddable engine is always better than an ummoddable engine. Moddability should be our first and most important evaluative criterion.
To a point. Even modding can only go but so far due to engine limitations. There was a really ambitious mod that was attempting to increase the landmass of Skyrim. They realized once they went outside the borders created by the game that all sorts of bugs and issues started to occur, making the experience unplayable. This was due to the fact that the engine literally could not render anything else without it being game breaking.
To always better yourself? If you make the same game over and over - which BGS has done since Morrowind, and really Arena - eventually the competition is going to leave you in the dust. What their common trend has been as of late is to release a mediocre, uninspiring game and allow modders to fix their mess. That's a disservice to everybody involved.
Obviously the new engine would be modder-friendly. That's a given considering BGS' development model. Again, BGS has the money and the resources to build an entirely new engine from scratch better than the Creation Engine in every way. There's no excuse for them to not to do so. What's even more troubling is that they currently have three long-term projects in development that aren't Fallout 4. More than likely, all these future projects will be running on the Creation Engine.
Selling well and being criticized by the community are mutually exclusive. The game was breaking records its first 24 hours before anyone even played it. However, you'd be foolish to think many people haven't been suffering issues with the game. Just go to Bethsoft's forums for Fallout 4 and the forums are littered with people having broken games. It went so far that Bethesda was asking the community to send in their save files because so many people were running into game breaking bugs and other issues.
VO discussions are purely subjective and have no place here. They are in and BGS isn't taking them out.
Again, I already gave you an example of engine limitations. Fallout 4 is actually not nearly as moddable as Skyrim, and it's the same engine. The author of Enhanced Natural Beauty (ENB) was having so many issues trying to alter the game that he literally gave up because some aspects of the game and engine are broken. That's pretty alarming for the modding community when ENB is one of the most popular and most desirable mods in BGS games.
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