Dragon Age impressions

[~*´¨¯¨`*·~-.¸-AIN'T]

Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa...where do you get a few slices of pizza for $5?!? I want in on this scam, too.

At Little Caesar's you can get a whole large pizza for 5 bucks. That's like 8 slices.

 

[Grifthin]

Fuck I wish we had a little Caesars in ZA. i would fucking bankrupt that place.

 

[Silellak]

Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa...where do you get a few slices of pizza for $5?!? I want in on this scam, too.

At Little Caesar's you can get a whole large pizza for 5 bucks. That's like 8 slices.

Ah, so you can. Never been a giant LC fan, but hey, pizza for 5 bucks is pizza for 5 bucks.

 

[Raghar]

Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa...where do you get a few slices of pizza for $5?!? I want in on this scam, too.

In your home, when you'd bel making it yourself.

 

[Vault Dweller]

It took me less than half an hour to finish.

How long does it take you to eat a few slices of pizza?

"It's only $5-10, a pittance!"

"It costs less/as much as a movie ticket and a movie only lasts 1-2 hours! A DLC is in comparison excellent value!"

"How much do you pay for [insert food item]?"

Have I covered them all yet? Because comparing completely different commodities certainly makes metric tons of sense.

How else do you determine if the value is acceptable? Let's say that you order a take-out and pay $50-70. Would you not think of what else you could have gotten for this money?

Or, if you don't like food analogies, consider buying a new console for $400-500. With taxes the console and a few games would cost you $500-600. I'd automatically check this purchase price against all possible ways to spend this money: PC games, a truckload of books, DVD player and/or DVDs.

My point is that making comments about the $5 price of the DLC without looking at what you can get for $5 is a bit silly. If $5 buys you fuck-all, then the price is more than reasonable. If you can get a better bang for your $5...

Tell you what, it can take you a while to finish Perdido Street Station since it's a novel that spans 640 pages. By that token, does that mean the novel should cost as much as DA or even more (you even get better writing)? And if a DLC that lasts half an hour costs $5-10 to purchase, should the game--assuming 25 hours of gameplay--cost you $250 or $500?

I can't buy this logic. Comparing the price to different products to determine if your money would be better spent on something else is one thing. Trying to figure out how much a product should be worth by comparing its perceived value to that of completely different products is asinine.

Here is a quick example. You can buy Perdido Street Station in softcover or hardcover. Without checking for deals, let's say that softcover will cost you $10 and hardcover $30. In other words you pay $20 more for the cover and font size. Does it mean that the novel, the 640 pages of good writing are worth less than a piece of cardboard? No, of course not. There you go. No, you don't have to thank me.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Just because people have different concepts of value than you does not make them "stupid" or "idiots", you arrogant little shit. 5 bucks for me is maybe 10 minutes at work.

Which is all fine and good, assuming in this day and age with so many surplus people, that you still HAVE a job, but there's one point you're missing: However much you're earning, if you SPEND the money, you've defeated the point of earning the money in the first place, since now you have lost the very money you worked to earn. Purpose-defeating, much?

Huh...you work to get money because you want money to spen on things. The purpose of money is to be spent on things you enjoy. Are you crazy or something?

 

[Elwro]

I think the "let's compare prices of two things and see which one is more worth the money!" idea works well only if these things satisfy similar needs. For example, if I'm hungry, I can choose between different types of food, including pizza, and a $12 pizza is for me worse than a $10 pizza if I prefer the taste of the second one. But if I'm in for some entertainment, I can decide to go to the movies, buy a book or a game... and I may prefer a $50 game to a $10 book, not simply because it offers a more than five times longer experience counting raw time, but also because of other factors. Someone could convince me not to buy a $10 DLC by properly arguing for the proposition that it's a waste of time that could be devoted to reading even just a part of a good $10 book. But mentioning the price of pizza can do nothing regarding my stance towards a given DLC: I'm wondering to what I should devote my free time, not what to eat.

 

[Dionysus]

How else do you determine if the value is acceptable?

I think most people compare it's value to that of the original game or other videogames. It's a lot easier than comparing it to a necessity that meets an entirely different need, like food.

I would have a lot of trouble shelling out 50$ for the original game, and then paying 7$ for content that isn't even close to 1/7 of the original game. It's not even in the ballpark. I guess it would work if you thought DA was really worth hundreds of dollars, and it was a real steal at 50$. But I don't. I'd rather spend the 7$ on some old game that I haven't played yet.

 

[Vault Dweller]

How else do you determine if the value is acceptable?

I think most people compare it's value to that of the original game or other videogames. It's a lot easier than comparing it to a necessity that meets an entirely different need, like food.

I would have a lot of trouble shelling out 50$ for the original game, and then paying 7$ for content that isn't even close to 1/7 of the original game. It's not even in the ballpark.

Should it be?

When you buy an expansion for half the price of the original game, do you get half of the original content?

 

[Monocause]

Well, what's so damn weird about people shelling out a couple of bucks on a mini-expansion for a game they like? I've seen people paying a big deal of cash for stuff like WH figurines or a single MtG playing card. Case is - they like it, they feel it worth the money. What's there to 'not get'? What 'money' and 'value' means is purely subjective. People who buy the DLCs don't feel ripped off. I, for instance, don't feel the DLCs to be valuable enough to warrant a purchase, and I don't buy them.

The difference is I don't have the gall to fool myself into thinking that everything that doesn't cater to *my* needs is shit.

 

[Dionysus]

When you buy an expansion for half the price of the original game, do you get half of the original content?

In the rare case that I do buy an expansion pack for full price, I expect an amount of content that reflects the price and is roughly congruent with the pricing of the original. I definitely don't expect it to be off by an order of magnitude. You can nickle and dime most people, but you lose a lot of potential customers when it's this obvious. The problem for Bioware is that their production cost is the same regardless, so it's hard to tell whether a fair price (by my standards) would pick up enough customers to increase or even maintain the profit margins.

Like I said, I could see it if I thought that I really ripped them off (by an order of magnitude) when I purchased the original product. But even in that case, I might pass so I can feel like I came out ahead. Once they set their price with the original game, it's hard for me to accept a significantly worse deal.

 

[Volourn]

"Well, what's so damn weird about people shelling out a couple of bucks on a mini-expansion for a game they like?"

People get personally butthurt when you enjoy a game they don't.

Why do you think spend so much timew asting just to bash and troll threads discussing a game. This is what the Codex is about. Me? i prefer to spend time on games alike. It's why you don't seem all that much in threads dedicated to Betehsda games outside of a comment or two. I just don't care enough.

 

[Tails]

My point is that making comments about the $5 price of the DLC without looking at what you can get for $5 is a bit silly. If $5 buys you fuck-all, then the price is more than reasonable. If you can get a better bang for your $5...

Someone can get jack shit for 5$ and still find a DLC disappointing and not worth such cash, simple as that. Really, this whole DA drama gets new low on both sides.

 

[Grunker]

Really, this whole DA drama gets new low on both sides.

This.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Has anyone else stumbled on a bug in the Human Noble origin? the door inside the main hall - after you win the fight, remains locked with the text "not possible to pick". You are supposed to find your father beyond the door but no luck since it's stoutly locked. Fuck, in NWN I could've at least bashed the door down. Have I missed something obvious or I should I just re-roll and hope not to encounter it again?

 

[Thrasher]

Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa...where do you get a few slices of pizza for $5?!? I want in on this scam, too.

At Little Caesar's you can get a whole large pizza for 5 bucks. That's like 8 slices.

Sure, if you like eating about the the worst pizza in the world.

 

[~*´¨¯¨`*·~-.¸-AIN'T]

I said Little Caesars, not Domino's

 

[Thrasher]

Has anyone else stumbled on a bug in the Human Noble origin? the door inside the main hall - after you win the fight, remains locked with the text "not possible to pick". You are supposed to find your father beyond the door but no luck since it's stoutly locked. Fuck, in NWN I could've at least bashed the door down. Have I missed something obvious or I should I just re-roll and hope not to encounter it again?

Hadn't seen that one. If you're talking about the door to the front courtyard, that one I couldn't reach because of the barricade of guards.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Uh, Human Noble Origins? Door remaining locked-bug?

 

[Korgan]

I have a GREAT idea! Pirate the DLC, pay for the pizza in SNAKES and keep your $5!

 

[Thrasher]

I said Little Caesars, not Domino's

Haven't had either in years, since they were both crappy, LC being the worst. But who knows, the battle for the crappiest may have been won by Dominos...

 

[Vault Dweller]

My point is that making comments about the $5 price of the DLC without looking at what you can get for $5 is a bit silly. If $5 buys you fuck-all, then the price is more than reasonable. If you can get a better bang for your $5...

Someone can get jack shit for 5$ and still find a DLC disappointing and not worth such cash, simple as that.

If your point was that somewhere someone is always angry about something, sure. If your point was that the content was bad and, like, totally not worth $5, I'd like to see your arguments.

Overall, here is another way to look at it. Expansions are usually priced at 19.99-29.99. DLC is a mini expansion and it should be compared to other expansions, if you feel like comparing it to something, not to a full game, because such comparisons are absolutely pointless.

Take Durlag's Tower, for example. I think that everyone agrees that it was a cool expansion. It was sold for $25 if I was not mistaken. While DT offered more than WK, it also cost 3.5 times more. For many people a $7 purchase is a lot more affordable than a $25 one. If we break DT down, we'd get 3 DLC: the ice isle - $5, the werewolf island - $7, the tower - $12.

So, the real question here is "Is WK a worse expansion pack than the werewolf island in DT?"

As for what WK offers:

"The interiors were great. The story/lore/more info on the Wardens - pretty damn good. I'd say it's a great, although short addition to the gameworld, painting the Wardens not as the overused "holy knights protecting the humanity at all cost" cliche, but as a very real, scheming faction that's not above joining rebellions, conducting forbidden experiments to gain more power, conflicting with the Chantry, and even arrogantly believing that they may not fail where the original magi who became the first darkspawn have failed.

The mage's "A Warden does what he must" response, his experiments, his views, his arrogance, his disregard of the cost, even the truly vile powers his research grants you paint a great picture of what the Wardens order is.

The choice between the mage and the demon who turned on him is well done. The rewards are decent, and as I understand you get a smith who can forge that meteor metal into a nice sword for you. So, overall, I wish it was longer, but I can't say that I feel that I was ripped off."

In the rare case that I do buy an expansion pack for full price, I expect an amount of content that reflects the price and is roughly congruent with the pricing of the original. I definitely don't expect it to be off by an order of magnitude.

Who cares what you expect (with all due respect)? What do you usually get? A new expansion pack will cost you about 50% of the original game. You never ever get more than 25% of the content of the original game. This is how it always works, so unless you're complaining about all expansion packs in general, you don't really have a point.

 

[Elwro]

If we break DT down, we'd get 3 DLC: the ice isle - $5, the werewolf island - $7, the tower - $12.

And Ulgoth's Beard. Iirc, it also increased the level cap, which let wizards cast more spells (which were not included in the original game). Also, the UI was improved and (as wikipedia tells me) thievery mechanics were redone.

 

[Tails]

If your point was that somewhere someone is always angry about something, sure. If your point was that the content was bad and, like, totally not worth $5, I'd like to see your arguments.

The part of your post just sounded like no mater how DLC is done it is automatically worth 5$ since hey, can you get something better for a fiver? That's all. There are always people who will be disappointed by DLC or game, no matter how in reality it good is, just different taste, expectation.

Oh and I didn't play DA:O (and probably won't for a long time, since this whole drama pushes me away) and keeping neutral attitude toward game for now, so don't put me on crusade list, VD.

 

[Silellak]

If we break DT down, we'd get 3 DLC: the ice isle - $5, the werewolf island - $7, the tower - $12.

And Ulgoth's Beard. Iirc, it also increased the level cap, which let wizards cast more spells (which were not included in the original game). Also, the UI was improved and (as wikipedia tells me) thievery mechanics were redone.

Yeah, that's one thing expansions typically do that is still pretty rare for DLC- actually going back and improving the core game, rather than just giving you new areas or quests. It's a shame too, because sometimes the improvements are pretty drastic and much-welcomed.

Granted, as a trade-off, these days those sort of improvements are more often made via a free game patch, or even come from the modding community, rather than through boxed expansions. I mean, can you imagine the shitstorm that would occur if Bioware changed/improved some of the core game mechanics and/or improved the UI/interface/whatever, but required you buy a $20 piece of DLC to have these new "features"? Yet back in the day of boxed expansions, that sort of thing was expected and perhaps even welcomed.

"Buy the new Dragon's Peak DLC and unlock the option to take 5, or even 6, party members with you on ALL of your adventures! Unleash your true potential and face the Darkspawn hordes at full strength! Coming March 2010 for $25."