Originally I wanted to do a Favorite Games of 2015 or something now that we're almost done with the year, but the train of thought ended up derailing when I realized 2015 sort of blew. I will say that Undertale was a lot of fun, but I'll couple that with being glad I beat it and had my share of it before the Internet At Large got a hold of it and meme'd the fuck out of everything about it. In no particular order, this is what bummed me out about gaming in 2015:
1) Payday 2, one of my favorite games to log time into until October, announced that they would be including microtransactions in the form of weapon skins and crates. Overkill as a developer was one of the surefire "I can trust these people" teams I thought I didn't have to worry about trying to fuck over their consumer base. The game has a lot of DLC that comes out pretty regularly and tends to only cost a couple of bucks for a new map or some new weapons, but looking at it now? It's a 30 dollar game with 120 bucks of DLC available.
Beyond that, last year they announced a sort of crowdfunding thing. They told people that, for 20 bucks, you'll get the mystery box sometime down the road: A cool piece of something that'll make it worthwhile, and that that sort of investment was "only for the true fans, who'll put their money where their mouth is." I was one of the 50,000 suckers who ponied up the cash, and then Crimefest 2015 happened. On day one of their annual birthday party celebrating the game's release, they announced weapon skins. Not only did they announce weapon skins, but they announced they would have stat boosts on some of them. These skins come in a safe, which you'll sometimes get after completing a level, but can only be opened with a drill that costs 2.50 in their cash shop.
Mind you, Overkill said at game launch that they valued their players more than that and would never implement microtransactions.
Better, they later announced that the 50,000 people who gave them a collective million dollars? They'd get a special safe with a special skin inside of it! Maybe. It's one of twenty-five skins, and you only get one, and it might be a shitty-quality one without stats on it (because of COURSE the weapon skin might be a shitty quality statless perk for 20 dollars!). To make sure you could use it, though, they also gave away 7 pieces of DLC alongside of it. DLC that came out a year or so ago, over the course of 2015. You know, the kind of stuff that "true fans" already owned. It wasn't even keys, either, so you couldn't pass them along to a friend. They just credited them to your account in case you didn't own them. Which majority of the people who blindly tossed 20 dollars away did.
So tl;dr Fuck Overkill and I'm sad my hang-out bro game turned to shit and I've uninstalled it.
2) Killing Floor 2! Tripwire was one of my OTHER not-quite-indie developers who I thought I could trust okay. Killing Floor 1 got a lot of play in my library and while there was a lot of DLC for it as well, most of it was just vanity stuff or character packs or side-grade weapons that didn't really impact the game at all (except for you, Flare Revolvers!). Killing Floor 2 seemed like a no-brainer, even though it was released as Early Access. Still, I wanted to play it and I was glad to plop down my money when it became available in April. The game was due out at the end of 2015, but it seems pretty unlikely.
Half of the game's classes aren't implemented yet. They had to rebalance a lot of the perks because they were all pretty fucking worthless. This is Early Access though, so it's sort of expected, and I know the team is hard at work on...
Wait. Hold on a minute. What the fuck is this bullshit? Killing Floor 2 has ALSO announced the implementation of weapon skins and bullshit in the same format as CS:Go and Team Fortress and Payday 2: You get a box, you give them money to open it. To their limited credit, they said that they'd only putting vanity in there without it impacting gameplay at all, but... Well, to say I don't trust a developer in Early Access is an understatement.
KF2 has been in Early Access since April 2015, with no release date in sight, with half of the game actually there, but the cash shop is up and running and being worked on alongside the rest of the game. For fuck's sake, whatever happened to just buying a fucking game?
Oh well. At least it's better than Evolve, a game that costs 40 bucks with 225 dollars in DLC available.
Or Star Citizen. Snicker.
Edit: AND ANOTHER THING: FUCKING NINTENDO FUN CLUB CLOSED.
1) Payday 2, one of my favorite games to log time into until October, announced that they would be including microtransactions in the form of weapon skins and crates. Overkill as a developer was one of the surefire "I can trust these people" teams I thought I didn't have to worry about trying to fuck over their consumer base. The game has a lot of DLC that comes out pretty regularly and tends to only cost a couple of bucks for a new map or some new weapons, but looking at it now? It's a 30 dollar game with 120 bucks of DLC available.
Beyond that, last year they announced a sort of crowdfunding thing. They told people that, for 20 bucks, you'll get the mystery box sometime down the road: A cool piece of something that'll make it worthwhile, and that that sort of investment was "only for the true fans, who'll put their money where their mouth is." I was one of the 50,000 suckers who ponied up the cash, and then Crimefest 2015 happened. On day one of their annual birthday party celebrating the game's release, they announced weapon skins. Not only did they announce weapon skins, but they announced they would have stat boosts on some of them. These skins come in a safe, which you'll sometimes get after completing a level, but can only be opened with a drill that costs 2.50 in their cash shop.
Mind you, Overkill said at game launch that they valued their players more than that and would never implement microtransactions.
Better, they later announced that the 50,000 people who gave them a collective million dollars? They'd get a special safe with a special skin inside of it! Maybe. It's one of twenty-five skins, and you only get one, and it might be a shitty-quality one without stats on it (because of COURSE the weapon skin might be a shitty quality statless perk for 20 dollars!). To make sure you could use it, though, they also gave away 7 pieces of DLC alongside of it. DLC that came out a year or so ago, over the course of 2015. You know, the kind of stuff that "true fans" already owned. It wasn't even keys, either, so you couldn't pass them along to a friend. They just credited them to your account in case you didn't own them. Which majority of the people who blindly tossed 20 dollars away did.
So tl;dr Fuck Overkill and I'm sad my hang-out bro game turned to shit and I've uninstalled it.
2) Killing Floor 2! Tripwire was one of my OTHER not-quite-indie developers who I thought I could trust okay. Killing Floor 1 got a lot of play in my library and while there was a lot of DLC for it as well, most of it was just vanity stuff or character packs or side-grade weapons that didn't really impact the game at all (except for you, Flare Revolvers!). Killing Floor 2 seemed like a no-brainer, even though it was released as Early Access. Still, I wanted to play it and I was glad to plop down my money when it became available in April. The game was due out at the end of 2015, but it seems pretty unlikely.
Half of the game's classes aren't implemented yet. They had to rebalance a lot of the perks because they were all pretty fucking worthless. This is Early Access though, so it's sort of expected, and I know the team is hard at work on...
Wait. Hold on a minute. What the fuck is this bullshit? Killing Floor 2 has ALSO announced the implementation of weapon skins and bullshit in the same format as CS:Go and Team Fortress and Payday 2: You get a box, you give them money to open it. To their limited credit, they said that they'd only putting vanity in there without it impacting gameplay at all, but... Well, to say I don't trust a developer in Early Access is an understatement.
KF2 has been in Early Access since April 2015, with no release date in sight, with half of the game actually there, but the cash shop is up and running and being worked on alongside the rest of the game. For fuck's sake, whatever happened to just buying a fucking game?
Oh well. At least it's better than Evolve, a game that costs 40 bucks with 225 dollars in DLC available.
Or Star Citizen. Snicker.
Edit: AND ANOTHER THING: FUCKING NINTENDO FUN CLUB CLOSED.
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