Dragon Age 2 Sucks Arse

This is the first of my infamous “Sucks Arse” blogs from MyIGN, reprinted here for your delight and delectation.  This post, first published on 16th March 2011 has been copied and pasted, unedited and in its original form, from my MyIGN site, complete with the update I had to write to let people know that this article, dripping as it is in undisguised sarcasm, is in reality a sarcastic dig at the irritating little pricks who complained about this game and not, in fact, a dig at the game at all.  I loved Dragon Age 2.  Really, I did.

I am appalled and disgusted with Bioware for releasing their new video “game” Dragon Age 2, which is clearly not fit for human consumption and is likely to cause vomiting and diarrhea in serious gamers such as myself.  I’m going to stress that this game should NOT be taken internally, and it may be contagious to even have in the house.  In fact even the word “game” is an overstatement and should probably be replaced by the word “Ebola”.  This post might go on a bit, because I’m now going to explain exactly why you should never buy it and why even looking at the box art in the shop can lead to potentially fatal nervous shock syndrome.

Warning: Biological Hazard. Do Not Ingest.

Now, I LOVED Dragon Age: Origins – it was the best game ever made and had no flaws at all.  It’s entirely likely that it wasn’t even delivered to shops, but instead it fell from heaven through a cloud of rose petals and God’s ambrosia.  It was conceived, written, programmed, performed and beta tested by the angels themselves, and was brought to our earthly domain by the archangel Gabriel Himself.  I think we can all agree that any changes AT ALL to Dragon Age Origins are the work of Satanic infiltrators who have ruined Bioware and all they stand for.

Mana from Heaven (Mage only – Stamina from Heaven if playing as a warrior or rogue)

COMBAT has been utterly ruined by Bioware’s Dark Forces.  They’ve taken the brilliant combat from the first game, screwed it up into a tight little ball, spat on it, shat on it and thrown it down the toilet, whereupon it has been peed on by all of Bioware’s employees.  On the surface it may seem faster, more responsive, more visually impressive and generally a lot more fun, but this is NOT TRUE.  It’s turned the game into a button masher, but without combos or any of the other criteria that are required for a definition of “Button Masher” to be appropriate.  Just pressing the X button over and over and over again is tedious, repetitive and crap, and while I COULD press the square, triangle and circle buttons (plus the R2 button and one of those three buttons for a further three attacks), I don’t WANT to, because if I did then it might add a bit of variety to the otherwise tedious combat, and then there might be no reason to complain about this utter disgrace of a game.

DO NOT USE THESE BUTTONS IN COMBAT. (or R2)

ARMOR is handled differently in this game.  While I can change the main character’s armor to my heart’s content, I can no longer change any of the other characters’ armor at all, unless I enter into a relationship with them and cause them to change their clothes (presumably because of messy sex).  This annoyed me a GREAT DEAL, because I wanted to send Anders into combat naked, have Varric wearing a studded leather thong and see Isabela in thigh-length boots, panties and nipple tassles while she fought off wave after wave of enemy scumbags.  Taking away my ability to do this has COMPLETELY RUINED the game for me, and now I refuse to even look at my party members’ inventory and attribute screens – hell, I even refuse to level the bastards up.  Bioware have removed the best part of the game – the part where you can fulfill your darkest and most perverse sexual fantasies vicariously by dressing your party members like prostitutes and gimps.

I want ALL the characters to go into battle like this. Bioware should be ashamed of themselves.

GRAPHICS Utterly appalling.  Even though every aspect of the graphics have been tweaked, refined and improved upon, Bioware have ruined the greatness that was Dragon Age: Origins.  The subtle and beautiful lighting effects are spoiled by the fact that the whole game takes place in a dirty and unpleasant city…except for the bits that don’t.  Who wants to see beautiful lighting effects in a CITY, for Christ’s sake?  What a total waste.  And don’t even get me started on the repetitiveness of the environments.  Forget the fact that Bioware are trying to tell a story here, and that the story they are telling takes place within a city.  Forget the fact that your character lives in this city, and his familiarity with it is echoed in the gamer’s familiarity of the game world.  That’s all bullshit – when I play a Bioware game I expect to be transported to a different alien world every fifteen and a half seconds, whether it’s relevant to the story or not.  If I’m not suffocating in a lava pit one moment, freezing my naked, nipple-tassled body to death in an arctic tundra the next, and bouncing in a low-gravity, goo-filled environment the very next moment then I just don’t want to hear it.  Fuck you and your story, Bioware – give me what I want!  Which brings me on to…

STORY What’s this story all about?  What happened to the Blight?  Don’t tell me that when they said it was over in the first game they actually MEANT it?  How can I be expected to invest myself in a fantasy RPG in which I don’t save the world?  Seriously, my self-esteem is so fucking low that the only way I can feel some self worth is by being a planet-saving hero in fantasy videogames.  Bioware say that the story to Dragon Age 2 is much more personal and smaller-scale than it was in Origins.  Well, if that’s the case then they can go fuck themselves – I don’t want that, and neither should any of you.  I will settle for nothing less than the same regurgitated storyline in every RPG I ever play.  In fact, RPG’s should be absolutely identical to one another, and follow every fantasy cliche in the known universe.  I was pleased in Origins when they had Humans, Dwarves and Elves, and I was extremely pleased to see the Warrior, Rogue and Mage classes.  It took me quite a while to accept the Qunari – I mean, whoever heard of the Qunari?  I’m pretty damned sure that Tolkien didn’t invent them.  But they were minor characters in Origins.  To make these non-fantasy-cliche-mainstay characters a more pivotal part of DA2 is unforgivable, and Bioware should be ashamed of themselves for being creative, fresh and original.

Tolkien is spinning in his grave. Shame on you, Bioware, for trying to be “creative”

LEVELLING UP has been ruined.  Although it works in basically the same way it did in Origins, it now LOOKS DIFFERENT.  How am I expected to be able to navigate a series of relatively simple attribute trees when I’m used to a different mechanism from the first game?  And only three attribute points per level, Bioware?  Really?  I know that’s all you gave us in Origins, but I’d have thought that if there was one improvement that could be made it would be to give the player character a million attribute points per level.  And you should level up after every 10XP collected.  Anything less is just shit.

CHARACTERS Where’s my Morrigan?!  I can’t believe that Bioware had the audacity to call this game “Dragon Age” and then not put Morrigan in it.  I know she disappears at the end of Origins, and I know that when you play the Witch Hunt DLC from the first game you find out exactly how she leaves, though not where she goes, and I know that having her in the DA2 story would be completely incongruous, irrelevant and ham-fisted, and I know also that this game isn’t about her, but what the fuck have you done with my Morrigan?  I want her back, and if she’s not in any DA2 DLC then I swear heads will roll.  And where’s my Grey Warden, for that matter?  Or Oghren?  Or Sten?  And what the HELL have you done to Anders?  His voice is different!  It’s almost as if you couldn’t get the same voice actor to play him, and I want to know why the fuck not?  If you’re going to put him in the game then you should make sure he’s identical – characters in movie sequels and tv shows don’t suddenly get replaced by different actors now, do they?  Except for when they do, but that’s not the point.  And his personality is different, too!  It seems like he’s been merged with another being and subsumed some of that personality  into their own, thereby making them a person who is different in many ways from both of the original characters!  What the fuck is that all about?  Think, Bioware, Think!

Without Morrigan, you can take your Dragon Age 2 and shove it.

VOICE ACTING Although the voice acting is of a generally very high standard, an improvement in many ways on the original, and nothing at all to complain about, I’m going to complain about it anyway.  Why are all elves Irish, except for Fenris, who’s English, and Merrill, who’s Welsh?  And a few others who are American.  Or Canadian.  Talk about crap.  Let’s have some consistency, please.  And I find it hilarious that some of the actors have difficulty pronouncing completely made up “fantasy” words that are almost unpronouncable – do they really call themselves “actors”, because I don’t.  Tossers, more like.  I wonder if Bioware know how much better this game would have been if it had played like a silent movie, with mugging, pratfalls and other slapstick actions in place of spoken dialogue.  Definitely a missed opportunity there, I think.

To wrap up, I think that everyone at Bioware should return to Hell, where they obviously came from.  The few human denizens of the studio should probably think about committing suicide, because my opinion of them is now so low that should I ever meet one of them I’m liable to vomit on their shoes while punching them in the face.  I actually feel  physically sick just writing this review, such is the level of my disgust that Bioware should ship such an appalling pile of trash.  Honestly, the sensationalist news reporting of the tragic events in Japan, the actions of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya and the attempted genocide of his own people by Saddam Hussein pale into comparison at the miserable excuse for a video “game”.  My indignant rage is so great that, while I have had a good vent here in this blog, I still feel like stomping on a kitten’s head, strangling a puppy and culling a pack of baby seals.  In fact, it may never leave me – I may be destined to forevermore be a bitter, spiteful bag of venomous sputum, forced to roam this planet spewing vitriolic comments at everything I see, play, do, touch and feel.

Be warned, Bioware: I’ll be here when Dragon Age 3 comes out.  I won’t play the demo, I’ll spend $50 or more on the game, and then I’ll resent it.  And you’d better be ready when I unleash my fury.

**UPDATE!!**

Due to an unprecedented amount of trust in what I say, I’d like to quickly take the opportunity to state that the post above is supposed to be dripping with irony.  I guess I didn’t do the irony very well.  Oopsie.  It was meant to be a lighthearted jab at people who complained about DA2.  I, personally, love the game and – being an unbelievable trophy whore – I intend to play it all the way to Platinum.  Thank you for listening to this public service announcement.

=)

Video Games Developers: Altruistic Hobbyists or Big Businessmen?

How often have you been on a web forum, message board, comments section on some post on some website or even out and about on the street and seen or heard somebody complaining about video games with a rant that centres around the idea that video game companies are only interested in money?

Most recently I have been playing Grand Theft Auto 5 (oh yes, I’m still harping on about that) and I have been keeping an eye on the Rockstar Games newsfeed.  GTA Online has been suffering some problems since it went live in October – not surprising given that it’s one of the most ambitious online games in recent memory, the game sold far more copies, far more quickly than Rockstar anticipated and, consequently, there have been some server issues as well as the bugs that one would expect in a game of this nature.

Now, the first thing to note is that a game as big as GTA is bound to have a few bugs in it.  People complain about it, but that’s the basic fact.  They complain that the people playing GTA Online now are “beta testing the game” for Rockstar, a job that they either should have done themselves or else they should have released a beta of GTA Online prior to the game’s release.

I’d like to point out two important points: Firstly, a team of thirty or forty guys at Rockstar shaking down the online component for 6 months is never going to be as thorough a process as a hoard of several hundred thousand gamers all using the online simultaneously for a week, let alone a month.  We can safely assume that the good folks at Rockstar did, in fact, test the online portion of the game prior to release, and it’s entirely possible that it appeared top be bug-free when it was approved for publication.

Secondly, Rockstar have effectively already stated that GTA Online is going to be a work-in-progress for some time to come.  They have plans to expand it, tune it, improve it over the coming months.  That said, the current version of GTA Online that we are all enjoying at the moment is the beta version of it.  The fact it didn’t come out prior to the release of GTA5 is neither here nor there.  Primarily we all bought GTA5, not GTA Online (hence the statement on the back of the box, “Featuring Grand Theft Auto Online”).

A lot of people have been saying they are disappointed with the main story – it was too short and they wouldn’t pay $60 for that game; they paid for the online component.  Now, I don’t know about you, but I spent over 80 hours with the main story, including side quests, collections and exploration.  That seems like my money’s-worth to me.  I’ve spent the same amount of money on games that were a lot shorter that I didn’t resent paying that kind of money for.

But back to the burning issue.

An astonishing number of people online have said things along the lines of, “Rockstar aren’t going to bother fixing the online properly – they’ve got your $60 so they don’t care any more.”  This statement is absolutely absurd.  For a start, Rockstar Games have released five updates for GTA5 since it came out on September 17th.  To emphasise that: GTA5 has had five updates in seven weeks!  I don’t think Skyrim, another game that was plagued with (arguably more) bugs, received five updates within its first year, let alone in less than two months.  So there’s some proof, at least, that Rockstar aren’t just taking your money and running – they want to fix these problems because they care about their customers.

“Ah!” I hear you cry.  “But do they care about us on an emotional level, or merely from the standpoint of a business that wants to keep its customers happy so that they’ll buy more games in future?”

To which I say, “What’s the difference?”

You see, hard as this may be to believe, the makers of video games have families.  they have bills to pay, rent or mortgages, mouths to feed, tables that need food put on them (and, of course, they need to buy the table in the first place).  Yes, video gaming may be a hobby, but the people who facilitate this hobby need to make money, the same way a supermarket shelf-stacker needs money, the same way a politician needs money, the same way an astronaut needs money, the same way everybody needs money.  Are video game makers in it for the money?  Well, partially, yes.  I’m sure that most people who make video games do it because they enjoy it, but I’m pretty sure they also expect to get paid for it.

But games companies like Electronic Arts, Activision, Capcom, Konami, Tecmo Koei and, well, all the other ones are vilified for being businesses.  I hate to break it to people, but without these businesses you wouldn’t have any video games to play.  Are these businesses out to make money?  Of course they are – if they make money then they can pay their staff, invest in research, development and expansion and, perhaps most importantly, fund the making of more games for you to play.

It’s easy to think of making video games as a hobby, pursued for the fun of it, or the challenge, and the joy of a positive reaction when you give the completed game to the world, but the reality is somewhat different.  Times have changed.  It’s not 1984 any more, the year Elite was launched onto an unsuspecting public.  In those days it was possible to make a game by yourself or with a partner, like Elite was.  These days it takes a team of hundreds to make video games.  And why?  Because gamers expect more from games.  As the technology improves we expect the games to improve along with it and, as a result, we end up with a game that took more people to make than do most Hollywood movies.

I think it’s pretty impressive, in fact, how comparatively cheap games are now given the substantial increase in wages alone, not to mention development time.  I bought Super Metroid in 1994 within its first month of release and paid £49.99 for it (and to this day I maintain that it was one of the best fifty pounds I ever spent).  I bought GTA5 on day of release and paid £34.99 for it.  That’s an incredible price difference, and that doesn’t even account for the rate of inflation!  Yet Super Metroid had a crew of maybe a couple of hundred people working on it, whereas GTA5 had… I don’t know. A lot more.  I watched the end credits of GTA5 the other day and it took over 35 minutes to scroll through all the names.  35 minutes!!  (Granted, video game credit scrolls do tend to move more slowly than Hollywood movie credits, but even so that seems a ludicrous amount of people to work on a video game when you consider that Elite was essentially made by two people.)

My belief and my understanding is that  makers of video games do believe in the stuff they’re working on, they don’t just churn out crap and demand your money.  Even games that have been critically savaged, such as Duke Nukem Forever, were worked on by people who wanted to make the best game they could.  (I still maintain that Duke Nukem was unfairly criticized – I have no idea what people were expecting of a game that spent so long in development hell, but the end result was just fine and dandy for me – it wasn’t the best looking game in the world, but nor was it the worst; it was maybe a bit too linear, but Call of Duty is pretty linear too, and that doesn’t get crapped on like Duke Nukem Forever did; it may have been pretty crude, but that’s pretty much exactly what you should expect of a Duke Nukem game – and yes that is a legitimate argument.)

I don’t believe for a second that there are people working in the industry who are rubbing their hands together thinking, “this game’s a festering pile of crap, but I know the fans will just lap it up and I’ll be rich – RICH!!!”  Even the people who make so-called shovelware generally, I believe, want to make as good a product as they can, because I believe that most people do actually take some pride in their work.  I find the cynical belief that games companies are taking gamers for a ride to be supremely depressing.  But then I suppose it’s indicative of the Me-Me-Me culture we seem to be cultivating these days.

I actually had an argument just yesterday with a guy who claimed that it wasn’t his fault that he used a money-making glitch in GTA Online.  It was Rockstar’s fault because they left the glitch in there and he’s just using it to make money.  It’s not his fault.  Fault?!  No, no, no – it’s not your fault that Rockstar left the glitch in the game, but it is absolutely your fault that you used it!  Talk about refusing to take responsibility for your actions!  I was gobsmacked.

I countered with the proposal that I could walk into a store (in real life) with a gun and hold up that store and take all its cash and it wouldn’t be my fault because the store owner shouldn’t have made it possible for me to walk into his store with a gun.

The guy I was arguing with didn’t get it.

Sigh.

Physics Special! – The Nature of the Universe

Ever since I was a child, from the first time I gazed up at the moon and wondered how big it was, how far away it was and what made it stay up there in the sky without scaffolding or wires, I have had a love affair with science.  Science lessons in primary school were a thrill, learning weights and measures, about volume and displacement, friction, reciprocating springs and gravity.  Later, in secondary school (or “High” School, as it is now known), our science lessons were broken down into Physics, Chemistry and Biology.  Chemistry I always found intriguing, Biology seemed to involve too much dissecting of potatoes, but I was always drawn to Physics.

Without Physics there is no Chemistry or Biology.  Physics lays down the fundamental laws that determine how Chemistry and, by extension, Biology works.  Furthermore, whereas Chemistry is concerned with the, often complex, behaviour of atoms and molecules, and Biology is such a broad field that draws together all living things under one roof, Physics is surprisingly straightforward.  Using an amazingly few basic principles it explains how pretty much everything works.

What I found even more interesting was the fact that all physics can be described mathematically.  Perhaps it would be more correct to say that physics is the use of maths to explain the universe.  Although I had always rather enjoyed maths, suddenly physics took it out of the realm of the abstract and made these cold, featureless numbers into something tangible.  At school, algebra seemed to have been invented for the sole purpose of complicating things – maths is all about numbers, so why use something that takes all the numbers out of maths?  But then physics explained why algebra was so important.

Want to know what the force is on a certain object?  Multiply its mass by its acceleration.

Want to know the kinetic energy of a certain object? Multiply one half by the object’s mass and the square of its velocity.

Or if you want to kick it up a notch there’s always the classic, “Want to know how much intrinsic energy is tied up in an object?  Multiply its mass by the square of the speed of light.”

Suddenly we see that algebra can be used to give us specific answers to specific questions.  There is an actual point to it!  Algebra sent man to the moon.  That, to me, is pretty impressive.

So where most people read a novel in bed before they go to sleep, I read science books.  I particularly recommend the books of John Gribbin, Brian Greene and Richard Feynman.  And if you’re in the mood for some serious science then you can do what I did recently and purchase the Feynman Lectures on Physics, a three-volume set of textbooks that cover pretty much everything you could want to know about physics (plus some bonus content covering aspects of Chemistry and Biology, too).  These books are essentially transcripts of a series of lectures that Feynman gave in the early 1960s to undergraduate students at Caltech and, as such, are quite a bit above and beyond the Physics I learned in high school, or even in college.  There’s also a hell of a lot of maths in it, which is hardly surprising given that you kind of need the maths to explain the physics.  But, if you’re willing to put the effort into them then you can get a lot out of them.  (I’m not going to claim that I have grasped everything in the books, but that’s what re-reading is for…)

Reading all of these books, from the basic beginners’ guides up to the Feynman lectures, I find myself spending many hours of the day pondering the nature of the universe.  I can’t help it – somewhere in my mind there is always this part of me thinking about it.  I wonder about how the universe really began, what time actually is (and space, too, for that matter), why do waves sometimes act like particles and particles sometimes act like waves?  In the absence of specific answers to these questions I have formulated my own solutions, some of them maybe a bit wacky, some of them, no doubt, plain wrong (but I am always open to alternative solutions).

Actually, reading back over that last sentence makes me sound like one of those internet whack-jobs who post articles “proving” that Einstein was wrong, or showing the world that they’ve stumbled upon some ultimate truth or unified field theory using nothing more than a calculator, a pen and a magic code-wheel from a Crackerjack box, thus showing that they are better than the greatest minds in the world today and – hey! – if Einstein could upset the foundations of physics when he was just working in a patent office then why can’t I?

So let me put it another way: I am not suggesting that these “solutions” are correct, or that I have stumbled onto something that has eluded scientists for generations.  In order to make some sense of the world and the universe to myself I have come up with some answers that seem solid.  You’ll probably find that some of these answers have already been proposed by people much smarter than I am – perhaps I’ve read them somewhere and, either consciously or unconsciously, adopted them as “my” answers.  Others are probably just me talking out of my bottom which, if you’ve read this far, you’ll know that I do quite a lot.  Regardless, over the course of the next few months I shall share some of my thoughts with you, the lovely people of the internet, here on my blog, tagged “Physics”.

Coming up you will find such musings as “What is time, why does it always move forward and why can’t it go backward?”; “What are little girls made of, or everything else for that matter?”; and the ever-popular “What is the true nature of the universe?”

And don’t worry – all this excitement will be interspersed with non-science-related stuff, too.

You have my word on it.

GTA V, Vapid Morons and the Plague of Instant Gratification

Less than two months ago Rockstar Games, creators of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, were being lauded as the Gods of Gaming, with literally millions of fans chomping at the bit in anticipation of their latest game.  The game was released in September to critical acclaim.  So loved was the game that when a popular gaming website, Gamespot, had the audacity to rate it 9 out of 10 (a very respectable score by anyone’s standards), the backlash was incredible.  So vociferous was the online community’s response that a Gamespot journalist was moved to release a video expressing his disgust at some commenters’ bilious abuse.

Fast-forward a month or so and the tables have really turned on Rockstar.  Having delayed the release of GTA5’s online component by precisely 2 weeks, its eventual release was hampered by overloaded servers, glitches and general frustration.  For my own part, I was unable to log on to GTA: Online for the first three days, and when I finally did it was intermittently buggy, sometimes freezing up and frequently telling me that the game couldn’t connect to the online servers.  My response?  Anger?  Frustration?  Prolonged diatribes on internet message boards to express my disgust and hatred for the game?  No.  I waited.  I waited for just a few days and tried again.  And do you want to know what happened?  With the exception of an occasional “couldn’t reach the Rockstar cloud servers” message it has been a pretty much flawless experience.

Perhaps I have been lucky, but even if that is the case I can’t help feeling that if the situation were different and I was one of the unlucky ones whose game was malfunctioning, I would be patient, wait for the necessary patch(es) and try again later.

However, apparently the world doesn’t work that way any more.  Already, the internet is filled with unhappy campers who are threatening a boycott on all future Rockstar products.  They’re trading in their copies and won’t be buying them back at a later date.  And even if there is a Rockstar game that’s maybe worth their while, they’ve said that they’ll only buy it preowned, a “clever” threat that tells a developer, “I want your game but I don’t want to give you any money for it.”  Astonishingly, and quite unbelievably (given that this is a Grand Theft Auto game), a huge portion of the Internet Whining Brigade have claimed that they want their money back as they only bought GTA5 for the online component.  Yes, allegedly people are buying GTA5 – the latest in a series of games that is adored for its vast, thriving free-roam world and massive single-player campaign – just to run around online and shoot random people in the head.

There are people who are shirking the deep, complex and intelligent story just so that they can enter 16-player deathmatches which, while fun, are about as deep and meaningful as a bathtub spillage.  There are those who ignore the intricate interplay between three utterly different playable characters in favor of playing an ultimately pointless and plotless run-and-gun affair with a mute, characterless avatar who isn’t even that customisable.  Sorry if that strikes me as being bullshit.

I have now played many hours of GTA: Online and have, by and large, enjoyed it a great deal.  There have been issues, I’ll grant you.  While in freeroam mode I have been repeatedly gunned down by random players for literally no reason whatsoever.  My very first foray into the online world involved entering a random team deathmatch and being verbally abused by a pair of Australian imbeciles who thought that hurling obscenities at me was entertaining in some way (judging by their girlish giggling at the childish insults being batted my way).

My original online character was a male, with whom I reached level 17.  Wanting to play online with a friend of mine who had not yet been online, i found that being 17 levels higher than him gave us access to missions that he wasn’t “levelled” high enough to play effectively, so I created a second character.  This time I decided to create a female, just to keep things interesting.  My first time online with her resulted in me receiving a message from another player.  The exchange went like this:

OP: I WANNA FUK YOU!

Me: That’s a shame, cuz I’m a dude.

OP: then ur gay.

Me: You keep telling yourself that.

OP: yawn

Me: That’s what I was thinking…

OP: Ur still gay.  can’t think

Me: Riiiiiight…

An entertaining exchange, I’m sure you’ll agree.  One always wants to converse with someone whose grasp of English grammar is matched only by their ability to spell the word “fuck”.  I almost feel sorry for the guy – if I hadn’t been a heterosexual male then I’m sure his romantic advances would have successfully wooed any self-respecting woman.  I mean, who isn’t turned on by being told that some random, ignorant moron wants to FUK them?

But here’s the kicker: as an apology to players, Rockstar have said that they’ll be giving everybody $500,000 of virtual cash to spend online to make up for the early teething problems with GTA: Online.  Note well that these are teething problems that Rockstar explicitly stated would be there before online was even launched.  Really we, the gaming public, are entitled to absolutely nothing, but the good folk at Rockstar feel the need to make an apology anyway.

This $500,000 was to be delivered in two $250,000 deposits, the first of which Rockstar hoped to deliver around two weeks ago (at time of writing).  When people complained of losing cash and online progress, Rockstar chose to delay the first stimulus payment, reasoning that it’s pointless giving people a quarter of a million dollars if there’s a chance that their game may inexplicably lose that money.  After this first delay the complaints started.  Here’s a selection from the comments section of the relevant post (as these are cut-and-pasted then I hope the sics are taken as read):

“where is my 500K i haven’t seen a cent and been playing since it went live.”

“WHERE THE FK IS THE MONEY?????”

“I tried 1 day after the update didnt get any money! scam!”

“It’s been over 15 1/2 days since this article was posted. I haven’t seen NOT ONE of the deposits that was promised. WHEN IS IT GOING TO HAPPEN?????”

Way back in March of 2012, Colin Moriarty of IGN posted a video in which he spoke out against the backlash levelled at Bioware for their game Mass Effect 3.  His video culminated in the accusation that many gamers have a sense of entitlement – that many gamers feel that they are owed something by a game developer if they feel that said developer has in some way “wronged” them.  Mr Moriarty was consequently the subject of verbal and written attacks not just by gamers but by websites around the world (including forbes).  The funny thing about all of this is that this is precisely what is now happening with GTA: Online.  Many gamers now feel that they are owed this $500,000 gift that Rockstar has promised them.  They feel that it is the least they deserve after having to suffer all the trials and tribulations of this game, this supposedly fun diversion that they so wanted to be a part of in the first place, despite the fact that they were all told that there would be teething troubles before the game even came out!

And why are people demanding the money?  Certainly there is a large subset of these people who want the money now.  They’ve waited for literally weeks!  How are they ever going to finish the game without that money?  They want that luxury apartment and 10-car garage  this instant!  they don’t want to have to work for the in-game funds to purchase these properties.  It’s grinding; it’s not fun.

Bottom line: if you’re not having fun then don’t play, simple as that.  You are not being cheated or scammed, you are not the victim of false advertising or misrepresentation just because you happen to not be enjoying a game.  There are plenty of people who are  enjoying the game, myself included.  If there are people who are capable of deriving enjoyment from the game then perhaps the problem is not with the game at all.  Perhaps the problem is you.

And it’s not just the so-called Stimulus Package, either.  Rockstar promised that there would be heists to do online at some point in the future. From the same article on the Rockstar newswire that I linked to earlier:

“We are planning for a constant stream of new content, tweaks and updates in the weeks and months ahead.”

Many gamers, though, want the heists right now.  They want more missions right now.  They want all this new content right now, and they will complain and kick and fuss until they get it.  Just a couple of days ago Rockstar posted up a new article that details two new content packs coming out in early November; the Beach Bum pack and the Content Creator.  In this article they tell us that these new packs will be completely free to download, but this hasn’t stopped people complaining, with many gamers asking how much the new packs will cost (!), griping that Rockstar have already had enough of their money and they’re not spending a penny more on new DLC(!), and even complaining that this new content should have been on the disc in the first place and that there’s no excuse for Rockstar to be releasing these DLCs now.  Bear in mind that these packs are free!  As in “not costing anything.”

The world has changed a lot in the last few decades.  Thanks to online shopping we expect to buy things and for them to be delivered without us ever having to get up off our arses.  Thanks to Netflix, among others, we know that we can watch a film – any film – instantly, without having to wait.  Thanks to advances in computing we expect video games to have the most superb graphics, the richest experience we’ve ever had, and every successive game should be better than its predecessors by a country mile.  But making bigger, better and brighter games requires more effort.  They become more complex, more prone to problems.  But when a game is delayed it’s the end of the world!  We hate to be kept waiting for anything.  And then, when the product comes out and has bugs in it it’s absolutely unforgivable!  Forget that a game can’t be delayed indefinitely.  Forget the fact that a team of game testers working for six months on QA is never going to be comparable with a week of shaking down by millions of consumers.  Forget the fact that games companies can fix these problems with patches.  It shouldn’t be allowed!  It should be perfect from the get-go.  Despite the fact that it’s a completely unrealistic expectation!

As Alan Grant said in Jurassic Park, “the world has just changed so radically, and we’re all running to catch up.”

Why can’t we just put aside our frustrations and enjoy things?

Seriously.