Smug City

I'm basking in the satisfied feeling of self-control as I have managed to keep myself from jumping onto a couple of recent releases that seem to be mostly a bust (for the moment at least).  It's so rare that I get to experience these feelings as I am the biggest sucker for hype and nifty, musically enhanced advertisements.  But I resisted the lure and now I can sit back and feel content that I've learned from my past mistakes and now share my scattered words of wisdom with others.

Wisdom #1--Iffith it Soundeth Unbelieveable-ith--don't believe-ith ith... (Don't Fall for the Hype!)

For the past year or so I had been keeping a side-eye on No Man's Sky.  Not hardcore tracking every Tweet or press release or new video, but just reading any articles that popped up describing the game.  On the surface it sounded like something that was going to be downright revolutionary.  Buuuuuut....there was always this part of me that was really skeptical.  How could anyone really find the time to make 18 quintillion unique planets?  Procedural generation sounds neato, but the reality is that it's still the same box no matter how many pretty colors you slap onto it.  For me, not jumping into this one was a great choice.  

Steam reviews seem very mixed between negative and positive reviews--many of the negative reviews are those who feel they were led to believe that certain things would be in the game that weren't.  I've been trying to ignore those and find the ones that talk more about the gameplay itself and it seems like many find the game very grindy and repetitive.  However, about 50% of the reviews seem to be positive with many people genuinely enjoying the game.  There's a chance I might still grab No Man's Sky in the future, but it's definitely going to be at a deeply discounted sale price.

One of the old pre-order ads from Steam.
Early release with pre-orders?  Ugh.

Wisdom #2--Don'teth Pre-Ordereth.

I am extremely guilty of not following this piece of my own wisdom.  If there's a game I really want my thinking is that I should just pre-order and get whatever ridiculous perk is being offered because I'm going to buy it anyway.  Ugh...so weak-willed despite the fact that I know I will almost always be disappointed.  Unfortunately it has become almost commonplace for big games to be released in a very poor state.  I watched from afar this week as the reviews for Deus Ex:  Mankind Divided started popping up on Steam.  And, lo and behold, there were several things that people were upset about--poor optimization, frequent freezes/crashes, and generally just the usual day one crap that seems to have become so standard.  It's really sad that this has become so standard in video gaming--when else would people accept a product that was faulty at release?

The reality of pre-ordering is that the developers already have your money so they don't feel that same pressure to deliver a product that is going to be perfect on day one.  Sucks for gamers.  On the other hand it has become almost completely unacceptable for developers to delay releasing something.  The backlash from pushing release dates back is nuts!  I would much rather have a developer push a release date back and have a playable, fun product on the very first day.  Being patient would save so many headaches.

(On a complete side-related note it seems like many people are upset about the inclusion of microtransactions in the single player campaign of DE:MD and day 1 DLC that seems at best shady and at worst very, very money grubby.)

Wisdom #3--Pre-loading is a load of crap-eth.

It...never...works.  NEVER!  There's the fake excitement of thinking--"oooh this is downloaded, I can pop right into the game the second it's officially out!."  It's a lie!  Don't fall for it!  What's going to happen is that you're going to spend a few hours downloading a bunch of encrypted files.  Then, on release day when you're feeling happy about your preparedness you're going to spend another few hours watching as those files are slowly, slowly decrypted.  Just wait and download after it's released.

So sayeth me.  Amen.  We'll see how long it takes before I break my own words o' wisdom--I'm guessing not long. ;)