Welcome back fellow gamers. Below I’ve included some of the
biggest stories in gaming that took place this week, September 30th-October
6th, 2013. As always, I offer my opinion along with links to the
relevant source articles in case you want more info. Now, on to the stories!
Big Trouble In Little
Los Santos
This week marked the debut of Rockstar’s ambitious new foray
into online multiplayer: Grand Theft Auto
Online which players who purchased Grand
Theft Auto V receive free access to. Rockstar anticipated a bit of a rockylaunch and boy where they right. Millions of users trying to log in all at once
took its toll on GTA Online’s servers
with a vast majority of users being unable to get very far past the character
creation screen.
After a day or so had passed and Rockstar had a chance to
work out some of the kinks, many players still remained locked out of GTA Online mainly due to their inability
to load up the mandatory tutorial racing mission which must first be completed
before they can explore the rest of GTA
Online’s world. Even worse, those who *did* manage to make it past the
tutorial reported losing their characters and progress. As a precaution,
Rockstar ended up disabling the game’s micro-transactions feature which allows
users to purchase in-game cash for real-world money.
As of the time of this writing, GTA Online’s performance remains far from stable and many users are
still complaining about lost characters and progress, many are unsurprisingly
frustrated at having already poured many hours into GTA Online only to see all their hard work gone the next time they
log in. Rockstar has released several patches and title updates to help deal
with some of GTA Online’s more
glaring issues but it’s still working on getting the issue of erased characters
and game progress worked out.
I myself was only just able to get past the beginning
tutorial mission yesterday evening and even afterwards still experienced my
fair share of freezes and crashes. I’ll admit GTA Online is a lot of fun when it works as intended but until
Rockstar gets all of the game’s issues sorted out once and for all, I’d say
proceed with caution and at your own risk due to the erased characters issue.
For the most up-to-date info on how Rockstar is combating GTA Online’s issues, check out the game’s
official support page.
Original Source: Polygon
Back In My Day…
If you were to say the phrase “extra lives” to a typical
gamer, they’d likely bring up fond memories of inputting specific button
sequences into their favorite game’s start screen in order to receive an
inordinate amount of lives. For all you whippersnappers out there, such rituals
were called “cheat codes” and were one of the many fun little secrets a typical
game had hidden away. Now Sega’s offering a similar incentive for fans of the
upcoming Sonic: Lost Worlds…For a
price.
Like most games, Sonic:
Lost Worlds, which comes out later this month on both 3DS and WiiU, comes
with a fair amount of bonus DLC content for those who decide to pre-order the
game from specific vendors. Fans who decide to pre-order from online retailer
Amazon get 25 extra lives. Yes, that’s right, 25 extra lives is the pre-order
DLC content fans get for pre-ordering from Amazon.
It would seem the days of inputting cheat codes are well and
truly dead. Why put in a hidden code to unlock lives when you can just charge
players a buck or two instead? What am I talking about? Well, while the
pre-order bonus on its own doesn’t seem too bad, Kotaku’s Jason Schreier, who
covered the news for Kotaku, pointed out the slippery slope Sega has put itself
on. Once Sonic: Lost Worlds is
released, what’s stopping Sega from doing exactly what I mentioned earlier,
putting the extra lives in as an optional DLC purchase?
When many of Kotaku’s more vocal commenters accused Schreier
of overreacting, he fired back with this rather eloquent post justifying who he
feels these extra lives are “literally the worst DLC of all time”:
“Here, you're not paying for something trivial—you're paying
for a core part of the game: the ability to try again once you've died. In any
platformer, that's an integral part of the core design. Some platformers choose
to challenge you by testing you over and over again until you figure out how to
pull off a tricky jump or spin move; others give you more rope and let you
challenge yourself to beat each level with more speed, or more completion, or
whatever.
By offering extra lives as a preorder bonus (and presumably
later for real cash, based on the "downloadable content" line), Sega
is damaging the integrity of that core design. Even if they didn't
intentionally make the game more difficult in order to get you to put in more
money, they've ruined the ecosystem of lives in this game, which immediately
makes it less satisfying and less desirable to play.”
Whether one agrees or disagrees with Schreier’s reasoning,
none can deny that this is dangerous ground for Sega to be treading on. Many
gamers like to joke about a day when getting any sort of in-game powerup from
an extra life to a fireball to a fancy new sword will require an in-game
micro-transaction but what Sega is doing with Sonic: Lost Worlds is making that absurd fantasy into slightly more
of a scary reality. Here’s hoping other developers don’t follow suit.
Original Source: Kotaku
That’s it for this week folks. Be sure to follow me on
Twitter at @NateHohl and check out my other work at VGU.TV and The LongfellowBridge.
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