Skip to main content

OMG, Squeenix hits a new low on hating its customers

Among my circle of friends, it's taken as established fact that Squeenix hates its players. They haven't released a game since the departure of Hiromichi Tanaka that didn't contain something that showed this.

Certainly the last Deus Ex title amply demonstrated the hatred, with the stupid "what, you were playing a stealth game? Naaah, it's an action game!" boss fights and, even worse, the grotesquely non-closing final voiceover in lieu of an actual ending cinematic and the parody of having multiple endings (you push one of four buttons, all next to each other on a console, and what difference it makes to the stupid final voiceover is too insignificant to spot).

But the announcement this week about the pre-order "bonuses" for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided are a new low. The initial structure is the already-annoying "you only get a pre-order bonus if enough people pre-order" system, which is a travesty to start with. But even if you do play along with that crap, you will only get one choice from each of the early tiers of "if enough people". If you want to get all three bits, you have to shell out more than 250% of the normal edition price for the "collector's edition".

And the top tier, get this: They will release the game 4 days earlier. Think about that. Does that mean that they'll magically finish it faster? No, it means they are going to hold it back for four days unless enough people cough up the bucks for the pig in the poke.

To me, this strongly suggests that the game sucks in some horrid way that will become obvious as soon as people start playing it, and they know it.

This is definitely one game not to pre-order!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJkzcQDqbpE

https://www.deusex.com/augmentyourpreorder

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Can't write, must play Pillars of Eternity

OMFG, I've barely started the game and I'm already hooked and feeling alt-oholic. I only looked at character generation and the first few minutes of play last night, as I can't afford to miss a day of work just for a new game any more. But I'm already sure that this game is living up to high expectations. It's not perfect, there are some flaws that Rock, Paper, Shotgun already did a good job describing, but this is better than many of the game I've paid $60 for over the years. Going to be hard to tear myself away long enough to keep my wife and toddler from getting upset at me this weekend.

The highest bang-for-buck thing in Fallout 4

So, I had a hankering for some first-person murder hoboing the other day just when Steam put Fallout 4 on sale, so I gave up my plan to wait for the GOTY edition. It's mostly living up to my expectations, good and bad, based on reviews and on previous Bethesda games. The ostensible plot hook (lost baby) is completely underwhelming (sorry, clicking a blob of pixels a couple times can't compare to bonding with a real baby) but irrelevant to the game anyway. The main plot sounds potentially less stupid than the one for FO3. The settlement stuff is not quite as bolted onto the side of the game as I expected - taking time and perks to improve your settlement network can pay off in upgrade mats. But the thing that surprised me most pleasantly was remarkably simple. If you choose a somewhat common name for your character, the voiced robot butler will actually call you by name (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Codsworth/recognized_names). I didn't know this going in, and my first ...

This article didn't quite change my life, but it was the most worthwhile thing I've read in a while

I like the games I like, and I'm no longer in the business of making games, so in many ways this article is not to my address. But it was still really worth my time to read carefully. It never gets anywhere near the stupid misogynistic pseudo-editorial "defense of games" crap that I'm not naming to avoid the still-raging humans pretending to be flamebots, and it comes from the opposite, and very constructive direction. And it quotes Tim Gunn more than once, in a very on-topic way. Tim Gunn is an awesome individual, even though I doubt he's ever been in the same room as a videogame for long. http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-11-07-video-games-are-boring