Skip to main content

Hats Off to Firaxis, for a Sane yet Attractive Pre-Order Bonus Idea

By
This is a really clever idea, especially after some of the total boners on pre-order ideas by other companies in the recent past (I'm thinking of the craptastic thing Bethesda tried and abandoned for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.).

The pre-order bonus for Civ 6 will be immediate access to a Civ that all other players will get for free three months later. So it's not a financial offer - latecomers won't have to pay anything. But it's still a great incentive for those of us who would buy the game anyway, to take the risk of pre-ordering.

Admittedly, Firaxis is one of the few companies that I don't feel I'm risking much to preoorder from. Even Civ: Beyond Earth, which was quite a bit weaker than I'd hoped and expected, was not such a disappointment that I felt I'd not have bought it if I'd waited for reviews. And Starships was clearly telegraphed and priced as a "lite" game.

But this approach is something that I hope other companies will emulate, and that I think they'll find reasonable to emulate. Making special preoorder content that will either never be available to latecomers is giving anybody who heard about the game late a strong disincentive to buy. Making preorder content available later as DLC is a bit blatant (almost as bad as shipping a game where chunks were obviously ripped out to be sold as DLC - I'm looking at you, Dragon Age: Origins).

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Looks like Nintendo may have gotten their head back into daylight this time

By
The Wii U was (IMO) a dumb idea that (factually) tanked, evidence that Nintendo had no clue how to follow up what made the Wii a breakthrough product. But it looks like they may have figured out what they are doing right with the 3DS, and how to really cash in on the new trend toward multiscreen entertainment at home without being needlessly expensive, asymmetrically lame on multiplayer, and totally separate from their successful handhelds. http://kotaku.com/heres-your-first-look-at-the-nx-nintendos-upcoming-con-1788004927
Post a Comment
Read more

Stellaris: Post-Honeymoon Review and Musings

By
If you're a TL;DR sort of person, here you go: Stellaris is not a 4X game at all. Its core design goes a completely different direction. It has some cool bits in it that will probably catch on in future 4X games, and by using mods to tune it I got a hundred or so hours of fun out of it before the honeymoon wore off, but in the long run it will likely be remembered as a non-4X game that was nonetheless a good influence on the genre. To go into more depth for those inclined: Pre-release, the big excitement about Stellaris was the hope for innovation in a 4X in ways to make the late game less of a grind - that period when you know you've won but the mechanics of getting the victory screen will take hours more. This was a bit of marketing poetry, or maybe outright disingenuous. At its core, Stellaris is not a 4X game. It's a pretty standard Paradox set-piece grand strategy game with a "1X" game bolted on the beginning to substitute for the real-world history t...
Post a Comment
Read more

GW2 Heart of Thorns, after some serious play time

By
The first week or two after Heart of Thorns went live, I was a bit disappointed. Playing on, first because four of my friends and I always play together on Mondays, I got a little more of a philosophical handle on how the expansion changes the game, and I'm no longer ambivalent about having bought it - I love some parts, and I just had to learn that the "different kinds of fun as you feel like it" game design is now painted in broader strokes - especially you should only go into one of the new zones if you feel like the activity that is going on in it. Roughly speaking, HoT adds four things to the game: A new character class, a new "elite" subclass for each class, a new form of progression at L80, and a bunch of new zones with their story. Of these, the zones are the most visible and important, and the mastery tracks are the most novel and IMO successful, so I'll leave those for last. In thinking about these changes together, I think I see a philosophica...
Post a Comment
Read more