Of course, Ground Zeroes comes rightfully under fire for potentially setting a rather dangerous precedent: paying near-full price for what amounts to a demo.
Who the hell paid full near full price? I got mine two days after release for $20 on PSN, and Xbox Live had it for the same price.
Even then, that's about
twice what the demo is worth in terms of reasonable play time,
not playing it until you know every tiny detail of the map down to the brown stains on the backs of your enemies' pants.
I get wanting to recoup some of the costs of making a huge game like this, and selling a demo is a fair way to do it and to drum up expectation at the same time. However, if its release price is above $5-10 US, then unless you're a hardcore fan, you're likely getting screwed out of your money. This is especially true if a newbie to the franchise can best all your content in less than 4 hours. What's there looks
amazing, but there's so little of it that its not worth asking above $10. But, since its Kojima, since you guys haven't gotten a new Metal Gear Solid in a long time, the incredibly poor value seems to be ignored by a lot of people.
I dunno, maybe I'm finally becoming old, but I seem to distinctly remember a time, not too long ago, when demos were mostly
free, or at most cost as much as the magazine with which they were bundled. Again, I get wanting to recoup your costs for making a huge game, but I...I just can't find myself agreeing with paying for a fucking
demo. Red Faction: Guerrilla had a demo, and it was fucking free! I got my demo of Thief II, which introduced me to a franchise I've been in love with ever since, from an issue of PC Gaming magazine.
[Separate Rant]
Another thing that irritates the fuck outta me? Companies that spend more time developing a cadre of features, many of which are only half-working at release, instead of fixing glaring issues in their game. The worst offender has
got to be Mojang. Having talked to mod makers and seen/heard/read commentary from some of the Minecraft Forge team, I have come to the inescapable conclusion that Minecraft's greatest core problem is Mojang and its nearly-criminal incompetence.
They focus so much on so many near-worthless features like horses and the villages that are only made useful thru mods instead of their barely working engine that chokes under the strain of its own content. It has almost
no multithreading to speak of, I believe the latest report was that Minecraft runs in a staggering
two threads. This means that even if you had an eight-core CPU, you'd have fuck all for performance if it doesn't have exceptional per-thread performance. Threading was fucking created to make things more efficient: you break up a single, monolithic program into smaller strands of execution that can all run asynchronously, dividing the workload up and improving performance. This is
not rocket surgery; I've bothered to look it up, and Java makes threading almost as simple as C# does, which is to say that its about as close to piss-easy as one can make threading.
Their rendering engine is, according to Reika (author of RotaryCraft), still a largely broken, half-working mess that lags under the horrific strain of a model more complex than a fucking piston. Their sound engine is
still an immense source of ungodly amounts of lag, likely also attributable to the fact they seem to think Ogg is anything other than a joke format made by the FOSS crowd.
These are problems that have existed, as far as I can find, since the dawn of fucking Minecraft. A game that forces a GPU to chug a metaphorical can of Monster to keep up while running with a texture resolution lower than the first-gen 3D consoles, all while using the most simplistic graphical approach available: volumetric pixels, also known as voxels. This game is so
fucking simplistic, why the fuck does it lag my machine more than fucking Guild Wars 2? Oh, right...
GUILD WARS 2 WAS MADE BY A TEAM OF FUCKING COMPETENT PROGRAMMERS, THAT'S WHY.
