Quote:
Originally Posted by SebC
I suspect that the activism reflects not only ME3's ending but also how people feel about Origin, lack of sales, and DLC prices. If you're going to avoid the standard industry practices of making your games available on multiple chanels and making bundles/sales/complete edition etc. available, you should expect to have to meet a VERY high standard.
People will put up with that stuff for the right product (you could argue that Blizzard is similar in that their stuff isn't on Steam either), but you're treading a tightrope if you choose to go that route.
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Yeah, you're right, and we already saw the anti-Bioware backlash during Dragon Age 2, with (the same) people bombing Metacritic with 20% reviews much like they do now with ME3. Some small incident of someone getting locked out of their game because of a forum post got inflated, and so on. There was some gay stuff, some writer got harrassed online. And the day-one DLC that already had activists campaigning against Bioware before the game was out. And then there was the final ME book that was genuinely incompetent and written by someone who didn't know the universe and didn't care enough to do his homework before writing it. They just haven't had any PR victories lately.
So there was already a significant amount of ill will towards Bioware building. But that just makes me more suspicious about some of the more strident criticism of ME3 that I see. I don't trust this kind of group sentiment.
And it's absolutely true that Bioware is suffering from guilt by association to EA. A standard view is that EA has ruined Bioware.
Getting the game going was a chore, once again. Sign on Origin, sign on some confusingly designed community website to get one DLC, search for 25 minutes where the hell you can actually purchase the From Ashes DLC on Origin, pay through PayPal, notice that you have been charged but nothing's happening, go online to see what's going on, waste your time until 40 minutes later you go back to the Origin and notice that you have just been added 800 Bioware points with no notification of any kind, spend those ####ing points to buy the DLC - and launch and then get stuck for another 20 minutes (at least) because Origin appears to updating either itself or the game, again with no notification of any kind, and you don't want to pull the plug on it before it's done. I'm sure there was more.
It always feels like you're jumping through hoops to get a Bioware/EA game working. A pirate has none of those problems.