Arkham Knight shows why we gotta stop pre-ordering games

I am pretty excited to finally be able to pick up Arkham Knight in a few hours. But goddamn it, Arkham Knight. I am not happy with you and your pre-order bonus bullshit, which is maybe the worst and most obvious case yet of taking content that's already in the game and hiding it behind a retailer code that will download a small patch to unlock it.

Anyone who buys games knows pre-order bonuses well at this point. There was a point where I didn't mind them so much, myself. Sure, I found it a bit uncool to block stuff off like they do, but it was easy to ignore it when it was typically alternate character skins or some other cosmetic appearance item. I remember one game (I forget what game, haha) where it was "Golden Guns." The guns weren't at all different from the default starting weapons, except they looked like they were made of gold. It was pretty easy to look at that stuff and think "who really cares?"

Turns out we should have cared, because as time has gone on, pre-order bonuses have gotten more and more out of hand in terms of what content they gate off. Borderlands 2, for example, gave those that pre-ordered the game an entire extra character class in Gaige the Mechromancer. If you didn't pre-order, you had to pay extra for that pack. Supposedly development of the Mechromancer was done after the game itself was complete, but you can only take Gearbox's word for that. That fact, combined with the decent amount of time between the pre-order announcement and the game's release, and with the pack being released only a couple weeks after the game itself, left a bad taste in plenty of customers' mouths. (I'll be honest, I ignored that one, choosing to just trust Gearbox when they said it wasn't something cut to drive pre-orders)

That's the first pre-order bonus I can really remember seeming that level of uncool. But since then it's become entirely common to see games announce pre-order bonuses consisting of entire maps, quests, weapons, characters...not cosmetic DLC, but actual "real" content, often divvied up further between individual retailers. Every Assassin's Creed can be counted on to have pre-order bonuses of a special mission, or possibly an entire small quest line. Alien: Isolation, a game that traded entirely on the success of the original film, set aside the levels and characters based on that film. I can't even remember how many items fucking Watch_Dogs had set aside for every store to have their own special thing, though I do remember it being the first game where I saw people making a goddamn spreadsheet to see how many copies you'd have to buy to get everything at launch.

And of course, if you don't get a retailer's pre-order bonus, don't worry, because after a few months you'll be allowed to buy it separately. Yes, the publishers will graciously allow you to turn over an extra $2-10 to unlock something that is already in your game, because it's no longer exclusive to Target customers.

Thing is, pre-ordering doesn't do anything special for the customers. It's entirely a win for the publishers and the retailers, and given the chopping up of games it cause now, it's a definite loss for players. And Arkham Knight proves that point more than anything before it.

Knight's predecessor, featured a pre-order bonus as well, with a couple challenge maps and the ability to play as the assassin Deathstroke. And Knight's chronological predecessor, Arkham City, featured a variety of appearance skins, as well as a handful of challenge maps and the ability to play as Robin. City also had the gross, "PS3-exclusive-just-because have to purchase a copy of Green Lantern on Blu-Ray" Sinestro Corps. skin, and the super gross bit with WB cutting out the game's Catwoman story content to be a "don't buy used" incentive, but those are different issues (and online passes are thankfully dead now). In those cases, at least, the skins only affected what Batman looked like, challenge maps are not an integral part of the game, and the bonus characters were challenge map exclusive anyway. And if Arkham Knight had stuck to that, I'd probably have just ignored it. But.

As I said, I think we all know this pre-order content stuff is actually part of the game, and just locked behind a special code wall publishers make the developers put there. There's usually not a whole ton of proof, but we pretty consistently have people finding the items on the disc already, and for years now we've known the difference in download sizes for items that actually download content and items that are essentially just an unlock key. Like, on the 360, unlock key stuff was always 119kb or some shit. But Arkham Knight is pretty handily caught I think. I'll mention it in a minute, but real quick, what are Knight's pre-order bonuses?

First the pre-order bonus for all retailers, the Harley Quinn pack, which includes the ability to play as Harley Quinn and some challenge maps, but also includes a story mission played as the character.

The Best Buy exclusive, the WayneTech booster pack, includes 4 actual moves for Batman's combat arsenal. Yes. They took things out of the main character's moveset to make a bonus.

Walmart gets a unique Batmobile with exclusive gameplay features.

And finally, at GameStop, and I think the one that looks the worst, the Red Hood story pack. This is a set of story missions where you play as the gun-toting Red Hood. Thing is, when you play as Red Hood, you use guns. And this has been mentioned as being part of the reason Arkham Knight got rated M instead of T. So obviously, when the game was complete and sent off for a rating, this was in the game. And then they lifted it out so GameStop could feel special. It's the worst and most obvious of them I can ever recall seeing.

This isn't something we should keep encouraging, is it? Because at this point the only way it stops is we stop doing pre-orders. They do this because it works, after all. And it's hard, I get that...I'm saying all this as someone who got angry at all of this but STILL pre-ordered Arkham Knight because I do want to play the Harley and Red Hood missions and I don't want it to cost me extra. Sure they said all pre-order content would be given to season pass holders once the exclusivity period was over, but that's still "pay extra for stuff that's already in there." The alternative is to wait for the seemingly inevitable Game of the Year or Ultimate edition (which will typically cost less anyway), but I also don't want to wait even longer to play the game.

But if we quit letting this work, they'll quit doing it. I already know I won't be pre-ordering very often after this. I'll make exceptions, I know. I pre-ordered the Rare Replay Collection for example, because I know exactly what I'm getting in that, and the deal gave me a $10 gift card for doing so (you'll notice that in that exchange there was a benefit for ME). Likewise I can understand if you like collectibles and want the special edition of a game, something that releases in limited quantities, and pre-ordering ensures you get one (*COUGHCOUGH WITCHER 3 COLLECTOR'S EDITION COUGHCOUGH MORTAL KOMBAT X COARSE EDITION COUGHCOUGH*). Maybe there's a discount involved, or an actual physical bonus- I probably would have pre-ordered Witcher 3 just for the wolf keychain, and a couple of the LEGO games have had a mini figure you couldn't otherwise find in a LEGO set. Or maybe you think this is a game that won't be easy to to just walk into a store and find- I pre-ordered Earth Defense Force 4.1 on Amazon for this exact reason, and I pre-order almost every Nintendo title these days because I've had such a poor experience trying to find them close to release otherwise. I get that there are reasons to do it sometimes.

But we have got to stop just blindly rewarding publishers for cutting up games with endless pre-orders for every title just because we fall into their big dumb hype machine.

A brief rant about my admittedly small problems with The Witcher 3

I am actually kind of pissed at CD Projekt RED. There are bugs in various Witcher 3 quests/activities that make them impossible to complete. Which I mean, okay. That happens with massive games like this. No matter how big your testing team is, you can't simulate millions of people all playing your game and doing every possible thing. No matter how big your testing team is, you can't simulate millions of people all playing your game and doing every possible thing. And yet they've immediately patched out exploits and shit when they pop up. 

You could buy seashells and turn them into pearls that sold for a higher price? Gotta patch so that merchant doesn't sell seashells! Someone has hundreds of thousands of gold? Gotta patch in a max gold cap that works in the dumbest possible way! The gold cap is 65535 or something. When you exceed the cap, when it resets, it will remove full increments of 65535 and leave you the rest. So if you have 67000, instead of dropping you to 65535, it drops 65535 and leaves you 1465. 200000? it drops 65535 3 times and leaves 3395. How dumb is that?

And yet, mutagen bonuses still won't save properly. Every time you load up to play some more, you need to go to your character screen and unequip/re-equip your mutagens so it will redo the math. Not to mention any number of bugs in various quests or activities that make them impossible to complete. For example, Person(s) In Distress map activities are commonly bugged in that the Bandit Leader doesn't spawn, so you can't loot the key to the cage. Of course, that's if the merchant in the cage spawns anyway. HOORAY.

Many of these bugs were posted within days of release. You can see the threads on their forums where players posted them, and you can see the replies from CD Projekt RED acknowledging the bugs. Consoles are on their 4th patch version now, and many of those issues are still not fixed, with no word on when they will be (edit: I guess 1.05 is supposed to fix mutagen bonuses, and stop the gold cap reset). And yet every time someone finds a way to exploit the games systems (not a glitch or a bug, but exploiting something as is), the developers have rushed to patch that out.

So...why the priority for patching out gold or experience exploits in a single player, non-competitive game over actually fixing shit that's broken? Because someone is playing not how you think they should? Because you decided the economy should be A and so nobody is allowed to B? First of all, that's bullshit, and second of all, at least fix actual broken things first!

I mean, there's not much reason to exploit for gold anyway. I know I at least haven't had any real trouble with having enough gold when needed. But I can see the appeal of getting a nice stash built up, so you can just buy missing alchemy or crafting supplies when you need to or whatever. And again, these exploits hurt literally nothing! Players that want to use them will, players that don't won't. They only people impacted by patching them out are the people who want to find and use them, and they're affected negatively.

Also, less annoying, but...um...they could maybe add something that makes it a little clearer when a quest require IMMEDIATE attention. I don't mind being able to fail quests if I screw up; I actually like that. But when nothing about a quest tells you you need to do it the minute you accept it, that's kind of a bummer. Like, it's of course smart to do side quests in Act 1 before advancing to Act 2, but for example, Bitter Harvest makes sense to do it right away. When a guy says ghouls are on the way, please fight them, it's safe to think accepting the quest will mean be ready to fight right then. But Love's Cruel Snares is not even a little bit obvious. Nothing in the quest giver's dialog or the journal entry says you gotta go right this minute, but if you decide wiping out the nearby bandit camp is a bigger deal and go there first, then quest failed with no reason whatsoever. I mean, spoiler alert, you only find the guy's dead body and pass along the bad news...what, did he get too dead in the five minutes it took to deal with the bandits?

So yeah. That's my complaints. Get better priorities on your patches, and maybe a tag in the journal for shit you have to do right away. Please?

Nintendo's E3 was deceptive as hell

Like, I watched it live and I was just kinda shrugging and going "meh" all the way through, but...watch it again, and hamstrung as it was, it was good, there were cool things shown, it was fun! I think it may actually have been the secret best presentation by virtue of focusing almost entirely on things we can have soon:

Now, before anything else, let's just be clear- the puppet thing is cool and there is to be no argument. You saw puppets and went "yep this is a Nintendo thing."

They did open strong, with Starfox Zero, which I will obviously buy the minute it hits shelves. I love that it still looks so thoroughly Star Fox (defiantly Star Fox when you think about what so-called "real gamers" would have to say, and when you see the comments from fans complaining about how it needs to look better), that little robo drone was adorable, and the transforming into a walker thing looked like a fun switch up. After playing Splatoon and seeing how well they used the Wii U gamepad gyro there, I can't wait to fly an Arwing with the damn thing. And Miyamoto just telling us about the origins of Starfox and how they decided to do what they've done with Zero was of course awesome.

Mario Maker looks really cool and all, but I can never seem to get too into those "you make the game" titles.

I don't personally care too much about the Skylanders, but it is kinda cool seeing the Bowser and Donkey Kong hybrid amiibo/Skylander figures, since of course we've all been seeing amiibo as a competitive response to Skylanders.

The Legend of Zelda: Triforce Heroes looks like a good time. It's a twist on both classic top-down Zelda games and Four Swords Adventures (which was pretty damn good), and it looks fun to play. They said they wanted to be a little more co-op, a little less competitive than previous multiplayer Zelda stuff, which is cool. I liked that the enemies seemed like they were designed to take advantage of vertical space, which makes sense with the mechanic of lifting your buddies up higher. And the last 3DS Zelda was GREAT, so I'm willing to bet this will be on the positive side of the Zelda spectrum and not another Spirit Tracks. The trailer was focused mostly on dungeons though, so I'm hoping when we learn more there's still an overworld element.

Hyrule Warriors 3DS, I mean...fuck yeah! Hyrule Warriors is a fantastic Wii U title, and I cannot wait to take it with me anywhere I would take my 3DS. I will not mind one bit having to unlock things a second time. And it'll have some new levels and characters too, so please enjoy my money Nintendo.

Metroid Prime Freedom Force looks like a fun way to kill some time with my friends, much like Hunters was back on the original DS. Does it look like a 2D Metroid game or new Prime entry starring Samus? No. Does it look like a fun little spinoff? Yes. Are whiny entitled fanboys acting like shitheads about it without playing even a demo? You betcha. Is there a petition to Nintendo to cancel this "disgraceful," "disrespectful" "atrocity" of a game. Of fucking course there is. Never mind that everyone and their mom knows that the next "real" Metroid is gonna be made by Retro, or Project M, or entirely in-house by Nintendo and that this is obviously a fun spin off made by Next Level. You may notice that Next Level is NOT Retro/Project M/Nintendo. You may also notice that, while Next Level has made some not great stuff with others, their Nintendo work has been great- Super Mario Strikers, Mario Strikers Charged, Punch-Out!!, and Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon were all Next Level titles. This is Sonic The Hedgehog's blue arms all over again.

God damn it. 12,251 people signing a petition to demand cancellation of a game because it isn't their favorite game. Should we tell them about Metroid Prime Pinball or Hunters? I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of GamerGate to defend the rights of content owner and content creator Nintendo to make or have made the game the want to make or have made because CENSORSHIP and CREATIVE FREEDOM.

Christ I'll probably by a copy just to offset one of these assholes who won't even give it a chance.

Back to the thing now!

Man...Xenoblade Chronicles X. It looks nice and all, but for some reason that I just cannot identify, I can't get into it at all. I LOVED Xenoblade Chronicles on the Wii. But the spiritual successor isn't grabbing me at all.

GODDAMN IT WORLD AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO DOESN'T GET THE APPEAL OF ANIMAL CROSSING?! It's cute, K.K. Slider is neat, and I have fun with every entry for about 20 minutes. Somebody explain this to me. Why do you all love Furries & Chores: The Game?

And here's an Animal Crossing version of Mario Party except every player also has to have an Animal Crossing amiibo, which is easily the shadiest amiibo tie-in yet, toppling the previous winner, "exclusive boards in Mario Party 10 if you buy Mario character amiibo" (which had previously beaten "you can only get the Spinner weapon in Hyrule Warriors if you buy a Link amiibo").

I do like amiibo, and I fully intend to purchase K.K. Slider, both colors of 8-bit Mario, Bowser Jr., Mii Brawler/Gunner/Swordfighter, 4 of Mr. Game & Watch so I can have one in each pose, R.O.B., Ryu, all 3 colors of Yarn Yoshi, and I still may try to find a King Dedede, simply because I like the little low-space decent statues. But when it comes to game tie-ins, they are slowly creeping up on becoming a worrisome thing. I hope Nintendo pulls back a bit on that.

Yoshi's Wooly World looks hella fun, as Yoshi games always are. It is also so fucking adorable that I might die. Can you please fucking tell us a release date already.

If you don't think they're gonna put out something golden with Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam, you are almost certainly wrong. Mario & Luigi and Paper Mario are by far some of the best non-Mario game things they've done with their biggest character. Come on. Mario is old reliable. Mario is never bad. Some may be not as good as others, but never actually bad.

Case in point, they took a better look at Mario Maker, which as you'll recall I thought looked neat but didn't care much about, and now holy crap I want it. Nintendo really is the best at this shit, and I don't know how everyone keeps forgetting that.

I said above that Nintendo was hamstrung for this presentation, and they were. They've already announce work on their next console, the NX, but we knew they weren't going to be talking about it at all until next year. They told us a while ago they wouldn't be showing anything from the Wii U Zelda title. And thanks to the leaks of Super Smash Bros. content and Earthbound Beginnings, they ended up announcing those in a Nintendo Direct when they could have instead been some sizzle for their presentation steak. And despite all that, everything they had to show was absolutely solid and looked like great Nintendo fun, even if some of it leaves me feeling cold (seriously what's the deal with Animal Crossing).

A quick sidenote on Earthbound Beginnings: can we all stop acting like this is great news? Mother was...not very good, honestly. It does not hold up. Earthbound is seriously Mother again except good. Earthbound is the Perfect Dark to Mother's GoldenEye 007 (except that GoldenEye 007 was also good, Perfect Dark was just that much better). Mother 3 is the one we should want. Hold the excitement for that one!

Except everyone also buy Earthbound Beginnings, because otherwise Nintendo can use the poor sales of this shitty game to justify not localizing Mother 3, as my friend David is currently pointing out. Ugh. Damn you Nintendo.

Except also you are great, Nintendo. You know what? A+

Sony's E3 also killed it, but differently and not quite as much

Again, skipping over the bits I don't care about, or where the most I could think is "looks cool, but let's wait to see a bit more:"

Opening goddamn STRONG with The Last Guardian fucking FINALLY and dear sweet baby Jesus please don't let it become vaporware again. It looks amazing, and if the long-ass delay was just a matter of what they wanted to do running into "we could start over on the PS4" then it looks pretty worth the wait.
Horizon: Zero Dawn looks really cool, despite having maybe the stupidest name of anything announced this year. Definitely a departure from Killzone, they are definitely leaving the comfort of that particular style behind, and I can't wait to see how it turns out. I like that their post-apocalypse world has humans actually falling back to pre-industrial habits rather than the usual "the world looks wrecked, but at least we still have all our modern guns and electricity and houses and shit."
I've always enjoyed the Hitman series, so I want to be excited for the new one. But when they talk about a digital release that will grow and evolve, and say they're doing a beta, I'm concerned that we're gonna get some weird online multiplayer focused version of a Hitman game.
I would like No Man's Sky now please. All in for a space game focused on exploring and discovering new shit instead of "BLAST EVERYTHING WITH LASERS."
Dreams looks like the coolest thing Media Molecule has done yet, and everything they've done has already been super fucking cool.
I want Syndicate but frankly Unity pretty much made up my mind on "no more Assassin's Creed games at launch." I do appreciate that Ubisoft seems to have learned that diversity is in fact something that matters and that they should work on that.
Final Fantasy VII remake making heads explode, although chill the fuck out people acting like it's a proof of God's existence religious experience. I'm glad they don't plan to just do the same game with better graphics, too. Maybe we can get a good translation, hopefully flesh out the story a bit, maybe make the story actually good instead of a passable stack of cliches. I wouldn't be surprised if they made Vincent and Yuffie not optional since they've made them a pretty set part of everything FF7 now. And while I don't want it to play like XIII, I won't mind at all if they have some ways in mind to update the systems.
The Shenmue 3 Kickstarter is kinda some gross bullshit. "Give us your money or else you won't be able to give us the rest of your money." I know they aren't the first game to use crowdfunding for just a small part of the budget to be able to show proof of interest to investors who will actually fund the entire game (like Bloodstained!). But they aren't being open about what the real budget will be, or what the intent is to secure the rest of the funding, or even how involved Sony actually is. Also, Shenmue isn't new IP, okay? We have had pretty solid proof of fan's interest in Shenmue 3 for a long-ass time. The idea that years of tweets or statuses or blogs or letters or videos or whatever the fuck else people have done to show their love for Shenmue and their desire for Shenmue 3 don't show that there's interest so they have to ask the fans for monetary proof is kinda garbage. AND since it fuckin' worked, we can probably expect to see this shit more and more in the future. Sarcastic yay.
And we've got Sony now running with Microsoft's timed exclusive content for multiplatform games baton, which is still the same level of bullshit it was when Microsoft did it. That shit needs to die, the sooner the better.
Overall, nice job Sony. It was good, but I can't A+ it in my mind. Not a whole lot of things we'll see this year, a whole lot of 2016 or beyond. And I personally don't care about a couple of their big things, Street Fighter V, Black Ops 3 timed DLC, Disney Infinity pulling another Sony exclusive figure...and I never got into Uncharted, so their big closer did absolutely nothing for me.  High B+

Microsoft's E3 killed it

Skipping over the bits I don't care about, or where the most I could think is "looks cool, but let's wait to see a bit more:"

If you enjoy Halo (I enjoy Halo, especially this new Halo starting from 4 where they're actually at least trying to make Master Chief a real character), Halo 5 sure does look like some damn good Halo. The Hunt the Truth marketing has been a cool little story to get me intrigued, and I'm hopeful this one is actually gonna do something with the fact that ONI are kinda terrible human beings. Having a squad you can command is cool, and I like that they're all characters and not just "here's Chief and 3 oddly resilient Marines." And the dual stories on a collision course thing is something I'm always a sucker for.
Backwards compatibility for 360 titles, both disc and download (including XBLA games, I heard?), which is both really awesome and a pretty good middle finger to Sony's PlayStation Now streaming service, a.k.a PlayStation Pay Us To Rent Games You Already Paid Us To Own Previously. It's a bummer that it can't just be the whole 360 catalog all at once, but at least there's no extra work for developers beyond approving the title and making sure no licensing issues exist.
The Elite controller, which looks and reportedly feels GREAT. $150 is a bit pricey, but as someone who happily purchased both a Razer Sabertooth and a Mad Catz modular Pro controller for the 360, I'm interested in an option that combines aspects of both while also being wireless, and I know first party is always gonna run more than third.
Fallout 4 on the One will be able to use mods, which is maybe the best piece of news I've heard the whole damn show so far. They also hope to do mods on PS4, but the One will have them first- I assume something about the console architecture (Bethesda + Sony does historically = oh fuck why won't this work) or perhaps the way MS has designed Xbox compatibly into Windows 10?
Rainbow Six Seige looks like I might actually want to try it. Still not happy about not getting Patriots, the Rainbow Six that looked fucking interesting, though.
Cuphead looks so great and I cannot wait to get my hands on it. The animation style makes you think everything's gonna get SUPER racist, but I'm gonna assume that doesn't happen.
Xbox Game Preview, a.k.a. Early Access...I see a lot of people freaking out about it. I think it could be not great, but I'm willing to wait and see. They've got a bit up on Steam at least, with allowing a free trial before you actually do the "pre-pay for an in-development game" part of the deal.
They're gonna put out Tomb Raider against Fallout 4, which I'm willing to call "dumb as hell." I will not be even a little surprised if that date changes by a week or two.
As much as the re-release trend has been annoying me this generation, I am all-in for the Rare Replay Collection. It's basically thirty games for a buck each, people. And frankly, there's probably something in there that you haven't played that's worth $30 by itself!
That Hololens shit! That was legit amazing. If you haven't seen that demo, you need to go and look it up right now. It's blowing my tiny little "started gaming on the Intellivision" mind. God damn.
Why the fuck would they end on a Gears of War remake and GoW4 tease? Seriously?! Look I am happy for you Gears people. I don't get you, a lot of you hated Judgement and I thought that was the best one, but I'm happy for you. And I do think there's been cool stuff in the Gears titles even if they aren't really my bag! But what a dumb closer. They absolutely should have closed on Hololens or backwards compatibility. Or at least close on Halo 5, the better of your two shooter franchises. Come on.
Good work, Microsoft. A+ for you.