June 22, 2015

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.

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