Crystal Planets

Since this is now a discussion in OH NOES DEE-EL-SEE IS BAD, I'll put in my two cents.

[EDIT:] This post is only talking about DLC that you pay money for. The free stuff is free stuff, how can it not be good?

Paying for content twice is bad. If you ask a developer, they'll invariably say that not everything made for the game got into the game. Some things were just bad ideas, or not in the mood for the game's direction, or just not finished in time. But coders and artists still spent time working on those, and they need to be paid for that time. That becomes part of the budget for the game, even though it didn't benefit or improve the game at all. When you buy a game, you're also buying the content that didn't make it in. The problem arises when that content is later sold to you as DLC. I don't have any problem with paying once for content that I don't get; a developer would deliberately not include content if they felt it was for the benefit of the game. I do, however, have a problem paying for it again later.

My other gripe with DLC is; splitting the in-game community. In single player games, this is really a non-issue as there is no in-game community. Everyone should understand that splitting the community is bad. People feel entitled because they have more money, friends can't always play with friends (oh no, the DLC map loaded, have the server boot the non-DLC players).


If DLC is legitimately new content, that doesn't split or damage the community then I think it's fine. I'm certainly not saying I'll buy it, but I'm not saying I won't either.

If it's an expansion and has as much content as an expansion, then that's a different story. I was more annoyed by the comment of someone paying ONLY for crystal planets. One piece of content which Neutrino himself said could be done in game. Crystal Planets would be one terrain type and he wants that to be a DLC. That's stupid.

Um you obviously haven't the faintest clue as to what goes into map creation if you think it's just a map editor setting and voila, you get a crystal map.


There's a reason the desert biome images are renders from 3dsmax - all the DETAIL is delivered via 3d models and meshes, and procedurally placed on the biome. The system chooses WHERE to put it, the artist chooses WHAT it looks like.


So, to create a 'crystal biome' someone needs to first pick the base biome settings (plains = 80%, mountains = 20%, waterheight =20), and then, an artist needs to create all the props for the biome. Crystal outcroppings, broken crystal fragments, different size crystal clusters, etc etc.

Now, a modder COULD do this (and I'm very sure some will!) but it will take a lot of effort and time, the biome will be incomplete / missing pieces for quite a while. A professional biome DLC pack from Uber would, on the other hand, have a professional artist do a complete set.

THAT is what I would pay for.

I'd love to see a system where the SERVER can host the custom biome, and anyone joining the server can play on it, but players without the custom biome (dlc or otherwise) cannot host or play singleplayer on that biome. That way you never fragment the user base, and you can 'demo' the dlc to anyone who joins. This would equally apply for something like custom skins on your units too.

You obviously have no idea about the state of the gaming industry if you want DLC so badly.

OK, yes, you're so totally right, a professional pack of content that people paid a reasonable price for would ruin the game, and in fact, the VERY CONCEPT of supplying content after a game has been released has ruined the industry.

And Uber is 100% the same as a triple-A title publisher who cares more about profit margins than producing good games.

Obviously they're going to release an alpha, fix 10% of the bugs, call it feature complete and then sell the 90% of 'updates' as DLC.


.....


We'll just ignore the premise of the Kickstarter stretch goals, which go something like 'We will make more CONTENT if you PAY US'.

Any time I see someone say "I want to buy DLC", my first thought is dis nig srrs? Then I remember that finance is not something taught in public schools.

Whatever the market will bear, I guess. :roll:

You can get something pretty good made by some random people for free in their spare time. But the sad truth is that when you buy DLC you are (ideally) paying for a professional team of programmers and artists to sit down, take time out of their day, and make a thing worth paying for.

But the nasty side of microtransactions that could come out of DLC I'd think would ironically enough, come straight from the modding community. When you make an in-game store and make it possible for someone to charge someone else money for game content they made then a lot of people who would have made a lot of decent (and free) mods in the past will say to themselves, "Oh wow I can make one thing, like an experimental spider bot or something, then charge $1 for it. And if 1000 people buy it I can make a sweet wad of cash for an hour's worth of work."

Now you have this toxic hellscape that is your online DLC microtransaction store (anyone with an iPhone, iPad, or iWhatever open up iTunes and look in the app store) where anyone and everyone is trying to make a quick buck off of quickly churned out content. Want bubble shields? $1. Want experimentals? $5. Weather effects? $2. Bacon biome? $1. Sexy lady commander? $15.

Then the whole thing will collapse in on itself because even though anyone is willing to download any dumb thing for free because they know that if they don't like it, they can just delete it later on and be right back where they started. Nobody is going to want to toss money at something (no matter how small an amount) if they aren't sure that it will be worth it.

In the end plenty of people will buy an Uber Entertainment Official Biome Pack. but nobody will give some random guy named Jim a dollar for "Big Jim's Bigass Bucket o' Biomes"