I assume you mean you’ll always be required to use Origin when installing. You can buy ME3 as a direct download from other outlets (Green Man Gaming is running it at 20% off), just not from Steam due to the argument over DLC accessibility. Origin wants you to buy the DLC directly from them, Steam doesn’t want games where you can’t also get all the DLC from Steam.
Serious question: what is so bad about Origin? It seems like Steam to me. Plus I am old enough to remember the teeth gnashing about Steam when it started but now people love it.
Frankly I am just happy to not have to futz with a disk every time I want to play. As long as it isn’t collecting information about me (is it?) I am good.
I’m also old enough to remember when EA wasn’t all bad (The Bard’s Tale anyone?) but I get why they kind of suck now.
Yes, that’s rather the whole point. Origin is essentially Steam of 7 years ago, which is to say, it has all of the hassle, without any of the things people like about current Steam. Steam, as a platform in 2012, is big on adding value to the games that utilize it. Steam provides things like a central server browser, VOIP, social networking, achievements, the new workshop functionality, and a few others, that can integrate directly into games. I can right-click on a system tray icon and see the list of servers currently populated for, say, Red Orchestra 2, or see if any of my friends list is playing something, and join their game with one click, without having to actually load up the game ahead of time. Steam does things that people actively like. Origin, in its current state, does not. Last I heard, Origin doesn’t even have an offline mode for its full-DRM games, so if you want to play without internet access, it sucks to be you.
Then you factor in that it’s EA that’s running Origin. They have a history of policies that make people leery of them, such as shutting down games outright in order to encourage people to buy a newer version. Origin has fine print in the EULA that they reserve the right to bar your access to games you’ve purchased, at any time, for any reason, which isn’t anything terribly new, but they actually USE it. They’ve banned entire accounts for critical posts on EA forums. They as much as say outright that they’ll revoke a game if you haven’t played it within the last year.
There are no shortage of entirely valid reasons why people can be happy with Steam and hate Origin.
There were two problems with the “premium modules.” One was that some of the material (Witch’s Wake) that was originally free was pulled and replaced by pay. The other was the always-on internet DRM scheme. The quality was uneven; I thought Kingmaker and ShadowGuard were boring, Pirates of the Sword Coast and Wyvern Crown of Cormyr were pretty good, and Infinite Dungeons was kinda fun but I’d rather play NetHack. Wizards of the Coast being jerks about the D&D license didn’t help either.
Bard’s Tale was not EA. It was Interplay. Most of the Interplay games back in the 80’s were published by EA. While Iplay owned the codebase, EA owned the names. This is one of the main reasons that when Iplay wanted to make a sequel to Wasteland and publish it, they created Fallout instead. EA owned the Wasteland name and wanted Iplay to pay a lot of money to release the name.
I was specifically thinking about “Shadows of Undrentide” and “Hordes of the Underdark”. Was any of the stuff you mentioned above actually written in-house by Bioware?
Didn’t DA2 come out like a year after the very successful DA1? That’s a blatant cash grab, a good game doesn’t come out in a single year. SWTOR after you got past the story (which was good and made leveling fun) was a very inferior MMO compared to WoW and Rift, it was nice in theory but story lasts you one month maybe and players are looking for several months or years of entertainment out of their MMOs. I haven’t played ME3 yet so i don’t know what the problem with it is.
I find the ChipIn charity campaign by ME3 change-advocates interesting and heartening. It seems a three-pronged approach - a way to channel the negative feelings into something that will be positive no matter what, a demonstration to the haters that the movement isn’t just a bunch of entitled douchebags, and a way to show Bioware that there are lots of people who feel this way who will vote with their wallets.
That is awesome. (“Hold the line!”) I am definitely donating, and even if nothing comes of it on Bioware’s end, it’ll do some good.
They have reached 34k as of now. Guess those who hate the ending are ready to put where down the money to prove their point.
It wasn’t quite that bad… more like 18 months, IIRC.
I was disappointed by the ending of DA2, but didn’t think that it was a terrible game taken on its own. But it simply didn’t feel like a sequel to DA:O. It was just too different.
I don’t think this is fair to SWTOR; I’ve been playing 10-12 hours a week since launch and haven’t finished any of the eight stories yet (I’m still playing my first two concurrently). I can’t imagine anyone exhausting all eight class stories in a month unless they are literally playing full time. And that doesn’t include any endgame content (which is sparse now, but so it was for WoW and Rift after the first three months). I’m enjoying it more than I have WoW for quite some time.
I believe Kingmaker, Pirates of the Sword Coast, Infinite Dungeons, and Wyvern Crown of Cormyr were all made by Bioware.
Bioware says they’re listening.
The challenge for any game like SWTOR is that they simply cannot have, upon launch, the same content as a MMORPG that’s been up for six years. It’s just not economically feasible. You couldn’t afford to build that on spec.
They had to deliver something to make some money and deliver enough to put off the players’ advancement until they could deliver more, and to be honest I think they did enough, and as much as could reasonably could be done. There is no possible way a person with an actual life could complete SWTOR in a month, and to their credit they’re getting some free content added in.
How long did it take WOW to add Burning Crusade? TOR has less time than that, but they have some time.
I think TOR is a success. It’s not perfect, and as I’ve said I wish it was MORE different from WOW than it is, but right now I find it much more fun.
I couldn’t have put it better myself. Though I wouldn’t call DA2 terrible in its own right, it is a terrible sequel for DAO and it was too much of a chore to finish.
Last time I checked 97% of people thought the ending needed fixing. If I was him, I wouldn’t be so concerned with giving people time to experience something they’ll hate.
That was my thought, too. 
Meanwhile, the Child’s Play donations in the name of requesting a better ending passed $52k! I’m going to donate on payday.
Mass Effect 3 Executive Producer Casey Hudson has opened his mouth regarding the ending, in a Bioware forum thread.
I’d quote the relevant part of it, essentially “we are listening to both sides and keep an eye open in the future,” but taking it out of context would make it seem less completely ambiguous than it actually is. His choice of wording is exquisitely non-commital, leading me to agree with many forum posters that this is the EA/BW PR Disaster Management campaign rather than the company indicating that they’re turning the ship around. While EA/BW obviously has its’ interests tied up in the DLC selling to a wide audience I can’t really bring myself to be soothed.
That said, BW has a lot of credit with me. They’ve made a long list of really good games, including Mass Effect 3, and I can’t bring myself to cut myself off. I know I’m grasping at straws here, but there is precedent for DLC repairing a lot of the damage caused by bad endings (Fallout 3, FFXIII-2) and I’m cashing in that credit to try to keep my mind open for future developments.
On another note, as one of the disappointed gamers, I’d like to point out that I do respect the artistic integrity and the right of a work’s author to decide how it plays out. However, I sincerely don’t believe the people working on Mass Effect 3 are themselves happy with the way the endings turned out. I think the rush of production, the leak and the immense amount of work that remained to be done at a point where the deadline was concrete and non-negotiable got to them and someone in charge said “Keep it simple and make the best of it.”
And I’d appreciate it if people - especially certain video game review websites - would refrain from condescending to us that we don’t “get” endings left open for interpretation. We get them just fine - and we’re fully aware that an open ending done right can be a ramp that lets a work live on forever in discussions and memory. But one of the pre-requisites of a successful open ending like that is that the universe is consequent and that the truth can be interpreted and argued from the content that is there. The feeling the audience needs to have for it to be successful is “Wow, I wonder what the hell happened next!” - Not “Wait, where’s the rest?! This makes no sense at all!”
I think the success of movies like Blade Runner and Inception, both which had endings which had several opposing conclusions depending on your interpretation of the content, supports this. Heck, even Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, once I calmed down enough to see that it was the only possible ending and always had been. (Though there were lots of other things wrong with that series, ending aside entirely.)