Combat Arms, and why you shouldn't play it.

I am a big supporter of the "Free to Play" games model that has appeared in the last couple of years, despite a lot of consumers recoiling at the idea of free to play games. I like how they allow people to spend as much or as little money as they like on a game depending on many factors. That being said, the Free to Play model is being abused by companies who read "Free to Play"  as "Let's milk our consumers". With that in mind, here is what I've been playing for the last couple of days:

On paper, this game looked like a fun little game. It's a military style FPS reminiscent of Call of Duty, but with more of  Quake/Unreal Tournament feel with how the controls react and now the players move around (matches can get very mental very quickly). It is also a Free to Play game. Surely all this sounds like awesome? It did, until I started playing it.

It has a leveling system pretty much identical to the Call of Duty games. You get experience for kills, winning matches etc. The standard leveling fare. It has a currency system within the game that you also earn for getting kills etc, pretty much the same as COD Points in Call of Duty: Black ops. However, I noticed a few things that instantly turned me off the game.

In order to get access to new weapons you have to meet two criteria: you have to match a weapons unlock level to be able to get access, and you also need currency to pay for the weapon. Simple enough right? Yeah I thought so too, 'till I saw there's a second currency in the game. Nexus Points. These are currency that can only be acquired via the means of paying for it with real money. But okay, it's a free to play game, they need to make revenue, this wasn't exactly a big surprise. What WAS a big surprise was that at least 50% of the weapons cannot be bought with GP (in game currency), however you need Nexus points to buy. This is selling power, and this is a big, BIG no no when it comes to in game microtransactions.

Second thing is that you don't own your weapons when you buy them, you "rent" them for either 1, 7,30 or 90 days. Again, most of the weapons can only be bought using Nexus Points. So that means you need to constantly rent your weapons if you want to even stand a chance in the game. You *can* buy your weapon outright, but that costs an outrageous amount of Nexus Points to do so.



So this is why you should not play Combat Arms, and why you shouldn't support this type of Free to Play abuse.

Is Call of Duty a bad game?

Wherever you go within the gaming industry, you're sure to find people who all have the same opinion on one particular game franchise: Call of Duty. Whether it be from parents or previous generations complaining that it's too violent and kids are spending too much of their time on it or from pretentious gamers who claim that it's been the same game since Call of Duty 4. Now I myself used to be leaning more towards a negative opinion than a positive one towards the franchise, and how it's publishers are milking its consumer base for everything they possibly can., however, in the last three or four months I got a PS3, ended up borrowing a Call of Duty game from a friend and have been hooked ever since. Now I have played it for a significant amount of time, I'm willing to weigh in again, my thoughts and opinions on whether it is a good game or whether the industry would be better off without the sodding franchise.

Now when it comes to the single player campaign of any CoD game since Modern Warfare, you generally get the same shit thrown at it: “Oh, it's a six hour campaign at a full AAA game price with thinly disguised versions of terrorists from the modern world, it's not worth my time”.

Now to be fair, that is a valid point. The campaigns in anything past Call of Duty 4 have been six hour trigger-happy gunslinging murder-fests. There isn't much of a story to the games, there's no real character development within the narrative and the characters all seem to be macho cock-compensating American tosspots who are as deep as a kids paddling pool, and the story arcs – I say that term loosely – are basically framing devices to get from point A in the game to point B. All that being said, in all the games they all focus on action. The games feature expansive dogfights in wartorn cities, sinking ships, fighting in underground lairs, taking down helicopters etc. It's all about the action. You could say that the Call of Duty franchise is the Hollywood spectacle movie of the videogame world. In my experience, any game that makes me go “fuck yeah!” holds a positive feeling. For example, in Call of Duty 4, an explosion so big it would make God balls shrivel in fear just comes in to crash the party in the form of a nuclear detonation whilst your buddy in the helicopter decides it would be absolutely marvelous to jump out and closer to the fireworks and pretty rubble. This is one such “FUCK YEAH!” moment.  

"brb looking at pretty lights lol"

When people spout the aforementioned opinion on the fact the campaigns are short as hell, they tend to forget the one thing Call of Duty players spend most of their time on: the multiplayer. As of writing this, I have spent a whopping 74 hours playing Call of Duty: Black Ops on the multiplayer, and roughly, 5-7 hours on the single player. When someone buys a Call of Duty game, chances are, they will gloss over the single player, possibly play the Spec Ops missions, but it's mainly about the multiplayer. The multiplayer offers hours upon hours of gameplay. Is this gameplay artificially lengthened by the Prestige system? Well most definitely, but at least that goal gives players something to work to, even if it does seem tedious and monotonous to players outside the Call of Duty community.   

What I'm saying is, Call of Duty is by no means the worst thing to happen to gaming like a lot of people make it out to be. Yeah it's hugely iterative of itself, and hasn't done much evolving since Call of Duty 4, but it's not the worst, and when it comes to the community being, well, dicks, that's not Call of Duty's fault. Not directly anyway. That fault lies on the gaming community itself and needs to be resolved as such. That is also another post for another day. 

Has DLC gone too far?

The question revolving around DLC for games has been a hot topic issue for quite some time now, and while I am not so arrogant to answer and/or resolve the issues around it, I can certainly weigh in with my opinions as objectively as I can. My opinions may be disagree with (read: WILL be disagreed with) by a lot of people, but that is the nature of opinions. They are not absolute, they are not set in stone. I've been thinking for quite some time on how I could approach this issue with as much objectivity as I possibly can, and, well, I'm not sure there is an objective standpoint on this. At all.

DLC has, in it's most primitive and basic form been around since the 1980's in the form of a service called GameLine. This was a service where owners of an Atari 2600 machine could download games to their machine via telephone lines. The game users would download would last for roughly 5-10 days before they had to pay for another download. It ultimately went under however because the company behind it, CVC, went bust in the video game crash of 83. A similar service was implemented by Sega called “Sega Channel”.

The first form of DLC as we know it today came from, surprise surprise, Microsoft, on its Xbox live service in 2002 for a game called Mech Assault.

This has moved on to packs of extra songs for the Rock Band and Guitar Hero games to skins and map packs for games like Call of Duty.

However, the reason I am bringing DLC up is because of two things:

1. Mass Effect Day 1 DLC “From Ashes”
2. Call of Duty MW3 Elite Premium Map Drops

I would like to just offer my standpoint first before I delve into these topics in greater detail:

DLC, in theory, I am fine with, in part. I have no objection to DLC that's entirely cosmetic : Skins etc. I am totally okay with that. Making people pay absurd prices for cosmetic items I think is a bit shady (I'm looking at you CCP) but generally cosmetic items are fine.

This monocle, costs seventy fucking dollars.

 In Free To Play games, again, cosmetic items are completely fine. If developers want to charge out of the arse for items, then I personally will not make any micro-transactions, but that is their choice.

I however, have a problem with DLC that affects the core gameplay in any way. If buying DLC gets you an advantage in a multiplayer title, you can count me out of that particular game entirely. There is a game called Modern Combat 3 (Yes, it is a rip-off of Modern Warfare 3) where you actually have to pay to get new gun unlocks. Are you fucking kidding me? Really? I hate that. I think that is one step too far when it comes to DLC. I also have a problem DLC that gives you an advantage in the single player part of a game. Why would you want to buy through some of the game? Doesn't that destroy the gameplay experience you, in some cases, paid a full £40/$60 for?

With that in mind, let's talk about Mass Effect 3's Day one DLC, “From Ashes”.

This DLC will mean something to anyone familiar with the Mass Effect canon. It features a character who is a Prothean. To anyone not familiar, the Protheans are an extinct race who vanished from the galaxy fifty thousand years prior to the first Mass Effect. Logically having a Prothean appear in Mass Effect 3 SHOULD be part of the main story right? Apparently EA thinks differently, and require you to fork out a fucking $10 fee to get this part of the story. I repeat, are you fucking kidding me?

Then we have the Call of Duty Elite Premium package. Oh Call of Duty. CoD bashing aside, it has a huge community and has sold millions and millions of copies everywhere. The CoD games have always had DLC in the form of map packs that cost £10-£15 a pack and they generally feature around 4-5 new maps and some even feature new game modes. Whilst this was ridiculous, the Premium Elite package gets even fucking worse.

There's a service called Call of Duty Elite, which was brought in with the release of Modern Warfare 3. Signing up to this service is free, (I myself are signed up to it) and you can see your matches played, custom classes, combat records, heat maps of games etc. Quite a convenient little service. However, there is a the premium package. This costs an extra cunting $50. For basically maps. This is an awful, awful crossing of the line, and, the Premium Elite members get the content before non Premium members. This splits your playerbase immensely, and if it wasn't for the mountains of money Activision are swimming in, not many companies could survive that. Do you know what the minimum age is to sign up? Thirteen. For a M-rated game. For a game that requires you, by law, to be 18 to purchase. That's a discussion for another post, but that is fucking disgraceful.

So yeah. That, in a nutshell is my thoughts on DLC.