I’d (Not) Buy That For A Dollar

Posted on April 18, 2006 by Scott Jennings| 26 Comments

Bethesda recently released “The Orrery”, the second downloadable mini-content addon for Oblivion. The first was a “Pimp Yo’ Ride” horse armor texture; both were available for a little less than $2.

I was willing to give Bethesda the benefit of the doubt with the Horse Armor unlockable – it was an experiment in e-commerce and downloadable content (both of which I am all for – I love downloading things, I bought Half Life 2 through Steam, and I think Darkness Rising was Mythic’s smoothest expansion rollout ever). But from what I’ve seen, the Orrery was just a sad excuse for 2 more bucks. Essentially for your shekels, you get a fetch-and-carry quest and a new spell. In a game where you can create your own spells. I’m all a-quiver.

PC users can now feel all kinds of smug that they have some really kickass mods already, such as gameplay plugins that modify Oblivion’s levelling system, tweaks to monster spawning, and even the first glimpses of content that already blow Bethesda’s away. XBox 360 users don’t have any of that – they just get to be ticked off at the nickel and diming.

If this were a mystical world of make believe and I were Bethesda’s live team producer, RIGHT NOW I would be drafting up contracts for the best of the PC modders to get their stuff on XBox 360, now. Leave the PC mods free – they’re wackily easy to pirate anyway (someone had the Horse Armor mod up and advertising it on Bethesda’s own forum a few days after it came out) and proceed to mint large amounts of cash from XBox 360 users, who are already implicity trading flexibility for ease of use.

But charging $2 for maybe 15 minutes worth of content at best is not only lame from a user’s standpoint, from an industry standpoint it damages all of us. Oblivion has enough visibility to really damage the entire concept of pay-as-you-go downloadable content. Let’s hope that the next one Bethesda releases makes up for it.

For a reference in what makes a good downloadable module, see Bioware’s series of modules. They contracted with the best module makers in the NWN community, came up with some very good modules that have hours of gameplay, and charge $5 to $10 each for them. More than fair, and I suspect Bioware is making their investment back from it. That’s the model that should be emulated, not $2 for shiny horse armor.

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  • Balasarius

    Preach!

    Fuck Bethesda.

  • Bob

    So far all I’ve seen out of Bethesda for these “add-ons” is content that seems to have been cut from the final release because it wasn’t complete in time to meet their schedule. While I love the game, charging people for very minor add-on’s when the game desperately needs patching seems to be ill-advised.

  • http://www.eqclerics.org Boanerges

    I dunno that it damages the PAYG concept all that much tho. You mentioned Steam, for instance. HL2: Episode 1 is due out sometime next month and you can bet your bottom dollar I’ll plunk down for it over Steam. And Valve has got to be making a killing selling all these $15-20 multiplayer games (even if they didn’t write them they’re making a cut for distributing). It makes for a very viable method of PAYG and it gives people a much needed platform to make and distribute games.

    Even MMOGs use PAYG, although they opt for large scale expansions rather than the nickel and dime approach it’s still the same basic principle.

  • Nicademus

    Why in gods name would you pay for shit like this? That’s wookie defense level stupidity. These aren’t revenue models, they’re carnie trick you learn to avoid when you’re 12 at the balloon pop booth.

  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com/ J.

    What the hell is an “orrery” anyway?

  • Aufero

    It’s a mechanical model of the movement of the planets. Or, in this case, an excuse to get another $2 per box out of Oblivion owners. I’ll leave the “Uranus” jokes to the imagination.

  • Elistor

    Orrery=Moving Model of the solar system, i think. Assuming my high school astronomy is holding up.

  • Elistor

    Wee somehow lost most of my post!

    You can play Oblivion without mods? At this point I don’t think I could play without at least BTMod minimum. There are just to many mods out there that do nothing but make the interface easier to deal with for me to ever go back to an unmoded UI.

    As to the pay as you go thing…. call me when they have something of actuall worth. I’m sorry but two pretty horses that I can ride around on and… only I will ever see is sad. (Yes I know there is a huge market for those wanting to play digital dress up and I got into it myself with City of Heros but in a single player game? ugh.) Or one quest and spell my Hack’n'Slash will never use? In a game where I can make my own spells? As Scott put it “I\’e2\’80\’99m all a-quiver”.

  • Freakazoid

    Does this really suprise anyone? Chances are this will be your new standard. Here’s a purple colored breastplate instead of the default silver. Now give me your 2 bucks, my porshe needs a new cup holder.

  • Atricks

    I wish I saw this before I tried to buy and download the Orrery. The installer does not even work with XP64, which is what I’m running on my high end system — because of the auth system it uses. (and it fails on a number of regular XP systems too) What’s worse, the horse armor had the same problem (Which I didn’t get), but they released the new one with the same problem even though it was a known issue.

    I think this is the first and last thing I’ll buy like this after the experience.

  • Surprised Penguin

    Bethesda used to be a good company. First they dumbed down Oblivion so the nose pickers and 13 year old kiddies with attention spans smaller than their IQs could play… then they make you pay for superflurous “content” Lame. Oh so fucking lame.

    Don’t like it? Send Bethesda and other game companies a message – don’t pay for it. If people stop paying for added content they’ll stop charging for it. Personally, unless it’s an online version, I expect my game to come complete. I don’t want to pay for content that should have been in on release.

  • Antarius

    I believe the above arguements can be summed up as follows:

    Bioware good
    Bethesda bad

  • Grax

    I’m afraid “Surprised Penguin” is entirely right about the consolization of Oblivion, which for the most part has worsened the game. And Elistor’s comment about how he can’t play without BTmod (at least) can be tied in quite neatly here: PC users require mods in order to remove all the console bullshit that has made its way into the PC version of Oblivion.

    I don’t know whether “consolization” and “dumbing down” overlap 100% (probably), but it doesn’t matter all that much. The fact is, Bethesda has some trash features in its game, from the compass arrow to the huge-text menus. The menus are like that so you can see them from your TV, I guess. As for the compass arrow, which completely trivializes the exploration aspect of Oblivion, it can be disabled with that same BTmod. Of course, since the designers of Oblivion knew that there was going to be a quest arrow that guided you everywhere, they took this into consideration and made quests that sometimes have too little information to be reasonably completed without a quest arrow. And of course, many errors in the game have been overlooked because they are rendered less fatal if one plays with a quest arrow (NPCs sleeping in the wrong house, wrong directions to meet with quest NPCs, etc.).

    Oblivion has some fucking amazing features and it is obvious that a lot of talented people have worked on it. It’s therefore a huge shame to see the game tarnished by a few bad decisions, considering the amount of hours of work done by people who deserve better. Oblivion manages to be a decent game (with some concentration, a willingness to be immersed despite oddly-behaving radiant AI, and some gameplay-enhancing mods that make it less of a dungeon-siege type rollercoaster ride).

    One final thought that is surely not new at all but too relevant not to repeat: the makers of Oblivion for the PC are relying on the modding community to correct issues in their game (e.g. the unchangeable huge-text menus). Today, perhaps most PC players would say that the shipped version of Oblivion is playable without mods. But as certain companies continue to rely on (or perhaps “exploit” is a better word) the modding community to turn their product into something playable, [insert apocalyptic view of games in an undetermined amount of time here]…

  • http://www.chabuhi.com chabuhi

    50% of us will part with the $2

    30% of us will grumble about it but still pay the $2

    10% of us will stick to our guns and not fall for this

    They’re banking on the sheep, who make up the largest portion of any consumer bloc (I know, I’m not saying anything earth-shattering there).

    Oh … I guess I owe you another 10% … hmm …

    They’re playing Tomb Raider: Legend?

  • Neep

    “If people stop paying for added content they\’e2\’80\’99ll stop charging for it.”

    No, if people stop paying for content, they’ll stop making it. Which isn’t a bad thing if it’s crap.

  • xzzy

    I can’t wait for the day when paying for crap is the norm, and $60 games ship in a half-completed state. You are then expected to shell out another $60 over the next couple months to get the complete experience.

    Shell out $2 so the Sleeper drops a shiny sword instead of cloth hats? It’ll happen.

  • http://www.beafraid.com Hellfire

    You forgot to mention that the sheeple who bought this on the 360 automatically paid a 10$ premium for the honor.

  • Surprised Penguin

    “No, if people stop paying for content, they\’e2\’80\’99ll stop making it.”

    The “added content” for Morrowind was free. Whether it was crap or not is debateable.

  • http://hgamer.blogspot.com Heartless Gamer

    Is there a reason I’m not playing Oblivion? Oh yeah… there is.

  • =j

    I can\’e2\’80\’99t wait for the day when paying for crap is the norm, and $60 games ship in a half-completed state. You are then expected to shell out another $60 over the next couple months to get the complete experience.

    Dude! You just described every MMORPG ever produced. Kinda sad to see this revenue model move into games that do not necessarily have high post-release costs (game severs, CSRs, billing, money hats, etc).

  • Cake

    “13 year old kiddies with attention spans smaller than their IQs could play”

    Well I’m not 13, and I’m not sure that saying their attention span is lower than their IQ is actually that insulting, but I do have a painfully low attention span and I can’t play it. First Oblivion gate? So bored, never went back. Kind of irritating because I could have gotten a reasonable bottle of tequila instead of this game.

  • Eryl Flynn

    I bought it on the 360, wanted some thing for my shiny new box. I of course didn’t pay 60 bucks, I am tending to wait for them to be onsale for at least 50 to buy them.

    As for the content, what content? I won’t buy that crap from them. On the 360 they have an excellent system for downloading things and buying things. The flaw is crap like this, things not worth buying and downloading. I hope Bethesda learns from this, but I doubt it. I am sure there are enough idiots out there for them to feel this is a success.

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  • http://cnn.com ubvman

    But its the virtual best horse armor bits that USD $2 can buy!

    To be fair, I am one of the sheeple that has bought all the little add ons (3 now). They are good products for $6, I like em and I also use the free mods (BTMod, saddle bags).

    The latest add-on is an incredibly nice caster house with teleports, alchemy garden and spell research facilities.

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