@Iridescent406 Being able to play the campaign from start to finish is a key development milestone. Video game levels are rarely built and completed in the order that they're played in the finished game. It's usually quite scattershot, perhaps with some levels towards the end of the game being finished before the ones in the middle or even near the beginning. Pre-alpha and alpha builds of games often feature snippets of levels, or rough outlines with huge gaps in the middle. What they're saying is that they've closed those gaps, and the game can be played from beginning to end without skipping over anything. Once the content is finalized, all that remains after that point is polish and bug testing.

@suprsolider Oh? Then why has every console shooter since Halo cribbed its recharging health, two-weapon limitation, melee attacks and context-based action controls? The true signs of a successful game are the hordes of imitators that fail to dethrone it.

Release Dragon's Dogma for consoles, but take a giant Aptonoth crap on what is essentially your flagship series by relegating it to the portable game bargain bin. Bravo, Capcom. Bravo.

Y'know what? I agree wholeheartedly. I want more girl power and female protagonists in my games. Seriously, it's my fetish.

Those graphics actually look really nice, especially considering that it's running on hardware from the mid-2000s. Oh! Does this mean that Halo 5 is going to be a launch title for the new Xbox?

Back in the day, we got substantial expansion packs for $30 instead of being charged a sixth that price for a hundredth the content. To be honest, I've always abhorred DLC in all its forms.

@cmterminator What cost $80 in 2010 cost $62 in 2000. Most on-disc DLC just barely adds up to $18 in additional cost to cover the difference. The reason for Day-1 or on-disc DLC is simple. Once the game is released, there's no profit in continuing to pay the dev team for post-release support. In order to fund patches and post-release DLC (and fatten the wallets of a few executives), publishers started employing this underhanded business strategy. Once again, this works because people will still pay for the same polished turds year in and year out. Grudgingly, yes, but they still do, even when they're aware that they're being deceived. Once they stop paying for this top-notch, triple-A shovelware, the trend will reverse. Remember, the money we pay them goes into funding the next BLOCKBUSTER MEGA-HIT SUPER ACTION EXTRAVAGANZA, with yet more Day-1 DLC and overpriced extras. Once we stop paying what they're asking, they'll simply quit making those types of games, and then the industry will belong to the social and app game makers who sell their cheesy flash game rip-offs for a few bucks a pop. It's just that simple. The economy affects more incomes than your own. In a depression, entertainment and luxury items are usually the first thing to go. When it all comes down to it, you don't need games to eat, drink or breathe, and some people on this planet can barely manage that much. Tch. Kids these days and their first-world problems.

Part 3: Honestly, I hope that all this kerfuffle about on-disk DLC will reinvigorate interest in the niche genres gamers have abandoned over the years, like space shooters and mech sims. I'd give anything for another MechWarrior, or Starsiege, or Freespace, or Starlancer. In this era, with a bunch of spoiled brats playing juiced-up, over-budgeted, and utterly vapid action games whilst complaining vociferously about the price of DLC, that will never happen. I feel like a relic already. Remember, this happened because of you. You wanted better graphics, bigger budgets. You wanted the Hollywood blockbuster experience, instead of something more subtle. More cerebral. You wanted this kind of over-stimulating tripe. Publishers take one look at the sales figures for a typical shooter, and they suddenly want to make more shooters. How is this mystifying to anyone? You buy shooters, they make more shooters, and they make them bigger, badder and more expensive. You buy LOTS of copies of shooters, they make more expensive shooters until they've nearly priced themselves out of the market. You buy even MORE copies of shooters and keep demanding BIGGER budgets, and they start cutting bits of the game out and selling them separately to cover their expenses. It's not rocket science. If you really feel like protesting, why not support indie developers for a change?

Part 2: I've played Fallout: New Vegas + DLC + mods (a good example of how to do DLC right) for 367 hours. That's about $110 or thereabouts, at a rate of half a cent per minute. For the sake of comparison, someone talking on their cell phone at a rate of 40 cents a minute for the same length of time would have racked up a bill of nearly nine thousand dollars. So, really, when game developers are charging to unlock stuff that's already on the disk, I can kinda see where they're coming from. Basically, they're doing this to avoid having to charge $100 for the game up-front, which means fewer customers. This is basically like distributing deluxe editions of a game with extra content, minus the added distribution and bandwidth costs. Pure profit, and that keeps the shareholders happy. But, it makes gamers unhappy. I wonder why? Do they not realize how much bang for their buck they're getting? Ah, well. I guess we'll all have to be a bit pickier about the games we buy, eh? I mean, plenty of these newer titles are the kind of thing you play once and never touch again, except perhaps for a few rounds of multiplayer now and then. If we want our money's worth, we have to make sure we're actually going to be playing it for a few hundred hours, or more. Right now, the only games that have the ability to hold my attention for that long are CRPGs, 4X games and GTA clones. But, there used to be other genres I liked. Back when they still made games for them, anyway.

I hate on-disc DLC as much as anybody, but let's be reasonable here for a minute. First off, over the past decade, the value of the dollar has decreased by over twenty percent. This is why the yearly cost of an Xbox Live subscription has gone up ten dollars. If you account for inflation, you're still paying the same amount of money you were back in 2002 when the service launched. Second, games these days have utterly massive budgets. Massive. Budgets. $25 million for a typical triple-A multiplatform title, and that's not including the cost of marketing and distribution. Games like Mass Effect and MW3 cost over twice as much to make, still not including the cost of marketing and distribution. They have to sell over a million copies just to break even. When you're working with such big numbers, the shareholders tend to get a little panicky. Thirdly, gaming is a relatively inexpensive hobby. A typical video game can be played for hundreds of hours with only minor expenditures for DLC. You guys ever try target shooting with a .45 Auto? Or a rifle? Shooting factory loads? It's expensive. Very expensive. Like, fifty dollars for a few minutes of fun. Which is, of course, why people buy .22 LR target pistols, because you can shoot eight times longer for the same amount of money. How about tabletop wargaming? Those guys don't mind being nickel-and-dimed for huge quantities of unpainted figures. It's their passion.