Passing on the Season Pass

It's surprising that the concept of downloadable content (DLC) has been around for 10 years now. Starting with the launch titles for the Xbox 360, DLC has become a major part of the industry as it gives the player more things to do in the game and keeps them from trading it in for something else. This need to keep gamers from trading in their old games has forced every major AAA title nowadays to have a plan for DLC or risk fading away into obscurity. With the industry's dependence on DLC, packaging all the DLC together in one purchase called a season pass has become a standard practice for every game big and small. What first started as a great deal has more commonly become a money gouging strategy by publishers.

The two most recent season pass offenders are Star Wars: Battlefront and Rainbow Six: Siege.

It has become common knowledge that Battlefront has great gameplay, but DICE clearly skimped out when it came to the content. Looking to make up for the short-sight, or what I like to call, "We need to get this game out now, better add this stuff later," DICE has provided 20 weapons, 16 maps, four playable heroes and villains, four new game modes, and an exclusive emote that players can buy in a season pass. The content seems reasonable until you look at its 70 dollar price tag. Seriously, 70 dollars! What does EA think they will achieve? They're scaring people away, rather than enticing them to pay for extra content. EA may be arrogant enough to believe severely overpricing their season passes is an acceptable practice, but it will come back to haunt them when gamers skip on the initial release of their games to wait for the inevitable Game of the Year version.

If you though Battlefront's season pass is bad, well the season pass for Rainbow Six: Siege is on a new level of exploitation. Spending 30 dollars on this season pass nets you seven day early access and instant unlock of eight new operators (which you can unlock free of charge by playing the game), weapon skins, 600 credits for additional in-game purchases, five per cent Renown boost, and two more challenges a day. I can't think of a worse way to spend 30 dollars. Outside of the minor boosts and cosmetic additions, everything contained in this season pass can be unlocked through regular play, meaning this pass only exists to gouge money out of Rainbow Six fans. Is Siege a AAA title or a freemium game, Ubisoft? Because how you treating it with this abomination of a season pass and the addition of unnecessary microtransactions are telling me otherwise.

Not all season passes are bad. Witcher III's expansion pass and the Mario Kart 8 DLC bundle price are two examples of great season passes. Just most of the recent offerings have been giving this option to buying DLC in bulk a bad name. Making new content for a game, no matter its size, can be costly especially with the ever-rising price of video game development, but that doesn't give publishers justification to gouge money out of the consumer that already pays close to 100 dollars for one title. Instead of enticing more people to buy more content for their games, these underhanded practices are good ways to keep people from buying DLC altogether.

E3 2015: Ubisoft Press Conference Impressions

2014 was a less than stellar year for Ubisoft's reputation as Watch Dogs fell far short of its hype and Assassin's Creed: Unity was shipped as a broken mess.  Despite Ubisoft's best efforts to fix the situation, many felt betrayed by Ubisoft's transgressions.  So the French publisher had something to prove coming into E3 2015.  The question was: could they deliver?

For how many games Ubisoft crammed into a 60 minutes, the conference moved at an incredible pace.  The hour flew by before you knew it as Ubisoft. much like Bethesda, let the games do the talking for them.  For every minute spent talking, three or more was spent showing live gameplay or pre-rendered trailers.  While I do prefer gameplay over trailers any day, the trailers that Ubisoft showed at their conference were short, sweet and incredibly produced.  My personal favourite was Trials Fusion Awesome Level Max's trailer, which saw a gun-toting cat riding a fire-breathing unicorn.  No, I'm not on crack!  It really happened!

The biggest plus from Ubisoft's conference was most certainly the live demos.  Seeing all those titles played live, including the newly announced For Honor, The Division, Rainbow Six: Siege and TrackMania Turbo, gave me a much better impression on all of them.  I'm actually excited to play all of them.  From a medieval melee combat to a tactical shooter to an arcade racer, there was incredible amount of diversity between the titles demoed and on the show as a whole.

Also, I have to praise Ubisoft for being the only publisher in the video game industry that can actually keep a secret.  There were no leaks or rumours about South Park: The Fractured But Whole, Ghost Recon Wildlands or a new IP in For Honor being set for Ubisoft's press conference.  Not having any prior knowledge on those games made all the surprises feel special, something that rarely happens nowadays.

It wasn't all sunshine and rainbows at Ubisoft's press conference.  There were some problems when it came to presentation.  It has become par for the course that Ubisoft brings in some celebrities to host, make appearances or even sing, but it never usually ends well.  The same can be said for this year's show.  Aisha Tyler tirelessly tried to inject some humour into the conference, but seemed to make things awkward ever single time.  Angela Bassett talking about her role as Six in Rainbow Six: Siege was completely worthless.  And to top it all off, Jason Derulo showed the world that he cannot sing—or he might of just hit puberty—in a moment that was so gloriously awful that it came off as being incredibly funny.  Like watching a train wreck, you couldn't turn your attention away from it.

Despite the problems with the conference's presentation, Ubisoft's press conference was a highly entertaining show.  It let the games stand as the sole focus and kept Aisha Tyler's on-stage shenanigans to a minimum.  You know it's going to be a good show from Ubisoft when the only reference to Tyler's girlwood is her necklace.

Grade:  A-

E3 2015: Microsoft Press Conference Impressions

Microsoft and the Xbox One has been reeling since their infamous performance at E3 2013.  Microsoft hasn't truly won back the support of gamers and the Xbox One is suffering because of it.  What Microsoft needs to do is announce titles that gamers can only find on the Xbox One and commit to shipping them in a timely manner.  The last thing they need is to repeat last year's good showing with no followup.  In fact, three key exclusives from last year's show (Crackdown, Scalebound and Quantum Break) aren't even going to be at E3 2015.  So does Microsoft have a few aces up their sleeve or are we in for another disappointing performance?

After 90 minutes, I can safely say that was Microsoft's best conference in recent memory.  While nothing at the conference was mind-blowing, it had a good mix of new and existing titles along with a couple surprises.

Microsoft's big strength at this conference was live demos.  The live demos for Halo 5, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Minecraft on Hololens and Gears 4 were all well done and highly entertaining to watch.  Out of the all the live demos, the Minecraft on Hololens demo was the best as it perfectly showed the potential of using holograms to interact with games in brand new ways.  Also it was nice to see a greater focus on survival horror and more proportional characters for Gears 4.

Outside of the demos, Microsoft had some solid announcements around exclusive content for Xbox One.  Comcept and Armature's Recore with an intriguing mechanic revolving around building up a team of friendly robots shows loads of potential.  Rare Replay and Sea of Thieves both look to recapture the spirit of Rare's former glory in the forms of a compilation and new IP respectively.  Even the ID@Xbox showcase and Xbox Game Preview unveiling were fun to watch although the approach seemed to be very familiar to Sony's way of highlighting indies at E3.

The one area where the Microsoft conference faltered was when it came to third-parties.  Aside from the Dark Souls III and Plants vs. Zombie: Garden Warfare 2 reveals, they spent a good third of the conference on titles like Fallout 4, The Division and Rainbow Six: Siege without breaking any new ground on them.  In particular, the "exclusive" Fallout 4 gameplay was the same demo from the Bethesda conference with a minute of new content.  On top of that, EA had an embarrassing showing of their EA Access subscription service.  I feel a little sorry for Peter Moore as every announcement he made fell on deaf ears, but the fact is gamers aren't going to respond to EA's crap no matter how nice you make it sound.

While Xbox One backwards compatibility does fall under the good from this conference, I am little skeptical on its functionality.  As Microsoft traditionally loves to do when they take about certain console features, they were very vague in how they outlined backwards compatibility for Xbox One.  Also they made a quick mention to downloading the 360 game to the Xbox One when you put in the game disc.  Due to the vague terminology, I have a feeling that Xbox One backwards compatibility won't be how everybody believes it will be.

Overall, Microsoft's E3 2015 press conference delivered where it counts: first-party content.  It was a relief to see Microsoft pull back from relying on third-parties so much and come more into their own.  Although we won't know if Microsoft can follow-up on these promises until months down the line, they did build the positive momentum needed at this point in time.

Grade:  B+

E3 2014: Ubisoft Press Conference Impressions

Ubisoft has never been overly consistent when they came to their press conferences.  Ubisoft tries to capture such a broad audience with their conferences that they are either very good or very bad.  Leading into this year's show, Ubisoft just launched their newest IP Watch Dogs to record setting sales.  Hopefully, the French publisher can use that momentum to put together an impressive E3 conference.

Like has been the case for three years now, Ubisoft knows how to end a press conference.  The gameplay footage and subsequent announcement of Rainbow Six: Siege was the highlight of Ubisoft's conference.  Seeing the game in action and all the players working together in unison was a sight to behold.  Personally, this writer is still a little sad that the greatness of the single-player focused Rainbow Six: Patriots is no more, but Siege looks fun nonetheless.  Aside from Aisha Tyler's flat jokes, nothing at the Ubisoft conference was absolutely horrible.  Even the more casual titles like Just Dance 2015 and Shape Up were at least entertaining to watch.  While entertaining to watch, the conference felt too safe.  Ubisoft is usually one of the few large publishers to try and push the envelope, but everything they showed off at their conference except the new Rainbow Six and Shape Up was already announced or just another entry in a yearly franchise.  The content of the conference was interesting yet this writer left the conference feeling underwhelmed.  Far Cry 4 started off the show in style as Ubisoft showed off the first five minutes which highlighted the craziness of the new villain.  The middle of the show lagged as Ubisoft showed more trailers than actual gameplay.  The Assassin's Creed Unity demo was interesting as the traversal system looks to be more fluid than other games in the series despite that many are getting fatigued over Assassin's Creed yearly release schedule.  The only other noteworthy game at Ubisoft's conference was Valiant Hearts, an adventure game where you play a dog as he interacts with four heroes during the events of World War I.  The trailer showed off the beautiful hand drawn graphics along with the incredibly touching story of the game.  With the great use of video and audio, Valiant Hearts' trailer can easily get the waterworks going.  Out of all the games Ubisoft showcased at their conference, Valiant Hearts, no matter its small scale, was the game that got this writer the most excited.

Ubisoft's 2014 Press Conference was a middling effort from the French publisher.  Much like the other conferences we have seen today, their press conference left this writer wanting more and not in a good way.  Giving us updates on titles already announced and announcing new entries in yearly franchise is not enough to get people excited anymore.  The video game industry has moved onto a brand new console generation and everybody expects a lot more from Ubisoft  this time around to justify the purchase of new hardware to play their future releases.

Grade:  C+