Capcom, EA, and Ubisoft would love Paradox’s latest DLC tactics

Posted by on March 30, 2012 in Games

The various sprite packs Paradox has been selling for their games — basically skins for the units — is one thing. That stuff is silly and if anyone wants to buy it, he and his money deserve to be parted. But charging for basic personalization options? It’s not unlike THQ charging you for cheat codes in Saints Row 3.

With the new Crusader Kings II: Ruler Designer DLC all these are in your hands. Customize your character your way. Tweak and change any aspect of the character or even create an all new character and dynasty to play with. Create your portrait, change the name and dynasty and even customize your coat of arms. Change traits and stats at will and decide the size of the immediate family. The game that lets you choose your goals will now let you choose your character.

In my day, we could name our dudes in X-Com whatever we wanted and we didn’t have to pay $5! If I want to do things to customize my experience in a game, I shouldn’t have to pay extra. DLC should be content, not options that already belong in the core game.

The Ruler Designer will be available for $5 in a few weeks. Don’t buy it. You’re just encouraging them.

  • Bmsardou

     Et tu Paradox, et tu?

  • thebigJ_A

    Huh. My immediate opinion when i saw this was “Hey, they’ve got the right idea for DLC.” And I usually dislike DLC (I’ve never bought their skins, for instance.)

    It’s completely cosmetic fluff, the game doesn’t need it, but it’s there if you want to buy it. What’s the problem? 

    The game isn’t X-Com, it was never about designing dudes. This is a cool little extra that may or may not be worth five bucks to you. It’s not pay-to-win, it’s not hiding fundamental gameplay behind a pay wall. The game is complete without it. Again, what’s the problem?

    Comparing this to the stuff EA has done weakens any anti-dlc argument you make in future, which is unfortunate as there are a lot of valid arguments against the way some companies do dlc to be made.

  • tomchick

    “Completely cosmetic fluff”? Are you kidding me, JA? It’s a character editor, and characters are basically the most important playing pieces in the game. Arguably more important than mere armies.

    But if you’re cool with paying $5 to be able to play with custom characters, knock yourself out. Suffice to say, there’s a reason publishers do these things, and that reason is because it works. In other words, that reason is you. Personally, I preferred it when the joke about DLC was horse armor that no one cared about because it wasn’t a meaningful part of the game.

    And at least Paradox is selling us the tool instead of milking us for content the way Civ V does with their add-on civs.

  • thebigJ_A

    Why would I buy it? It’s not anything I’d want, because it’s a game about playing historical characters and their offspring, not rolling a character in an rpg. Making your own is a bonus to some people, but nothing that was missing from the main game.

  • http://www.facebook.com/andrew.dagley Andrew Dagley

    It is mostly cosmetic besides the attributes editor and everything besides the coat of arms generation can be easily done by editing a few text files.

    That said I’m not giving them anything for this kind of DLC. That said it looks as though the 1.05 patch will have some free important gameplay changes and additions.

    http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?597830-CK-II-1.05-Development-Diary-1-of-3-March-30th-2012 

  • http://rudolphthesnowdeer.myopenid.com/ Rudolf

    Paradox has been very disappointing lately. From the floods of DLC they release to the obvious lack of bugtesting and QA on their externally developed titles and the increased focus on multiplayer this and multiplayer that, it seems they’ve embraced everything that I dislike about the modern games industry.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Brian-Rucker/100000745851295 Brian Rucker

    I think it’s neat and I don’t see it as “pay to win” or something.  It’s another way to play the game that doesn’t invalidate or supersede the core game in any way.  Folks who’ll buy this, like me, probably aren’t going to build ubercharacters to win more easily (that’s kinda defeating the fun of the game) but starting nobles with angles we’d like to see play out.  Sure, you could probably find someone somewhere who already meets the trait requirements but being able to create your own particular English lord gives you a particular context for your story-experiment.

    It’s very much a roleplaying thing and not every CKII player is going to find a use for it or want it.  But some of us do and I’m happy to pay for it.  I spend money on useless and unfun crap all the time.  I’ve no problem rewarding people for doing things I find interesting and useful.

  • Anon

    So, selling cheats… Does that mean using a trainer or downloading advanced save files is copyright infringement now?

  • thebigJ_A

    It’s not a cheat. There’s a limit to how many points/traits you can give a character, so it can’t be uber.

  • Anon

    Was referring to “It’s not unlike THQ charging you for cheat codes in Saints Row 3.”.

  • OtaganY

    Normally, I would be in complete agreement with this, but in Paradox’s case they have made a conscious decision to try something new with post-release content for CK2.  Instead of releasing expansions that add options that already belong in the core game, they’re releasing smaller pieces of individually purchasable DLC that include options that already belong in the core game.  This has the nice bonus of allowing those who are not inclined to purchase the DLC to continue to benefit from further patching and content for the base game, instead of having an expansion divide the player base (like Divine Wind, which you must own to get the benefits of any EU3 patch from the last year).  If you don’t want the DLC, you don’t have to purchase it, but this is their experiment for funding continued development of CK2.

    While I’m not particularly pleased with this first step as I would agree that this in particular is a relatively trivial and silly thing to sell as DLC, I am interested to see where they go from here.  Will they continue adding features like that or will there be more dramatic overhauls or added features to come in future installments?  What are they going to continue to add to the base game?

    Time will tell.  Sooner or later, time will tell…

  • Foo

    LET’S BURN DOWN THEIR OFFICES!!!

    ONLY A SCORCHED CRATER SHALL REMAIN AFTER OUR RIGHTEOUS CRUSADE!!!

  • Solace

    Five bucks to write in a new name? It’s ok to pay for cosmetic fluff when it takes actual, you know, work to make. For five bucks I should be able to call Paradox and have one of their programmers type my name in manually.

  • http://www.facebook.com/Janster01 Jan Bjørnebo

    I think Paradox aprils fools may have worked well here… Johan you devil.,

  • Shahabbabakhani

    And the great DLC rip-off begins in earnest.

  • Chip10

     Easy there. If it goes your way it’ll see a slow demise, through your righteous crusade of market forces.

  • thebigJ_A

    You might want to check your sarcasm meter. It doesn’t seem to be working properly.

  • Roboczar

    I’m usually pretty good at picking up what you’re puttin’ down most of the time, but this is kind of silly.

    You can edit all this stuff in a text file. Takes about 10 minutes longer than using the DLC, and you don’t even need to do either to enjoy the game.

    Whenever DLC comes around, I always stick by this question before throwing up my arms in indignant rage:

    “Can I play the game from start to finish, without impediment, out of the box?”

    If the answer is yes, then I will not complain about the DLC, and I will not buy it, because it doesn’t meet my condition of “necessary for enjoyment of the game”. I feel like most people in the scene either don’t ask the question, or don’t answer it honestly.

  • Anonymous

    This is dumb. You can edit the save file (which is plain text), search for your character by name, and set his stats/traits/face/money/piety/etc to be whatever you want.

  • http://twitter.com/SESSpackman SamSpackman

    and…. “This was interesting.. It seems the ruler-designer is our most succesful expansion and/or DLC we’ve made..”