Good point.

RIGHT? Dude, Under-Karazhan looked amazing. It pains me that that was just abandoned.

I'm not sure I'm answering this thread correctly but to touch on some of the stuff people below said (also the formatting on this is going to be pure shit and I apologize):

DukeGrimm: "It's not a scap goat when they release content that was certainly not done in all of 1-2 months since the game was released. It's…

Thank you for the kind words!

Yeah that's always the fun counter-argument: "You know if this wasn't on disc, you'd have to download it, right? Would you rather download 15GB of stuff when it's all done, or have some empty maps included on the disc and cut that down to 5GB?" It's a no-win situation sometimes.

See, that's the trap you fall into, though: You're radically simplifying how games are built. They didn't divert resources into the DLC "away" from the main game, that's not how it works. Development isn't a linear path. You don't work on every aspect of the main game simultaneously and you don't do it in order.

Here's…

Yes, it does. This happens either when planned DLC gets finished before the final game ships and they opt to just toss it on the disc anyway, or (worse) when they decide to make finished content into DLC to wring some extra cash out of people.

Usually the finished-on-disc DLC is stuff like preorder bonuses and are…

Honestly it's not common knowledge at all. It's sort of like how many people don't realize movies generally aren't filmed sequentially, or books aren't written with the chapters in order and often have a lot of them juggled around or cut out.

No problem!

I hope nobody feels like I'm talking down to them with this, either. Game development is weird and unintuitive for the most part, so hopefully it's more like "Oh, okay, that's weird but it makes more sense than 'ha ha we made this stuff and now we're gonna charge you to access it just because!'"

For anyone who's not sure how this works, here's a quick primer (source: I work in game development):

When you make a big, open-world style game like Destiny, there's a lot of stuff that goes into what is essentially pre-visualization.

This game seems like a perfectly passable, fun game with some neat ideas that Marketing has decided Needs To Be The Second Coming™ and so it is relentlessly hyped by its publisher, and then we get some vaguely confused-seeming journalists essentially going "Well, I mean it's a perfectly good game, buuuuuut...."

Reminds…

...Wow.

Whatever happened to the console versions, anyway? Are they still around? Do tumbleweeds blow through them? Have they had any updates at all?

So, this is weird: There's actually a Microsoft Cert Requirement (and a Sony one for that matter) that insists on "parity" between the publishing console and its competition. You can fail out of certification if your game has something missing in it that's present on other consoles.

I've got a Nexus 5. Is the performance jump noticeable? I dunno if an extra inch of screen space and a higher resolution alone is worth $650; I honestly haven't seen my Nexus 5 choke on anything I've thrown at it, and I beat Max Payne on the damn thing. Everything seems to run great, and I've got Android 5.0 on it…

Wow. Okay, I'm 100% behind this! Not everything has to be super Grimdark™ all the time, but you're right. This is giving off serious FFT vibes, and that game was ridiculously grim (and surprisingly gory) once you dug into it a bit. If they can pull off that kind of unusual-for-a-FF-title atmosphere, sign me up.

RIGHT!? Oh my god this confuses the living fuck out me. I'd ask for explanations but given the amount of windowlicking on any article involving this I'm pretty sure there isn't one that doesn't eventually boil down to "Girls are scary and I did not enjoy high school".

...Actually, okay you know what? Fuck it, that's…

It's kinda similar to all the "We're not misogynists you stupid cunt!" tweets and all their variations sent at women critical of the whole thing.

Some of these dudes complain about misrepresentation and (quite literally) in the same sentence embody that very stereotype they're complaining about being lumped into. I…

I appreciate the rationale for putting F3 above NV. It's kind of a tough call for me. I agree with the rest of the list though!

For the record, I played all the games in order when they came out. I'd keep your list and just swap F3 and NV.

Fallout 2 though. My God. The best of the bunch, and the most "authentic" Fallout…

Great article. This should be required reading for devs looking to make military FPS games going forward. You make great cases for what the stage does right and contrast it very nicely against what NOT to do and then explain why. Good stuff.

Curious: Did Battlefield 4's campaign ever fix the "You drop dead of a heart…