Since I have more time to flesh out this opinion... New Vegas has a really mixed bag of DLC.  Dead Money is pretty bad.  Honest Hearts is pretty easy, but is a good, fun romp if you just want to destroy something.  Plus it gives you some pretty good weaponry for... Old World Blues, which is pretty much the best piece of DLC I've ever played in an RPG. It's got the great 50s sci fi aesthetic, totally crazy and lovable characters, but it is TOUGH.  Lots of mechanical enemies with high armor and you will die a lot.  It's worth it, though.  I didn't play Lonesome Road, but I've heard good things about it.

Old World Blues is amazing.  Worth the price alone.

Aha, I think I see where our disagreement is.  You're arguing that the games these people have worked on previously have gone free to play and I thought you were referring to Zenimax the company.

Yeah, the designers worked on MMORPGs previously - but this is Zenimax's first game.

Edit: To be clear, the two games you have highlighted were both produced by Mythic/EA.

I think you may have Zenimax/Bethesda confused with another company.  Zenimax Online formed in 2007 and as far as I know, the work has been exclusively on TESO.

I honestly don't know why so many companies use Digital River as a vendor for their ecommerce stores.  Digital River is HORRIBLE from just about every perspective - data, customer service, and communication.  All are quite poor.

I hope that you will be able to eat the Fire Emblem people to absorb their powers.  This has already had a proof of concept with Kirby in Smash Bros.

You know, I was talking about weird crossovers in our staff forums and came up with Nobunaga's Ambition X Aerobiz.



I think FE X SMT might just take the cake over that.

I much preferred Revelaitons.

Hell, I can't even play devil's advocate on that one, much less defend it.  That's almost collusion.

I think that logic cuts both ways, though.  If you stop providing games to major outlets for review, you're losing out on a very large number of potential impressions for your title.  And let's be honest here - most publishers know when they're publishing a mediocre game and what to expect from review scores long before they're published.  Modern publishers to boatloads of focus groups, mock reviews, etc.


From personal experience, review events are relatively common, though you usually go home with a copy of the game. We attended a review event for Deus Ex Human Revolution, but the difference was that it was a few weeks before the release of the game and Stephen went home with a copy to play. That being said, review events where you don't walk away with code?  Those are pretty bullshit. Usually just for very large titles where they think there's a very significant chance of piracy, but I completely agree that playing a game in a studio isn't a replacement for the experience at home.  I still love preview events, though.  One of my favorite RPGFan memories is playing Reckoning at Big Huge Games and watching the developers go from station to station observing all the different journalists playing and taking notes and asking questions.  Those guys really did love that game.

Edit: Also from personal experience, I can tell you that providing consistent coverage of a game is more important than a review score 9 times out of 10.  Certainly every company is different, but I can tell you that I haven't met more than a handful of people in the games industry over the 11 years I've been writing that struck me as being deliberately conniving.

http://www.rpgfan.com/news/2013/1034.html

I tell you what, 2013 is off to a good start for announcements.  I thoroughly enjoyed what of Namco X Capcom I played, and my understanding is this is supposed to be relatively similar.

Why not?  I couldn't care less about the story in a game like that.  It could have the plot of Bad Dudes for all I care, as long as the gameplay itself is good.  Also, I have to laugh every time I see that game companies buy people off.  It's a giant conspiracy theory, based on everything I've seen.  The only time I ever see the concept of pay for review is in the world of mobile games, where developers will pay outlets for publication space. Fact of the matter is, a lot of people love DmC, you just might not be one of them.  And that's A-OK.

I figure the PSP market is dead or close to dead at this point.  No one is going to localize an RPG for a platform that has almost no retail space unless it's super niche and likely inexpensive to localize (Corpse Party, Generation of Chaos)