This disgusts me.

If they intended on just selling a full game piecemeal they may as well have just released it on a disc and called it a day.

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--Bureau of Internet Morality

Square just loves to strip the class right out of their games don't they? 

But they've been milkers for like 20 years now, right?

I disagree.  It lets me pick and choose what matters to me.  It puts some of the choice in my hands.

Let's be frank, I don't want the bikini or mischievous clothes.  Those sounds stupid.  But I could be interested in a dungeon or new skills.

Fair enough, but I can see this just being the beginning of the DLC. By the time they are done, the gamers who want it all will get milked for more than $60 I'm sure and the amount of content they will have to show for it will more than likely be less than what would've been on the full retail release of the game. I don't know for a fact that this is true, but hell, it wouldn't surprise me in the least.

Bikini.  Yes.

I actually like downloadable content. Horse armor no. But I'm of the belief that it has the potential to let microtransactions give the consumer more flexibility of choice in their experience, and allow experiences to be more flexible in the market they reach. A one size fits all is fine, but it may also involve some exclusion of some markets.

That isn't to say that DLC isn't being exploited. But there are applications where DLC does wonders: like music games or free web MMOs. Episodic games are also benefitting from the processes of DLC. DLC in and of itself can be a good thing. It can also be made to be a bad thing.

wrong, they are using the funds from the Wii DLC to fund the PS3 FF games, therefore we should BOYCOTT this evil practice and stop it dead in it's tracks.

DLC is alright since the asking price isn't high.

Unlike something like Super Smash Bros. Brawl, where I have little desire to unlock most of the extras.  I have my Strikers Daisy trophy.  The rest of the game is sketchy onrine with ruined classic fighters and forgettable music.

I've got mixed feelings on this.  On one hand, the content is cheap and all sold separately, so you can pick up what you want.  On the other hand, even though SE says that the game is complete without any DLC, looking at the idea behind "Infinite Dungeon" scares me.  I assumed you could send search parties to dungeons whenever you wanted, but this leaves me with the impression there's an end point, where you can no longer do so without SE's DLC.

Aside from that, it's obvious that a lot of cheap-to-create content was intentionally left out of the introductory package in order to nickel and dime us later on.  I'd rather have a complete game with genuine add-ons available as DLC.

Better question, how many blocks of Wii Memory would it take up?

Xbox 360 has tempted and made me fall into that temptation of DLC more than I'd like to admit.

Depends if it's already on the disk or not.

What next? You have to pay to download the download?

Let me assuage that as much as I can. You can keep sending parties into dungeons, but at a certain point a dungeon is "cleaned out." This means that no major quests are in that dungeon to do, and that adventurers sent there can only gain experience and have a low level of finding specific items. You're most likely going to move your adventurers to newer and newer dungeons so that you can get the biggest rewards.

At least, that's what it looks like with what the booth worker explained it to me at the media summit. Perhaps Windy could clarify a little more?

What this "infinite dungeon" says to me is that this will be a dungeon that never gets "cleaned out" but will offer constant quests, probably requiring extremely high level adventurers, that have substantial rewards. The "Infinite dungeon" will never give you diminishing returns, so to speak.

But that's the thing, Kairon.  When you drain all the other dungeons, you'll have to pay $3 to get one that you can keep using.  Since this is the only dungeon that never diminishes, it means there's a point in the game where you can't use much else beyond their DLC, right?

You know, back in the day, you used to not be able to even replay levels (Super Mario Bros. 1,2,3).  And other games, you could go back into the level, but you wouldn't get anything extra for it (Legend of Zelda, Zelda II, Link to the Past).

And you didn't even get the *option* do download new content to these games.

If you're asking if the game reaches a point where you've pretty much done everything and all you have left to do is grind dungeons over and over for little reason... yeah, I suspect there might be such a point in this game. But doesn't the same hold true for most games? Like Harvest Moon (yay two years are over I can... farm... more) or WoW (yay I hit 60 I can... grind... for marginally better gear) ?

Maybe Windy can shed more light on the subject?

Yeah, I suppose you guys are right, but I still feel like we're getting a short-end of a stick here somehow, and that this game isn't going to work great without some of this content.

I think I may have to agree with you, thatguy, in regards to this particular game. DLC is great if they work like smaller scale expansion packs but to start charging for more content the DAY of launch comes across as a way to gouge money. In fact I'd be far more comfortable with it if it came out at least a month after the release.

I'd agree if they were charging full price for the "main" game, then charging extra for DLC.  But think of this as buying a trial size version of the game (obviously, at a discount) - if you like it, you can buy more.  If you don't like it, then save your money...

It's not a full game, itself, though.  I could go get a PS2 and Dark Cloud for a more complete game with a somewhat similar theme.

The game itself, if I understand correctly, is a sim-type game along the lines of Sim City.  I've played sim games before, most notably, Roller Coaster Tycoon.  There's a lot to do, several scenarios, and a near-infinite number of ways to build a park.  Essentially, I feel like the actual gameplay that this game consists of is about equal to one individual scenario of Roller Coaster Tycoon, only it's probably not in real-time, and there's less available options.  However, this game is obviously prettier, I'll give it that.  Roller Coaster Tycoon ran for $30 when it came out, IIRC, and it, as far as I can tell has several times the content available than what this game could have if you bought everything.  Yes, you can factor in inflation and all that jazz, but we've learned that inflation and technology don't go hand-in-hand.

On top of that, the character, building, and world models have probably already been developed, at least to some extent,  for the Wii FF:CC that's on the way (supposedly, since we haven't heard about it in about a year).  My point is, this game was likely very cheap for SE to make.  The gameplay, as far as I've read, seems to be very immature and devoid of any decent level of interaction.  The biggest issue for me, is that I don't feel that what SE is offering for a $39 whole package is even worth the "trial" $15.  If SE would say that the game is an investment, and that what happens here can benefit other games, maybe I'd go for it.  I like real gimmicks.  They haven't, though, and I'm seriously debating whether this game would be worth my money, something I rarely do, rather, I worry about titles being worth my time.

I don't know.  Maybe there's more there to it.  I certainly haven't followed every little piece about it.  It just seems to me that the "trial" UncleBob suggests isn't even much as a trial, I see more gameplay available for free demos than I expect from this game.

We'll just have to see.

Well I can about guarantee that I'll fall into the trap because I'm getting this game, I LOVE simish games.

This is another game that I would definitely buy if I had the blocks. Nintendo needs to know how much money they're losing out on because of the lack of a storage solution.

I don't think anyone knows why Nintendo doesn't allow alternative storage. You are right though, it WILL hurt sales, even I have hesitated getting a VC game because of going through the trouble of moving everything to the SD card to play it (which takes forever to even copy over).

There's at least $50 worth of stuff, and probably a lot more, where the only thing stopping me from purchasing it is my space issues. Though that may not necessarily be a bad thing, I've already bought more than a quarter of the VC games that have been released. I think I have a real problem.

I was stressing about the space issue also until I found a solution. Copy EVERYTHING to the SD card and just leave 1 blank space for VC/WiiWare games and when you're in the mood to play a game just copy it to the Wii memory, but don't delete it from the SD card. Then when you're done delete it and you're ready to copy the next game.

Sure it takes a bout a minute to do, but if you think about it, turning off the SNES, taking out Super Mario World, putting in Donkey Kong Country and turning the SNES back on takes about the same amount of time there is nothing to complain about.

I think people who make it out to be a big deal are just exaggerating because I found doing this way not only saves time but works effortlessly. You don't even have to leave one space open you can fill up the system memory with your 15 or so favorites and leave a couple black spaces near the end to do the swapping out. Just be sure to leave everything on the SD card and it's not a big deal.

Copying back and forth takes forever and a day but once it's all on the SD card then swapping games is a lot easier and less cumbersome than swapping SNES and moving over to Genesis then going to N64 and back to SNES. Before the Wii whatever system I had hooked up that was what got played.

AS for the topic at hand...

I am sorta with UB, once a game is done it's done, having the choice to download extra content is fair and reasonable but I am opposed to DLC on principal because it does allow for developers to put out a Demo of a game and charge extra for the rest. Then again is it really any different than Shareware? I guess I will take a wait and see approach.

Wait till the game comes out and see how much you actually get for the introductory price. If it's less than what you get from a demo, then by all means bitch and moan, if its at least as much as you'd get from a shareware title (even though I don't think anyone still does that) well then it's at least enough to justify the introductory price and then you can pick and chose what to download at your leisure.

No, no. You've got perfectly valid concerns. But it doesn't sound like you're worried about DLC. It sounds more like you're worried that the game doesn't have enough depth to satisfy you. I mean, this game has you staying in a city and sending adventurers out to do your dirty work: you never set foot in a dungeon! ... i love it...

Wow, that's actually a really great idea.  I take back half the bad things I ever said about you.

I guess I mistook this game for that "dungeon crawler" you were talking about before, what is that game called and when does it come out, I am not interested in sims other good old Sim City. Or am I even more confused now than I was then?

It would take hours to copy everything to an SD card.  It copies at an incredibly slow rate.

Yes, but at least in my experiment earlier copying from the SD card to the Wii is significantly faster (still not fast, but a lot better than the  other way). This would work a lot better if you were copying each game as you got it instead of all at once, I can't begin to imagine how long it would take to copy all 61of my VC games to an SD card, but I'm thinking about trying it.