Or, if you're a PC user, some time in the far future that is TBD. But hey, at least I got charged full price for the Season Pass.
I haven't bought a season pass yet. So aggravated that I have to install every damn game into the xbox one. Why can't it be like the 360? Go to the store, buy a game, bring it home, put it in, play it? Instead its go to the store, buy a game bring it home, play it the next day 'cause it had to download all damn night and while ya were at work...and that's if you're still in the mood to play that game. Annoyin' as hell.
Because it's technically impossible, at least if you want decent performance. The optical drive literally can't read discs fast enough to keep up with current-gen games. Horse's Mouth
Roommate started New Game+ the other day, which carried over all his Riddler trophies, so he was finally able to beat Riddler today. I just started downloading the Batgirl story, but I probably won't have a chance to play it until Thursday. I'm working too much between now and then.
Played the Batgirl story this afternoon. A nice little distraction, took me about an hour. The way it's set up, I was wondering if it was going to end...badly. We're not quite there yet, though. I'm excited to see what other kinds of adventures the Season Pass will offer.
Played through the Harley Quinn mission... It's a bit buggy and they forgot her facial animations, she looks like a scary clown-doll through it all...
Just sat down to play the game, put the disc in and...yay! 3.7 GB update! (53 minutes left) Why is this crap tolerated so easily in the gaming community? This update isn't even needed to play the game, but Sony still won't let me use network features until I sit here waiting for an hour. And I buy new games infrequently enough that it happens every time I get a new game for any system. Would it seriously kill them to let you download these updates on your own time instead of, you know, the moment you sit down to the console you haven't touched in two months excited to play the shiny new game you just bought?
Because in most newer games network features are designed to be intrinsic to the experience. You're going to say the constant obligatory downloads just to use a console's core features isn't obnoxious? Nobody would tolerate this in any other context. Anyway, once I was able to play the game, it's a good game. The litmus test for whether I really like a game is whether I have trouble putting it down, so it passes. The game looks awesome. The Batmobile thing is really cool but I'm not sure it will hold up as a core game mechanic. The controls aren't that great and the combat is like Mako combat only you're surrounded and enemies only fire once every twenty seconds after slowly and carefully aiming. The Riddler course was fun but these weird jumps and power winch sequences with awkward controls are annoying. Frankly, gliding around the city is more fun than driving the Batmobile and following arrows around instead of making your own path is boring. Hopefully the game focuses more on the stealth aspect that made AC great and the long time it took to get to the first stealth sequence was because the Batmobile was the new thing.
Well, unless you find a way to improve the technology, we're just gonna have to deal with it. There is A LOT of Batmobile in the game, and it was annoying to me at first, but I grew to really enjoy it. The controls are awkward, but you get used to them.
It's not an issue of improving the technology -- it's that starting with the previous generation of consoles, publishers have been content with the mentality of "eh, just shove it out the door, we'll patch it later" -- see the Bethesda games like Fallout 3 and Skyrim. (Thank God this didn't happen with Arkham Knight; word from people who saw the GDC demo last year was that the console version was completely broken, moreso than the PC version that released last month -- and even then the console versions still had a Day One patch.) There is a balance between making sure the game is perfect, which is impossible, and shipping out a pile of shit, but good lord publishers have fallen in love with the "ship now, patch later" mentality. That's a mentality that did serious, serious damage to the PC gaming community for a long time, and it isn't doing any good on consoles, either, especially when ISPs are enforcing data caps, and on top of downloading a 50 GB game, you then have to suck down a 4GB patch or whatever -- under some ISP tiers, that's half your monthly cap.
Re: Batman: Arkham Knight Is it a good time to mention that you can definitely plow into mobs in this game to incapacitate them? Of course, they get magically 'shocked', but they sure as hell go down.
It has nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with Sony wanting to micromanage your experience. It's no different than if every time Apple had an update, they said "You must download this now or else your machine will be unable to access the internet". The only reason it's okay when Playstation does it and wouldn't be if Apple did it is that there exist alternatives to Apple products that have equitable features and don't do the same thing themselves. Playstation's only competitors are one system that has most of the exact same games and is equally bad about micromanaging your experience and shoving micropayments down your throat, and one system whose selection of games caters to an entirely different niche. And yeah, the Batmobile is fun, it's fine. It's just not as fun as the other aspects of the game and it takes a lot of time away from the more fun aspects.
It's to do with the compatibility of games. PC, Xbox, PS, they all do it because it has to be the same version to network the games. It's more like iTunes getting an update and Apple saying "Some features won't work unless you update" which they do.
I finished the Two-Face side mission to 100%! First side mission I've completed! Man-Bat is at 75% right now...