Batman - Arkham Knight

Concannon7

I have such a selection of games I need to finish (and that I want to buy) so this wont be bought this year. That and the fact I don't have the same interest in the series that I originally had. A drop in price next year and I might pick it up then.

Mr Freeze

Are Amazon emailing any else with "tempting" deals to get you cancel your ridiculously low pre order price and get Batman Arkham Knight and some other game in a more expensive bundle*?

And also, no way would I go near that Season Pass, even at half that price its too much for skins and tracks and challenge rooms, etc.

*Might not be more expensive, I didn't even look.

Generic Dreadhead

2 fo €80 when some of the games are €39.50 each is a pretty sweet deal :pac:

crybaby

Looking forward to playing this next year on a new PC when it inevitably appears on a steam sale one day

kearneybobs

Going REALLY cheap on cdkeys.com. £14.90 (~€21).

http://savygamer.co.uk/2015/05/01/batman-arkham-knight-pc-14-90/

I couldn't resist. Can even get it with the season pass for £25 (~€34)

cadea

Not sure I should be happy about this, but went for the season pass as well, thanks!

Robert ninja

Tempting, but I'm in no hurry to spend money on a product I'm not even getting yet. I'll just wait for it to be out for a lil bit first. Lose nothing. Gain a lot.

irishmover

kearneybobs

Robert ninja wrote: »

Tempting, but I'm in no hurry to spend money on a product I'm not even getting yet. I'll just wait for it to be out for a lil bit first. Lose nothing. Gain a lot.

The problem with that is the price 'skyrockets' on release.

Take GTAV. You could get it for about two thirds what you're being asked to pay right now for it. For that price, it's probably worth the risk. For me it is anyway.

EoinMcLovin

Earlier this week, WB Games announced the Season Pass for Batman: Arkham Knight and now they have more information about the content they will be providing in the 6 months following the game’s release.

Batgirl: A Matter of Family

An all new prequel story expansion in an entirely new location where you play as Batgirl for the very first time in the Arkham series - check out the first render of Batgirl.



The Season of Infamy

Play as Batman in all new story missions featuring legendary super-villains invading Gotham City, with new story arcs, missions and gameplay features.

Gotham City Stories

Play as Batman’s key allies in narrative missions extending their storylines, from both before and after the events in Batman: Arkham Knight.

Legendary Batmobiles with Themed Tracks

Drive the most iconic Batmobiles from Batman’s 75-year history, on custom-built race tracks, each themed to that Batmobile’s specific era. Every Batmobile will be drivable across every race track.

Crimefighter Challenge Maps

Engage in a series of new challenge maps utilizing the unique play styles of Batman and his allies.

Character Skins

A variety of skins from across the eras for Batman, Robin, Nightwing and Catwoman.

As we fully ramp up development on the Season Pass, we will be sharing even more details on each monthly content drop. We hope you enjoy playing Batman: Arkham Knight as much as we’ve enjoyed making it.

Zero-Cool

Well the story dlc sounds good but the season pass usually works out at one of the packs being free and i can do without skins, races and challenge packs so will just get the story packs on their own.

Again, I'm fairly sure this could have all been in the game but WB want them Batman dollars. The 40 quid price tag has still left a bad taste in my mouth.

senordingdong

The batgirl thing seems substantial

Potential-Monke

Had to pick it up at that price. I got an email about it, just purchased now. €33 for the base game alone is fairly good, but to include the season pass for that too... Bring on June!

Robert ninja

Christ. At this point I gotta wait for another complete edition.

Shiminay

The $40 Season pass price announcement coupled with all these pre-order bargains for the super duper edition seems oddly coincidental...

senordingdong

All for pc....

Shiminay

Well, yea, but this is the trade off - I'm about to drop the price of a PS4 on a graphics card We pay the cost of a console for a single component, we save massively on games and not having to pay for online services. Quite a few of the places we buy cheap CD Keys from also sell console game keys too, you're starting to catch up on digital distribution and the falling prices will most definitely follow.

gizmo

sheehy83 wrote: »

Well the story dlc sounds good but the season pass usually works out at one of the packs being free and i can do without skins, races and challenge packs so will just get the story packs on their own.

Again, I'm fairly sure this could have all been in the game but WB want them Batman dollars. The 40 quid price tag has still left a bad taste in my mouth.

Whatever about the character skins, I highly doubt they'd have been able to cram in all the additional single player content given the description of it so far. Rocksteady are what, 160 people, not all of which are developers? Working on a game of this quality for about three and a half years, including all of the delays, and releasing it simultaneously on five different platforms? Can't imagine they'd have had much time to be twiddling their thumbs to be honest.

I'll be doing the same as yourself purchase wise though. I'm currently playing through Origins and I haven't given the extra skins and challenge maps a second glance so far.

irishmover

gizmo wrote: »

Whatever about the character skins, I highly doubt they'd have been able to cram in all the additional single player content given the description of it so far. Rocksteady are what, 160 people, not all of which are developers? Working on a game of this quality for about three and a half years, including all of the delays, and releasing it simultaneously on five different platforms? Can't imagine they'd have had much time to be twiddling their thumbs to be honest.

I'll be doing the same as yourself purchase wise though. I'm currently playing through Origins and I haven't given the extra skins and challenge maps a second glance so far.

This is a terrible excuse for a company charging this much for a game. What you're saying is that we're paying for their overtime, and then some.

$90 USD for the 'full' version of the game on PC is a joke. Seriously dont pay this price otherwise it will become the industry norm.

Kiith

This is a continuation of Asylum and City right? Never got far into City, so might play through it before this comes out. Catch up with the story (even though i'm sure it's not a requirement).

gizmo

irishmover wrote: »

This is a terrible excuse for a company charging this much for a game. What you're saying is that we're paying for their overtime, and then some.

$90 USD for the 'full' version of the game on PC is a joke. Seriously dont pay this price otherwise it will become the industry norm.

I said absolutely nothing of the sort.

They're charging the standard RRP for the game. They're also making a bunch of extra content available, both now and at a later date, and selling it as part of a season pass I feel is extremely overpriced. That being said, if you want to believe all of that extra content should have been included in the retail release to make it "full" then that's fine. It is a belief, however, I feel is completely disconnected from reality.

irishmover

gizmo wrote: »

I said absolutely nothing of the sort.

They're charging the standard RRP for the game. They're also making a bunch of extra content available, both now and at a later date, and selling it as part of a season pass I feel is extremely overpriced. That being said, if you want to believe all of that extra content should have been included in the retail release to make it "full" then that's fine. It is a belief, however, I feel is completely disconnected from reality.

This extra content is part of the story they're feeding us. If you want to complete the story you need the 'extra content'. I'm not sure when you started playing games but years ago you bought a game for the RRP or under and you got to finish the story. There was no addons needed.

I blame Battlefield and Call of Duty for this.

Interested Observer

No way I'm paying the full whack anyway. Will wait a couple of years until the GotY version is €10 on a Steam sale.

Varik

irishmover wrote: »

This extra content is part of the story they're feeding us. If you want to complete the story you need the 'extra content'. I'm not sure when you started playing games but years ago you bought a game for the RRP or under and you got to finish the story. There was no addons needed.

I blame Battlefield and Call of Duty for this.

If they weren't getting more money they wouldn't be doing more work.

Same with all those Gamestop exclusive skins and the like, they're getting paid or getting a very large order off them.


WB published stuff is on sale often enough, no need to even wait that long after for these.

gizmo

irishmover wrote: »

This extra content is part of the story they're feeding us. If you want to complete the story you need the 'extra content'. I'm not sure when you started playing games but years ago you bought a game for the RRP or under and you got to finish the story. There was no addons needed.

I blame Battlefield and Call of Duty for this.

Nothing described in the additional content so far reads as though it is required to complete the story. It appears to serve as either prequel and sequel material with some even set in a completely different city and unique area. Basically pretty similar to the content released for the previous games, none of whose omission would have led to an incomplete feeling nor which particularly set the world on fire quality wise.

I've been playing games long enough to have seen some ****ty business practices and some great ones. I've also seen several which are somewhere in between. This is one of them. Assuming the game is released complete then I have no problem with them releasing additional content. My feelings on that, however, are completely separate to my feelings on how much they're charging for this additional content. I think I've been pretty clear on that above.

As Varik basically says above, at some point a line is drawn underneath the amount of content that can be included in game for its budget based on estimated sales. Each Batman game so far has been chock full of great content (and even more chockful of collectible filler which may not be to everyone tastes) but at no point have I ever felt short changed. So far I have no reason to think this will happen with Arkham Knight either.

And no, I still won't be pre-ordering it. :pac:

irishmover

gizmo wrote: »

Nothing described in the additional content so far reads as though it is required to complete the story. It appears to serve as either prequel and sequel material with some even set in a completely different city and unique area. Basically pretty similar to the content released for the previous games, none of whose omission would have led to an incomplete feeling nor which particularly set the world on fire quality wise.

I've been playing games long enough to have seen some ****ty business practices and some great ones. I've also seen several which are somewhere in between. This is one of them. Assuming the game is released complete then I have no problem with them releasing additional content. My feelings on that, however, are completely separate to my feelings on how much they're charging for this additional content. I think I've been pretty clear on that above.

As Varik basically says above, at some point a line is drawn underneath the amount of content that can be included in game for its budget based on estimated sales. Each Batman game so far has been chock full of great content (and even more chockful of collectible filler which may not be to everyone tastes) but at no point have I ever felt short changed. So far I have no reason to think this will happen with Arkham Knight either.

And no, I still won't be pre-ordering it. :pac:

Yeh fair enough. I've not read anything since 2 days ago but all I did read then was that the story wouldn't feel complete without the additional content played through. I'm sire people will still feel they've missed out and buy the extra content anyway though.

Anyway I've paid $50 AUD for the premium edition as provided from a poster above. Bit iffy about the huge price difference but that's about the maximum I'd ever pay on PC.

Shiminay

By the way, the story writers get to decide what's in the story, not you or me or any of us. This entitlement to some sort of "I want my exact thoughts for this multi-million selling mass media entertainment product's content to be absolutely fulfilled or else damn the man!" attitude needs to die in a fire.

Yea, we were absolutely right to be pissed off about the Protean being DLC in Mass Effect, but we have no right to call a whole extra single player chunk of content with a different character part of the main story, it's simply not. I'm sure it'll be tied in somehow so it doesn't seem weird to have even been there in the first place.

I suppose we can only blame the marketing people who've been telling us for 15+ years that we get to play games "our way" which simply isn't possible in the physical universe we currently occupy.

irishmover

Shiminay wrote: »

By the way, the story writers get to decide what's in the story, not you or me or any of us. This entitlement to some sort of "I want my exact thoughts for this multi-million selling mass media entertainment product's content to be absolutely fulfilled or else damn the man!" attitude needs to die in a fire.

Yea, we were absolutely right to be pissed off about the Protean being DLC in Mass Effect, but we have no right to call a whole extra single player chunk of content with a different character part of the main story, it's simply not. I'm sure it'll be tied in somehow so it doesn't seem weird to have even been there in the first place.

I suppose we can only blame the marketing people who've been telling us for 15+ years that we get to play games "our way" which simply isn't possible in the physical universe we currently occupy.

I'd never suggest otherwise.

However, I/you/the consumer can decide how much we should pay for it.

They want to charge me $120 AUD for a premium edition on PC I'll tell them where to go and either wait for a sale or find a cheaper alternative. In this case the cdkey for 60% cheaper.

Shiminay

I don't disagree with "pay what you think it's worth" and having picked up the premium edition with the season pass for €36 last night, I'm feeling like I've already got my money's worth - I love Batman, I love the Arkham Games and I'm still cross with myself for not being able to resist it's tasty cheap charms

johnny_ultimate

Am I the only one who finds the whole discourse surrounding season passes and DLC a bit, well, hysterical?

Nobody's forcing you to buy anything. There is no evidence whatsoever yet Arkham Knight is incomplete in order to sell extra content later. If that turns out to be the case, calling foul is justified. But for now, it seems to be a whole load of totally optional content with several months of extra production time once the main game has been shipped. Is it over expensive? Absolutely. Is it ridiculous to ask people to pre-order DLC before the main game is even released? Totally, and I don't know why anybody would do it unless they've gotten a genuine bargain as some people here seem to have. But this is the way of AAA game development and distribution in 2015, so I'm always baffled why there seems to be fresh outrage every single time it happens, when the more rational response is to simply ignore it and find out if the DLC is worth an investment when it actually comes out (and given season passes are often full of 'value added' worthless junk anyway, one can pick and choose the bits they actually want anyway). If anything, I found Arkham City to be too packed with content in the first place (lost interest well, well before 100%), and certainly didn't feel I missed anything without paying for the extra stuff that came later. As I've said before in this thread, I found the DLC I did get free - the Catwoman campaign - actually took away from the game by mediocre 'B-team' designed content interrupting the flow of the game at seemingly random points.

These sort of big name, big budget blockbusters are insanely expensive to produce, and yet at the same time everybody's demanding more game and cheaper prices (and once again I can only restate I firmly believe many key reselling prices have set expectations unreasonably low, and games sold only at those knockdown prices would not at all sustain the types of budgets big AAA games demand - and that's exactly why the console market remains the one that heavily sustains games of this scale). Content beyond the core game is a way of making good on an investment, which makes sound business sense especially when all evidence seems to indicate it's a model that works, and damn well at that. And yet as intelligent, independent consumers we can decide if we want it or not. We are not sheep. Nobody is forcing us to buy the season passes.

Absolutely call out the ****ty business practices: I think the Assassins Creed game that explicitly left out chapters of the game to sell later was shameless and undoubtedly worthy of criticism. And personally I have never invested in a season pass, except for the Titanfall one which cost me something like a fiver on sale (and one can always wait for a sale) and the Resogun one which cost less than a tenner. But let's not ignore how the games business and development works either. For now let's at least wait and see if Arkham Knight is 'complete' as is, which going by Rocksteady's track record it should be. If that's the case, then the DLC will be what DLC almost always is - totally optional extra content that in no way negatively impacts the main game by its absence. Maybe it will even be that rare breed: the artfully designed follow-up content that meaningfully builds on the lessons learned making the 'main game' (eg Last of Us Left Behind). But hey, now that's just delusional