Gonna be honest, I have mixed feelings about this.
On the one hand, I do agree that it’s kinda shitty to charge $6 ($8 here in Aus) for something that was basically the thing people already had in the original game.
On the one hand, the description of it as “22-year-old JPEGs” is wrong. They’re at the very least upscaled, but certainly in some form higher quality than the originals. There’s also the fact that they’re completely optional and unnecessary. They provide nothing but cosmetics, and not even cosmetics that you see in important places like character models. I also think it was primarily intended as a small added bonus for people with the Premium Edition, and to me the Premium Edition is a no-brainer for reasons completely unrelated to this. It costs like $20 extra, and includes the first two upcoming expansions free, each at $15 (or similar maths to that), as well as the Freyr god pack. It’s able to be bought stand-alone, but I don’t think that’s really what’s intended.
Still, yeah I really think trying to upsell with this pack is kinda penny pinching in a way I wish they wouldn’t do things.
Yeah, probably fine.
But it’s still good to get a public reaction against shady money grabs.
It’s not like this is an indie game from an unheard of studio, it’s going to do fine and recover later.
But the backlash to DLC is heard by every studio/publisher. And may effect the ones doing real shady shit.
Also:
Portrait packs are like the easiest mods. So I’m sure by the time the game is released this will be a mod that’s free.
As you did, I bought the legendary edition, because all in all it is a good price for the game + upcoming DLC.
But your part about the upscaling taking work … so did remaking the rest of the game and I am paying for that. But what are they going to do next if we don’t give push back? Making each separate upscaled unit or faction a DLC?
I’m not commenting simply on it taking work. I agree that it was silly penny pinching to charge extra for it. I was merely correctly the lie from the headline that this is “22 year old JPEGs”.
Dungeon keeper mk II
