Imagine a world where funding a game becomes a logistical nightmare because you're competing not by preparing demonstrations and project pitches, but having to deal with extremely brief blurbs on kickstarter and relying on an ill-informed population to understand what is actually going on.

Imagine a world where there is no supportive infrastructure for new side projects, since there is no steady stream of developer funding from blockbusters to fund the small fry.

As with all 'Throw the bums out! Power to the people!' schemes, this sort of thing is full of good intentions but crowded with potential unintended consequences. That's not to say that there is no place for this sort of thing, but it's not a real model for an industry, and could be extremely harmful if it tried to be.

I don't care how much money Bobby Kotick has. Honestly? Almost this entire piece is unrelated nonsense, trying to make us feel bad for the poor game devs and how dare we do anything to stop them from getting their due!

Slight problem: the game, when I buy it, is mine. I can light it on fire. I can throw it at people, perhaps even construct a sort of disc-based ballista. I can put it in a microwave to see what happens and put it on youtube! And if someone wants to buy my game, I have every right to give them my game in exchange for cash. By demanding that the subsequent purchaser pay a tithe to the publisher for the privilege of using the thing they could legally buy from me, they are interfering with my right to do whatever legal thing I want to my property -- including sell it -- that I please. That is wrong.

Please spare us the repeated bleatings about poor developers and how evil second-hand markets are and how game development is a special, beautiful flower that cannot be compared to other markets. Every industry has an aftermarket -- books, electronics, appliances, you name it, people are selling them used. "Books" haven't collapsed as an industry, and nobody has been deterred from trying to become an author because of the existence of second-hand bookstores (in fact, second-hand bookstores are the only physical bookstores that are still thriving). Hundreds of engineers put loads of time into developing that washing machine that you bought second-hand. Is their time worth less, or their work less quality, than these developers we are supposed to take pity on? Nobody is complaining about after-market washers. It's our property. Don't try to add strings and control it after the sale.

And to respond to the only actual salient point in the piece; I won't buy games with online passes. I do, however, enjoy video games, and I enjoy exercising my right to sell and buy video games from other people, and I do not want anything to interfere with that. In addition to doing so, I will continue to explain why I think this is a terrible idea and why I am opposed to it. So no, I will not "shut up," and I certainly won't buy into any flimsy moralistic nonsense that you or anyone else has constructed to make me feel like an "entitled prick" or attempting to shame me out of doing something I have every single right to be doing.

(Square has realized this and is demanding money in exchange. Curse their eyes!)

The game is a hideous buggy mess on all platforms. The PS3 is just the worst of them.

The problem is that you have to wade through hours upon hours of grinding to get a drop of that great story. It's telling that the bonus missions ("do this while you're in the area") have numbers like 40 mobs to kill. It's absolutely insane. I actually am somewhat of a control group, since my Shadow stealths past whatever I can. I reckon I'm back about three entire levels (from 37 to 40) just off the masses upon masses of random mobs the game expects me to kill along the way. Heck, you can't even speeder down a road on most planets without running into a bunch of mobs (who near-automatically dismount you) that you have to cut down.

This would be A-OK if the game didn't play like launch WoW paired with the meaningless complexity of RIFT. I have 30 buttons and I use maybe 10 of them, and only about 3 regularly. One of them would be the auto-attack, in most games.

As for the rest of the game, I feel that it's serviceable. Crew skills are interesting, but STO's duty officer system does the same thing in a much more satisfying way. Social points encourage player interaction, but a real LFG tool would serve that purpose more effectively. Planets are pretty but way, way, way too big for the amount of content on them. And, of course, there's really not a whole lot of content from 35-45 (which is somewhat standard for launch MMOs, I should point out), even though there is basically only one set path for each faction past the first few planets. Space combat is fun, but there are really only 4 missions ("reskins" with higher difficulty keep content alive) and it's pretty basic. Plus, I have STO.

That said, I keep mentioning STO, and that's a good thing ... an MMO always has the chance to mature and improve with age. I just hope that Bioware starts learning from other games and from its own game's failings, because it apparently hasn't learned anything from the past five years of MMO design.

Video game epic RPGs are "about" traveling the world, and DA2 stuck you in Kirkwall. I remember reading that endlessly; how dare they stick you to just one stupid town? Why aren't you out saving the world and seeing tons of vaguely different locales?!

It also really screwed with gamers by giving no obvious "best" solution. Kirkwall was going to Hell. It doesn't matter how good Hawke was, or how talented or powerful, things were going to suck. Your main choices were in which ways it would suck more or less. So, gamers were stuck in a city they basically couldn't save, no matter how "well" they played their cards. How dare they not give us a GOOD END?

That is why the great parts of DA2, the characters, the writing and the scenarios, were overlooked. Nobody won. There was no princess and no cake. You saved the city, but only after all the important and useful people in it were murdered (many of them by your terrorist friend, Anders!).

We haven't been trained to appreciate tragedy as consumers of media, and as gamers we certainly haven't been conditioned for inescapable failure of a kind DA2 constantly presents us with. So while the characters are clever and personable and have realistic relationships, many people just can't shake the idea that "you're stuck in one place and it's going to hell no matter what you do" can make an engaging story. After all, we can't WIN. And gaming is all about winning it all.

Just letting everyone know.

They did a few more things, such as cleaning up the early game and making the endgame much, much more accessible, but ground combat and doffs are the major new systems.

Also, it should be noted that according to Massively, THE BAN STORY IS A HOAX, as confirmed by Bioware. Let's not play so fast and loose, hm?