Found this thread at the Mass Effect forums while checking to see if there's going to be an ME PC demo. Like the froggie Francaise poster jbaudrand, I'm really only interested in a demo for testing how the game would run on my PC, "2GB download" be damned. I'll just delete the thing when I buy the full game! What does it really cost the company to bang out a brief demo for what amounts to benchmarking? Didn't they already make the damn game? I'll admit I don't know everything that goes into porting from console to PC, but they sure as hell MADE the game on a PC (or Mac) so it can't take THAT long--surely they can set aside some interns or something to lop off a couple areas and make a benchmarking demo out of them.

My real issue, however, isn't with Bioware, but its mini-legion of slavering fanboys defending corporate laziness.


Argoyne says:
"Demos can be a poor reflection of a games actual content and performance a poorly done one can harm sales of a good game and a well done one can sell rubbish." Never happened to me, since, y'know, I have a brain, but perhaps it could... no, no, that statement is just "rubbish".
He continues:
"I've never had a game that has had an issue that a demo would have highlighted."
Argoyne is described as a "game owner". Apparently that's not plural, since if he owned more than one game he'd have run into that. All those titles listed under his name must be for show.

But the crowning piece of mind-blinded buttspeak comes from :
"I think if the game is good enough, it's worth buying without testing"
Mayyyyyyyyyyyybe on a console, where if the thing don't run there's nothing the companies can expect you to do beyond blowing in the CD slot. The rest is up to them. They've either got to put up a patch PRONTO, or face replacing thousands of discs for free (except in the case of Microsoft, whose awful console will destroy your discs if you make the mistake of trying to play them, and they'll charge you 20 bucks to get a new disc with information on it YOU'VE ALREADY PAID THEM $60 FOR; a disc which costs them $2 to make) On PC, you sure as shirt can't take that disc back to the store if it runs like crap. Nope, you've got to invest a couple hundred more bucks in improving your PC and then, maybe, it'll run. If it don't, then OOPS, you must have and nVidia instead of an ATI or whatever other card manufacturer the developer was in bed with. "Tough luck," they say, "but there's 'known issues' with your card. Sure, they're 'known', and have been AT LEAST since we put together the readme, but we didn't do a damn thing about 'em. Enjoy, clocksuckers*!"
BTW, that means people with sucky CPU clock speed. Not people who perform fellatio on Cogsworth cosplayers. Like Tim here.


PC Games need demos. They don't have to be great -- in this marketplace of wildly differing system setups, PC gamers just need to be reassure that the damn thing will run. There are more than enough video reviews, previews, and DE-views (don't ask) for us to find out what the game is really like. We'd just like to be sure we can play it before we pay you.

*Sigh* But in the end, these are BioWare's own forums, doubtless infested with fanboys of varying levels of rabidity. I doubt they'd espouse the same views on demos if the were burned by an undemoed, misleadingly sys-req'd game from..., well whoever's the opposite of Bioware. VUGames? They suck pretty bad. Point made.