Street Fighter x Tekken - CAPCOM! My rage, have all of it.

So Street Fighter x Tekken is finally just a few days away(2 days if you are in the states) from being released, so a few will have it by now. This is cool, i've got mine pre-ordered, was feeling pretty damn good with myself, ready to get back into the fighting game community, then suddenly it happened. The fantastic guys over at Destructoid published an article on the game, specifically for the 360 version, showing that not only was the alternate costumes already on the disk, the 12 DLC characters set to be released as part of the full Vita title are there too, and by that i mean the character models, prologues and endings. This drove me mad.

Now to clarify, the characters are Sakura, Blanka, Elena, Guy, Cody & Dudley(capcom side) and Lei, Christie, Jack, Brian, Lars & Alisia on the Tekken side, plus, the biggest kick in the teeth, Megaman and Pacman are on the disk too. Now, being a 360 owner, i always knew i was getting the worst deal for it, but to know that somewhere down the line, capcom where going to release megaman and pacman to us as well just made me want to rage. Sure, ok, they have yet to tell us if the characters will be paid DLC or not, but that's not the point. The fact of the matter is that the game has these characters, to whatever extent ALREADY ON THE DISK. If they are on the disk, i don't give a toss what kind of deal and money sony have given you, give us megaman and pacman for free, with the game at launch. The other 12? Well yeah, that's also an issue. The Vita will get them normally. Really? I mean, giving a handheld version of this game, which i might add, will never be used for competitive play, all these characters before the home console editions? and no less, for free? That is a sign that tells me capcom are just out to steal our money, and i'm not having that. They are going to have to offer these to me cheap or for free to get me convinced this will work. But chances are, everyone who is picking this game up and wants to get into it fully, will buy these characters. Heck, i want Sakura so i can get my dream combo of Sakura and Asuka into the frey, but i'm not more inclined to head to gamestation and cancel my order, and telling them why at the same time.

Mind you, this shouldn't even come as a surprise to us. Bioware/EA just did something as stupid as this with Mass Effect 3. If you buy the Collectors edition, you get the "From Ashes" DLC free with it. DLC which, i might add, had dialogue and data in the original data-mined beta xbox had leaked back in october-ish last year. This "Day 1" DLC has apparently been made after the game went gold, so why is this data on the disk already? And why can't you offer it to us for free much like you did to all new copies of Dragon Age for Shale, or Mass Effect 2 and Zaeed/Cerberus Network? I want to shout EA as loud as i can, but i may wake someone up, but you get the idea. We're constantly getting screwed around with thanks to this DLC system now in place. What happened to the days where we could get a full package, at the launch of a game, and be extremely happy with it, no problems whatsoever?

I can only think of two games worthy of being called "full packages" at the moment, and they are The Witcher 2 & Twisted Metal(PS3). The guys who made the new incarnation of Twisted Metal decided they wanted the game to be complete on launch, with no consideration for DLC. This is FANTASTIC. I'd buy the game to support them just for that mindset. A mindset i miss dearly. CDprojekt decided to release all DLC for The Witcher 2 as free updates, and heck, even the stuff being added to the 360 version is being included for free for the PC as just as regular update. THESE are the people we need in the gaming market at the moment, not money grubbing whores like Capcom and EA, who are out to use their franchise names to make a pretty penny over things we should get for free.

If you want to use the DLC market for stuff that is properly new and not even considered at Day 1, awesome, that's fine. You want to have costume packs or purely cosmetic extras as DLC? that's fine too, as they change nothing. But, especially with a fighting game, 12 characters which aren't included at launch, and have a decent amount of data on the game disk straight off is unacceptable, and i for one, am at wits end with it.

For those interested. Here is the Destructoid post which shows you the stuff that was leaked.