Seriously, I went out of my way to question whether or not the Sony hating is justified but for fuck’s sake. According to Dan Hsu on EGM Live, the official EGM podcast, PS3 titles will offer awards for fulfilling certain objectives within them. This fantastic innovation will be called…Entitlements.
Can anyone even defend this if it’s true? I saw them unveil the motion sensitive controller with a PS3 guide button but this is just ridiculously fucking brazen. Stories abound of people becoming addicted to Xbox 360 Achievements to the point where they’ll play shite for easy points so it’s a proven concept but please Sony, just come up with some of your own ideas to at least try to make it look like you’re not ripping off everyone. Even Stuff magazine, who have a hard-on for anything shiny and brandishing a Sony logo, called the PS3 “me too, through and through” in their latest issue.
I’m tempted to rescind my comments from a couple of days ago that we should give them the benefit of the doubt if they’re going to keep doing this. Is there an original idea in that place?
yea to be honest i have heard that sony actually want to be microsoft! maybe msoft may let them maybe all it will take if sony ask nicely!
Personally I don’t buy it. Entitlements doesn’t fit in any achievements-esque context. What’s the angle? “Oh, you’ve just played through these shitty launch titles for over 20 hours a piece, so now you’re ENTITLED to 400 of our shiny points, you lucky little scamp you?”
No, it doesn’t feel right. Milestones, maybe. I like “milestones” more than “achievements”, it’s a slightly more formal register. A bit more class. “Achievements” is so obvious, so bourgeoisie.
If I was going to try and defend it, i’d argue that the feature was so eetsy bittsy irrelevant that it would be like your friend sneezing, then you sneezing, then him accusing you of only sneezing because he did it first. But, like you say, people actually buy tat for easy points, so it’s obviously important to someone, somewhere.
It’s not really like sneezing since that’s a normal function. If we were saying that Sony copied them because their system outputs in high definition then yeah, but this was something new and fairly unprecedented that they thought up as something to attract people to their new system, and it seems to have worked.
I agree on the semantics of “entitlements” though, which makes me inclined to believe that this might be bullshit. Even if “achievements” isn’t the perfect term, you’ve achieved something and get your reward. In this situation it’s a few points but for ages we’ve been rewarded for our achievements in games with new cars, maps, etc. You’re not “entitled” to them per se because, hey: it’s only a game. Not to mention that “entitlement” is a little too close to “achievement” for comfort.
Besides, Microsoft’s legal ninjas would be all over it. When they have patents for things as frivolous as being able to spectate on an online game when you’re in another country to the participants (seriously, they have that one) I’d bet that the achievement system was patented years ago. And would it even work on a less centralised network like what Sony are pushing?
I won’t have you picking holes in my superb analogies >:( It IS like sneezing, as that is where Microsoft’s greatest ability lies: being able to make subtle new additions to stuff and make it seem like they’ve been there all along! Like sneezes!
Whilst most of the people I know, outside of the internet, are intellectually challenged by a pile of hay, they can all agree that their lives have been both enriched and enhanced by achivement points. One of them has even gone as far as to say that he won’t play a PS2 game ever again because it doesn’t HAVE achievement points.
These people are, of course, the very worst examples of the human race, but they all love spending a lot of cash on video games. Sony is buggered whatever which way it tries to spin the situation. Implement a similar system and people will moan that they’re stealing, or neglect to implement it and have people, like my friends, refuse to buy into their console on the grounds that it’s missing something as mundane as achivement points.