Thought Popped in my Head Pre-ordering Resident Evil 2

How ridiculous are video game clothes these days? No, I'm not regarding Sora's zippers or fucking female armor, but the costing of these fake clothes for your fake characters that you paid real money for. Resident Evil 2 is around the bend here s we're just about nine days away; the Deluxe Edition of this game three outfits for Claire (maybe we should get onto female armor), two for Leon, and a pistol modeled after the series' villain's handgun. Is this worth the extra ten bucks which then makes the price 69.99? Not to this guy.

Though, among the three for Claire is an outfit that her original intended character, Elz Walker, was wearing in the original Resident Evil sequel before the project was scrapped and reworked; this sequel has been labeled Resident Evil 1.5 as it was shown to the masses in many forms so for those of us old enough we remember what this outfit looked like from the rarely seen trailers of the day or in any of the numerous video game magazines of the time.

To tug on nostalgia is a tactic incited often. It doesn't end there, though, as the biggest factor for the Deluxe Edition may lie in the Retro Soundtrack Swap which isn't only a soundtrack swap but it'll also alter some sounds to that of the original game, too! Ah! Nostalgia you fucking bitch. The first time I'd witnessed the original game was in a dark room with a horribly lit EGM magazine that had a guide for the beginning hours of the game, as I tried to navigate my older brother beyond the utterly terrifying Licker players initially meet; this was pants-pissing reaction was different from the original Resident Evi's experience where my brother decided it was a grand idea to call a zombie a "bastard" in front of our mother as she was on the phone with our grandmother.

Fucking brilliant.

Here we are, though, 21 years later as much I'm looking to capture lightning in the bottle I can't justify to my wallet nor myself that fake clothes are worth the money, enticing as the soundtrack may be it is highly outnumbered and sadly even listed as the last bullet point on this premium package. The era of nickel and diming over microtransactions or incentivizing an extra cost for what is already built into the game but locked for those only seeking to overpay, initial and apparent or not, must come to an end.

10$ for all that seems totally fine, I dunno.

Agreed, a case can be made for the value(or lack of) of stuff like this...but this one is really mild by modern standards.

Sounds like a lot of bullshit for $10, but if someone wants to put their money into a few cosmetics, that’s not going to bother me too much.

My only real concern is the nickel and dime economy that popped-up in Gears of War 3 and Destiny 2, where you have 1,000 palette swaps on sale instead of just making them options.

Destiny 2 went one step further down the bullshit stairs and provided the option to buy consumable palette swaps.

Buying this stuff encourages the creation of more of this stuff for sale and discourages something as simple as changed RGB values as a bulit-in option.

I’m not going to get up in arms if someone buys this stuff, I just find it slightly unnerving.

I preordered the regular version of RE2 cause I wanna support the series being good again, plus I really loved the demo.

I almost never preorder now, but regardless I've always thought paying real money for alternate outfits in games has been kinda pointless.

@panfoot: This is definitely not the worst offense but one that offered the most conflict for me as I love this series, I think the RE 1.5 outfit really offers enough intrigue to have have what we never got.

@nutter Gears 4 still shows through to this day with the store being riddled with the same character rendered ten different ways. It is painful to see the franchise go this route after years of having campaign characters be the options, and that worked, and there was beauty in simplicity that electric or luchador skins can't offer.

@efesell I can't wholly agree but I can't completely disagree as the soundtrack swap truly is a cool concept to bring to remakes such as these. To have a deluxe edition of a remake, though, is quite odd to me.

@theflamingo352: I'm in my last year of GCU so against the policy I've had for years of no preorders or wait for deals I've got to swipe what I can while I can.

I fully acknowledge that I'm a sucker for pre-ordering the deluxe edition, or really pre-ordering in general. I am absolutely the kind of nostalgic mark who willfully pays an extra $10 for an Elza Walker costume and classic soundtrack. That said, in my defense it was also right before Amazon got rid of their flat "20% off pre-orders" so I still technically got the game for $60. Sure I could've gotten it for $50 if I had just picked the regular edition, but details schmetails.

I'm doing much better at resisting the similar deluxe edition for Devil May Cry 5. While I'm sure the mega buster arm for Nero will be "neat" and the idea of watching the actual live-action motion capture for cutscenes is fun, I don't know if it's an extra $10 fun.

I pre ordered the base edition partially because i was going to buy it anyway, partially because i'd get a little bonus for pre ordering, but mostly because i want Capcom to keep making good games, and throwing money at them early is kind of the best i can do to make that happen.
It's expensive and the smart thing to do would be to wait for a price drop, but as i said, i approve of the path Capcom is currently on and want it to continue.
I won't however be getting the Deluxe costume stuff, i always play through a game with default costumes the first time around, and it'll be years before i potentially replay this game so i just wouldn't be using them.
Exception recently was Leanne in Resonance of Fate, because her alternate costume is a bit more casual.

@mrcropes: In Gears 4, I’ve bought all the characters I want by scraping things I don’t care about (no money spent). I feel like real money in that game is a shortcut. The only place it feels a little filthy to me is in how bad the scrapping mechanics are (too many clicks).

If I recall correctly, Gears 3 was the one that added a million weapon skins that I THINK you could only buy with real world money.

So I actually think Gears got a little better about that, but it’s still a bummer to see character models from the campaign that can be purchased for real world money. I get it if the developers give you those skins, or make them unlockable via gameplay, AND THEN charge for wholly new skins that were created just for purchase.

I get that everyone’s sensitivity to monetization schemes will be different, though...

I came in here expecting the thought to be "why did I pre-order something?"

@nnickers: There is that as well. I went years without doing this but Best Buy's GCU shifted that slightly. I'm not preordering everything I want to play but those definite day ones why not? There is an argument against preorders, but let's save that for another day!

@nutter I feel my thing against Gears 4 is how crates earned are not separated whatsoever from those you can purchase, you have two you've earned but you can buy this amount too kind of thing. You're not wrong at how horrible that scrapping system is, it isn't very user friendly at all. I'm really just grumpy gamer that has given up on almost any and all DLC, I think my last investment in such was Fallout 3 add-ons. There's reasons for that but I sadly don't have the time to dive so in depth on that thought process. You're right, all of us see the monetization differently.

@mrcropes: Yeah, I sparingly go for DLC. I got it for Spider-man, which was fine. It was on sale and a nice excuse to swing around some more.

The last truly great DLC I can recall are the two major Witcher 3 expansions. Those were better than most games released that year.

With the Gears stuff, if it didn’t feel like MAYBE scrapping was made painful to encourage just spending money instead, I think I’d feel better.

I haven't seen them, but after getting burnt by RE Revelations' "stripper cowgirl" and "barely legal bunny street ninja," I always check Capcom costumes before I buy anyway.

As someone who will hop into bed with alternate costumes, no questions asked cause I am a SLUT for them, I'm fine with paying extra. People worked on them, artists designed them, and while programming them in probably isn't a TON of work, I think charging a bit isn't the worst idea.