Over the past few weeks I’ve seen a set of articles go up alongside a slew of Twitter comments that all basically said, “Don’t buy games at launch. There’s no good reason to or here’s a few reasons why you shouldn’t”. While I think that’s perfectly understandable and there are more than a lot of reasons to not purchase video games on launch day (especially triple A releases), I still hold that there are a few good reasons to get them on day one too.
This past week a few new games have come out that I was really interested in: Dragon Age Inquisition, Far Cry 4, and Hatsune Miku Project Diva f 2nd. All of these games have been pretty great thus far but none of them are perfect, so why buy them at full price?
Part of the reason to do so is because I want so badly to be in on the new release internet hype. Lately I’ve been working six days a week and almost exclusively during the evenings so I don’t have much of a chance to hang out with the few friends in my area in person. With that being the case I’m on Twitter quite a lot and have met a bunch of new people there, and when a new cool game comes out that’s what they talk about. Now I wouldn’t say I’m getting these games out of some sense of peer pressure. If I wasn’t going to buy it anyway this wouldn’t be enough to change my mind, but it’s really neat to be playing a game and talking about it when everyone else is too. It gives me an easy to talk about games with said people and we can all share tips, tricks, experiences, and jokes.
There hasn’t been much talk about Far Cry 4 from who I follow but Dragon Age seems to be the talk of the town still and I’ve been really happy to be a part of that. Even before it released the excitement brought up some new opinions of Dragon Age 2 and its better parts. Being a fan of DA2 back when it came out I was very interested to discuss it myself. After the midnight release of Inquisition everyone was immediately going on about the new and extensive character creation options. Soon after the comments changed to thoughts on the huge environments, faster combat system (for those who didn’t play DA2) and some of the side quests. Even with the new Project Diva game that only appeals to a small intersection of Vocaloid and rhythm game enthusiasts got some small conversation out of someone who had been following me for a while now but never spoken to me before. I want to keep up with what’s current and if it’s a game I was going to buy already I don’t mind spending the extra money to be able to have some nice conversations with people I like and even people I don’t know.
The other reason I tend to purchase games at launch is to always be on the bleeding edge of technology. I keep my desktop computer as up-to-date as possible so I can always try to play at the highest settings and consequently I want to see the newest gaming tech performing at its best. I don’t mean just photorealistic graphics either even though seeing games get closer and closer to climbing out of the uncanny valley is interesting in and of itself. It’s also about smoother animations, new art styles that no one’s tried, seeing new stories brought to life by all the background processes running at once, and new systems. I can always go back to some older games that I haven’t played before and see things that are new to me but there’s always the desire to check out what literally could not be done before. Games still have a long way to go in every respect and I want to be there at the forefront for as long as I reasonably can be.
I know that these aren’t reasons why everyone should go out and get new games at the first possible moment all the time, but for my specific life situation where I’ve got a good bit of money and enough time, I’m happy to always be at the front of the line.
EMPTY SKYBOX 