Discussing Season Passes and the kickoff of 2016


For this week’s cast, this is the first one that was recorded in 2016 and I welcomed back Tim Wetzel from A Paladin Without A Crusade to continue our talk from last time, with a focus on season passes.

Season Passes

We started with catching up and I asked Tim about what he’s looking forward to in 2016. Somehow we got on the topic of Blizzard and Starcraft 2, which led to talking about RTS design and how Blizzard has been changing its approach to development and post release support. We also talked about E-Sports play and what Blizzard has done to try and balance the game’s design between E-Sports play and general play.

Talking about games we’ve played, I spoke about Hand of Fate and Undertale; two games I bought from the last Steam sale. Hand of Fate has been a surprise hit for me and I’ll have my review up soon along with Undertale. Tim has been playing the Talos Principle which was one of my favorite games of 2014. That led into talking about the puzzle design and Tim’s thoughts on it and the Swapper. We also talked about the game Oil Blue, which was the precursor to Cook Serve Delicious from the same developer.

For our major topic, we talked about season passes and their implementation and use among developers. Tim and I talked about our thoughts on the marketing strategy and the problems that arise when developers try to sell unknown content to consumers. We talked about examples like Arkham Origins, Star Wars Battlefront and even XCOM 2, which has also been met with some push back from consumers.