Rick

@Flesseck I love COD and play it every year from Nov to Aug pretty much non-stop and I'm not bored yet. The gameplay is what brings me (and millions of other gamers) back every year. Don't try to shit on it just because it's not your thing. I also love Gears and will be grinding away in Horde 2.0 for years to come (just like I did with Gears 2).

Believe it or not, there are people like me who enjoy these games and have careers that give us the money to spend towards them if we so choose.

You can easily find footage of Gears 3's Blood Drive on YouTube (and its visuals have been very nicely updated). Hopefully, it's in the first DLC in November because it was one of my favorite Gears maps.

As for holding back and selling them later, it's douchey, yes. However, on Gears 2 Epic put out a ton of maps post-launch and in the end there were something like 29 maps in total to play on. They're including extra campaign stuff this time (not deleted scenes) in addition to multiplayer maps, so I'm not all that miffed I guess.

@US 447 Just for the sake of say, facts, every feature announced so far (in handy list form all over the internet) for COD Elite will be free. Paid features are 100% optional and have also not been announced yet (as they will tie directly into MW3 and competitions/tournaments). Just fyi. Nice rant, though.

@Slomoshun

Oh man, you certainly live in a fantasyland, dude. Left over code and placeholder images for maps that weren't finished in time for Gold Master of the original game disc doesn't equal finished maps being on there, too. I'll just stop here because I'm obviously dealing with an amateur who doesn't know jack shit about web video or the way developers create DLC. Done.

@Slomoshun

Almost forgot...

Black Ops DLC hasn't been included on the disc waiting to be unlocked. Not sure where you're coming from with that (first time I've ever seen anyone claim it was the case with this game). Both DLC packs so far have been several hundred mb and would never have fit on the disc, especially the Xbox version.

Now, as for this trend in other games, I'm in agreement with you. It's stupid. EA is especially bad about doling out tiny, mediocre content they claim is new, but is in fact just unlocks for things that either were on the disc and locked or things that should have been on the disc and unlocked from the start. Look at how terribly Bad Company 2 was supported with fake "map packs" that were just mode unlocks. That was a horrible joke to pull on gamers.

@Slomoshun

"When I can take any single clip from Black Ops, put it in After Effects and add a very small Hue/Saturation effect and have it come out looking way better there's something to be said."

So, you add what you say is a "very small amount" of Hue/Sat and you think that equals...what exactly? And you're claiming that by adding this "very small amount" that in turn means that Black Ops is "borderline greyscale".

Let's start at the beginning... What's your source footage? Something downloaded off Youtube? Something that went from a capture card hooked up to a tv/pc (let's assume here that you did the capture yourself and didn't get the footage from a third party that may have done who knows what along their own pipeline) to Final Cut or AE then exported to what codec in Quicktime or some other wrapper then possibly run through Compressor or Squeeze or some other compression app and was viewed on multiple monitors to allow for adjustment to some happy medium for all factors involved? (Run-on, I know, but it makes a point here.) You sound pretty confident, so you must also be running some sort of color management system along your entire pipeline that guarantees you're getting reliable matches, right? And back to codecs, are you running everything along the entire pipeline (from ingest to final format before distro) in some sort of higher end option like Pro-Res 444 or something else?

The point I'm making is that there are a lot of factors in the how/why videos end up looking the way they do online. You claim expertise in this area, so you know this. If you think it was all so close to greyscale, you need to get your vision checked or start fiddling with your screen settings.

@docalien @Mr Esc is the namesarcasm is my

Fair enough. Rant mode off...for now. : )

@ColorblindMonk Which anyone with a job can afford. It's the same cost as a single lunch for 2 people, the same cost as 3 or 4 beers at a bar, the same cost as a small bag of groceries. If you're poor enough to have to worry about paying $15 for a map pack, you probably should cancel your internet, cable, cell phone, cell phone data/text plan, etc as well since you're living in poverty as it is and you need to learn how to get your priorities straight and live like a halfway sensible adult in society who knows how to handle money.

@Slomoshun I work as an animator for a design company, and I don't see a whole lot of heavy color correction going on here. Different video codecs alter color & contrast, especially h.264, which has a well-known bug that washes out colors when rendered (there's an alternative x264 codec that fixes that bug in Quicktime). I've been annoyed for a long time when seeing game trailers that are all washed out when I know the actual game doesn't look anything like that. Black Ops is certainly not dull in the color dept. In fact, Treyarch has a pretty firm grasp on color use throughout their maps that is interesting and bold. Maybe you just need to adjust your tv settings.

@baby sea tuna Yeah, I think the something something is "Underperforming tryhard competitor".