Jim Sterling did an episode on this today. Personally two things I hate in games are useless padding, and games not coming out as completed products. Warner Brothers is combining the two in an effort to  milk as much money from Shadow of War customers as possible. 

There are a lot of games that could be half the length and twice as fun, but certain developers tend to think they absolutely must have an 80 hour game. So what do they do? They give the player lots of useless chores to do, or add a thousand cutscenes, or make the player spend most of their time traveling. A few good examples of this: Windwaker for GameCube took forever sailing around the world. Dragon Quest VII has grinding and insanely long cutscenes that serve no purpose. Fighting the Condemned three times in Skyward Sword. 

There are a lot of games these days that don't come out as completed products. I don't mind DLC if it's either free, or adds to an already complete game, ala the Witcher III. But when you've got  paid DLC coming out just a month or two after your game comes out, it's obvious that developers cut content from the completed game, so they could make money on selling you the missing parts later. Injustice 2 did this pretty well, and so did Mass Effect 2. 

Anyway Warner Brothers has taken it a step further. They're including DLC for an incomplete game, useless padding, and microtransaction to help skip over the useless padding. So you can either play Shadow of War as a grindfest, with things intentionally designed to take way too long, or you can pay for random lootboxes that speed up the game, at the expense of emtpying your wallet further. 

I hope everyone boycotts this game, and I've already taken it off my buy list for the winter. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TXWdyrqFP8 Edit: Mods could you make this playable in the thread? I'm not sure how to do it myself. 

People talk big buy don't act. You think the 20 people who boycott this game will matter?

yeh, I decided about 2 weeks ago i is no longer going to buy this game because of the way they are implementing this, the game is full price... there is no reason to do this.

So, are the microtransactions going to be for the single player? Are they going to ban mods, then? If I make a free mod that does the exact same thing as their microtransactions, they are going to see it as competition (or even PIRACY). How is that going to work. This is an idea destined to fail.

The bolded part is logically incorrect.  It could be cut content but it could just as easily be content that was planned to be separate from the start.  You can't make that assumption from the timing alone.

In fact, planning out additional content makes a lot more sense than cutting content to re-add later, as that could really mess up the flow of the game, not to mention the programming aspect.  

The most logical way to handle it would be to put your writers and artists working on DLC when their part is done with the main game.  That would be an efficient use of resources.  Then you move other members of the team over as they become available.  

Edit:  That, and I have no faith at all in Jim Sterling's opinions about anything.

Angry Joe still does gaming videos? Been ages since I checked out his channel......I swear at some point he become super boring and lazy with his content

@OP, shit sucks....but this game will probably do quite well, and then we'll se more of this in other games. Yay

Good idea. I might just pirate the entire game on PC, so I can mod the bad parts out of it. 

From a comment on youtube: 'But Jim, you forgot the best part of it all! When playing ranked multiplayer, you lose the orcs that die, and there are gonna be rewards for high ranking!

You know what that means? Yes, is the same business model of your FREE TO PLAY mobile game, that applauds you for cheating their game with real money and slowly kills the bonus that got you first place so you have to buy MORE to keep staying here.'

Skip, wait three years until crazy sales with everything included (or just super cheap...), play it then.

...though I honestly ignore 99% AAA releases, not worth your time or money. JS's video was good though.

I'm talking about on disk DLC here. It's already mostly in the game in hidden files and folders. You just pay to unlock it as "DLC" a month or two later. 

This is the future of AAA gaming, folks.

Games-as-a-service bullshit is profoundly insidious. One day it will entrench its roots so firmly that soon, even single-player games will require a constant connection to an online server.

We're letting them get away with it, and more and more studios are turning to this. Activision, EA, Valve, Rockstar, Ubisoft, Warner Bros....they're all moving in the same direction.