So I know I'm like five years late to the party, but I finally started playing Splinter Cell Blacklist. I got the deluxe edition in a Humble Bundle and like most special editions it comes with some special in game content. But while most special edition content contains weapons or gear better than what you start with but not as good as what you will eventually receive, the weapons in the deluxe edition of this game are the second best weapon of each type in the game. Being a Ubisoft title the game also supports Uplay and I had a couple hundred points saved up so I unlocked the special armor and the $200,000 worth of currency. So first mission of the game I had essentially the best armor in the game, the second best pistol and assault rifle each fully upgraded, and the crossbow for non-lethal takedowns.

To put in perspective how unbalanced this made the game, the wave based survival side missions are often cited as being quite difficult for a single player but I made it through 10 waves with only the final couple giving me any sort of issue. Basically these upgrades make Sam unstoppable regardless of how you want to play, especially because you don't need to spend your in game currency on weapons and armor. So by the halfway mark I had fully upgraded the plane, fully upgraded my gloves (the one piece of armor the Uplay stuff doesn't give you a great version of), and nearly fully upgraded my goggles. Plus I had purchased and fully upgraded the best pistol and assault rifle.

So is it just me or does all of Ubisoft's bonus content make this game something of a joke and completely ruin the progression system?

Also, yes I know I could just ignore all the freebies if I wanted but that just seems dumb to me.

Yea it's a been a problem for awhile with pre-order bonus items. I did choose to ignore the freebies because otherwise it ruins the fun of getting new things, and especially considering Blacklist is quite a good game I didn't want to ruin it for myself.

That being said Bioware is the biggest offender in this regard, they basically kill their games with things like the Black Emporium giving the best weapon schematics in the entire game. It's even worse in RPG's than it is in a game like Splinter Cell as well.

@ivdamke: While I haven't played Dragon Age 3 yet I can't say I've had that issue with any of Bioware's other titles. I'm almost positive that I have the Black Emporium but I don't recall it unbalancing that game for me. And the preorder stuff/dlc in Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 were additional missions and some good but not game breakingly powerful weapons. To be honest the only other game I can think of where the various preorder bonuses and dlc really killed the balance was Saint's Row The Third. I got the GOTY edition that included all of everything released for the game which included a super tank that let me beat pretty much every mission without issue, but Saint's Row is a series about absurd and over the top abilities so I thought it worked for that game. While the various bonuses and DLC oftentimes slightly alter the game balance it is pretty rare I think for them to completely ruin the entire progression system of a game like they do in Blacklist.

From what I remember it was pretty good armor, but on the flip side I guess you don't have to use it? Think of it like the difficulty slider on a game - at any point you can switch over to Easy and breeze through the levels, but thats up to you whether you want to experience it like that or not. You can use the extra unlocks if you want, and it will make the earlier parts of the game a lot easier, or you can just use the natural game progression and experience the difficulty spike up organically.

All that said I don't remember Blacklist being an especially difficult game since you get just SO many options over the AI.

I never use pre-order bonus type things in any game ever. Publishers and developers are actually really stupid with that type of stuff. It's not an incentive, it's just another reason not to pre-order because you don't want your game to be piss easy. And if those things don't make it easy, they spoil the fun of discovering new things. In BL2 for example, they make the intro sequence ridiculously easy, but they'll soon fall out of usefulness after that. But that still means the weapons you discover up to that point are pointless, and that's really too bad.

It makes it so dumb, because they know unlocking things is part of the fun. So they're essentially saying: pre-order now, for less fun!

Yeah it really sucks. I ended up liking Blacklist a fair bit, but that's just because I made it into a challenge run instead. I don't put a lot of stock into unlocking things as my carrot, I just want to have fun killing some guards. So I ended up playing my first playthough of the game as knife only, hardest difficulty. Basically nullifying any progression whatsoever except story, but at least it made the stealth engaging. Still not very hard as far as stealth games go though.

If you actually want to have fun using all the cool gadgets, you might be shit out of luck because it makes the game pretty bad.

The Chaos Theory armor gets outclassed by the endgame armor included with the base game, for what that's worth, in terms of use for the stealth gameplay.

I fucking love Blacklist. They took the few things Conviction did right and married them to everything that the first three games did great.