A post on reddit has cast some light on an issue that many people may have otherwise been unaware of.
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12: The Masters was released as a full $40 PC title on Tuesday. The game, however, is marred with hidden charges and missing features. The single-player modes are apparently uncannily similar to Tiger Woods Online, a free-to-play game released two years ago and there are some notable discrepancies between the advertised features and the in-game reality, as a review at truepcgaming.com reveals.
Before we get into the meat of the review, the issue of advertised features by EA need to be addressed first. The following is taken directly from EAs main Tiger Woods 12 page:
Some of the new features:
Masters Moments Tiger at the Masters The Caddie Experience All New Career Mode New Players New Championship Courses
After 7 hours of gameplay, I have yet to see a caddie. After a doing a little research by visiting various forums and watching YouTube clips, I finally found out the caddie feature is only available in the console versions of the game. As you can read for yourself, there is no distinction listed between PC and console platforms.
The rest of the review makes for equally doleful reading; broken distance projection, incorrect stats and significant graphical downgrades compared with the previous versions do nothing to make up for the game's shortcomings.
In an additional twist, the multiplayer component of the game is a three-month subscription to Tiger Woods Online, where upgrades are only attainable via microtransaction.
While the annoying issues surrounding a golf game may have nary an affect on the majority of us, the fact that EA would be so misleading and exploitative (at worst) or careless (at best) of a new PC release is alarming - especially at a time when you might imagine they'd be putting every effort toward shoring up consumer trust.
