Slashdot Mirror
BioWare Has Neverwinter Publisher
Urthpaw writes: "BioWare (maker of the Baldur's Gate series of games, among others)'s D&D-based 3D, multiplayer uber-RPG, Neverwinter Nights, who's future has been recently cast into doubt by some legal trouble will be released, after all. It is currently scheduled for "Early 2002" release, on Linux, MacOS, and Windows. The press release is here."
So far every "commercial" game I've tried on Linux has required some obscure or non default
library and/or X windows extension module to be loaded before it'll even give you the time of
day. In fact the situation is worse than Windows IMO. Game designers seem to assume that can can happily use all those junk libraries shipped by
RedHat and it'll work on any dist. Unsurprisingly
this is not the case. I've yet to get a single mainstream game to run on my Slackware dist without having to spend half a day poking around
the net downloading libCoolGraphics23.34.B and libDoAllThe3dForUsCosWe'reTooLazyToDoItOurselves. Ok , I'm being sarcastic but you get the point.
Its damn annoying.
Why is the dialog in these games always so embarrasingly crappy? Listening to strong American accents in a pseudo-medieval setting just doesn't do it for me...
...is in the wait time before one actually gets to play the game. Look at it from a solely time-oriented standpoint. Before, you had to wait for the Interplay logo to load, then the Bioware logo to load, and then the opening movie (which you can skip). NOW, on the other hand, you add in Infogrames' logo (and depending on if you live outside the US/Canada, the translators' logo as well).
This may seem like a whiny complaint, but it seems to me like this whole dispute came about because some people didn't have their hands far enough in the cookie jar. I sincerely dread to watch this trend continue, when eventually it takes longer to start playing the game than it does to actually play it and all because some corporate execs wanted to latch onto the "next big thing". Plus, this could wind up affecting "business" software, too. What if the next version of Windows forced you to watch a thirty-second MPEG showing the MS logo fading onto the screen? Not good.
I'm not saying that developers shouldn't get credit; not at all. In fact, I like to see my favorite groups get the recognition they deserve (eg. BioWare, Blizzard, Sonic Team, KCEJ, etc.). But I'd imagine that there could be some way to let everyone be equally displayed without wasting the player's time. It's eventually going to get ridiculous, and I don't want to see that happen. Just my two cents.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
Exactly, man, you grok.
The only certainty is entropy.