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Warcraft III Gone Gold
0x00 writes "Shacknews seems to be the first to report that Warcraft III has gone gold. The press release is here. Blizzard have announced that the game will be available July 3rd around the world - just in time for my mid-year University break (great timing!)." Update: 06/13 15:16 GMT by M : Please consider the fact that Blizzard is suing people who write software to interoperate with theirs when deciding whether you want to purchase this game.
that no matter what it is that we're protesting at the moment, that it doesn't really matter because we're not serious about the boycotts.
Say what you like about Blizzard, they make some pretty damn good games.
I have been pwned because my
Who cares if they're suing people. I'm sorry, just because they don't exactly follow the mores of the Slashdot Community, doesn't make them evil. Certain things are forgivable when you makes games as well as they do.
Some people just like to have a cause.
It's still objective. He didn't say: ...."
...."
"No one should buy this game because Blizzard X
Nor did he say:
"Everyone should buy this game because Blizzard X
All he asked was that you keep it in mind when making your own decision. Geez, even the whining is sub-par on slashdot...
Justin Dubs
...in that regard. Games are not so important to me to sacrifice my principles over them.
If it doesn't run on Linux, I'm not terribly interested in buying it. If a company's going to pull the stunts Blizzard has went at lengths to do, I'm definitely not going to buy it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
2. it's questionable just how much they apply to traditional news outlets. Most newspapers and TV news shows are quite free with the editorializing, and usually far less honestly than above. And besides,
3. No specific course of action is advised by the comment. It's just an objective piece of information: a reminder that Blizzard is currently suing the authors of bnetd. Insofar as any product announcement implies an imperative to go out and buy the product (what, you think it's world news?) they are simply providing more information about the product - that the company making it is engaged in a lawsuit against open source developers.
Blizzard is exercising its right to not allow anybody except for Blizzard to use the gaming technology that it built! Panic, panic, boycott, boycott!
I think Michael is forgetting one crucial bit of information -- BLIZZARD GAMES ARE NOT OPEN SOURCE. Blizzard built it, people play it; Blizzard has the legal right to choose who they allow to interact with their game at any level. Not to say that interop software would be a bad thing -- id Software and Valve have proven that a game or gaming engine's longevity is closely tied to how accessable it is to the modding community. But if Blizzard has no desire to venture down that path, so be it.
Blizzard makes good games, period. If you don't want to buy them, that's your beef. But don't try to turn this into an open-source crusade -- you're wrong, they're right, end of story. Deal with it.
There are so many posts about how "i am going to get even by pirating the game"...
guys (or gals), please do not sink yourself to that level. While we agree on the fact that Blizzard sueing bnet.d is questionable (okay, dead wrong and full of malicious intent), we also all know that copyright infringement is wrong. not necessarily as wrong as MS and BSA make it appear to be, but still wrong non-the-less. copying their software will not make things any better. in the end they will just come back with the statistic and say -- look, of COURSE we need to take these legal actions.
the future rests in each of our hands (gosh that sounds lame), that may seem to be insignificant at first, but i really believe that it's an important responsibility.
think it through -- i mean, it IS just a game you know.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I'm so turned off by the lawsuit against bnetd that I just can't bring myself to support Blizzard anymore.
Nows the time to make our feelings known by NOT making a purchase.
Sorry Blizzard, great looking game but I'm passing.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Please consider the fact that Blizzard is suing people who write software to interoperate with theirs when deciding whether you want to purchase this game.
Somehow I don't think that a game publisher needs to be held to quite the same interoperatibility standards as an operating systems publisher ... because it's a game. Odds are, no matter how much they sue or how inoperable they are, they're not going to push all other games out of the market.
Am I going to buy it? I'll wait for the reviews on the single player campaign. I never liked warcraft I or II multiplayer - it seemed to be the simple art of running exploding suicide troops at the enemy.
Which borders on unpatriotic these days, now that I think about it.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
Duping/hacking/cheating is an epidemic on battle.net. That's why a lot of people want an alternative. Developing an alternative was a lot of work but was done completely legally through standard reverse engineering as is often necessary for interoperability with undocumented interfaces.
Sorry, Blizzard's baseless copyright infringement suit does nothing to help the hack situation. I wish they would drop harrassment tactics against fans and attack the real cheaters and pirates instead.
Well if you read the CBDTPA you would realize it called for closed hardware, open source software way of dealing with this. MS read the open source software and ran like a dog.
Just go out and buy Neverwinter Nights (in a week or two when it hits stores) and forget all about WC3. If Blizzard's tactics don't appeal to you, support the competition instead! You get a great game, and that should make it a lot easier to let go of your pain and get on with your life.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
That's a nice little bogus viewpoint. Committing wrongs for free doesn't make them right... and would open up the door for companies funding neat little non-profits for mangling other companies. Hell, they're already willing to legally relocate to Bermuda to cut their taxes via some interesting financial manuevers...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Lets see here ..
Wolf 3d, Doom, Doom II, Duke Nukem, Quake, Quake II, Quake III, Half-life, Unreal Tournament, Return to Wolf, SoF, etc, etc, etc.
These lists can be made for almost any type of game-when something sells (FPS, RTS) people copy it, update it, and so forth. There really hasn't been any innovation in computer games in years, but that doesn't stop new games from being a lot of fun, nor old ones. I just can't stand it when people rant about gameplay being "old." Come up with a new idea yourself, see how easy it is.
Grr.
Colin Winters
And they probably didn't give out the information because, being in a program they couldn't control (without resorting to legal action like this), that would make their CD key checks potentially very accessible. I referred to this earlier, but let me explain it this way: you can't ask Blizzard to make an anti-piracy solution available to an open-source project (thereby giving a strong potential for that solution to be cracked), be told no, and then promptly continue on with something that ENSURES that piracy is possible. Imagine going into a store, demanding a 50% discount that the store can't afford, and then shoplifting (which the store really can't afford) when you're told "no." Would you do that in the physical world? Of course not - you understand that the store has a bottom-line to maintain and employees to pay. Why does that suddenly change in the software world? Blizzard doesn't want to knowingly risk piracy (i.e. their bottom line and paying employees) simply because someone would like to host their own servers.
Hmm, seems to me that spending $65 on the WarCraft 2 Graphics Upgrade Pack would be like buying an expensive gift for a way-too-spolied child. Let's think about this for a minute. A company offers a product, gives us a date for it, lists a ton of features. Sounds like a good deal. Until they start pushing the date back. Still no big deal. Then they start cutting features...like mad. Now if this was any other company, we'd all be panning their product and despising him, but for some reason everyone LOVES Blizzard for it
I read earlier in this list of posts "I don't think anyone would argue that Blizzard makes good games" (paraphrased, but something to that effect). I am standing up right here and preparing to argue it soundly. This is not a troll, it's a statement of belief. Warcraft 2 was a great game. Since that point, Starcraft, Diablo 2, and WarCraft 3 (based on my experiances with the beta) have been simply TERRIBLE games. Buggy, unbalanced, uninteresting, lacking strategic or tactical depth (in the cases of StarCraft and WC3), using cheap workarounds to fix fundimental game flaws (i.e. Hey, if we let them only select a limited # of units at once, noone can rush right? right?), and always ALWAYS falling far short of the grand feature-scapes originally planned for them. Why would I want to play StarCraft or WarCraft 3 when I could play larger, richer games with far more depth (ohh...say...Total Annihilation comes to mind).
Now, to be fair, these comments relate to WarCraft 3 only through my experiance with the beta version. I honestly do not know if the game has changed since then, and if it has my opinions might change as well. But here is what I saw. The game was very pretty, it looks quite nice. However, the game mechanic hasn't changed or evolved at all since WC2. Same extremely limited unit selection, same "rock-paper-scissors" unit balance that makes "strategy" equal to "Just build some of each and run at each other". The "Hero" units were unimpressive and seemed to only be more powerful normal units that could somehow use Town Portal. The "Unaligned NPCs" were just weak units you killed to get at some resources. Games were fast and pointless, the races were unbalanced at that point, there was no strategy at all as you could never have enough units to enact a given strategy.
Maybe TA has spoiled me. I'm used to massive 2000-unit battles where you actually USE all 9 unit hotkeys, feint and probe, battle across a massive map. Strategy and production were vital tools as you pushed forward to conquer territory. Admittedly, maybe such things aren't everyone's cup of tea. But I don't understand how the RTS genre has remained the exact same game since the original C+C. Many people have tried to innovate somewhat, but where's the evolution? Shouldn't we demand MORE instead of eating up what's only vaguely satisfactory??
Well, there are more, but that's 18 games right there that didn't bankrupt their creators by allowing people to run servers at a LAN party.
/. crowd, I don't think Blizzard is too happy about losing 90% of their sales (assuming WC3 gets pirated at 2/3'rds the rate of the Dynamix figures) so that Joe Slashdot can meet up with his friends in an empty room rather than in Battle.Net.)
Well, actually, Dynamix *did* go bankrupt, partly due to the fact that virtually no-one actually bought Tribes 1. Why? Because people didn't need CD checks to play online, so they just warez'd it and played.
I remember talking to one of the ex-Dynamix staff, and they were saying that the figures for pirated people playing through their master server vs legal copies was something like 15-to-1.
Also, quite a few titles in that list *do* have centralised key auth'ing systems. Half-Life has WONID's based off serials, Tribes 2 did, Quake 3 did, and MoH:AA did. I don't think you can seriously count Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, since they were pre-internet gaming.
So before you go "Hey, it's not going to bankrupt them", it does.
(and as a side note: I'm going against the flow and supporting Blizzard here. It doesn't matter if bnetd heals a dying swan and fixes every bug in the game, it still gets around CD protection.
While that might be fine for the "Any use of the DMCA is evil, even if it means shooting off our feet"