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Tomb Raider Delays Worry Eidos
Thanks to several readers for pointing to a Yahoo/Reuters report discussing the continued delays to Lara Croft: The Angel Of Darkness, the latest in Eidos Interactive's Tomb Raider series. As the article mentions, "Already delayed twice, 'Lara Croft: The Angel of Darkness' is slotted for a release on June 20th. But that's looking less likely.. the game has to be in stores by June 30th in order for the company to recognize sales [estimated to be 1.5 to 2.5 million units] for its current financial year." With rumors of a delay into July for another long-awaited title, Republic: The Revolution, Eidos definitely has cause for financial concern. But of course, gamers will probably forgive and forget if both of these titles turn out well, even after so many delays.
About perfect?!?!? That is really very funny. Maybe you bought Half-Life this weekend at Best Buy but Half-Life was FAR FAR from perfect. I managed to install it (yes the installer mostly worked.) then proceeded to D/L a 5MB patch. A week later the patch had swelled to 26 MB and is CURRENTLY 82 MB!! A game requiring an 82 MB patch is not "perfect"
That 82MB patch includes at least 3 mods (TFC, DMC, Ricochet?), and some updated models/content for the base game. It's not even close to 82MB of bug fixes.
The biggest problems with the initial release were:
1) The uninstaller, which whiped out the entire folder the game was installed to (default was Sierra\Half-life, it would whipe out the entire Sierra folder, even if other games were there, if you installed to C:\Half-Life and used the original uninstaller, you'd almost be just as well off if you had typed format c: in the command prompt). Very few people saw this bug, though, since they released a patch fairly quickly to address it (and iirc it was significantly smaller than 5 MB).
2) The networking code, which was mostly fixed within 2 months of release (that was the 5MB or 15 MB patch). Though they eventually completely replaced the networking code in a much later patch that also added DMC to the patch (TFC was sometime after the original networking fix, but long before the complete networking overhaul).
Basically, the 82MB patch gives you a completely different game if you're an online player, but has very little to do with bugs in the single-player game for which Half-life gets so much praise.
Basically, the size of the patch reflects how much Valve has added to the game, not how much work was required on the game. Most developers probably would've stopped support for Half-life around the 1.0.0.8 patch (the original release was 1.0.0.5, there was no public 1.0.0.7), which had given multiplayer capability on par with every other game out there, and left things like DMC, TFC, etc to the mod developers. Not to mention that a number of the later patches had to do with issues related to trying to stop people from using external cheats and internal exploits, mostly related to the mods, and most of which could've been fixed by external developers.
Also, each of the newer patches are released as a choice between two patches:
1) patch from any previous version, which basically includes everything to upgrade from a base install, but will patch any version released since then as well
2) patch from the previous version, which allows people that have kept up to date with their HL install to download what is almost always a significantly smaller patch.
bleh, whatever, I got a bit sick of the way Valve treated the multiplayer side of the game eventually, but overall I'd say they supported it a hell of a lot better than most other developers ever would, and that the initial product was nearly perfect, in that the single player worked very well for most people, and the multiplayer code only need 2 minor revisions to work well for most people (which is saying a lot since most multiplayer code can only hope to work well for most people).
-PainKilleR-[CE]
Lara Storms Store Shelves This Weekend!
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.