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EA To Publish for Valve
Primotech writes "It appears that Valve has secured EA as its new publisher. When the developer settled its lawsuit with Vivendi back in April, the company was left without a publisher to distribute boxed copies of its games. The company has tapped EA, which will publish and release Half-Life 2: Game of the Year Edition and Half-Life 2 for the Xbox sometime this year. From the article: 'EA is the worldwide leader in bringing best of breed games, for all platforms, to market...By combining EA's unparalleled operation structure and distribution channel with Valve's award-winning development teams and games community, we've established an awesome combination for delivering great products to console and PC gamers around the world.'"
Maybe EA will learn a few things about online implementation from Valve, rather than stick to this GameSpy travesty that haunts Battlefield 2 at the moment. Favorite servers, history, friends network...even though some of these don't work at all, they are features sorely missed in BF2.
Firstly, they need a publisher for the X-Box version (presumably the fact that they went with EA means that they couldnt or didnt want to self-publish this)
And secondly they need a publisher to get copies of things like expansions, mods (and also the eventual Half-Life 3) onto store shelves (not everyone is prepared/able to buy HL2 from Steam)
According to GameSpot, Valve is self-publishing the title. EA is only distributing the game (i.e. using their contacts to get their games into stores like Toys R Us and Target). That's it. Nothing to freak out about.
"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
Clone CD did it for me. It ignored Dameon Tools, but until I pulled Clone CD, it didn't work.
People who've poked through the battlefield 2 found the original interface menus. These had all the core features expected of a multiplayer game interface, as well as a whole tree for clan-specific functions! Everyone who owns BF2 can vouch for the "Boost" button in the Land controls. Did you guys ever realize that there is no vehicle that uses this button? Ayup that's right, it's a key for vehicles that were never put in the game. They didn't have time to remove the key from the key configuration menu apparently. Wondered why the ranking system only goes up to sargeant ranks when they advertised that you could go up to general ranks? They're saving them for the expansion which has the rest of the unlocks. EA was incredibly quick to announce their upcoming expansion to BF2, before even releasing the patch necessary to fix major playability issues! The 1.01 crash caused memory leaks that lagged and crashed servers to the point where it had to be repealed! (We have 1.02 now, which is just the working version of 1.01) They're selling us the rest of the game and just tacking on a few extras. EA rushed the developers to an early release date, leaving the consumer with a buggy game and the programmers scrambling for a playable patch. They pulled this same crap with Splinter cell games. I just love how you need a workaround just to use the apostrophe key in chat. Whether or not you're talking through text, hitting apostrophe will open the console! "Im sorry but Im just not a fan of saying youre, theyre, and its/its".(I'm serious, this was in Pandora tommorow, and was still around for the sequel Chaos Theory) This was a simple problem to fix.