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Valve Talks Half-Life 2 Episodes 2 And 3
With the fall release of Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal growing ever closer (check out the new trailer), Valve is finally beginning to release some information about what actually happens in Episode 2 and some information about Episode 3's progress. From the Episode 2 preview: "Looking down the mountainside reveals a scene that immediately demonstrates one of the key elements of Episode Two: expansiveness. Far off in the distance is the semi-destroyed Combine headquarters, with mighty plumes of smoke rising into the sky amidst a shattered cityscape. Arcing up towards the sky from the imposing edifice is brilliant white stream of energy, meeting the cloud layer in a turbulent maelstrom--a 'portal storm,' Alyx notes."
Did you play the same HL and HL2 I did? These games were always completely closed and linear. The linear cinematic experience is what those games were all about. This is hardly new to HL2:EP1.
Actually, this is one reason I'm anticipating Portal more than HL2:Ep2. The lab-rat setting of Portal makes closedness and linearity perfectly natural and unnoticeable.
I remember being really pissed about this "feature" at first. Up until I realized that all I needed to reinstall the game, was a username and password and the Steam client. It would download everything for every game I had on my account. This included the Half Life 1 series which only required that I enter my valid serial number one time. Now, as far as copy protection goes, I would much rather have something check the internet once in a while than have me pull out the CD/DVD every time I want to play. Give it a try, you may find that you don't mind it as much as you would think. I have never noticed the Steam client doing anything out of the ordinary. Also, you can still play the game without it connecting, just either firewall Steam, or disconnect just before running Steam. It will try to connect, then go to offline mode and will not, that I know of, try to connect again later. I like this copy protection WAY better than the other forms and never thought that I would. I would think that you could sell it, but the next owner would need to have the username and password to your Steam account and all your games are lumped together, it's all or nothing. So, that would be a negative to you I would think. One more positive is that it will check for updates and get them for you, that's nice to me. My .2
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its called steam. Its a system of copy protection that not only is a convenience and not a problem, but it helps stop hackers too on online multiplayer games by blocking them from all games on their account if they cheat. And "subsequent" does indeed mean that yes, you ARE asserting that you needed a connection every time. Honestly I think your just a big liar though; nobody buys something and complains about connecting to the internet as some issue and thus wastes their money. Nobody is that much of a wheeny.
It sickens me to see all the people complaining about steam. "OMG GEORGE ORWELL 1984 BLAH BLAH BLAH THEY IS GONNA SPY ON ME."
How about people actually TRY it and see that it works excellently. Now instead of a game being tied to the physical media or being tied to a single computer, the game is tied to YOU (your account). You can go to a friends house with the cache on a DVD or just spend the time downloading it and bam now you can play it there too. The only catch is that if you want to play it offline, you have to save your username and password on that computer, thus making sure people don't just install it on like 20 different computers and select "play offline."
Nothing like going to work and playing TFC on my lunch break with about a 20 minute download beforehand.
Tying the media to you instead of to a disc that can break means you can play the game on any system anywhere as long as its not playing on more than one system at once. I'd say thats a win-win situation for us and valve.
I tolerated ignorant complaints about steam before they rolled it out, but now there is really no excuse to complain about a system that works quite well.
And I'm sure if valve ever went out of business and you wanted to play their games, they'd probably just release one last patch to steam that eliminates the internet check. Not that valve is gonna be disappearing any time soon.