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The Evolution of Multiplayer Games and Online Play
Ranga14 writes "The recently announced Command & Conquer 4 seems to be following the same path of Blizzard's Starcraft 2 in having no LAN/offline multiplayer. They will require users to be logged in at all times to even be able to play any facet of the game. What will this mean for LAN parties, gaming events and those who don't play online? Is this a sound business decision, or do EA & Blizzard not get that this method of attempting to thwart piracy will fail like others have?"
I think it's a wrong move, but not because of LAN parties. LAN parties used to be a thing when internet was scarce, connections were slow and often you also had metered lines that only let you transfer so much traffic per month. Today, with bandwitdths that break the mbit borders easily and often hover about 10mbit, carrying your computer somewhere is, at best, something you'd do for special occasions. Events, maybe sponsored, where you may even win a prize for being good. Not just "getting together to play".
My argument against those mandatory online services is simple: What if the company ceases to exist or ceases to support the product? Good bye multiplayer (or even singleplayer)? Today I could still fire up a game of Starcraft, locally or through the internet, I needn't connect with BattleNet (let's assume it ever went away), I could play SC for as long as there is TCP/IP v4 around. Dunno if it works with v6, someone would have to try.
Tying a game to its maker essentially results in a better rental version. And I refuse to pay premium for renting a game.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The commentary added to the bottom of the summary is wrong. This has a good chance of success at thwarting piracy.
The goal of anti-piracy measures is never to eliminate 100% of piracy until the end of time. That's nearly impossible, and they know it. What they really want to do is make it so that either you can't pirate it for the frst little while, or that you don't want to. Having no functional online play whatsoever in the pirated version is a pretty effective way of making the pirated version worse then the retail version. (That's the opposite strategy of stuff like SecuROM, which generally makes the retail version worse then the pirated version.)
LAN functionality is a real problem in that department now, because it's used primarily for pirates to play on Hamachi (and the like) with each other. Remove it from the game entirely, and the pirates no longer have to simply bypass SecuROM or an offline disk check. They have to emulate Battle.net in order to get any multiplayer working.
Will they do that eventually? Absolutely. Will they do that within the first 2 week sales rush? Highly unlikely. If it takes them a couple months before the pirated versions have online play, then by the standard of what the companies are trying to do, it's a successful anti-piracy measure.
As usual, you crooks who rip off games because you want free stuff are just screwing it up for everybody else.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Dormitories in college tend to be amazing places for mass lan parties.
Back in 03 in my last year in a standard dormitory I remember whole floors engaging in multiplayer FPS and RTS games, doors open, taunting, cheering, and having fun.
This move is indeed dumb, especially given the ever tightening noose on college gateways.
If no patch is made to incorporate lan play into the game, it simply will not be used by a heavy portion of the target demographic for lack of feasibility.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Hell, my Atari 400 came with 4 joystick ports.
I don't count the 8-bits because they barely had enough palette colors for two players + enemies, let alone four.
We had a multi-tap for our SNES so you could play 4 player games.
The NES, Super NES, PlayStation, and PlayStation 2 had hubs for gamepads. But these hubs often didn't come out until one or more years after the console's release, and apart from games such as Bomberman that were bundled with a hub, programmers couldn't depend on one being present. That's why the N64, Dreamcast, GameCube, and Xbox had more games that actually used four gamepads.
You have fond memories of late-1990s LAN gaming. But as I understand it, PCs in the 1990s were still considered too expensive for mom, dad, and three kids to own five PCs among them.
Once new game consoles came out that have ports for everyone to plug in their own audio/visual head set, then you'll have a case.
PSP.
This is exactly why everyone should play Starcraft: Brood War, you may argue that the UI and graphics are shit but hey, the same could be said about chess or go, I mean, having to actually move the peices with your hand? Worst UI design ever, yet people still play these games. Plus, Starcraft has a lot of gameplay and metagame, taking a long time to master unless you are a genius, making the gameplay never boring as it is a learning experience throughout, even the pro's are constantly learning and changing their strategies. But for such a game, the latency ( or time between when your mouse click or keyboard hit is registered ) in multilayer games is very important for micromanagement ( especially mutalisk harassment where mutalisks are timed to launch their attack on the edge of their range and move back immediately to achieve a very optimal and powerful guerrilla warfare effect when done repeatedly ). Which is why latency changing tools have been added to the game so that latency equal to that of lan can be archived on battle.net ( of course with a penalty to lag which is not the same as latency ). Graphics to me, mean nothing, because just look at the world around you, if you want to look at pretty pictures, just look out your window. Starcraft's online environment is ( IMO ) much more mature than other games ( eg Halo on Xbox live ) since the players online are ages 20+, the only players under the age of 20 playing starcraft online are kids from Korea. Teens new to gaming will generally not play Starcraft in north america as they have much newer games with better graphics to attract that age group. However the argument that LAN is dead to me is completely invalid as I on a weekly basis have lan parties at friend's places through a wireless router, and everyone has laptops so it is not like carrying around a pc, nowadays laptops are so portable as you can carry them in backpacks designed to carry laptops.
the entire PC market [...] it's a tiny fraction of the size of the console market.
I'd like to see your source that the PC gaming market is a tiny fraction of the PLAYSTATION 3 gaming market. Or are you taking all the mutually incompatible consoles and lumping them into one market?
I loved the original starcraft game but didn't really like playing online because of the cheating and honestly it's more fun to play in a room full of people you know. I also don't support this designed obsolescence crap. I can still load up starcraft and play it with my friends and will still be able to in 10 years regardless of what happens to blizzard.
I just sent off an email to blizzard telling them I'm not buying their new version and I suggest you do the same. It only takes a minute and if everyone started doing something other than sitting on their asses things might change.
http://us.blizzard.com/support/webform.xml?locale=en_US
I see no way to email EA without having an account. Maybe someone else can find a method.
Obviously C&C 4 will not be appearing on the list of potential 'something newer', as I *refuse* to connect any wintendo machine to the Internet.
Refusing to connect a computer to the internet purely because it runs Windows is silly. That might be somewhat valid for Win98, but certainly not XP+. Of course, if you were the type to listen to logic and learn things other than your own opinion, you probably wouldn't call them 'Wintendo machines'
The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.