Where did I say anyone was worthless? I'm just saying that they don't really get a vote. Users don't admin a server, the admin does. (duh)
I rent a server. It's my server, it's my money - I'll run it how I see fit and have fun with it.
I open a server on my broadband, that's my broadband, it's my money, I'll run it how I see fit and have fun with it.
Now, does that make someone who isn't running my server a worthless human? No, it makes them a potential guest, nothing more. Don't want to join my server or don't like it? Fine, but it doesn't mean I'll change it.
Sure it behests gaming companies to open up public servers to show of their games and probably vanilla games normally makes the most sense there. If they have the pockets to do it, great (and Epic, btw, runs several UT2004 servers). But what if you hate those because they're public and full of kids screaming curse words? Oh me oh my, what to do?
Start your own server, do what you want. It might not be a democracy, but it sure is easy to buy your own little fiefdom.
The same, btw, goes for mod servers. I get this all the time. "Wow, X is a neat mod, there's a shame there's no servers!" Well, it's a shame people don't use all that high powered DSL/Cable connections for something other than being LPB's.
I've read the same argument on Penny Arcade, that mods and mutators ruined Unreal Tournament 2003. Being the author of one of the larger mutator packs for UT2k3, I thought this was a bit suprising.
#1) Mods and mutators are actually fairly hard to proliferate online, they aren't some kind of virus that seeps into servers - they get put on and stay on because the people enjoy playing them. If people didn't enjoy playing them, they wouldn't be there.
#2) If people preferred to play vanilla games, people would run vanilla servers. For those people who prefer to play vanilla games they should run vanilla servers.
#3) If you can't afford renting a server by yourself, find some like minded people and share the cost. Or, just up your broadband and run a very low-end server (most decent connects can run at least 4-6 player games, and yes - those can be fun too with the right players).
#4) If you can't afford a server, don't have any online friends, and are still running off a 56k modem, then, well, tough. Sorry, the internet gaming world isn't a democracy and never has been (you don't think the term Low Ping Bastard came from nowhere did you?).
Now - the part where I do give this complaint sympathy is in -finding- vanilla online games. Here is where UT2004 really shines, giving much better filters for mutators or no mutators or custom maps or no custom maps and comes with a complete voting package right out of the box so that people on your server can choose to play what they want.
(and btw, the reason Quake III is so tweaked is that many people mastered this game years and years ago... you don't want them playing vanilla Q3 - they'll likely rocket jump your ass out the door;) )
"Nagy claims Roberts and Shambro netted millions of shares of stock but he received nothing."
Because a lot of people are going to be saying similar things about this company. It's the dotcom strategem of converting ideas into cash without having to back them up.
#1) Most of people, and by that I mean most of you, didn't even realize how good DX1 was until it hit Europe and actually started to sell. So this rabid devotion to the original is near hilarious in light that most gamers dismissed it as a crappy Quake-Killer-Wannabe when it came out.
#2) There were probably as many, if not more, bad reviews of DX1 than there were for DXIW.
#3) Also willing to bet that a lot of people are bitching about DXIW because of the demo, which was poorly put together and technically flawed. The full version definately still had problems, many of which were fixed in an early patch.
Most people I know who actually finished DXIW have two basic complaints: it was short, and it didn't have all the features of the original. I have never, ever heard from someone who completed the game go through all the bile and hate that you see spewed out.
Personally, I found it slightly short but still probably got 20-30 hours of play on it. I lament the cut of Spector's brilliant skill system, which hasn't been really done since, and it annoyed me that I had to hack some ini files to adjust the game to my liking (particularly to get around the evil unified ammo).
But I rather enjoyed it, and played it nearly twice over until I got sidetracked by other projects. It's a good game, possibly not the great game it could have been, but a good game nonetheless.
My biggest complaint: they tinkered with the engine so much that they couldn't ship with an editor. I would have loved to have modded this stuff. Instead, I'm putting aspects into my new mod ( http://forums.beyondunreal.com/showthread.php?t=12 7803 )
As for DX:CW, The Deus Ex backdrop is rich enough to cover a variety of genres. I'm more than willing to see what Ion Storm comes up with as it's developed.
I think this contrasts greatly with possibly reviewer ommitance between two SOE products: PlanetSide and CoN.
Snowblind has said that when they burned CoN, they weren't seeing the lockups and glitches that consumers are - which means it's entirely possible that reviewers didn't see them too (as many of them don't get the consumer version).
PlanetSide on the other hand, had technical issues up the wazoo on it's get go, and there was only one version to play there. Many of the bugs were acknowledged by the devs as big old Oopsies.
But then again, reviewers probably had another excuse for the version of PS they played.
It was just a beta.
I think the problem is this need for all reviews to be published the very day a game comes out. I think anything printed on that time line should still fall into the realm of preview, whereas what I would like to read is a review of a copy some reviewer got off a shelf, not in a publisher's envelope. Unrealistic - probably...but definately more accurate.
But for the record, I love CoN (almost as much as I kinda hate SOE). My GF, her sister and I played it for hours yesterday - no real problems. But clearly these problems DO exist, and I have to say - they're indicative of a Sony Online Entertainment product.
If I get your CDKey, and I get banned with it - you can't play the game as you paid for.
Dat's a crime. It might not seem like a big crime, but I think once you got done screaming at forums about how you have to go plunk down another $50 to play again, you might disagree.
People have to understand how voting from the wallet works (and you should after reading this article).
The problem with the "I only pirate good games" argument is that you're missing the core point of the article. If you didn't pirate anything you would have to weigh the merits of software in terms of their real cost.
Most small dev shops may not be capable of the quality of the big ones, but their stuff usually doesn't cost as much either. So Paint Shop Pro might not be as powerful as PhotoShop, but it also costs 1/10.
When pirate software, that fact just becomes irrelevant. Worse, you aggravate the situation by widening the gap between the developers - in effect degrading the quality of small software devs by siphening their revenue.
This is doubly painful for games - where smaller shops might need to try something innovative or different, which is harder to market when people are more like to try and pirate UT2004.
You can justify it any way you want - but the reality is: piracy sticks it to nobody but the little guy. So when every year games become more and more mainstream, less innovative and EA buys another license - just look to you hard drive and you might know why.
I remember standing outside my old office having a friend explain to me how I, little old me, could become a multi-millionaire. Stocks, splits, shares, options, blah blah blah.
Now, a year or so later, the only multi-millionaires are the brainiacs who ran the business into the ground but did it so convincingly that they walked off with the only value the company had left. It almost seemed a distinct negative correlation between the how hard someone worked and how talented you were to how well the company would treat you in the end.
The guy spending 70+ hours a week writing OO code? Fired without notice, 3 month serverence.
The "turn around genius" office manager who spent an entire year flying first class and never managed to land a single client? His $300,000+ salary was paid to him for a year after the office folded.
And the top execs all pulled their golden chords, made millions, and bought fast food chains or notwhat.
Hey Infinium. Bite me. I've heard this nonsense before.
Gamespy's article on how jedi work (or for the most part, don't work) in SW:G is indicative of SOE's horrid production/design philosophy when it comes to games. Essentially they offload all the cost of gameplay decisions and testing to the players - lumping out outrageous monthly fees and then using gamer ideas and quality assurance data to slowly improve the games in the hope of keeping them around.
This is clearly true in SW:G, where being a Jedi makes no sense and yet SOE declares it "meets their design goals" but they'll change it in the future to gamer demand.
In other words - they didn't really spend much forethought into how jedis should work in the game, they just slapped it in there and let the gamers sort it out - at cost.
PlanetSide has the exact same issues - it's gameplay has changed significantly twice since I left that game.
I'm all for developers listening to gamer feedback - but it's way different when the developers seem incapable of getting it done right without that feedback.
Games don't attract people to an OS - an OS attracts game developers because of a target audience.
If Halo had come out for only Linux, do you think there'd be a million more Linux users? No, because nobody is going to ditch their OS just to try out one game. And no game developer is going to spend the millions it takes to make a AAA game on an OS with low yield.
Maybe, just maybe, if there was an excellent hobbyist community and development platform then as amatuer productions like FPS mods and the like get more and more mainstream Linux could get a bit of rise up, but nothing serious I'd imagine.
Linux should just keep the long slow road it's been on. Get prettier, get friendlier.
that's true of any licensed game - unless it's medium is so far removed from myth/fictional world that nobody can object. I don't think even the biggest LucasGeek looks to be jedi if they're playing "Attack of the Clones Tetris", but they're expecting more from "Jedi Knights VS Capcom" - but even then not as much as anything with RPG or FPS in the title.
Add in a persistent world and 1000 other geeks, and surely you have raised the bar of expectation.
No, I really wasn't trying to take it seriously. But it's not really very satirical, ironic, humorous or entertaining - so serious is about the only thing left.
The Return of the King stuff was kinda funny. This Death O Video Games just isn't.
Because it comes off like it's trying to make a point, but never really backs it up - instead it just hides it's tongue deep in cheek to cover up a rather loose munging of facts.
Yeah, OK - Red Faction 2 wasn't much different than Goldeneye, especially if you aren't counting texture depth, level size, polygon count, vehicles AND geomod technology. Just because two games can produce screenshot of blockish rooms doesn't mean they're even remotely similar.
Which kinda pulls the rug out of the "tech plateau" which seems like, if there is a foundation for a logical argument, is the only one.
If technology has plateau'd so much, how come game requirements keep going up at nearly the same rate? I'm guessing his next article is "The Radeon 9800 is a capitalist conspiracy!!"
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Where did I say anyone was worthless? I'm just saying that they don't really get a vote. Users don't admin a server, the admin does. (duh)
I rent a server. It's my server, it's my money - I'll run it how I see fit and have fun with it.
I open a server on my broadband, that's my broadband, it's my money, I'll run it how I see fit and have fun with it.
Now, does that make someone who isn't running my server a worthless human? No, it makes them a potential guest, nothing more. Don't want to join my server or don't like it? Fine, but it doesn't mean I'll change it.
Sure it behests gaming companies to open up public servers to show of their games and probably vanilla games normally makes the most sense there. If they have the pockets to do it, great (and Epic, btw, runs several UT2004 servers). But what if you hate those because they're public and full of kids screaming curse words? Oh me oh my, what to do?
Start your own server, do what you want. It might not be a democracy, but it sure is easy to buy your own little fiefdom.
The same, btw, goes for mod servers. I get this all the time. "Wow, X is a neat mod, there's a shame there's no servers!" Well, it's a shame people don't use all that high powered DSL/Cable connections for something other than being LPB's.
I've read the same argument on Penny Arcade, that mods and mutators ruined Unreal Tournament 2003. Being the author of one of the larger mutator packs for UT2k3, I thought this was a bit suprising.
... you don't want them playing vanilla Q3 - they'll likely rocket jump your ass out the door ;) )
#1) Mods and mutators are actually fairly hard to proliferate online, they aren't some kind of virus that seeps into servers - they get put on and stay on because the people enjoy playing them. If people didn't enjoy playing them, they wouldn't be there.
#2) If people preferred to play vanilla games, people would run vanilla servers. For those people who prefer to play vanilla games they should run vanilla servers.
#3) If you can't afford renting a server by yourself, find some like minded people and share the cost. Or, just up your broadband and run a very low-end server (most decent connects can run at least 4-6 player games, and yes - those can be fun too with the right players).
#4) If you can't afford a server, don't have any online friends, and are still running off a 56k modem, then, well, tough. Sorry, the internet gaming world isn't a democracy and never has been (you don't think the term Low Ping Bastard came from nowhere did you?).
Now - the part where I do give this complaint sympathy is in -finding- vanilla online games. Here is where UT2004 really shines, giving much better filters for mutators or no mutators or custom maps or no custom maps and comes with a complete voting package right out of the box so that people on your server can choose to play what they want.
(and btw, the reason Quake III is so tweaked is that many people mastered this game years and years ago
And get used to this statement:
"Nagy claims Roberts and Shambro netted millions of shares of stock but he received nothing."
Because a lot of people are going to be saying similar things about this company. It's the dotcom strategem of converting ideas into cash without having to back them up.
Did I stumble onto BluesNews?
2 7803 )
#1) Most of people, and by that I mean most of you, didn't even realize how good DX1 was until it hit Europe and actually started to sell. So this rabid devotion to the original is near hilarious in light that most gamers dismissed it as a crappy Quake-Killer-Wannabe when it came out.
#2) There were probably as many, if not more, bad reviews of DX1 than there were for DXIW.
#3) Also willing to bet that a lot of people are bitching about DXIW because of the demo, which was poorly put together and technically flawed. The full version definately still had problems, many of which were fixed in an early patch.
Most people I know who actually finished DXIW have two basic complaints: it was short, and it didn't have all the features of the original. I have never, ever heard from someone who completed the game go through all the bile and hate that you see spewed out.
Personally, I found it slightly short but still probably got 20-30 hours of play on it. I lament the cut of Spector's brilliant skill system, which hasn't been really done since, and it annoyed me that I had to hack some ini files to adjust the game to my liking (particularly to get around the evil unified ammo).
But I rather enjoyed it, and played it nearly twice over until I got sidetracked by other projects. It's a good game, possibly not the great game it could have been, but a good game nonetheless.
My biggest complaint: they tinkered with the engine so much that they couldn't ship with an editor. I would have loved to have modded this stuff. Instead, I'm putting aspects into my new mod ( http://forums.beyondunreal.com/showthread.php?t=1
As for DX:CW, The Deus Ex backdrop is rich enough to cover a variety of genres. I'm more than willing to see what Ion Storm comes up with as it's developed.
April Fool's was yesterday.
everyone keeps reading them.
I think this contrasts greatly with possibly reviewer ommitance between two SOE products: PlanetSide and CoN.
Snowblind has said that when they burned CoN, they weren't seeing the lockups and glitches that consumers are - which means it's entirely possible that reviewers didn't see them too (as many of them don't get the consumer version).
PlanetSide on the other hand, had technical issues up the wazoo on it's get go, and there was only one version to play there. Many of the bugs were acknowledged by the devs as big old Oopsies.
But then again, reviewers probably had another excuse for the version of PS they played.
It was just a beta.
I think the problem is this need for all reviews to be published the very day a game comes out. I think anything printed on that time line should still fall into the realm of preview, whereas what I would like to read is a review of a copy some reviewer got off a shelf, not in a publisher's envelope. Unrealistic - probably...but definately more accurate.
But for the record, I love CoN (almost as much as I kinda hate SOE). My GF, her sister and I played it for hours yesterday - no real problems. But clearly these problems DO exist, and I have to say - they're indicative of a Sony Online Entertainment product.
...another company comes into the industry, prepared to lose billions to buy out some market share? Nah, that can't ever have any effect...
I've only tried to play 1 PS game on my PS2 - XCom ... and it didn't support the PS2 save cards.
So if it was flawless, I'd probably be hyped about it, but I don't entirely trust it anymore.
I'd love to see PC based modding of console games to become mainstream as it has for Quake, UT, Half-Life, etc.
Imagine opening up an IDE, coding a new level for Champions of Norrath, and then sitting down with your girlie and playing it for a night.
...is that most mod teams will just use a pirated version of 3DStudio Max anyway.
Old engineering adage:
the last 10% of the project can take 90% of the time.
"Nearly complete" is a poor estimate of "Time to Completion". I assume games are similar.
If I get your CDKey, and I get banned with it - you can't play the game as you paid for.
Dat's a crime. It might not seem like a big crime, but I think once you got done screaming at forums about how you have to go plunk down another $50 to play again, you might disagree.
People have to understand how voting from the wallet works (and you should after reading this article).
The problem with the "I only pirate good games" argument is that you're missing the core point of the article. If you didn't pirate anything you would have to weigh the merits of software in terms of their real cost.
Most small dev shops may not be capable of the quality of the big ones, but their stuff usually doesn't cost as much either. So Paint Shop Pro might not be as powerful as PhotoShop, but it also costs 1/10.
When pirate software, that fact just becomes irrelevant. Worse, you aggravate the situation by widening the gap between the developers - in effect degrading the quality of small software devs by siphening their revenue.
This is doubly painful for games - where smaller shops might need to try something innovative or different, which is harder to market when people are more like to try and pirate UT2004.
You can justify it any way you want - but the reality is: piracy sticks it to nobody but the little guy. So when every year games become more and more mainstream, less innovative and EA buys another license - just look to you hard drive and you might know why.
I got to play a lesbian. Or at least flirt with one. That was awesome.
I remember standing outside my old office having a friend explain to me how I, little old me, could become a multi-millionaire. Stocks, splits, shares, options, blah blah blah.
Now, a year or so later, the only multi-millionaires are the brainiacs who ran the business into the ground but did it so convincingly that they walked off with the only value the company had left. It almost seemed a distinct negative correlation between the how hard someone worked and how talented you were to how well the company would treat you in the end.
The guy spending 70+ hours a week writing OO code? Fired without notice, 3 month serverence.
The "turn around genius" office manager who spent an entire year flying first class and never managed to land a single client? His $300,000+ salary was paid to him for a year after the office folded.
And the top execs all pulled their golden chords, made millions, and bought fast food chains or notwhat.
Hey Infinium. Bite me. I've heard this nonsense before.
Not to mention, it's been thought of before. Amiga-on-a-Card, PC-Compat-on-a-card, it never survives both consumer demand and Moore's law.
Gamespy's article on how jedi work (or for the most part, don't work) in SW:G is indicative of SOE's horrid production/design philosophy when it comes to games. Essentially they offload all the cost of gameplay decisions and testing to the players - lumping out outrageous monthly fees and then using gamer ideas and quality assurance data to slowly improve the games in the hope of keeping them around.
This is clearly true in SW:G, where being a Jedi makes no sense and yet SOE declares it "meets their design goals" but they'll change it in the future to gamer demand.
In other words - they didn't really spend much forethought into how jedis should work in the game, they just slapped it in there and let the gamers sort it out - at cost.
PlanetSide has the exact same issues - it's gameplay has changed significantly twice since I left that game.
I'm all for developers listening to gamer feedback - but it's way different when the developers seem incapable of getting it done right without that feedback.
I think the quite-better-than-average Amiga FPS Gloom was a BlitzBasic game. Blitz would be a boon to any OS. Good to hear.
Games don't attract people to an OS - an OS attracts game developers because of a target audience.
If Halo had come out for only Linux, do you think there'd be a million more Linux users? No, because nobody is going to ditch their OS just to try out one game. And no game developer is going to spend the millions it takes to make a AAA game on an OS with low yield.
Maybe, just maybe, if there was an excellent hobbyist community and development platform then as amatuer productions like FPS mods and the like get more and more mainstream Linux could get a bit of rise up, but nothing serious I'd imagine.
Linux should just keep the long slow road it's been on. Get prettier, get friendlier.
Actually, it's only free if you ignore the tax money spent on it.
;)
That stuff comes from somewhere, ya know
>Make the most of it, or play a different game.
Deal! Truly, that has to be best description of why I'll never, ever play SW:G.
that's true of any licensed game - unless it's medium is so far removed from myth/fictional world that nobody can object. I don't think even the biggest LucasGeek looks to be jedi if they're playing "Attack of the Clones Tetris", but they're expecting more from "Jedi Knights VS Capcom" - but even then not as much as anything with RPG or FPS in the title.
Add in a persistent world and 1000 other geeks, and surely you have raised the bar of expectation.
For the most coverage a Star Wars mod has gotten without getting the legal slapdown from Lucas.
No, I really wasn't trying to take it seriously. But it's not really very satirical, ironic, humorous or entertaining - so serious is about the only thing left.
The Return of the King stuff was kinda funny. This Death O Video Games just isn't.
Because it comes off like it's trying to make a point, but never really backs it up - instead it just hides it's tongue deep in cheek to cover up a rather loose munging of facts.
Yeah, OK - Red Faction 2 wasn't much different than Goldeneye, especially if you aren't counting texture depth, level size, polygon count, vehicles AND geomod technology. Just because two games can produce screenshot of blockish rooms doesn't mean they're even remotely similar.
Which kinda pulls the rug out of the "tech plateau" which seems like, if there is a foundation for a logical argument, is the only one.
If technology has plateau'd so much, how come game requirements keep going up at nearly the same rate? I'm guessing his next article is "The Radeon 9800 is a capitalist conspiracy!!"