1) They announced TF2 years before they announced HL2
2) They showed video and screens of TF2 years before they announced HL2
iow, TF2 was supposed to be out well before now.
My theory - TF2 was abandoned long ago, and the tech that worked has been roped into Counter-Strike. VOIP, new map views, spectator servers - all features they were using to hype TF2.
There's no way Valve has the bandwidth to be producing both games at the same time. If we see TF2, it will be in 2005 or 2006. And it will be nothing like it was originally conceived.
Watching my girlfriend use the flamethrower on passerbys in GTA, and score 200 kills in Dynasty Warriors 4 - I'd have to say there is wisdom in these words...
Quake Deathmatch has grown boring not due to lack of socialization, but because it's simply grown boring. Most games don't make the effort to make it challenging with bots, and so humans become the only real target.
Unreal 2 hasn't been abandoned, they've already announced a free multiplayer expansion.
It seems odd that Unreal Warfare intrigued the most. It was never announced, there were never any details of it, Epic never openly talked about it, and there was essentially nothing to get intrigued over. It's a rumored long term project for Epic, and one of those things that we will "know about when we can". IOW, they're still building the technology for it. This is where the "Unreal Warfare Engine" term came from - because games were using tech that was being used to build UW.
UW may never get developed though, or it might show up in different ways.
And Epic will never sell the Unreal franchise. They are actively upgrading the UT2kX series (last year? I saw screens... um, yesterday). Epic's business is the Unreal series, and selling it makes as much sense as Id selling off Doom or Quake. They don't need to sell off anything, that's why they have a licensing model.
What I found on PlanetSide was that you can complain about the *game* without much worry, but if you start to complain about *Sony* or their practices, or pricing, etc. - you'll get your thread deleted.
I'm glad to see so many PlanetSiders speak the truth when it comes to SOE's aggressive, unfriendly and annoying tactics when it comes to community building on their forums and web site.
I was banned from PlanetSide for harassing their technical support. Despite harassing them so much that it warranted my removal from the game completely, SOE Tech Support NEVER responded to any of my problems, issues or posts until the day they told my they were cancelling my account.
SOE Tech Support won't talk to you unless you post in the right format. This includes cutting and pasting at least a couple lengthy log files. Problem is - my PS wasn't creating these log files. I tried to inform them of this. Got no response. I tried to describe all the crashes, mis-spawns, and other issues that made the game unplayable for me. No response.
I'm not a person who is easily aggravated. But when I paid $50 for a game and am being asked to shell out even more monthly - I don't think being able to A) play the game for more than hour without it crashing to the desktop and B) having a tech support capable of carrying on a conversation about it without having to jump through 15 hoops is too much to ask.
SOE clearly doesn't agree. It's your *privilege* to be playing their game, and their assistance in making it an enjoyable experience for you is really not their concern.
Nearly all of my posts, btw, were deleted from the forums. There's basically no evidence any of my complaints took place. That's another "interesting" tactic of the SOE forums.
I've never been banned from any game -ever-. Not for player killing, or behavior, or cheating, or anything.
And certainly not for complaining about tech support.
SWG forums turn player only? Good. Trust me, you aren't missing anything. Let's leave SOE to their fanbase who still supports all their beta development with a monthly fee.
Let's try this from the top. Let's say you write a story about vampires. Can Anne Rice sue you? No. Nobody owns a copyright on vampires, or the sun, etc. Now let's say you write a story where vampires have long bloodlines and family fueds, etc. Can Anne sue you now? Probably not - because you haven't done anything specific that's unique in her books.
If you start writing about an interviewer talking to a vampire of a long family... now you might start having problems.
JK Rowlings had a similar lawsuit against a Harry Potter ripoff recently and I'm pretty certain won handedly. Does anyone own a copyright on wizards? No. It's all about the details, and WW putting vampires disappearing isn't saying they own that idea, it's just listing details that make up a bigger picture.
If the similarities are strong enough, it doesn't even matter if Sony did this intentionally.
That's kinda the point. Sony is allegedly profiting from White Wolf's design. Also, WW almost has to sue them if they ever want to make a movie on their own, or face getting sued by Sony over the same thing. Isn't copyright fun?
Actually - after reading the point by point of the argument, I think PA has taken a pretty shallow, albeit kinda funny, look at this. Some of the comparisons are quite silly, some are just a bit too similar. When you combine it all, there's a case to be made.
Claiming Romeo & Juliet for any story about tragic lovers as "source material" is kinda like saying any action flick uses Rambo as "source material". The reason why R&J stands as a bedrock of "star crossed love" is because it's pretty simple straightforward text.
And yeah, lots of people have done work with vampires. But they almost all do it in stylistically or creatively unique ways. PA suggests White Wolf doesn't have a leg to stand on because The Count from Sesame St. exists - but that just isn't the case.
Sure, any movie about two lovers going against the grain invokes R&J. (spoiler) I think equally any movie about a werewolf and a vampire boinking to create a hybrid invokes Collin's as well.
You aren't serious, right? Comic book sounds have been used all over in video games. The innovation here is in how they are being used and displayed. It's not just and additional "THWAK" image when someone is hit, but also when someone is walking past you, etc - and the style is consistent with an actual comic... not just Double Dragon.
Some slashdotters seem to think that because it's an cel shaded FPS based on a comic, it simply can't be innovative. Which is odd since there has never been a cel shaded FPS based on a comic.
I thought the cel shading was very well done, almost eirely so. It has more original design elements to it than 90% of shooters in the last 5 years. Quite looking forward to it.
But I bet their tech/customer support is 100 times better than Sony's. I'd give (insert any name other than Sony) a second chance before I pick another SOE product off the shelf.
Oh I made the mistake of paying for the game. And it isn't growing fast, people generally get the free trial and then leave. There have been recent calls from players to consolidate servers due to low population.
But I'm biased - I was banned from the game for trying to heckle tech support into actually helping me with the game. It might be great squad tactics, but it sucks when you crash 5 times in an hour trying to play. When I couldn't find my crash log to report the problems (PlanetSide "forgot" to generate one it seems), SOE Tech Support deleted my post for being in the wrong "format". When I continued posting, they banned me. Yup - I was banned from PlanetSide for being a disgruntled user.
It does have some very fun squad tactics - and for those who don't have technical problems and can play the game without being respawned as a -wall-, I think it could be a lot of fun. But these problems exist, they're quite persistent (just wander around SOE's forums to find out), and their Tech Support staff is useless. There's no way a significant number of people are going to pay $13/mo with that kind of service/quality.
Launched in April 2003, Sony has yet to release any subscription figures for PlanetSide, and I lack any data to make a good estimate. http://planetside.station.sony.com"
Yeah, well PlanetSide's stability and technical support is a joke - not to mention that they're still working out the gameplay itself.
the C64 is of course, an awesome brand name - but this seems to have all the angles of a business plunder and no real innovation (which is what made the Commodore brand name great).
What they should do is introduce a brand new Commodore 64 - a 64 Bit computer running an Amiga OS and chocked with enough dev tools to make any hobbyist developer/game designer/musician/photo nut quiver. Stick a C64 emulator in for pure shlock value.
But I guess that would go the same way as the BeBox...
I tried to sign up for their beta until I realized they couldn't even get a mailto: form to work correctly - something my old *boss* figured out on his own. You think I'm letting these geniuses anywhere near my network?
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly.
1) They announced TF2 years before they announced HL2
2) They showed video and screens of TF2 years before they announced HL2
iow, TF2 was supposed to be out well before now.
My theory - TF2 was abandoned long ago, and the tech that worked has been roped into Counter-Strike. VOIP, new map views, spectator servers - all features they were using to hype TF2.
There's no way Valve has the bandwidth to be producing both games at the same time. If we see TF2, it will be in 2005 or 2006. And it will be nothing like it was originally conceived.
Watching my girlfriend use the flamethrower on passerbys in GTA, and score 200 kills in Dynasty Warriors 4 - I'd have to say there is wisdom in these words...
Quake Deathmatch has grown boring not due to lack of socialization, but because it's simply grown boring. Most games don't make the effort to make it challenging with bots, and so humans become the only real target.
Unreal 2 hasn't been abandoned, they've already announced a free multiplayer expansion.
... um, yesterday). Epic's business is the Unreal series, and selling it makes as much sense as Id selling off Doom or Quake. They don't need to sell off anything, that's why they have a licensing model.
It seems odd that Unreal Warfare intrigued the most. It was never announced, there were never any details of it, Epic never openly talked about it, and there was essentially nothing to get intrigued over. It's a rumored long term project for Epic, and one of those things that we will "know about when we can". IOW, they're still building the technology for it. This is where the "Unreal Warfare Engine" term came from - because games were using tech that was being used to build UW.
UW may never get developed though, or it might show up in different ways.
And Epic will never sell the Unreal franchise. They are actively upgrading the UT2kX series (last year? I saw screens
No. It just has some vehicles and a lot of bugs.
What I found on PlanetSide was that you can complain about the *game* without much worry, but if you start to complain about *Sony* or their practices, or pricing, etc. - you'll get your thread deleted.
I'm glad to see so many PlanetSiders speak the truth when it comes to SOE's aggressive, unfriendly and annoying tactics when it comes to community building on their forums and web site.
I was banned from PlanetSide for harassing their technical support. Despite harassing them so much that it warranted my removal from the game completely, SOE Tech Support NEVER responded to any of my problems, issues or posts until the day they told my they were cancelling my account.
SOE Tech Support won't talk to you unless you post in the right format. This includes cutting and pasting at least a couple lengthy log files. Problem is - my PS wasn't creating these log files. I tried to inform them of this. Got no response. I tried to describe all the crashes, mis-spawns, and other issues that made the game unplayable for me. No response.
I'm not a person who is easily aggravated. But when I paid $50 for a game and am being asked to shell out even more monthly - I don't think being able to A) play the game for more than hour without it crashing to the desktop and B) having a tech support capable of carrying on a conversation about it without having to jump through 15 hoops is too much to ask.
SOE clearly doesn't agree. It's your *privilege* to be playing their game, and their assistance in making it an enjoyable experience for you is really not their concern.
Nearly all of my posts, btw, were deleted from the forums. There's basically no evidence any of my complaints took place. That's another "interesting" tactic of the SOE forums.
I've never been banned from any game -ever-. Not for player killing, or behavior, or cheating, or anything.
And certainly not for complaining about tech support.
SWG forums turn player only? Good. Trust me, you aren't missing anything. Let's leave SOE to their fanbase who still supports all their beta development with a monthly fee.
Let's try this from the top. Let's say you write a story about vampires. Can Anne Rice sue you? No. Nobody owns a copyright on vampires, or the sun, etc. Now let's say you write a story where vampires have long bloodlines and family fueds, etc. Can Anne sue you now? Probably not - because you haven't done anything specific that's unique in her books.
... now you might start having problems.
If you start writing about an interviewer talking to a vampire of a long family
JK Rowlings had a similar lawsuit against a Harry Potter ripoff recently and I'm pretty certain won handedly. Does anyone own a copyright on wizards? No. It's all about the details, and WW putting vampires disappearing isn't saying they own that idea, it's just listing details that make up a bigger picture.
If the similarities are strong enough, it doesn't even matter if Sony did this intentionally.
That's kinda the point. Sony is allegedly profiting from White Wolf's design. Also, WW almost has to sue them if they ever want to make a movie on their own, or face getting sued by Sony over the same thing. Isn't copyright fun?
Actually - after reading the point by point of the argument, I think PA has taken a pretty shallow, albeit kinda funny, look at this. Some of the comparisons are quite silly, some are just a bit too similar. When you combine it all, there's a case to be made.
Claiming Romeo & Juliet for any story about tragic lovers as "source material" is kinda like saying any action flick uses Rambo as "source material". The reason why R&J stands as a bedrock of "star crossed love" is because it's pretty simple straightforward text.
And yeah, lots of people have done work with vampires. But they almost all do it in stylistically or creatively unique ways. PA suggests White Wolf doesn't have a leg to stand on because The Count from Sesame St. exists - but that just isn't the case.
Sure, any movie about two lovers going against the grain invokes R&J. (spoiler) I think equally any movie about a werewolf and a vampire boinking to create a hybrid invokes Collin's as well.
You aren't serious, right? Comic book sounds have been used all over in video games. The innovation here is in how they are being used and displayed. It's not just and additional "THWAK" image when someone is hit, but also when someone is walking past you, etc - and the style is consistent with an actual comic ... not just Double Dragon.
Some slashdotters seem to think that because it's an cel shaded FPS based on a comic, it simply can't be innovative. Which is odd since there has never been a cel shaded FPS based on a comic.
I doubt UbiSoft is either. Be careful in trying to mistake legalese for english, especially when it was written by a French company...
I thought the cel shading was very well done, almost eirely so. It has more original design elements to it than 90% of shooters in the last 5 years. Quite looking forward to it.
Yes. Naming your game after the comic it's based on is really dumb.
but the Phantom is vaporware of the first degree and anyone who doesn't realize that believes what they read way too often.
But I bet their tech/customer support is 100 times better than Sony's. I'd give (insert any name other than Sony) a second chance before I pick another SOE product off the shelf.
SOE is more than uncaring, they're downright antagonistic - they banned me for complaining about their tech support
Oh I made the mistake of paying for the game. And it isn't growing fast, people generally get the free trial and then leave. There have been recent calls from players to consolidate servers due to low population.
But I'm biased - I was banned from the game for trying to heckle tech support into actually helping me with the game. It might be great squad tactics, but it sucks when you crash 5 times in an hour trying to play. When I couldn't find my crash log to report the problems (PlanetSide "forgot" to generate one it seems), SOE Tech Support deleted my post for being in the wrong "format". When I continued posting, they banned me. Yup - I was banned from PlanetSide for being a disgruntled user.
It does have some very fun squad tactics - and for those who don't have technical problems and can play the game without being respawned as a -wall-, I think it could be a lot of fun. But these problems exist, they're quite persistent (just wander around SOE's forums to find out), and their Tech Support staff is useless. There's no way a significant number of people are going to pay $13/mo with that kind of service/quality.
"PlanetSide (Confidence Rating: D)
Launched in April 2003, Sony has yet to release any subscription figures for PlanetSide, and I lack any data to make a good estimate. http://planetside.station.sony.com"
Yeah, well PlanetSide's stability and technical support is a joke - not to mention that they're still working out the gameplay itself.
the C64 is of course, an awesome brand name - but this seems to have all the angles of a business plunder and no real innovation (which is what made the Commodore brand name great).
What they should do is introduce a brand new Commodore 64 - a 64 Bit computer running an Amiga OS and chocked with enough dev tools to make any hobbyist developer/game designer/musician/photo nut quiver. Stick a C64 emulator in for pure shlock value.
But I guess that would go the same way as the BeBox...
I tried to sign up for their beta until I realized they couldn't even get a mailto: form to work correctly - something my old *boss* figured out on his own. You think I'm letting these geniuses anywhere near my network?
And then link to a game that's still in development? nice. And I loved Fallout Tactics.
you don't mention what version of Moz you are running.
"Am I the only one who thinks this points up a significant hole in the anti-trust case?"
in a word, yes.
AOL doesn't have a monopoly, it doesn't have anything to abuse.
IE's hold as the de facto browser is based purely on demographics.
Demographics change. Quickly.
Hence, relying on IE as the de facto standard is pretty near-sighted.
inkly
George Romero was onboard but they finally ended up rejecting his script and they went their different ways.
And if a movie studio rejects your script about a *video game*, it's probably best that they did.
I have fond memories of the original N of the Living Dead, but what great things has George done lately?
And him complaining the RE is a NOLD rip-off is kinda Lucas saying he owns Space Operas.
But you have respect his desire to make it again, his excitement of it. Sequel rumors are already in the mix, maybe he can helm that.
inkly