A lot of what you say already exists and is somewhat transparent. Here are some examples:
For years they said that cross-realm mail was impossible, that the physical segregation of hardware (despite them all being on the same network) made it impossible. Now we have cross-server group finding in the random queues. We have account-wide mail of account-bound items that are not tied to servers or factions.
The cross-realm character transfer (and faction transfer) are advertised as though they they take at most 24 hours, and some forum posts by Blizzard employees have hinted that it isn't just a switch in a database, that it was closer to taking a USB stick and physically moving character data. If you've ever paid for any of those services, you'll notice that it is typically done in minutes, as though it was done in a lower-priority task as soon as the servers in question had a few free cycles. Or maybe just a simple transact-SQL script.
Hell, they even said for years that there was no way to automatically level a character, that the process was too complex and computationally expensive. Now you have "boosted" 90's running around all over the place. They've also implemented a server-side update stream for pre-patching installations, as well as server-based changes in environments (see phasing).
Of course, this is all just speculation. They could very well still have all the separate servers, complete with little printed labels slapped onto the front of the machines separating Drak'Thul from Doomhammer. 9 years is a lot of time for software development, they might have refined their network code to make all the above that much easier. They might have also upgraded from copper to fiber. They aren't public with their server setups, so who knows what they've got going on.
We already see this at gas stations, though I wonder where the advertisement offset truly goes. You start pumping gas then all of a sudden this speaker starts in on the wonderful gas station hot dogs and how they're one step shy of caviar served off a french stripper. I'm already paying for the fuel, and paying as much or more then other gas stations within eye-shot, am I really that starved for amusement that the gas pump has to start talking to me for the few minutes I'll be there?
Or "Cyan toner low", or "Fuser needs replacement" or any number of other status outputs. Or to make setting the IP address parameters easier. Or to display help to the newb user who needs to change a toner but doesn't know how.
Simple stupid inkjets plugged into one computer don't necessarily need a screen, but a good networked one does.
What, you're too good to program it with punch cards? and you can't tell what "Beep Beep Boop Wrrrr" means?
Winston Brooks, superintendent for Albuquerque Public Schools, makes $250k a year as of 2013. APS teachers averaged closer to $43k last year. According to CNN Money the poverty rate (lowest 15% of income) in 2013 was on the order of $51k nationwide. Granted there are some areas that bring up that average, such as Washington DC, New York and California. You can look into the salaries for teachers and assorted staff, but it still doesn't seem to add up to the overall funding line. Money gets tied up into standardized tests and the bureaucracy in managing them. Similarly to large corporations, education systems can (and sometimes do) get top-heavy with assorted C-level personnel that demand an unexplainably high salary for being little more than stamp jockeys.
This is what they mean when they say they can't be common carriers, it will cut their ability to "upgrade infrastructure".
I'm not following how Merger-fest 2014 is somehow giving consumers more choice, however.
I'd attribute the popularity of the SNES in part to the resurgance of classic titles being released in ways like Nintendo's Virtual Console. In addition, those folks that grew up with the NES/SNES would be hitting their 30's now and may already have that good job and are able to go back and buy some of their childhood from their local used game store. I know I've been doing just that this year.
To give some numbers to CronoCloud: SNES had 784 games. Playstation 1 had 2,418 games. Playstation 2 had 3,870 games.
(Side note, N64 had 387 games.)
Touche'. Gears of War apparently had 20 people actively working on it at any given time... but that does not include the number of developers working on the Unreal Engine, nor any of the publishing company, marketing, etc...
100 seems small when you start talking about every single person that ever had the title cross their desk, including middle and upper management whose only role was endorsing the project. The Wikipedia page for EWJ (the only thing I can access from work) shows 2 designers, 2 composers and 4 artists. Not sure how many programmers, but I do know it was heavily marketed and I'm sure some of the stamp-jockeys in big offices wanted their name on it too. Dammit.. now you're making me want to do some "empirical research" and go beat some of these games...
There is a reason that Austin has topped Forbes list of Biggest Boom Towns, and Top Tech Town. The ratio of income to cost of living, it even made it on Slashdot. A lot of big names have offices there too, such as Dell, HP, Cisco, Apple, etc...
On one hand, it's probably cheaper shipping to get those brides from Russia and China that it would be for those guys living in New York. On the other hand, they often don't put enough food and water in the crate for that two week voyage on the ship, to say nothing of the air (water) holes.
A friend and I have been going back and playing some older games just because, and it's still remarkable just how few people it took to create some of those iconic games. Or some of those lesser-known gems. Some examples:
Legend of Zelda (NES) - roughly 12 developers
Metroid (NES) - roughly 12 as well
Actraiser (SNES) - roughly 50-ish
Guardian Legend (NES) - haven't beaten it yet
Castlevania II (NES) - Unknown, credits are a joke... watch the AVGN episode if you don't beleive me
Earthworm Jim (SNES) - been a while since i beat it, probably 50-100 people... though I think marketing and sales are in there too.
There are certainly others, but it still illustrates the point that great games don't need stupid amounts of marketing, or absurdly large development teams.
I'm not so sure ATI does blow equally. I have two 660ti's in SLI to power 3 monitors. Anything beyond the ~2 year old 327 series drivers does not work for me. Without surround mode, I at least get three screens with newer drivers... generally I get a stupid amount of slowdown to the point where I feel like I'm running Windows 7 on a 486. If I somehow manage to turn on surround mode, all three screens are recognized, but only 2 of them display anything. The slowdown also gets much, much worse. To date I have not found anything about other people experiencing similar issues, and all of the nVidia documentation shows "this driver improves surround on 600 series and higher chipsets!".
3 fps is better than 2 fps, but still useless.
It might actually be reasonable. There are a number of businesses out there that provide blackberries or other "work" cell phones. They could also be throwing in assorted iPads and other tablets, since they too probably have some 3g/4g plan associated with them. While I too doubt that it's 1 for 1, there are some areas where it might be 2 or 3 devices for one person. Who knows whether or not those folks make up for those ends of the world without cell towers.
Do a job search on LinkedIn or Monster for "Computer Scientist" and see how many of those listings are web development. I did a search in my home town (not really CS friendly) and of the 2 dozen jobs that turned up, 75% had ASP.NET or ColdFusion in the requirements.
The real question is how do we fix what HR has broken?
"retrieving them repeatedly would cause them to gradually decay"
Memory likely works much more like ant paths. The details that are recalled more frequently are reinforced, and can be remembered longer. It could also be compared to a caching algorithm; details used more often are less likely to be lost, or need fewer hints to retrieve them.
I'd really like to see a reference for this. Not because I disagree with your analogy, after all it's the basis for education and classical conditioning. It's a fair assumption that certain tasks such as facial recognition and memory recollection can be associated with certain regions of the brain. However, we still don't know how we go from synapses firing to midget wrestling. Looking at it from another direction, we don't regrow brain cells, they don't change in size or form like a popular anthill path may become stronger via compaction of soil or wider to accomodate more ants. We don't know specifically if a neuron has a "firing limit", or otherwise may wear out over time. At least, in my limited research I've never come across such studies.
And then using this assumption to declare something as non-computable demonstrates a lack of understanding of the concept of computability. The only way that conciousness could be non-computable would be if there is a supernatural element to it. Otherwise, the fact that it exists means it must be computable.
Agreed. Even the decay of RAM or any sort of storage medium susceptible to decay can be calculated somehow. How else would we have MTBF and expected write limits for Hard Disks, SSD's and such?
Nintendo has a rebuttal with their 3DS sales. Sony disagrees as well. Each of their handhelds has reportedly sold 4 million+ units in their 2.5 years or so of being on the market. While that's no rush to 6 million of the PS4 and XB1, it's still a significant amount of hardware to sell.
Unless you mean that the hardware itself doesn't work anymore, in which case I'd have to ask what you're doing with it. My Gameboy color and Game Gear work just fine.
To say nothing of the training between MS Office versions. Office 2k3 and Libre/OpenOffice are very close analogues of one another. When MS Office 2k7 came along with it's "ribbon" interface, my work had a hayday with getting all the users used to 2k3 up to speed with how to do their job in 2k7. Hell, it even took some of the more savvy folks months to remember where things had moved to and involved a lot of clicking around the ribbon and scanning for whatever it was they were looking for. It's arguable that instead of 2k7 they could have moved to LibreOffice and done away with the training, and saved ~$100 per seat. When you have some thousand users, that savings would add up.
In my mind it starts with hiring managers using correct terminology. Do a search for "software engineer" or "computer scientist" on LinkedIn or any other job site, and see how many web developer and database admin jobs show up. This isn't to belittle all web development, since some can get pretty creative in their optimizations (the "science" part of CS), but many simply have HTML and Javascript as requirements.
Once managers begin to understand the skill set they actually need and start asking the right questions, things will start looking better.
I'm surprised no one mentioned this so far. DOCUMENT EVERYTHING. Any IT person worth his salt should have thoroughly documented the configuration, standard software loadout, group policies, audit policies, etc... such that if one does get hit by a bus, the organization won't be crippled. Having handed over the keys on more than one occasion, I can honestly say that ip_freely_2000 is right, maintain a couple of your own hooks in case the new guy doesn't work out, but take a step back and enable him to do his job. Note the word choice, your job as manager is to enable him, not just turn your back and let him sink or swim.
These answers are short-sighted and don't get to the real questions a game designer should be asking. Lets look a little bit closer:
Are there doors in your game? This is really asking about portals from one area to another. Do a web search for an analysis of the Doom 3 source code and you'll see what I mean. Is your game broken into logical sections and how do you navigate between them?
Can the player open them? This is really asking if there are restrictions in place to prohibit free movement in the game world. Doom had key cards and colored doors. Mario has Pipes, paintings and stars, etc... Zelda is famous for "soft locks", where you can see something, but you need a new ability to get there, like the hookshot or bow and arrow.
Can the player open every door in the game? This is more of a visual style question. Again with Doom and the doors, some did not open, such as the one you came through to get to the beginning of the level (the ugly flat silver doors). Uncharted, Tomb Raider, Resistance, and even Halo are intended to take place in a beleivable world. All of them have a point A, a point B, and a path between them (sometimes 2 or a really wide path). Would you honestly want to go into every single building, every single floor, every single room in Saints Row? Infamous? Crackdown? GTA? Assassins Creed? Do you have any idea how long the development time would be? How much storage space you'd need to store an entire city the size of Brooklyn?
What tells a player a door is locked and will open, as opposed to a door that they will never open? This is a question about visual queueing. AVGN had an episode on Aliens that touched on this, the doors weren't distinguishable from ones that opened and ones that did not. Castlevania Simon's Quest was actually pretty good about it, open doors could be entered, closed doors could not. Gears of War had little green lights over doors that could open, particularly those that the player was supposed to go through.
What happens if there are two players? In Doom, if the door was open any player could pass. If they didn't have the key, the door didn't open. Simple. Resident Evil 5 allowed players to go through almost any door, only a few required teamwork.
Does it only lock after both players pass through the door? In Doom, no. In RE5, yes. In Gears of War, sometimes.
7. What if the level is REALLY BIG and can't all exist at the same time? This is really a question of separation of media within the game. How do you handle having too much for your 2GB of RAM? Do you simply crash and tell the user they need to buy more RAM? Do you detect that limit and begin streaming?
Given that almost every PC is separate, distinct, and unique from almost every other PC, you can't possibly know exactly how much video RAM or system RAM a user may have. Best you can do is "minimum suggested", which in many cases is only going to store a fraction of a level. Castlevania SOTN did this very well, those odd rooms with no music were loading rooms. No loading progress bar, no "Please Wait". It would load a good portion (if not all) of the area (e.g. Marble Gallery) into memory and let the player muck around. In other games the loading may just be of the needed textures, while only loading the level geometry for the immediate large room. To say "Your technology is not good enough" is taking an elitist approach to design. An XBOX360 is not capable of loading the entirety of Gears of War 3 into RAM all at once. Most computers aren't capable of loading the entirety of Skyrim into RAM all at once. WoW is over 20GB, compressed. Uncompressed who knows, but Windows is not going to allocate that much RAM to a single process, not when you also have web browsers, music, youtube, netflix, whatever loaded too. The doors provide a logical separation of data, I believe that in many cases they are used to queue the game engine to drop one set of textures/geometry and load in another.
All good questions, but many are still premature. Remember this is due to be released in October, which means going gold sometime ~6 weeks prior (or something like that). They'd have to have things wrapped up in August, and we're in April. Plenty of time for a death march. This is all my speculation.
Is the gameplay as carefully balanced and the world at least as immersive, large, and interesting as Skyrim plus expansions?
I doubt they could do much about world size now, being so late in development. Immersion depends entirely on the players suspension of disbeleif. Some people find the old-school Thief games incredibly immersive, I just found them to be a pain in the ass. All it takes is one awkward NPC statement to break some people out of it. Gamers are incredibly fickle that way.
No amount of eye candy can make up for weak gameplay mechanics or a small world. Is the dialogue matched to gameplay?
Well said, eye candy can't make up for crap gameplay. Just look at DNF (sort of), or any of the free to play chinese MMOs. I would bet the dialogue has already been recorded, any "matching" is probably being worked on now.
Is it matched to the gamer's style?
I doubt we'll see something like "That was awesome how you did that triple backflip off that boulder and stabbed two guys in the back." The number of things a player can do is just too large to enumerate every response. I bet the most we'll see is "good job".
Is it close enough to bug free that immersion isn't lost?
It's still in what I'd guess is a beta. That's a question come October.
Is the mechanic for buying and selling goods balanced?
Another question for October.
Does the game support all possible playing styles without falling apart in some way?
I doubt any game could effectively do this. The number of possible styles is just too large, there's any number of variations of Rambo-ing, sniping, fist fighting, etc... If it's worth it's salt, you'll have to come up with the appropriate counter to whatever you're facing.
Is the AI at least decent?
Which part of A.I.? That encompasses movement, facial expressions of NPCs, weapon choices of enemies, motion of enemies, tactics of enemies, weapon behaviors (i.e. jamming or inaccuracy), tactics of allies...
I'm assuming you mean the tactics of enemies. Looking at gamasutra's articles (thinking the Uncharted A.I. scripting engine), they still have plenty of time to refine it. Other things, such as hiding behind vs inside a rock, may be harder to find and fix.
Re:And all this after we have paid them to do it..
on
AT&T's Gigabit Smokescreen
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I know someone that recently moved to Austin. On the side of their house is a little box that says "AT&T Fiber". When they called AT&T to ask about internet service: "I'm sorry, we don't have service in your area".
I guess it could be fast if they knew where there infrastructure was in the first place...
Exactly this. I've known more than one person struggling to make ends meet and have heard a number of stories of places like Wal-Mart intentionally limiting a persons hours to avoid having to pay health care or benefits for their employees. Regardless of that employees needs or desires, they may only get 15-20 hours a week. I take it the Economist hasn't looked at other news lately and seen mothers shoplifting school supplies and clothing for their kids.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of what you say already exists and is somewhat transparent. Here are some examples:
For years they said that cross-realm mail was impossible, that the physical segregation of hardware (despite them all being on the same network) made it impossible. Now we have cross-server group finding in the random queues. We have account-wide mail of account-bound items that are not tied to servers or factions.
The cross-realm character transfer (and faction transfer) are advertised as though they they take at most 24 hours, and some forum posts by Blizzard employees have hinted that it isn't just a switch in a database, that it was closer to taking a USB stick and physically moving character data. If you've ever paid for any of those services, you'll notice that it is typically done in minutes, as though it was done in a lower-priority task as soon as the servers in question had a few free cycles. Or maybe just a simple transact-SQL script.
Hell, they even said for years that there was no way to automatically level a character, that the process was too complex and computationally expensive. Now you have "boosted" 90's running around all over the place. They've also implemented a server-side update stream for pre-patching installations, as well as server-based changes in environments (see phasing).
Of course, this is all just speculation. They could very well still have all the separate servers, complete with little printed labels slapped onto the front of the machines separating Drak'Thul from Doomhammer. 9 years is a lot of time for software development, they might have refined their network code to make all the above that much easier. They might have also upgraded from copper to fiber. They aren't public with their server setups, so who knows what they've got going on.
We already see this at gas stations, though I wonder where the advertisement offset truly goes. You start pumping gas then all of a sudden this speaker starts in on the wonderful gas station hot dogs and how they're one step shy of caviar served off a french stripper. I'm already paying for the fuel, and paying as much or more then other gas stations within eye-shot, am I really that starved for amusement that the gas pump has to start talking to me for the few minutes I'll be there?
Or "Cyan toner low", or "Fuser needs replacement" or any number of other status outputs. Or to make setting the IP address parameters easier. Or to display help to the newb user who needs to change a toner but doesn't know how.
Simple stupid inkjets plugged into one computer don't necessarily need a screen, but a good networked one does.
What, you're too good to program it with punch cards? and you can't tell what "Beep Beep Boop Wrrrr" means?
Yes, but where is that money going?
Winston Brooks, superintendent for Albuquerque Public Schools, makes $250k a year as of 2013. APS teachers averaged closer to $43k last year. According to CNN Money the poverty rate (lowest 15% of income) in 2013 was on the order of $51k nationwide. Granted there are some areas that bring up that average, such as Washington DC, New York and California. You can look into the salaries for teachers and assorted staff, but it still doesn't seem to add up to the overall funding line. Money gets tied up into standardized tests and the bureaucracy in managing them. Similarly to large corporations, education systems can (and sometimes do) get top-heavy with assorted C-level personnel that demand an unexplainably high salary for being little more than stamp jockeys.
This is what they mean when they say they can't be common carriers, it will cut their ability to "upgrade infrastructure". I'm not following how Merger-fest 2014 is somehow giving consumers more choice, however.
I'd attribute the popularity of the SNES in part to the resurgance of classic titles being released in ways like Nintendo's Virtual Console. In addition, those folks that grew up with the NES/SNES would be hitting their 30's now and may already have that good job and are able to go back and buy some of their childhood from their local used game store. I know I've been doing just that this year.
To give some numbers to CronoCloud:
SNES had 784 games.
Playstation 1 had 2,418 games.
Playstation 2 had 3,870 games.
(Side note, N64 had 387 games.)
Touche'. Gears of War apparently had 20 people actively working on it at any given time... but that does not include the number of developers working on the Unreal Engine, nor any of the publishing company, marketing, etc... 100 seems small when you start talking about every single person that ever had the title cross their desk, including middle and upper management whose only role was endorsing the project. The Wikipedia page for EWJ (the only thing I can access from work) shows 2 designers, 2 composers and 4 artists. Not sure how many programmers, but I do know it was heavily marketed and I'm sure some of the stamp-jockeys in big offices wanted their name on it too. Dammit.. now you're making me want to do some "empirical research" and go beat some of these games...
There is a reason that Austin has topped Forbes list of Biggest Boom Towns, and Top Tech Town. The ratio of income to cost of living, it even made it on Slashdot. A lot of big names have offices there too, such as Dell, HP, Cisco, Apple, etc...
On one hand, it's probably cheaper shipping to get those brides from Russia and China that it would be for those guys living in New York. On the other hand, they often don't put enough food and water in the crate for that two week voyage on the ship, to say nothing of the air (water) holes.
Superio graphics, AI and audio don't make a kick-ass game. IMO, the greatest video game of all time is Star Control 2 (1993)
Great nominee but I'd go with Mail-Order Monsters (1985), personally.
A friend and I have been going back and playing some older games just because, and it's still remarkable just how few people it took to create some of those iconic games. Or some of those lesser-known gems. Some examples:
There are certainly others, but it still illustrates the point that great games don't need stupid amounts of marketing, or absurdly large development teams.
I'm not so sure ATI does blow equally. I have two 660ti's in SLI to power 3 monitors. Anything beyond the ~2 year old 327 series drivers does not work for me. Without surround mode, I at least get three screens with newer drivers... generally I get a stupid amount of slowdown to the point where I feel like I'm running Windows 7 on a 486. If I somehow manage to turn on surround mode, all three screens are recognized, but only 2 of them display anything. The slowdown also gets much, much worse. To date I have not found anything about other people experiencing similar issues, and all of the nVidia documentation shows "this driver improves surround on 600 series and higher chipsets!". 3 fps is better than 2 fps, but still useless.
It might actually be reasonable. There are a number of businesses out there that provide blackberries or other "work" cell phones. They could also be throwing in assorted iPads and other tablets, since they too probably have some 3g/4g plan associated with them. While I too doubt that it's 1 for 1, there are some areas where it might be 2 or 3 devices for one person. Who knows whether or not those folks make up for those ends of the world without cell towers.
You're kidding right?
Do a job search on LinkedIn or Monster for "Computer Scientist" and see how many of those listings are web development. I did a search in my home town (not really CS friendly) and of the 2 dozen jobs that turned up, 75% had ASP.NET or ColdFusion in the requirements.
The real question is how do we fix what HR has broken?
"retrieving them repeatedly would cause them to gradually decay"
Memory likely works much more like ant paths. The details that are recalled more frequently are reinforced, and can be remembered longer. It could also be compared to a caching algorithm; details used more often are less likely to be lost, or need fewer hints to retrieve them.
I'd really like to see a reference for this. Not because I disagree with your analogy, after all it's the basis for education and classical conditioning. It's a fair assumption that certain tasks such as facial recognition and memory recollection can be associated with certain regions of the brain. However, we still don't know how we go from synapses firing to midget wrestling. Looking at it from another direction, we don't regrow brain cells, they don't change in size or form like a popular anthill path may become stronger via compaction of soil or wider to accomodate more ants. We don't know specifically if a neuron has a "firing limit", or otherwise may wear out over time. At least, in my limited research I've never come across such studies.
And then using this assumption to declare something as non-computable demonstrates a lack of understanding of the concept of computability. The only way that conciousness could be non-computable would be if there is a supernatural element to it. Otherwise, the fact that it exists means it must be computable.
Agreed. Even the decay of RAM or any sort of storage medium susceptible to decay can be calculated somehow. How else would we have MTBF and expected write limits for Hard Disks, SSD's and such?
Dead you say?
Nintendo has a rebuttal with their 3DS sales. Sony disagrees as well. Each of their handhelds has reportedly sold 4 million+ units in their 2.5 years or so of being on the market. While that's no rush to 6 million of the PS4 and XB1, it's still a significant amount of hardware to sell.
Unless you mean that the hardware itself doesn't work anymore, in which case I'd have to ask what you're doing with it. My Gameboy color and Game Gear work just fine.
To say nothing of the training between MS Office versions. Office 2k3 and Libre/OpenOffice are very close analogues of one another. When MS Office 2k7 came along with it's "ribbon" interface, my work had a hayday with getting all the users used to 2k3 up to speed with how to do their job in 2k7. Hell, it even took some of the more savvy folks months to remember where things had moved to and involved a lot of clicking around the ribbon and scanning for whatever it was they were looking for. It's arguable that instead of 2k7 they could have moved to LibreOffice and done away with the training, and saved ~$100 per seat. When you have some thousand users, that savings would add up.
@TheReal_AndyMac: The average human walks 900 miles per year and drinks
22 gallons of beer per year. That's 41 miles per gallon...which is not bad.
Need I say more?
This and this. It's also a neverending cycle.
In my mind it starts with hiring managers using correct terminology. Do a search for "software engineer" or "computer scientist" on LinkedIn or any other job site, and see how many web developer and database admin jobs show up. This isn't to belittle all web development, since some can get pretty creative in their optimizations (the "science" part of CS), but many simply have HTML and Javascript as requirements.
Once managers begin to understand the skill set they actually need and start asking the right questions, things will start looking better.
I'm surprised no one mentioned this so far. DOCUMENT EVERYTHING. Any IT person worth his salt should have thoroughly documented the configuration, standard software loadout, group policies, audit policies, etc... such that if one does get hit by a bus, the organization won't be crippled. Having handed over the keys on more than one occasion, I can honestly say that ip_freely_2000 is right, maintain a couple of your own hooks in case the new guy doesn't work out, but take a step back and enable him to do his job. Note the word choice, your job as manager is to enable him, not just turn your back and let him sink or swim.
For our more visual learners:
Check this cartoon
All good questions, but many are still premature. Remember this is due to be released in October, which means going gold sometime ~6 weeks prior (or something like that). They'd have to have things wrapped up in August, and we're in April. Plenty of time for a death march. This is all my speculation.
Is the gameplay as carefully balanced and the world at least as immersive, large, and interesting as Skyrim plus expansions?
I doubt they could do much about world size now, being so late in development. Immersion depends entirely on the players suspension of disbeleif. Some people find the old-school Thief games incredibly immersive, I just found them to be a pain in the ass. All it takes is one awkward NPC statement to break some people out of it. Gamers are incredibly fickle that way.
No amount of eye candy can make up for weak gameplay mechanics or a small world. Is the dialogue matched to gameplay?
Well said, eye candy can't make up for crap gameplay. Just look at DNF (sort of), or any of the free to play chinese MMOs. I would bet the dialogue has already been recorded, any "matching" is probably being worked on now.
Is it matched to the gamer's style?
I doubt we'll see something like "That was awesome how you did that triple backflip off that boulder and stabbed two guys in the back." The number of things a player can do is just too large to enumerate every response. I bet the most we'll see is "good job".
Is it close enough to bug free that immersion isn't lost?
It's still in what I'd guess is a beta. That's a question come October.
Is the mechanic for buying and selling goods balanced?
Another question for October.
Does the game support all possible playing styles without falling apart in some way?
I doubt any game could effectively do this. The number of possible styles is just too large, there's any number of variations of Rambo-ing, sniping, fist fighting, etc...
If it's worth it's salt, you'll have to come up with the appropriate counter to whatever you're facing.
Is the AI at least decent?
Which part of A.I.? That encompasses movement, facial expressions of NPCs, weapon choices of enemies, motion of enemies, tactics of enemies, weapon behaviors (i.e. jamming or inaccuracy), tactics of allies...
I'm assuming you mean the tactics of enemies. Looking at gamasutra's articles (thinking the Uncharted A.I. scripting engine), they still have plenty of time to refine it. Other things, such as hiding behind vs inside a rock, may be harder to find and fix.
I know someone that recently moved to Austin. On the side of their house is a little box that says "AT&T Fiber". When they called AT&T to ask about internet service: "I'm sorry, we don't have service in your area".
I guess it could be fast if they knew where there infrastructure was in the first place...
Exactly this. I've known more than one person struggling to make ends meet and have heard a number of stories of places like Wal-Mart intentionally limiting a persons hours to avoid having to pay health care or benefits for their employees. Regardless of that employees needs or desires, they may only get 15-20 hours a week. I take it the Economist hasn't looked at other news lately and seen mothers shoplifting school supplies and clothing for their kids.