Highly competetive games, especially shooters, are always being outdated by newer games and technology. Why frag (or be fragged by,) someone in Quake II when you could frag someone in Unreal Tournament 2004.
You're so terribly wrong in that statement. Highly competitive games tend to last a very long time. I offer the following examples:
StarCraft Counter-strike Quake 3 Warcraft 3
As a veteran of competitive games, let me tell you - the most popular competitive games, FPS or not, tend to last a very long time. It's the games that lie below the cream that cycle frequently. Battlefield 1942/Vietnam, Call of Duty, Return to Castle Wolfenstein (which is actually still being played), Soldier of Fortune II, and, the, list, goes, on, etc.
Not making a qualitative assessment of your over-arching statement, but that point itself is, IMO, completely wrong. At the very least its highly misleading.
Funny you'd mention that. A lot of the beta testers think that's part of the reason Blizzard's moving forward as fast as they are. They also think its a stupid idea, because they've played EQ2 and all agree that its pretty to look at, and sucks in most other regards.
But what he's saying is right, a lot of the vulnerabilities have to do with people downloading third-party software. If I wanted Fox News style reporting I'd.. watch Fox News.
There was a lot more interesting news in that interview than 'OooOOoOOooOo He said ', and a lot more to be worried about if you're still wearing the tinfoil hat, than that one meager line of text.
EA doesn't produce games, really, they just handle the licensing/distribution/etc., like Activision did for ids earlier stuff (do they still, I don't know..?). They also do QA for their games, and maintain a lot of the production studios as almost in-house, but they're still production teams, and should be viewed as such.
I suppose you could hold Blizzard to a similar standard since they do have Blizzard and Blizzard North, so maybe it's moot. Still, if you look at signal to noise ratio, you'll find that every one of Blizzard's games has not only been critically acclaimed (which really means little, I think), but financially succesful, and wildly popular. Really, it seems like EA releases games like farts, and some of them are just worse than others. Okay, maybe that's harsh, but they produce a lot of really awful games in addition to their more succesful titles.
Regardless, I think Maxis is as close as you can get to a contendor, and if you factor in Blizzard's international success (very popular in Asia and Europe, both), I don't think Maxis has quite that much of a claim, even though their games do reach a broader base and an easier learning-curve.
I have to disclaim that I don't have any figures to back up my estimation on Maxis' influence, just gut feeling from following the gaming world reasonably close over the years.
See? That's what I mean. At the very least, that's an extremely subjective choice, since there is no widespread definition of the order, ie what constitutes being a more successful gaming company than others. I most certainly disagree, actually I wouldn't want to put that label on any single company - but that's also just my own very subjective opinion.
I took a step back from attempting to qualify their merit and just said 'succesful', which I think is a lot easier to validate *and* agree with. Blizzard has not had a failure yet. By all signs, WoW won't be a failure either, whether or not it lives up to the hype. I've been a fan of gaming for many, many years, since before Warcraft I, and I cannot think of any software company that can wrest that title from Blizzard. The closest is perhaps id, but they've had a few misses with Quake 2 and Quake 3 (which was a tremendous multi-player game, but not at a point where multi-player could really drive a game's sales).
If you can think of any better examples I'm all ears. Maybe Maxis and its Sim franchise? I don't think it has quite the international presence that Blizzard does, though. Anyway.. if you disagree, do let me know who you have in mind instead. If you look at every title Blizzard's released, though, through the Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo lines, it's a tough case to make otherwise.
So people who don't like the genre aren't suddenly going to like the genre. That's.. great?
BTW, they did do a European beta, which just went out a few weeks ago. Sorry if you missed out on it. They're doing an open beta soon, too. Maybe you can get in on that.
I don't know if you're insinuating that I'm one of those 'rabid fanboys', since I've done what I could to be ultimately objective, but it's to be expected that the most succesful gaming company would have the most rabid fanboys. I don't count myself under that banner, but.. whatever.
One man's innovation is another man's polish, then. You're saying that taking a worn genre like MMORPGs, figuring out what all was wrong with the genre as it stood, and then setting out to fix them, wholesale, isn't an innovative idea. I think, especially for the gaming world, that it is. I think most game developers come up with a few ideas, then craft a game around it. Blizzard's approach isn't one that's just vested in its own in-house talent. The quality in their games is the product of a comprehensive look at what features people do and don't like in their and other people's games, and how they can be made differently. They take a few ideas, make a game, *then* go back and polish it. VIRTUALLY NOBODY ELSE DOES THIS. Everyone else gets a game ready, throws it out, then releases a few patches if there's anything horribly wrong.
Additionally, no company has ever given quite the attention to multi-player gaming as Blizzard has. Nobody's come even close, except Valve, when they took up Counter-strike as an official product. The only other thing that really wanders into the vicinity of this is id's initial push into creating a mod 'community' for the quake series. Even this was something that was pushed largely by fans of the game, and id simply realized it'd be a good idea to give fans more leeway to make these things happen on their own.
You criticize point 7 by saying that it proves your point. How? How does pushing a genre that was done only once before (with mild success, at best) into the mainstream, bringing it to multi-player, carefully balancing the gameplay such that it can still be an active and competitive gaming venue some 6-7 years later, and creating the entire battle.net frontend to catalyze the process NOT qualify as innovative? You don't have to invent a new wheel to be innovative.
If you go over this with any more fine-toothed of a comb, you're going to bring this down to the ridiculous belief that there is no such thing as innovation because every idea is somehow derivative of another, which is a foolish conclusion.
If you want to boil it all down, it comes to this:
- Battle.net - Instanced (potentially massive) multi-player RPG. - Starcraft, the single longest-standing competitive PC game on the world stage.
I have no idea what you mean by 'Quake 1 + Meridian 59 = Battle.net'. I looked up Meridian 59. Its an MMO with an ugly interface.
Battle.net has no connection to MMOs whatsoever. From a software perspective its a glorified IRC client. The innovation is in the fact that it serves as an easy interface for even the least advanced gamer in the world to get involved in a game, start playing, and keep track of his statistics. The fact that your best example had to involve a hybrid of two games, is evidence enough of the fact that there really isn't anything like it out there.
Lastly, regarding point #8, 'noteworthy' was your own words. The point was that this game was built to allow for top-notch competition, and while it may seem trifling if you're not interested in this sort of thing, it has had a huge effect on cultures outside of yours and mine. So while the scope of its significance may not be readily apparent, it is actually quite broad. It was *years* before any company took their game's multi-player online competition seriously enough to actually spend time refining it. Many companies still don't, and simply put a multi-player mode or two in as a throw-in to a single-player game.
Blizzard is the most polished developing studio of the modern gaming era. However, they never do anything really noteworthy and imaginative - their games are pretty derivative. This isn't necessarily a bad thing - they're still damn fun games - but it's clear that it's up to other companies to come up with truly new ideas.
I think you're dead wrong, and I'll tell you why:
1 - WoW is geared towards letting players level at a reasonable pace. Many games call themselves 'quest driven', but few of them do it well enough that you can actually progress through the game by primarily doing quests, and doing 'the grind' or dungeon crawling only if you really want to. There are some repetitive quests, it's not perfect, but much of the game is driven by goal-oriented activities, with levels being a side-effect.
2 - WoW is incorporating instanced dungeons into a true MMO environment. If you've played MMOs at all, think about how much that's going to change the high-end gaming experience. No more camping out dungeons. No more waiting hours for that one loot item. They're allowing for 'raid groups' of up to 40 people to do the really large-scale dungeons, and scaling loot tables to match it. No more stocking up 50-person groups just to get two items. Read the worldofwarcraft.com article on 'raid dynamics' for a full idea of what they're doing with this.
3 - PvP with an 'honor system', where killing tougher opponents nets you positive 'honor', and killing significantly weaker opponents nets you 'negative' honor, eventually reaching a point where your own home-town's guards will kill you on sight.
4 - All of this meshed with game quality that blows anything else out there out of the water. The artwork, the storylines, the themes, the worlds, they're all very well-polished. The art is top-notch on every level, from the written to the rendered. The immersion level for this game is very high, and the dynamics are actually fun, so while you do have to work harder for accomplishments at higher levels, it's not ridiculous to the point of Everquest, et. al.
5 - Battle.net. Hello? You want something new and imaginative?
6 - Name me a multi-player game like Diablo/Diablo2.
7 - Warcraft 1-3 and Starcraft were not the FIRST RTS's out there (a distinction belonging to Dune 2), but they pushed the genre into the mainstream, even bringing multi-player online RTS competition into light.
8 - Ask Korea what they think about how 'noteworthy' they think Blizzard is.
We both agree that Blizzard is a top-notch developing studio, but I don't think you can viably knock their ability to bring innovation to their games. World of Warcraft has been designed explicitly for the purpose of fixing all the things that were done poorly in previous MMO games, and just because WoW isn't the first game in that genre doesn't mean there's no room for non-derivative work. You can't expect them to pioneer a new genre with *every* game they release, even though they've done it before.
The best part, to me, about Blizzard's 'epic fantasy universe', is how well-detailed the conflicts are. There is no 'good guy/bad guy', as you can come up with equally dastardly and heroic achievements and motivations for all races in the Warcraft universe, and even the Starcraft universe to some extents. When you're playing the game, it allows you to really get behind the side you're playing, because its easy to think of the other guy as the 'bad guy', while they may feel the exact same way about you.
The storyline goes beyond some simple, obligatory, and arbitrary storyline: [The orcs attacked us. We fought back. We drove them out. We won!]
and genuinely delves into something that begs to be fleshed out [We followed them into their portal, their twisted leader destroyed their home world and fled, his unwitting followers fled to our land, and now we have made them our slaves]. Things actually happen. It's not like the world is at rest, then a s
I didn't want to reply to this because I wanted to mod this discussion, but I can't resist:
You may not realize it, but there's a huge, huge, huge presence of online games that are NOT Counter-strike (or Doom 3, or any other FPS). I'm a huge FPS fan, always have been, but online gaming certainly is moving in other directions - while still progressing heavily in the FPS market, if for no other reason than vendors wanting to push a viable competitive vehicle for them to show off hardware on.
Sims Online, the virtual morass of MMORPGs out there, Yahoo! Games, Starcraft/Warcraft 3, etc. By the way, I'm playing in the WoW beta, and I highly suspect it will make the biggest splash in the MMORPG world since Everquest, if not since Ultima Online virtually pioneered the genre.
While I'm on the topic, Blizzard for best game developing studio of the modern gaming era? I can't think of anyone who comes close to their unparalleled success in multiple genres, and if WoW works out as I suspect it will, the gap will just widen.
If it sounds like a job to you that probably explains why you don't do it. Some of us enjoy spending long hours practicing.
And your analogy of all the money going to the top 3 is related more to the fact that there isn't as much money in eSports (as they're often called) yet. Quake hit the scene in late 1995/mid 1996. Actual tournaments started up around then. That was the first real exploration into what we now know as eSports. The PGL, Quakecon, and events like this were less than 10 years ago. Golf's been around for what, over a century? Racing? Virtually pre-historic.
The venue simply hasn't matured yet. Still, it's shown a steady increase year after year, and so far there's little to no indication that it won't continue to, as long as organizations like WCG and the CPL continue to grow as they have.
Well, technically speaking, video games are not an anti-social self-contained experience. More and more, games that used to be the sole domain of single-player experience are becoming not just 2 or multi-player, but online-capable. That's a console reference, consoles being the slower-moving of gaming platforms. Computer games have been social almost across the board for years now.
So what exactly about video games isn't a 'real life' experience? Are the people you talk to not real? Is it not real because they act a little differently online than they would if, say, you were hanging out with them after work, or at school, or whatever the suitable scenario was?
Quick newsflash: Video games are as much a part of 'real life' as anything else. The fulfillment, enjoyment, and socialization is completely real, just different. Many of my friends these days are people I've played video games with competitively for 5 years now. Some of us come and go, some of us find other things to do, but this is no different than any other hobby.
People need to get over referring to communication and socialization over the internet as not being a part of 'real life'. It's very real, people have gotten married based on internet-founded relationships, people have gotten divorced because of them, and the gamut of experience is far wider than that. It may not seem normal, or healthy, but that's your own opinion to deal with.
For the purposes of disclosure, I've been playing video games almost compulsively since I was a child. I have been diagnosed with ADD, and at one point they went so far as to suggest I had a particular disposition to impulsive/compulsive behavior. Yet I still live a fairly cultured life. I go out on weekends, I enjoy beautiful weather, I absolutely love trying new restaurants, I enjoy independent movies - most of which I watch in a theatre, not on my computer. I've been in a happy, steady relationship with someone for just short of 4 years. I hold a full-time, well-paying job in the Software industry. I finished school.
Yet, there are frequent nights when I play 5-6 hours of video games, and occasionally on weekends I'll spend most of the day playing them.
The point here is that there is no disconnect between my 'real life' experiences and my video game experiences, because there's no disconnect between the 'reality' in both. I got hooked on the internet at the age of 13, some 11 years ago, and I've been there ever since.
Part of the reason for that is that these precious 'real life' experiences you're suggesting were one or more of the following: trite, unfulfilling, unwelcome, overrated, or destructive. It wasn't until I reached young adulthood and found that the barriers of who I associated with were based less on age and more on character that I really started to enjoy 'getting out'.
I won a 6800 Ultra at a raffle done by NVidia back in mid-April or so. I received the card in mid-June. No big deal, except that they'd used the exact same model of those cards in a tournament they hosted at the same time as the raffle. I scrambled to get it on Ebay, thinking I wanted to beat it to market, but it turns out I was still a month or so ahead of the release schedule anyhow.
Many people who upgrade their computers do it in steps. Usually the largest hump is the motherboard/cpu/RAM upgrade, but the video card, sound card, peripherals, monitor, are often released at different paces, so there's no point trying to upgrade them all at once. I just recently bought my first new sound card in about 3 years, but I've been through 3 video cards in the same time frame, and as many CPU/MB/RAM sets as well. My girlfriend wins out, too - she gets most of the leftovers.
You're fooling yourself if you think Doom 3 has achieved some pillar of achievement that isn't going to be breached within the next generation of games.
Heck, Far Cry was almost as demanding as doom 3 and it came out last summer. Some people even liked it more, especially when Ubisoft released the Pixel Shader Model 2.0 patch for it, to let it make use of the new shader technology on the GeForce 6800 cards - which, by the way, looks pretty cool, if you haven't seen it yet.
They've got one of these posted along Highway 101, too. For anyone not in the Bay Area, that's the (far) more heavily-used of the two highways that goes from San Francisco to San Jose.
I fail to understand why posts like this get modded up. How is this an interesting statement? Is there a (-1 Boring) or (-1 Uninspiring) mod in the works? Please, can we at least try to quit pandering to karma whores?
A true electric vehicle would presumably consume *no* fossil fuel, but otherwise you did an excellent job of missing the point.
The fundamental concept was conservation. Your car got 45 on *diesel*. Stop and think about that. Your colleague's Range Rover gets 25.. so what?
And you're right, my car does not make me savior of the Earth. The holes in my hands and my ability to walk on water does. Now, please, pass the fish, I've got mouthes to feed.
Actually, driving home today I got 55 mpg. The other point here was that hybrid vehicles are also SULEV, which your small car may not be. In fact, I've read in two places now that the Prius actually meets all of the specifications listed for ILEV standards (which I find surprising, and am not putting much faith in at this point), but there is a specific caveat that the CA DMV is enforcing that hybrid vehicles *CANNOT* apply for an ILEV sticker.
Supposedly there is legislation in the works to rescind that, so my concern would seem to have at least some veracity, but given our governator here I'm not terribly hopeful for any sort of progress on the green front anytime soon.
Disregard then. I'd still like to know if anyone knows whether or not they've changed the laws to allow SULEV/non-ILEV vehicles onto the HOV lanes in California, though.
And the drive for oil is a direct result of the human urge to consume. This urge is manifested by my desire to eat ice cream. Would ice cream therefore be 'on topic' too?
Ice Cream.. electric cars.. Chewbacca lives on Endor!
Slashdot Mirror
Highly competetive games, especially shooters, are always being outdated by newer games and technology. Why frag (or be fragged by,) someone in Quake II when you could frag someone in Unreal Tournament 2004.
You're so terribly wrong in that statement. Highly competitive games tend to last a very long time. I offer the following examples:
StarCraft
Counter-strike
Quake 3
Warcraft 3
As a veteran of competitive games, let me tell you - the most popular competitive games, FPS or not, tend to last a very long time. It's the games that lie below the cream that cycle frequently. Battlefield 1942/Vietnam, Call of Duty, Return to Castle Wolfenstein (which is actually still being played), Soldier of Fortune II, and, the, list, goes, on, etc.
Not making a qualitative assessment of your over-arching statement, but that point itself is, IMO, completely wrong. At the very least its highly misleading.
Funny you'd mention that. A lot of the beta testers think that's part of the reason Blizzard's moving forward as fast as they are. They also think its a stupid idea, because they've played EQ2 and all agree that its pretty to look at, and sucks in most other regards.
But what he's saying is right, a lot of the vulnerabilities have to do with people downloading third-party software. If I wanted Fox News style reporting I'd .. watch Fox News.
There was a lot more interesting news in that interview than 'OooOOoOOooOo He said ', and a lot more to be worried about if you're still wearing the tinfoil hat, than that one meager line of text.
EA doesn't produce games, really, they just handle the licensing/distribution/etc., like Activision did for ids earlier stuff (do they still, I don't know..?). They also do QA for their games, and maintain a lot of the production studios as almost in-house, but they're still production teams, and should be viewed as such.
I suppose you could hold Blizzard to a similar standard since they do have Blizzard and Blizzard North, so maybe it's moot. Still, if you look at signal to noise ratio, you'll find that every one of Blizzard's games has not only been critically acclaimed (which really means little, I think), but financially succesful, and wildly popular. Really, it seems like EA releases games like farts, and some of them are just worse than others. Okay, maybe that's harsh, but they produce a lot of really awful games in addition to their more succesful titles.
Regardless, I think Maxis is as close as you can get to a contendor, and if you factor in Blizzard's international success (very popular in Asia and Europe, both), I don't think Maxis has quite that much of a claim, even though their games do reach a broader base and an easier learning-curve.
I have to disclaim that I don't have any figures to back up my estimation on Maxis' influence, just gut feeling from following the gaming world reasonably close over the years.
Funny that your website also happens to appear in conjunction with QNX frequently in google searches :p
the most succesful gaming company
See? That's what I mean. At the very least, that's an extremely subjective choice, since there is no widespread definition of the order, ie what constitutes being a more successful gaming company than others. I most certainly disagree, actually I wouldn't want to put that label on any single company - but that's also just my own very subjective opinion.
I took a step back from attempting to qualify their merit and just said 'succesful', which I think is a lot easier to validate *and* agree with. Blizzard has not had a failure yet. By all signs, WoW won't be a failure either, whether or not it lives up to the hype. I've been a fan of gaming for many, many years, since before Warcraft I, and I cannot think of any software company that can wrest that title from Blizzard. The closest is perhaps id, but they've had a few misses with Quake 2 and Quake 3 (which was a tremendous multi-player game, but not at a point where multi-player could really drive a game's sales).
If you can think of any better examples I'm all ears. Maybe Maxis and its Sim franchise? I don't think it has quite the international presence that Blizzard does, though. Anyway.. if you disagree, do let me know who you have in mind instead. If you look at every title Blizzard's released, though, through the Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo lines, it's a tough case to make otherwise.
So people who don't like the genre aren't suddenly going to like the genre. That's.. great?
BTW, they did do a European beta, which just went out a few weeks ago. Sorry if you missed out on it. They're doing an open beta soon, too. Maybe you can get in on that.
I don't know if you're insinuating that I'm one of those 'rabid fanboys', since I've done what I could to be ultimately objective, but it's to be expected that the most succesful gaming company would have the most rabid fanboys. I don't count myself under that banner, but.. whatever.
One man's innovation is another man's polish, then. You're saying that taking a worn genre like MMORPGs, figuring out what all was wrong with the genre as it stood, and then setting out to fix them, wholesale, isn't an innovative idea. I think, especially for the gaming world, that it is. I think most game developers come up with a few ideas, then craft a game around it. Blizzard's approach isn't one that's just vested in its own in-house talent. The quality in their games is the product of a comprehensive look at what features people do and don't like in their and other people's games, and how they can be made differently. They take a few ideas, make a game, *then* go back and polish it. VIRTUALLY NOBODY ELSE DOES THIS. Everyone else gets a game ready, throws it out, then releases a few patches if there's anything horribly wrong.
Additionally, no company has ever given quite the attention to multi-player gaming as Blizzard has. Nobody's come even close, except Valve, when they took up Counter-strike as an official product. The only other thing that really wanders into the vicinity of this is id's initial push into creating a mod 'community' for the quake series. Even this was something that was pushed largely by fans of the game, and id simply realized it'd be a good idea to give fans more leeway to make these things happen on their own.
You criticize point 7 by saying that it proves your point. How? How does pushing a genre that was done only once before (with mild success, at best) into the mainstream, bringing it to multi-player, carefully balancing the gameplay such that it can still be an active and competitive gaming venue some 6-7 years later, and creating the entire battle.net frontend to catalyze the process NOT qualify as innovative? You don't have to invent a new wheel to be innovative.
If you go over this with any more fine-toothed of a comb, you're going to bring this down to the ridiculous belief that there is no such thing as innovation because every idea is somehow derivative of another, which is a foolish conclusion.
If you want to boil it all down, it comes to this:
- Battle.net
- Instanced (potentially massive) multi-player RPG.
- Starcraft, the single longest-standing competitive PC game on the world stage.
I have no idea what you mean by 'Quake 1 + Meridian 59 = Battle.net'. I looked up Meridian 59. Its an MMO with an ugly interface.
Battle.net has no connection to MMOs whatsoever. From a software perspective its a glorified IRC client. The innovation is in the fact that it serves as an easy interface for even the least advanced gamer in the world to get involved in a game, start playing, and keep track of his statistics. The fact that your best example had to involve a hybrid of two games, is evidence enough of the fact that there really isn't anything like it out there.
Lastly, regarding point #8, 'noteworthy' was your own words. The point was that this game was built to allow for top-notch competition, and while it may seem trifling if you're not interested in this sort of thing, it has had a huge effect on cultures outside of yours and mine. So while the scope of its significance may not be readily apparent, it is actually quite broad. It was *years* before any company took their game's multi-player online competition seriously enough to actually spend time refining it. Many companies still don't, and simply put a multi-player mode or two in as a throw-in to a single-player game.
Blizzard is the most polished developing studio of the modern gaming era. However, they never do anything really noteworthy and imaginative - their games are pretty derivative. This isn't necessarily a bad thing - they're still damn fun games - but it's clear that it's up to other companies to come up with truly new ideas.
I think you're dead wrong, and I'll tell you why:
1 - WoW is geared towards letting players level at a reasonable pace. Many games call themselves 'quest driven', but few of them do it well enough that you can actually progress through the game by primarily doing quests, and doing 'the grind' or dungeon crawling only if you really want to. There are some repetitive quests, it's not perfect, but much of the game is driven by goal-oriented activities, with levels being a side-effect.
2 - WoW is incorporating instanced dungeons into a true MMO environment. If you've played MMOs at all, think about how much that's going to change the high-end gaming experience. No more camping out dungeons. No more waiting hours for that one loot item. They're allowing for 'raid groups' of up to 40 people to do the really large-scale dungeons, and scaling loot tables to match it. No more stocking up 50-person groups just to get two items. Read the worldofwarcraft.com article on 'raid dynamics' for a full idea of what they're doing with this.
3 - PvP with an 'honor system', where killing tougher opponents nets you positive 'honor', and killing significantly weaker opponents nets you 'negative' honor, eventually reaching a point where your own home-town's guards will kill you on sight.
4 - All of this meshed with game quality that blows anything else out there out of the water. The artwork, the storylines, the themes, the worlds, they're all very well-polished. The art is top-notch on every level, from the written to the rendered. The immersion level for this game is very high, and the dynamics are actually fun, so while you do have to work harder for accomplishments at higher levels, it's not ridiculous to the point of Everquest, et. al.
5 - Battle.net. Hello? You want something new and imaginative?
6 - Name me a multi-player game like Diablo/Diablo2.
7 - Warcraft 1-3 and Starcraft were not the FIRST RTS's out there (a distinction belonging to Dune 2), but they pushed the genre into the mainstream, even bringing multi-player online RTS competition into light.
8 - Ask Korea what they think about how 'noteworthy' they think Blizzard is.
We both agree that Blizzard is a top-notch developing studio, but I don't think you can viably knock their ability to bring innovation to their games. World of Warcraft has been designed explicitly for the purpose of fixing all the things that were done poorly in previous MMO games, and just because WoW isn't the first game in that genre doesn't mean there's no room for non-derivative work. You can't expect them to pioneer a new genre with *every* game they release, even though they've done it before.
The best part, to me, about Blizzard's 'epic fantasy universe', is how well-detailed the conflicts are. There is no 'good guy/bad guy', as you can come up with equally dastardly and heroic achievements and motivations for all races in the Warcraft universe, and even the Starcraft universe to some extents. When you're playing the game, it allows you to really get behind the side you're playing, because its easy to think of the other guy as the 'bad guy', while they may feel the exact same way about you.
The storyline goes beyond some simple, obligatory, and arbitrary storyline:
[The orcs attacked us. We fought back. We drove them out. We won!]
and genuinely delves into something that begs to be fleshed out
[We followed them into their portal, their twisted leader destroyed their home world and fled, his unwitting followers fled to our land, and now we have made them our slaves]. Things actually happen. It's not like the world is at rest, then a s
I didn't want to reply to this because I wanted to mod this discussion, but I can't resist:
You may not realize it, but there's a huge, huge, huge presence of online games that are NOT Counter-strike (or Doom 3, or any other FPS). I'm a huge FPS fan, always have been, but online gaming certainly is moving in other directions - while still progressing heavily in the FPS market, if for no other reason than vendors wanting to push a viable competitive vehicle for them to show off hardware on.
Sims Online, the virtual morass of MMORPGs out there, Yahoo! Games, Starcraft/Warcraft 3, etc. By the way, I'm playing in the WoW beta, and I highly suspect it will make the biggest splash in the MMORPG world since Everquest, if not since Ultima Online virtually pioneered the genre.
While I'm on the topic, Blizzard for best game developing studio of the modern gaming era? I can't think of anyone who comes close to their unparalleled success in multiple genres, and if WoW works out as I suspect it will, the gap will just widen.
If it sounds like a job to you that probably explains why you don't do it. Some of us enjoy spending long hours practicing.
And your analogy of all the money going to the top 3 is related more to the fact that there isn't as much money in eSports (as they're often called) yet. Quake hit the scene in late 1995/mid 1996. Actual tournaments started up around then. That was the first real exploration into what we now know as eSports. The PGL, Quakecon, and events like this were less than 10 years ago. Golf's been around for what, over a century? Racing? Virtually pre-historic.
The venue simply hasn't matured yet. Still, it's shown a steady increase year after year, and so far there's little to no indication that it won't continue to, as long as organizations like WCG and the CPL continue to grow as they have.
Well, technically speaking, video games are not an anti-social self-contained experience. More and more, games that used to be the sole domain of single-player experience are becoming not just 2 or multi-player, but online-capable. That's a console reference, consoles being the slower-moving of gaming platforms. Computer games have been social almost across the board for years now.
Funny, I felt like I would come across more as trying to make a sociological point than sounding like some angry LARP fanatic.
The former is true, the second.. I never liked LARPs.
So what exactly about video games isn't a 'real life' experience? Are the people you talk to not real? Is it not real because they act a little differently online than they would if, say, you were hanging out with them after work, or at school, or whatever the suitable scenario was?
Quick newsflash: Video games are as much a part of 'real life' as anything else. The fulfillment, enjoyment, and socialization is completely real, just different. Many of my friends these days are people I've played video games with competitively for 5 years now. Some of us come and go, some of us find other things to do, but this is no different than any other hobby.
People need to get over referring to communication and socialization over the internet as not being a part of 'real life'. It's very real, people have gotten married based on internet-founded relationships, people have gotten divorced because of them, and the gamut of experience is far wider than that. It may not seem normal, or healthy, but that's your own opinion to deal with.
For the purposes of disclosure, I've been playing video games almost compulsively since I was a child. I have been diagnosed with ADD, and at one point they went so far as to suggest I had a particular disposition to impulsive/compulsive behavior. Yet I still live a fairly cultured life. I go out on weekends, I enjoy beautiful weather, I absolutely love trying new restaurants, I enjoy independent movies - most of which I watch in a theatre, not on my computer. I've been in a happy, steady relationship with someone for just short of 4 years. I hold a full-time, well-paying job in the Software industry. I finished school.
Yet, there are frequent nights when I play 5-6 hours of video games, and occasionally on weekends I'll spend most of the day playing them.
The point here is that there is no disconnect between my 'real life' experiences and my video game experiences, because there's no disconnect between the 'reality' in both. I got hooked on the internet at the age of 13, some 11 years ago, and I've been there ever since.
Part of the reason for that is that these precious 'real life' experiences you're suggesting were one or more of the following: trite, unfulfilling, unwelcome, overrated, or destructive. It wasn't until I reached young adulthood and found that the barriers of who I associated with were based less on age and more on character that I really started to enjoy 'getting out'.
I won a 6800 Ultra at a raffle done by NVidia back in mid-April or so. I received the card in mid-June. No big deal, except that they'd used the exact same model of those cards in a tournament they hosted at the same time as the raffle. I scrambled to get it on Ebay, thinking I wanted to beat it to market, but it turns out I was still a month or so ahead of the release schedule anyhow.
Many people who upgrade their computers do it in steps. Usually the largest hump is the motherboard/cpu/RAM upgrade, but the video card, sound card, peripherals, monitor, are often released at different paces, so there's no point trying to upgrade them all at once. I just recently bought my first new sound card in about 3 years, but I've been through 3 video cards in the same time frame, and as many CPU/MB/RAM sets as well. My girlfriend wins out, too - she gets most of the leftovers.
You're fooling yourself if you think Doom 3 has achieved some pillar of achievement that isn't going to be breached within the next generation of games.
Heck, Far Cry was almost as demanding as doom 3 and it came out last summer. Some people even liked it more, especially when Ubisoft released the Pixel Shader Model 2.0 patch for it, to let it make use of the new shader technology on the GeForce 6800 cards - which, by the way, looks pretty cool, if you haven't seen it yet.
True. I never considered that any sort of legitimate elitism, but it is, just the same.
Stickers as a ticket to elitism. Who knew?
They've got one of these posted along Highway 101, too. For anyone not in the Bay Area, that's the (far) more heavily-used of the two highways that goes from San Francisco to San Jose.
I fail to understand why posts like this get modded up. How is this an interesting statement? Is there a (-1 Boring) or (-1 Uninspiring) mod in the works? Please, can we at least try to quit pandering to karma whores?
A true electric vehicle would presumably consume *no* fossil fuel, but otherwise you did an excellent job of missing the point.
The fundamental concept was conservation. Your car got 45 on *diesel*. Stop and think about that. Your colleague's Range Rover gets 25.. so what?
And you're right, my car does not make me savior of the Earth. The holes in my hands and my ability to walk on water does. Now, please, pass the fish, I've got mouthes to feed.
Actually, driving home today I got 55 mpg. The other point here was that hybrid vehicles are also SULEV, which your small car may not be. In fact, I've read in two places now that the Prius actually meets all of the specifications listed for ILEV standards (which I find surprising, and am not putting much faith in at this point), but there is a specific caveat that the CA DMV is enforcing that hybrid vehicles *CANNOT* apply for an ILEV sticker.
Supposedly there is legislation in the works to rescind that, so my concern would seem to have at least some veracity, but given our governator here I'm not terribly hopeful for any sort of progress on the green front anytime soon.
Disregard then. I'd still like to know if anyone knows whether or not they've changed the laws to allow SULEV/non-ILEV vehicles onto the HOV lanes in California, though.
And the drive for oil is a direct result of the human urge to consume. This urge is manifested by my desire to eat ice cream. Would ice cream therefore be 'on topic' too?
Ice Cream.. electric cars.. Chewbacca lives on Endor!