The masses *are* held back by Linux. Its not mainstream in the desktop market. I use it, sure, but honestly, what percentage of people have two computers they can dedicate to EQ and one of them is running linux? Yeah, it absolutely limits the masses.
I'm 25, and I used my own credit card to play EQ for 2 years. What was that, about $240? Totally worth it. My total time played was just under 50 days, so about 1000 hours over two years. How much does normal entertainment cost per hour? I bet its more than $0.25. A movie is about 4.50 an hour, but those people aren't "stupid enough to pay" are they? Hmmm...
Oh, and I liked Everquest (just didn't have time for it anymore), and so do about 400,000 other people.
Umm, ok. In real life, when I put on armor...oh, wait, I don't put on armor in real life, that's why I play games.
Oh, and by the way, EQ (without any cheats) gives me a perfect measure of the armor's protection. Its called "AC". Maybe you've heard of it...its in most roleplaying games.
But I digress. Your stated thesis is false. I roleplay all the time in games that give me all the stats. Neverwinter Nights, for one. Oh, and wait, there was one before that that I recall being the father of all roleplaying games where I had to calculate everything...what was that called? Oh, thats right, Dungeons and Dragons.
No, I think that there is no coorolation between knowing the numbers behind the game and your ability to roleplay. I don't think it makes it a "gigastic cluster-fuck of mayhem" to know how much mana I have, either.
Umm, right. Because all those Doom mods that we didn't convince id to help us develop were cheating too. And the quake mods. Oh wait, they were the birth of the concept of the mod community.
Don't sit back in your armchair and dictate in 24 words the entire world of cheating as you see it, with no evidence.
ShowEQ has done a lot to make the players and developers understand how the game world works, and a lot of official changes to the game have resulted from the data players collected using ShowEQ. For this, it is good. But for finding monsters that are supposed to be hidden, or for gaining an unfair advantage over other players, it is bad.
Research what you make declarations on, and speak responsibly.
You're missing my point. I'm defending people that run ShowEQ by explaining that they helped shape the game into what it is today. Their feedback changed the way Verant chose to run the game rules. It was important for development, and not only that, it benefited all players because the data was made available to them on numerious (well known and respected) websites. Oh, and did I mention that its not a PvP game like UT or CS, its an adventure game? Quake doesn't have headshots.
Its not that everything that ShowEQ does is cheating per-se, but some of what it does is, and that is to be avoided. In other words, use the tool responsibly. Which is the exact reason the ShowEQ team wanted to keep it on Linux and (therefore) away from most of the EQ masses. But now...with a windows client, all that goes out the window. You make a vaild point, but that doesn't mean every person who used ShowEQ is a cheater, at least not in the despicable sense of wallhack cheaters, or aimbot cheaters.
If ShowEQ runs locally on the windows box, it doesn't sniff the packets, it sniffs the memory address where EQ has stored the unencrypted key. Problem solved. Before now, this wasn't necessary. I expect they could create a small utility on the windows box to feed the key to the old ShowEQ running on the Linux machine next door, and the process would be just like old times. =)
Its a good idea to trade in client side computation for server side, except that EQ is the only game I have ever played online where I was as comfortable playing over modem as ethernet (cable/dsl/whatever). They have done masterful work putting key elements on client side and keeping the bandwidth necessary to a minimum. As I understand it, the monster list is sent when someone zones in, and then only changes are sent (i.e. when a monster is killed). The pathing is done locally as well (in sync with server) so that all the location data doesn't have to be sent every tick. Low bandwidth and security are pulling in opposite directions in this case. Sony chose low-bandwidth. I wise decision, if you ask me.
What I'm saying is that the entire commuity has used the data gotten from ShowEQ. How can you call people who run it cheaters, when you're not calling the guy who goes to eqatlas.com a cheater? eqatlas gets a lot fo their data from ShowEQ and it is a widely recognized site that gives data on all kinds of things, hit values, damage, spawn times, monster location, maps, etc. But anyone in the communnity can use it, not just the people you would call "cheaters" that run ShowEQ. I don't see the difference - one who obtains the information is no more a cheater than one who uses it. And *everyone* uses that information.
And it shows that you've never played EQ. What you can do by yourself in the game becomes irrelevant by level 30 anyway. For reference, I've seen a character get powerleveled to 25 in one night. In anycase, all those "cheats" you mentioned are already in game. Get a level 50 Ranger. He'll tell you exactly where all the monsters are in the zone. Where is the dragon going to show up? Are you joking? All that data, plus maps, spawn times, and everything else you would wish for is published online. And its not even gotten from ShowEQ, its gotten from 100s of 1000s of people experimenting. ShowEQ doesn't change any of that. Don't make this out like stealing money in Monopoly, or like wallhacking in CounterStrike. Its not the same thing, and anyone who has played to any decent level will say the same. My primary was a 55 Cleric when I stopped playing a year ago. No amount of information would have made the high level raids my guild did any easier. We always knew the maps and the monsters, we knew everything before we did a raid. But it was still fun. And we didn't even use ShowEQ. The game does the same thing, every time. So you learn how it goes, and learn to play so you don't die. Cheating? Hardly.
High level Rangers in the game (and druids for that matter) have the ability (in-game) to see every monster in the zone, sorted by how difficult it would be to fight them. Sony *has* to send this data to the client. Its called "Tracking".
No, it doesn't. That's like saying "Well, it wasn't illegal to steal one loaf of bread, but it's illegal to steal 1000 loaves." The legality of the action (or in this case, the agreement) doesn't change with repetition, it just makes it more annoying. The flip side of this is that it becomes a less credible defense for someone to say "I didn't see it." or "I didn't read that." I played EQ for two years (stopped about a year ago) and clicked through that agreement 1000s of times, but I don't think I ever read it. Maybe I did once, but I can't remember what it said. =P
Have you *ever* played EQ? Do you even know what you're talking about? SEQ was used primarily in the beginning to aid people in finding out how your odds of hitting changed with certain gear, and how much mana you had (something EQ never told you). It quantified all kinds of things that players really needed to know, but were never published anywhere with the game or from any official source. Ever. SEQ allowed players to critically evaluate how the game was calculating things, and you know what? That started huge dicussions on Verant's OFFICAL message boards between Verant and customers on what changes the customers wanted. There are mana calculators everywhere online, but they were all developed from info gathered from SEQ. Players use them all time. The most recent changes to meditation, spell behavior, and damage checks were all a result of the community gathering info using SEQ and bringing the data to Verant and saying "This isn't right!". And Verant listened and changed it. Cheating?? I think not. It was the community stepping in and filling a gap for the better of the players and the developers. None of this can be said of Aimbots, or wallhacks in Q3, UT, or CS.
The client has to know certain things to run. To alter what it knows would to make a thin client game even thinner, and would alter the balance of the client/server load. If the servers are picking up slack for the clients (or the sole purpose of players not sniffing that info), then the servers have to be redesigned and beefed up. Not likely, I say.
Or, more to the point, the thing *Sony* fears is a weapon to be held against them. If you suddenly have every EQ idiot using SEQ on their 'doze box, and they ban them (as Sony said they would) then they lose money. Or, they have people cheating rampantly. Either way, Sony loses. Bad move for them, I say. Leave well enough alone. Nice quote. I would guess that you're a Rush fan, but then I noticed your name. OK, so I *know* you're a Rush fan. =)
...that perhaps would illuminate the converse side of the problem is "Why did you switch to Linux?" For me, there was one thing: Window XP. I'll freely admit I admire the technology of that OS, but I couldn't disgaree more with its politics. I just bought a laptop from Alienware, and the moment I booted it up, Windows XP up told me I had 30 days to register, lest it disable itself. Give me a break! Just because I purchase a computer does NOT mean the company whose OS I use needs all my personal details. Its absurd. If I decide to change my hardware to any appreciable extent, Windows XP demands and explanation. Again, what is the justification? I know it helps prevent piracy, but I object to it on philosophical grounds. Which leads to my next question "Why did you stay with Linux?" Because it offers more power out of the box than $20,000 of proprietary closed source software offers on Windows. Example: I don't always have web access at work for security reasons (military) but I want to be able to read the news. Just last night, I wrote a bash/perl script in about 15 minutes that utilized wget, gzip and sendEmail (a perl smtp script) to automate getting the text page of google news, zip it up, and send it to my work address when I'm out at sea. I put it in my crontab to do it every 12 hours. Match that on windows. Sure, it can be done, but the pure simplicity and ease of it is not there. Many say Linux doesn't offer anything Windows doesn't have, and that's simply false. Those that say that must have grown up with Windows, and cannot bring themselves (it was hard for me!) to throw all that away and venture forth into the unknown, with no RealLife support (I have no friends that understand Linux, I had to learn it completely on my own, I'm sure many share the same situation). Does Linux take time (vice money with Windows)? Absolutely. But I justify it by assuring myself it will pay dividends down the road, because Linux will always be around; I rest easy knowing there will always be someone somewhere working on it. It will support new architectures, it will adapt and morph to work with anything we develop. I can use the same tricks on my Zaurus, laptop and desktop. All the same software can run on all of them (with slight modifications). I have Perl on the Zaurus, which allows me to script on my handheld with no learning curve, since I've been doing it on my desktop for ages. Why? Because linux is portable, and allowed the porting of Perl from x86 to ARM. Try that with your beloved PocketPC running Windows CE. Windows will not, and cannot, be flexible in this way. Linux is flexible, free, and filled with intriguing ways to put together various tools to do amazing things. I was a Windows user for as long as it existed, but I could never go back now.
One of the biggest aspects of military security lies in not revealing what technology they use. Any information given gives a potential attacker a clue where to start...a lack of such information greatly increases the time to even ascertain whether an encryption is even worth spending time on. As anyone who has hacked or tried to find security vulnerabilites knows, one of the nicest things you can hope for when trying to gain access to a server is what software and version its running. If you don't know that, it kind of makes it hard to know where to start.
If you go to the Vorbis listening test site and grab a few of the samples, I found no problem hearing the difference on my free-with-my-computer altec-lansing speakers. Usually I have to use headphones to make out the difference, but in this case, it was quite apparent.
I have to disagree. Carmack has always done things because they are The Right Thing. And while I'll concede that he is a man that will draw the line on feature bloat, I don't see how writing a Client/Server multiplay would be even remotely more difficult for him. He has Quake/2/3's netcode and C/S code to base it off of. In fact, P2P would probably be far harder to construct, considering *no one* has ever written a P2P online gaming architecture designed for TCP/IP. And to the original poster: you think that Carmack hasn't figured out that P2P system is difficult to implement in gaming? He's the guy that designed the original C/S architecture after writing the first P2P architecture. I think he knows the pros and cons. All that remains to be seen is: how does it play?
What people fail to realize is that most of the genre's are tired. The important thing to note is FP shooters drive the industry. At no point in gaming did it become obvious that 3D was the way to go until FPS games were developed. Now, we have the pleasure of seeing things like Bioware's NeverWinter Nights in 3D, and we have other games we can develop with that technology in the first person (Morrowind, for one). Even Blizzard, a company I admire much for their games and not so much for their politics, has made the switch to 3D, saying they had done as much as they could with a 2D engine. And really, it doesn't occur to me to complain that id is putting out another FPS - they created that entire type of game, pushed the technology behind it, and changed the face of almost every game out there because of it. FPS is what I expect from them, just as I expect yet another turn-based strategy game from Sid Meier. And their new technology isn't always used the best in their own games. The real power of the Quake III engine was only seen in games like Alice, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Heavy Metal: FAKK II (all of which were fun to play, and took a new tack on the old FPS). Monkey Island, innovative? I think not. Perhaps hilarious (they are!), but hardly a new concept. Th idea of adventure games has been around as long as gaming, as far as I know. As soon as the PC as we know it rolled out of factories, we had Roberta Williams there with the King's Quest series. I have to admit, besides the witty banter, Escape from Monkey Island was essentially very similar to that series (even in skurvy-inducing 3d). Solve the puzzle, move on to the next, face the boss, win. Actually, I'd be hard pressed to really say any "crop" of games was particualrly innovative. Sure, theres King's Quest, Sim City, Doom, Quake (just because it introduced internet play of a game), and the Sims. Oh, and sports games. But really, what else hasn't been some form of rehash? I don't think creating games within an existing genre and doing good things with them is necessarily bad. Technique and implementation are often as valuable as innovation.
Its funny you had the reaction. I played a little DS, and found it to be quite impressive eye-candy-wise, but lacking in depth. I'm not sure how robust the multiplayer is in DS (other than there is an 8 peron limit) but NWN certainly has the most robust non-MMORPG system I've ever seen. Up to 64 (or is it 96?) players on a server, modules can be created that require teamwork of 10s of people, one of the things that always made P&P scenarios (and EQ/UO) so much fun. DS offers teamwork, but in a much more limited scope. And, now that I think about it, I guess one of the coolest parts of NWN is that it has a great plot set in a world that has been devleoped in the first two BG games and the Forgotten Realms R. A. Salvatore novels. Its always fun to play in a world that you liked so much in books. Maybe my impression will change if I'm ever willing to fork over the money for a copy of DS and try it out on my windows box. I don't think replay value is something to be taken literally, however...DII and DS's idea of just having you play again through the game in a more difficult mode is, while interesting for a time, ultimately kind of boring; I don't seem to feel like I'm making real progress.
Re:Maybe with linux, NWN will actually be stable
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NWN Linux Screenshots
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Erm, I've been running it under 'doze waiting for the Liux client for some time, and under version 1.22, I haven't encountered a single bug, and I'm almost through to the end of Chapter 2... Anecdotal, but hopefully worth noting. I am aware ther earlier builds were quite bad, btw.
That's an awful lot like saying that that Linux would never be worth downloading unless it matches windows feature for feature and bug for bug. You're making a weak assumption that just because something is used by the majority, it is therefore the best. Let's talk about the term opinion. Opinions by definition cannot be correct. You are assuming that a lab filled with 100 people telling Microsoft what they feel about their new browser in a "controlled" environment is inhernetly better that a group of beta testers online for evalutating the functionality of the software. Also a weak assumption. You be hard pressed to assert that either group is random, and equally hard pressed to say that the opinion of 100 people in a lab is more vaild than those "prgrammers" on the internet, especially when Mozilla 1.0 is a self-admitted *developer* application. Lastly, millions of hours spent by people testing a filing bug reports, plus a $1.25, will get you a cup of coffee, Mozilla 1.0, Openoffice.org 1.01, Linux 2.4.19, and a thousand other perfectly usuable, free programs.
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The masses *are* held back by Linux. Its not mainstream in the desktop market. I use it, sure, but honestly, what percentage of people have two computers they can dedicate to EQ and one of them is running linux? Yeah, it absolutely limits the masses.
I'm 25, and I used my own credit card to play EQ for 2 years. What was that, about $240? Totally worth it. My total time played was just under 50 days, so about 1000 hours over two years. How much does normal entertainment cost per hour? I bet its more than $0.25. A movie is about 4.50 an hour, but those people aren't "stupid enough to pay" are they? Hmmm...
Oh, and I liked Everquest (just didn't have time for it anymore), and so do about 400,000 other people.
Umm, ok. In real life, when I put on armor...oh, wait, I don't put on armor in real life, that's why I play games.
Oh, and by the way, EQ (without any cheats) gives me a perfect measure of the armor's protection. Its called "AC". Maybe you've heard of it...its in most roleplaying games.
But I digress. Your stated thesis is false. I roleplay all the time in games that give me all the stats. Neverwinter Nights, for one. Oh, and wait, there was one before that that I recall being the father of all roleplaying games where I had to calculate everything...what was that called? Oh, thats right, Dungeons and Dragons.
No, I think that there is no coorolation between knowing the numbers behind the game and your ability to roleplay. I don't think it makes it a "gigastic cluster-fuck of mayhem" to know how much mana I have, either.
Umm, right. Because all those Doom mods that we didn't convince id to help us develop were cheating too. And the quake mods. Oh wait, they were the birth of the concept of the mod community.
Don't sit back in your armchair and dictate in 24 words the entire world of cheating as you see it, with no evidence.
ShowEQ has done a lot to make the players and developers understand how the game world works, and a lot of official changes to the game have resulted from the data players collected using ShowEQ. For this, it is good. But for finding monsters that are supposed to be hidden, or for gaining an unfair advantage over other players, it is bad.
Research what you make declarations on, and speak responsibly.
You're missing my point. I'm defending people that run ShowEQ by explaining that they helped shape the game into what it is today. Their feedback changed the way Verant chose to run the game rules. It was important for development, and not only that, it benefited all players because the data was made available to them on numerious (well known and respected) websites. Oh, and did I mention that its not a PvP game like UT or CS, its an adventure game?
Quake doesn't have headshots.
Its not that everything that ShowEQ does is cheating per-se, but some of what it does is, and that is to be avoided. In other words, use the tool responsibly.
Which is the exact reason the ShowEQ team wanted to keep it on Linux and (therefore) away from most of the EQ masses. But now...with a windows client, all that goes out the window.
You make a vaild point, but that doesn't mean every person who used ShowEQ is a cheater, at least not in the despicable sense of wallhack cheaters, or aimbot cheaters.
If ShowEQ runs locally on the windows box, it doesn't sniff the packets, it sniffs the memory address where EQ has stored the unencrypted key. Problem solved. Before now, this wasn't necessary.
I expect they could create a small utility on the windows box to feed the key to the old ShowEQ running on the Linux machine next door, and the process would be just like old times. =)
Its a good idea to trade in client side computation for server side, except that EQ is the only game I have ever played online where I was as comfortable playing over modem as ethernet (cable/dsl/whatever). They have done masterful work putting key elements on client side and keeping the bandwidth necessary to a minimum. As I understand it, the monster list is sent when someone zones in, and then only changes are sent (i.e. when a monster is killed). The pathing is done locally as well (in sync with server) so that all the location data doesn't have to be sent every tick.
Low bandwidth and security are pulling in opposite directions in this case. Sony chose low-bandwidth. I wise decision, if you ask me.
What I'm saying is that the entire commuity has used the data gotten from ShowEQ. How can you call people who run it cheaters, when you're not calling the guy who goes to eqatlas.com a cheater? eqatlas gets a lot fo their data from ShowEQ and it is a widely recognized site that gives data on all kinds of things, hit values, damage, spawn times, monster location, maps, etc. But anyone in the communnity can use it, not just the people you would call "cheaters" that run ShowEQ. I don't see the difference - one who obtains the information is no more a cheater than one who uses it. And *everyone* uses that information.
And it shows that you've never played EQ. What you can do by yourself in the game becomes irrelevant by level 30 anyway. For reference, I've seen a character get powerleveled to 25 in one night. In anycase, all those "cheats" you mentioned are already in game. Get a level 50 Ranger. He'll tell you exactly where all the monsters are in the zone. Where is the dragon going to show up? Are you joking? All that data, plus maps, spawn times, and everything else you would wish for is published online. And its not even gotten from ShowEQ, its gotten from 100s of 1000s of people experimenting. ShowEQ doesn't change any of that. Don't make this out like stealing money in Monopoly, or like wallhacking in CounterStrike. Its not the same thing, and anyone who has played to any decent level will say the same.
My primary was a 55 Cleric when I stopped playing a year ago. No amount of information would have made the high level raids my guild did any easier. We always knew the maps and the monsters, we knew everything before we did a raid. But it was still fun. And we didn't even use ShowEQ. The game does the same thing, every time. So you learn how it goes, and learn to play so you don't die.
Cheating? Hardly.
High level Rangers in the game (and druids for that matter) have the ability (in-game) to see every monster in the zone, sorted by how difficult it would be to fight them. Sony *has* to send this data to the client. Its called "Tracking".
No, it doesn't. That's like saying "Well, it wasn't illegal to steal one loaf of bread, but it's illegal to steal 1000 loaves." The legality of the action (or in this case, the agreement) doesn't change with repetition, it just makes it more annoying.
The flip side of this is that it becomes a less credible defense for someone to say "I didn't see it." or "I didn't read that."
I played EQ for two years (stopped about a year ago) and clicked through that agreement 1000s of times, but I don't think I ever read it. Maybe I did once, but I can't remember what it said. =P
Have you *ever* played EQ? Do you even know what you're talking about?
SEQ was used primarily in the beginning to aid people in finding out how your odds of hitting changed with certain gear, and how much mana you had (something EQ never told you). It quantified all kinds of things that players really needed to know, but were never published anywhere with the game or from any official source.
Ever.
SEQ allowed players to critically evaluate how the game was calculating things, and you know what? That started huge dicussions on Verant's OFFICAL message boards between Verant and customers on what changes the customers wanted. There are mana calculators everywhere online, but they were all developed from info gathered from SEQ. Players use them all time.
The most recent changes to meditation, spell behavior, and damage checks were all a result of the community gathering info using SEQ and bringing the data to Verant and saying "This isn't right!". And Verant listened and changed it.
Cheating?? I think not. It was the community stepping in and filling a gap for the better of the players and the developers.
None of this can be said of Aimbots, or wallhacks in Q3, UT, or CS.
The client has to know certain things to run. To alter what it knows would to make a thin client game even thinner, and would alter the balance of the client/server load. If the servers are picking up slack for the clients (or the sole purpose of players not sniffing that info), then the servers have to be redesigned and beefed up. Not likely, I say.
Or, more to the point, the thing *Sony* fears is a weapon to be held against them. If you suddenly have every EQ idiot using SEQ on their 'doze box, and they ban them (as Sony said they would) then they lose money. Or, they have people cheating rampantly. Either way, Sony loses. Bad move for them, I say. Leave well enough alone.
Nice quote. I would guess that you're a Rush fan, but then I noticed your name. OK, so I *know* you're a Rush fan. =)
...that perhaps would illuminate the converse side of the problem is "Why did you switch to Linux?" For me, there was one thing: Window XP. I'll freely admit I admire the technology of that OS, but I couldn't disgaree more with its politics. I just bought a laptop from Alienware, and the moment I booted it up, Windows XP up told me I had 30 days to register, lest it disable itself. Give me a break! Just because I purchase a computer does NOT mean the company whose OS I use needs all my personal details. Its absurd. If I decide to change my hardware to any appreciable extent, Windows XP demands and explanation. Again, what is the justification? I know it helps prevent piracy, but I object to it on philosophical grounds.
Which leads to my next question "Why did you stay with Linux?"
Because it offers more power out of the box than $20,000 of proprietary closed source software offers on Windows. Example: I don't always have web access at work for security reasons (military) but I want to be able to read the news. Just last night, I wrote a bash/perl script in about 15 minutes that utilized wget, gzip and sendEmail (a perl smtp script) to automate getting the text page of google news, zip it up, and send it to my work address when I'm out at sea. I put it in my crontab to do it every 12 hours. Match that on windows. Sure, it can be done, but the pure simplicity and ease of it is not there.
Many say Linux doesn't offer anything Windows doesn't have, and that's simply false. Those that say that must have grown up with Windows, and cannot bring themselves (it was hard for me!) to throw all that away and venture forth into the unknown, with no RealLife support (I have no friends that understand Linux, I had to learn it completely on my own, I'm sure many share the same situation). Does Linux take time (vice money with Windows)? Absolutely. But I justify it by assuring myself it will pay dividends down the road, because Linux will always be around; I rest easy knowing there will always be someone somewhere working on it. It will support new architectures, it will adapt and morph to work with anything we develop. I can use the same tricks on my Zaurus, laptop and desktop. All the same software can run on all of them (with slight modifications). I have Perl on the Zaurus, which allows me to script on my handheld with no learning curve, since I've been doing it on my desktop for ages. Why? Because linux is portable, and allowed the porting of Perl from x86 to ARM. Try that with your beloved PocketPC running Windows CE. Windows will not, and cannot, be flexible in this way.
Linux is flexible, free, and filled with intriguing ways to put together various tools to do amazing things. I was a Windows user for as long as it existed, but I could never go back now.
One of the biggest aspects of military security lies in not revealing what technology they use. Any information given gives a potential attacker a clue where to start...a lack of such information greatly increases the time to even ascertain whether an encryption is even worth spending time on. As anyone who has hacked or tried to find security vulnerabilites knows, one of the nicest things you can hope for when trying to gain access to a server is what software and version its running. If you don't know that, it kind of makes it hard to know where to start.
If you go to the Vorbis listening test site and grab a few of the samples, I found no problem hearing the difference on my free-with-my-computer altec-lansing speakers. Usually I have to use headphones to make out the difference, but in this case, it was quite apparent.
I have to disagree. Carmack has always done things because they are The Right Thing. And while I'll concede that he is a man that will draw the line on feature bloat, I don't see how writing a Client/Server multiplay would be even remotely more difficult for him. He has Quake/2/3's netcode and C/S code to base it off of. In fact, P2P would probably be far harder to construct, considering *no one* has ever written a P2P online gaming architecture designed for TCP/IP.
And to the original poster: you think that Carmack hasn't figured out that P2P system is difficult to implement in gaming? He's the guy that designed the original C/S architecture after writing the first P2P architecture. I think he knows the pros and cons.
All that remains to be seen is: how does it play?
What people fail to realize is that most of the genre's are tired. The important thing to note is FP shooters drive the industry. At no point in gaming did it become obvious that 3D was the way to go until FPS games were developed. Now, we have the pleasure of seeing things like Bioware's NeverWinter Nights in 3D, and we have other games we can develop with that technology in the first person (Morrowind, for one). Even Blizzard, a company I admire much for their games and not so much for their politics, has made the switch to 3D, saying they had done as much as they could with a 2D engine. And really, it doesn't occur to me to complain that id is putting out another FPS - they created that entire type of game, pushed the technology behind it, and changed the face of almost every game out there because of it. FPS is what I expect from them, just as I expect yet another turn-based strategy game from Sid Meier. And their new technology isn't always used the best in their own games. The real power of the Quake III engine was only seen in games like Alice, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Heavy Metal: FAKK II (all of which were fun to play, and took a new tack on the old FPS).
Monkey Island, innovative? I think not. Perhaps hilarious (they are!), but hardly a new concept. Th idea of adventure games has been around as long as gaming, as far as I know. As soon as the PC as we know it rolled out of factories, we had Roberta Williams there with the King's Quest series. I have to admit, besides the witty banter, Escape from Monkey Island was essentially very similar to that series (even in skurvy-inducing 3d). Solve the puzzle, move on to the next, face the boss, win.
Actually, I'd be hard pressed to really say any "crop" of games was particualrly innovative. Sure, theres King's Quest, Sim City, Doom, Quake (just because it introduced internet play of a game), and the Sims. Oh, and sports games. But really, what else hasn't been some form of rehash? I don't think creating games within an existing genre and doing good things with them is necessarily bad. Technique and implementation are often as valuable as innovation.
Its funny you had the reaction. I played a little DS, and found it to be quite impressive eye-candy-wise, but lacking in depth. I'm not sure how robust the multiplayer is in DS (other than there is an 8 peron limit) but NWN certainly has the most robust non-MMORPG system I've ever seen. Up to 64 (or is it 96?) players on a server, modules can be created that require teamwork of 10s of people, one of the things that always made P&P scenarios (and EQ/UO) so much fun. DS offers teamwork, but in a much more limited scope.
And, now that I think about it, I guess one of the coolest parts of NWN is that it has a great plot set in a world that has been devleoped in the first two BG games and the Forgotten Realms R. A. Salvatore novels. Its always fun to play in a world that you liked so much in books.
Maybe my impression will change if I'm ever willing to fork over the money for a copy of DS and try it out on my windows box. I don't think replay value is something to be taken literally, however...DII and DS's idea of just having you play again through the game in a more difficult mode is, while interesting for a time, ultimately kind of boring; I don't seem to feel like I'm making real progress.
Erm, I've been running it under 'doze waiting for the Liux client for some time, and under version 1.22, I haven't encountered a single bug, and I'm almost through to the end of Chapter 2...
Anecdotal, but hopefully worth noting.
I am aware ther earlier builds were quite bad, btw.
That's an awful lot like saying that that Linux would never be worth downloading unless it matches windows feature for feature and bug for bug. You're making a weak assumption that just because something is used by the majority, it is therefore the best.
Let's talk about the term opinion. Opinions by definition cannot be correct.
You are assuming that a lab filled with 100 people telling Microsoft what they feel about their new browser in a "controlled" environment is inhernetly better that a group of beta testers online for evalutating the functionality of the software. Also a weak assumption. You be hard pressed to assert that either group is random, and equally hard pressed to say that the opinion of 100 people in a lab is more vaild than those "prgrammers" on the internet, especially when Mozilla 1.0 is a self-admitted *developer* application.
Lastly, millions of hours spent by people testing a filing bug reports, plus a $1.25, will get you a cup of coffee, Mozilla 1.0, Openoffice.org 1.01, Linux 2.4.19, and a thousand other perfectly usuable, free programs.