I would be more worried if this was happening at the NSA. Only goes to further prove that DHS was an ill-conceived extra layer of bureaucracy added at the spur of the moment to make American's feel warm and fuzzy at a critical moment.
Considering we already have an article anouncing that he would be stepping down today... did we really need another article now that he has stepped down?
Well MS has Nelson. Nintendo has a handful of people posting content on their main webpage, not sure if that's technically blogging but sometimes there's blog-esque postings... I always assumed Sony had something similar already.
How about the underwater level in the first game? Pain in the ass maze with a time limit which ends up being significantly harder than the final boss for the area.
Except it was the appeals court. If the FCC appeals, this will have to the Supremes I think?
This is a good thing anyways. It's been documented that the FCC is pandering to a very vocal minority of ultra-conservative special interest groups in recent years.
Didn't you see the recent Simpsons episode? The main Fox channel funnels money through FCC fines to the republican party who supports the news channel?
Wait.... I think I just goofed that up. I was never good at conspiracy theories.
Could be from that department because this seems to come up every time the moratorium's time is up. Not necessarily because it's a dupe, but this chatter seems to rear it's head every couple of years.
Different micromanagement. *craft games are more about managing specific unit abilities. I thought the philosophy behind Taylor's RTS games was to focus more on troop movements, than the exact moment to have your Ghost lockdown a couple Arbiters and nuke the playing field before running away and decloaking to regain energy?
The fact that the ads are still just simple non-intrusive banner adds at the top of the lobby/chat screen is amazing. Kudos to them in a time where contextual custom-tailored in-game advertising is about to hit.
Brood War unit types got a little more complex compared to the original SC. For instance, blinding was introduced, but medics could heal it.
That's what I think killed Warcraft III for me. If you didn't have every unit for any given situation you were screwed when you sent out your raiding parties no matter how strong they were. Some strategies in SC were fine by me, carry observers because you had a good chance something would be cloaking/burrowing, but Warcraft III was just insane with abilities and their counters.
Agreed. Blizzard and polish are two words that go together. Hell, after Starcraft they went back to Warcraft II and dealt with some long-standing dumb bugs (ie. they broke attack-move going from War1 to War2) added some nifty small things from SC and Bnet support and put the thing out as a budget title. They even started a weekly/monthly map download program but dropped it soon after they realized people weren't playing it as much as Starcraft.
They also kept Starcraft's "Map of the _____" program going strong for 3 years. Only slowing down the releases in the last year I think.
Or how about the fact that they've kept patching Diablo II and Starcraft since they were released? This includes overhauling the Diablo II skill system with 1.10 and adding nifty features to Starcraft such as replay support, TCP/IP (the game originally only had IPX) support, minimap pinging, etc. after they started working on Warcraft III and Starcraft II.
The only games they don't currently keep patching are Warcraft, War2/War2BNE, and Diablo. Most likely due to lack of interest and the fact they've probably done all they can with them.
Ok. It's a tech tree. It's just a freaking stick, not a tree. Unless you count the commander unit as the root and then it is a tree because you have the initial branch. The difference is that you don't have arbitrary steps that come out of nowhere in order to build a single unit or two at the central building location (ie. Terran Academy in SC for Firebats & Medics, Tauren Totem in War III for Tauren, Ogre Mound or Stables in War II, etc.).
People also forget that the SC team went to War3 not WoW. SC took years to get the balance straightened out. Read the changelogs, it's funny to see some values/parameters get "balanced" and then "balanced" again back to their original values. Which reminds me, I don't think I've played the game since before the last balance patch... Hmmm... Have to rectify that and not touching Diablo II since 1.09.
I think that hits the nail on the head. I wondered the same thing in regards to Diablo II balancing.
It really comes down to what player group you cater to. PvP tends to be a small subset of the overall population, so ideally Blizzard should focus more on PvE balancing.
It's debates like this that makes me appreciate PvP in Kingdom of Loathing, where you have a series of randomly selected challenges that check players stats, equipment and a ton of other random stats they track inside the game to determine a winner in a PvP challenge. Granted the system has its flaws, but it eliminates the need to balance skills and equipment against both other players and monsters.
TA/SupCom also have no tech tree to begin with. They are not so much trees as they are rods. You build Tech Level 1 plant for vehicle type of your choice (and SupCom simplified this even further by merging vehicles and bots into a Land Factory) which gets you the engineering unit for the next step up the tech tree. There's no external dependencies like you find in other strategy games (even turn-based ones like Civ and Heroes of M&M have tech trees).
The philosophy of Taylor's RTS games is to cut out the BS with resource management and base building and move head first into the actual combat which is where he feels a game should be decided: he who can out strategize the opponent should win. You are right though about units != depth. In the end of TA you had hundreds of units, trying to find the right mix to send off against an opponent was a chore in itself. The learning curve is much higher since the differences in the units is not immediately obvious, something I found existed in SupCom when I played the demo.
TA/SupCom also focus less on active scouting since you can use radar to do the scouting for you. Also, the maps are significantly larger than in SC so if you know something is coming you have a little bit of time to crank out some units. Finally, TA also allowed long-distance shelling and nuking of the enemy:)
Comparing the two games makes for a nice ven diagram.
They're probably waiting to see how well their old colleagues at Flagship studios do with their online plans for Hellgate: London.
I'd be surprised if they required a fee to play anything on Battle.net. That's what drew a lot of people to the service in the first place. Funny how back in the day we had pay-for-play services like TEN and Mplayer and then we got the free services, and now we're coming back around full cycle. I'd expect a subscription plan if they have some premium services, but I'll bet they'll allow a no-cost option if they head down that route.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure 'snowclone' either ties or beats 'blogosphere' in my book. Probably two of the dumbest words ever coined.
Because there wasn't a link to the Game Informer with this news?
Although, that's a surprising twist... Game Informer getting a couple of scoops this issue (new DNF picture being another one).
2008. The year the Games Industry flipped out.
I was pretty sure during the Hot Coffee scandal, you could still purchase San Andreas directly through R*'s website...
I was just gonna say that.
I would be more worried if this was happening at the NSA. Only goes to further prove that DHS was an ill-conceived extra layer of bureaucracy added at the spur of the moment to make American's feel warm and fuzzy at a critical moment.
Which reminds me of wondering how the hell Sony is having trouble with controller battery life with their new found attempts at rumble.
Considering we already have an article anouncing that he would be stepping down today... did we really need another article now that he has stepped down?
/ 1726200
/rant
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/26
I really hate it when I see "news" and think it's old, because I read the "announcement of the announcement" a month or two earlier.
Just what we need... an excuse for the MAFIAA to subpoena our bodies for network traffic analysis.
But http://www.boardgamegeek.com/ already exists!
Well MS has Nelson. Nintendo has a handful of people posting content on their main webpage, not sure if that's technically blogging but sometimes there's blog-esque postings... I always assumed Sony had something similar already.
How about the underwater level in the first game? Pain in the ass maze with a time limit which ends up being significantly harder than the final boss for the area.
Except it was the appeals court. If the FCC appeals, this will have to the Supremes I think?
This is a good thing anyways. It's been documented that the FCC is pandering to a very vocal minority of ultra-conservative special interest groups in recent years.
Didn't you see the recent Simpsons episode? The main Fox channel funnels money through FCC fines to the republican party who supports the news channel?
Wait.... I think I just goofed that up. I was never good at conspiracy theories.
So does that mean prices will drop soon to compensate for an oversupply? I don't think anyone would complain...
Could be from that department because this seems to come up every time the moratorium's time is up. Not necessarily because it's a dupe, but this chatter seems to rear it's head every couple of years.
Just what we need. Every citizen with their own personal Abrahms.
At least it'd keep the terrorists out of Dodge.
Different micromanagement. *craft games are more about managing specific unit abilities. I thought the philosophy behind Taylor's RTS games was to focus more on troop movements, than the exact moment to have your Ghost lockdown a couple Arbiters and nuke the playing field before running away and decloaking to regain energy?
The fact that the ads are still just simple non-intrusive banner adds at the top of the lobby/chat screen is amazing. Kudos to them in a time where contextual custom-tailored in-game advertising is about to hit.
Brood War unit types got a little more complex compared to the original SC. For instance, blinding was introduced, but medics could heal it.
That's what I think killed Warcraft III for me. If you didn't have every unit for any given situation you were screwed when you sent out your raiding parties no matter how strong they were. Some strategies in SC were fine by me, carry observers because you had a good chance something would be cloaking/burrowing, but Warcraft III was just insane with abilities and their counters.
Agreed. Blizzard and polish are two words that go together. Hell, after Starcraft they went back to Warcraft II and dealt with some long-standing dumb bugs (ie. they broke attack-move going from War1 to War2) added some nifty small things from SC and Bnet support and put the thing out as a budget title. They even started a weekly/monthly map download program but dropped it soon after they realized people weren't playing it as much as Starcraft.
They also kept Starcraft's "Map of the _____" program going strong for 3 years. Only slowing down the releases in the last year I think.
Or how about the fact that they've kept patching Diablo II and Starcraft since they were released? This includes overhauling the Diablo II skill system with 1.10 and adding nifty features to Starcraft such as replay support, TCP/IP (the game originally only had IPX) support, minimap pinging, etc. after they started working on Warcraft III and Starcraft II.
The only games they don't currently keep patching are Warcraft, War2/War2BNE, and Diablo. Most likely due to lack of interest and the fact they've probably done all they can with them.
Ok. It's a tech tree. It's just a freaking stick, not a tree. Unless you count the commander unit as the root and then it is a tree because you have the initial branch. The difference is that you don't have arbitrary steps that come out of nowhere in order to build a single unit or two at the central building location (ie. Terran Academy in SC for Firebats & Medics, Tauren Totem in War III for Tauren, Ogre Mound or Stables in War II, etc.).
People also forget that the SC team went to War3 not WoW. SC took years to get the balance straightened out. Read the changelogs, it's funny to see some values/parameters get "balanced" and then "balanced" again back to their original values. Which reminds me, I don't think I've played the game since before the last balance patch... Hmmm... Have to rectify that and not touching Diablo II since 1.09.
I think that hits the nail on the head. I wondered the same thing in regards to Diablo II balancing.
It really comes down to what player group you cater to. PvP tends to be a small subset of the overall population, so ideally Blizzard should focus more on PvE balancing.
It's debates like this that makes me appreciate PvP in Kingdom of Loathing, where you have a series of randomly selected challenges that check players stats, equipment and a ton of other random stats they track inside the game to determine a winner in a PvP challenge. Granted the system has its flaws, but it eliminates the need to balance skills and equipment against both other players and monsters.
TA/SupCom also have no tech tree to begin with. They are not so much trees as they are rods. You build Tech Level 1 plant for vehicle type of your choice (and SupCom simplified this even further by merging vehicles and bots into a Land Factory) which gets you the engineering unit for the next step up the tech tree. There's no external dependencies like you find in other strategy games (even turn-based ones like Civ and Heroes of M&M have tech trees).
:)
The philosophy of Taylor's RTS games is to cut out the BS with resource management and base building and move head first into the actual combat which is where he feels a game should be decided: he who can out strategize the opponent should win. You are right though about units != depth. In the end of TA you had hundreds of units, trying to find the right mix to send off against an opponent was a chore in itself. The learning curve is much higher since the differences in the units is not immediately obvious, something I found existed in SupCom when I played the demo.
TA/SupCom also focus less on active scouting since you can use radar to do the scouting for you. Also, the maps are significantly larger than in SC so if you know something is coming you have a little bit of time to crank out some units. Finally, TA also allowed long-distance shelling and nuking of the enemy
Comparing the two games makes for a nice ven diagram.
Precisely the difference between EA and a lot of other AAA title producers.
They're probably waiting to see how well their old colleagues at Flagship studios do with their online plans for Hellgate: London.
I'd be surprised if they required a fee to play anything on Battle.net. That's what drew a lot of people to the service in the first place. Funny how back in the day we had pay-for-play services like TEN and Mplayer and then we got the free services, and now we're coming back around full cycle. I'd expect a subscription plan if they have some premium services, but I'll bet they'll allow a no-cost option if they head down that route.