Why are you still screaming about the forums ? We already WON that battle - the company listened to their users and changed their stance ! What the hell more do you want from a company ?
This article is about them listening to users regarding the in-game version and adding features people wanted. The one you're getting vitriolic about and cussing over is one I already mentioned. These latest changes show them being responsive to people's concerns - even if clearly they are not getting the kind of high developer priority you demand - some of us think that what with having cataclysm in beta their developer resources may be a just a tad strained at the moment. It's a positive sign and promising with regard to getting the other features we would like in the near future.
Can't you be happy about that?
Happy about them implementing a half-harsed feature? If their resources really were stretched that much they wouldn't have even made Real ID in the first place.
Don't get me wrong I like some of the features of Real ID but the fact that it shows your real name to everyone along with them being able to see everyone else on your Real ID list is completely ridiculous. There is no excuse for that.
But if you are going to pay $60 for a game, wouldn't you want to be able to pick up and play it, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years from now and it be just as fun as it was the day it was released? Quite honestly, I think that is the mark of a really great game, if you can't do that, its not that great. For example, Super Mario Bros. is a great example, its just as much fun today as it was when it was released. Final Fantasy VII is also another great game that stood the test of time, barring the load times, its a very fun game. Same thing with Yoshi's Island and Doom. If you have to see the game in rose tinted glasses with a qualifier with "for its time..." the game failed. Super Mario Bros wasn't a great platformer for its time, it was a great platformer. Final Fantasy VII wasn't a great RPG for its time, it is simply a great RPG. Etc.
If I'm going to buy a game for full price on launch day, it better be a classic or close to one. and not a tech-demo style game emphasizing graphics or temporary features over long-term fun. I'm not going to be impressed with HD graphics 20 years from now, I'm not going to be enjoying a multiplayer feature that no longer exists, however, if the game is fun, it will be just as great as when it came out.
Whilst that would be nice it doesn't work like that in reality. Games evolve too fast for me to be concerned about playing it in 5, 10, 25, etc. years time and I really cannot think of any game from 25 years ago that I still want to play. Super Mario Bros may still be a fun game but the desperately aged graphics would put me off and I would probably choose a different game to play instead.
FFVII isn't great either and I would get bored of Doom fairly quickly.
Because there is no change in the challenge. Let me illustrate by a simplified example: Your enemies have always 100 hitpoints more than you do. That means the challenge is always, unchanging, "do 100 points more damage to them than they do to me". Once you've figured it out, it is purely repetitive, because the difference between you and them never changes. Only numbers change - instead of hitting them 2 times, you may have to hit them 5 or 20 times, but aside from that it is the same.
You also lose all sense of accomplishment. If there are some enemies that are almost impossible at level 2, challenging at level 5 and easy at level 10 - then you can have the feeling of finally having "conquered" those enemies, of having become clearly better. If everyone in the game world levels with you, then what is the point of levelling at all? I could complete the game while staying level 1, and it would be the same experience.
You are assuming that everyone plays with the same motivations that you do. There are plenty of games that are excellent regardless of how difficult they are, not to mention the fact a player cannot keep improving forever - at some point they will reach the limit at which they can play so the challenge remains.
In which game? Where is the difference? In most implementations, the enemy now has 200 instead of 100 hitpoints. But you do now 20 instead of 10 points of damage. Zero difference, it takes 10 hits to kill them.
Auto-levelling is just a lazy shortcut by developers who are afraid of the player becoming bored because he is "too good". There are better ways to handle that.
And, frankly, it is highly satisfying to be able to walk all over those enemies that gave you trouble 10 levels back.
Again, you are making huge assumptions here. Auto-levelling worked fine in Baldurs Gate 2 and there is nothing lazy about that game.
Is there a good reason why these new Google toys don't work in Opera by default? Neither the background image option or that swirling ball trick from the other day worked in Opera until you set it in the options for Opera to mask itself as IE or Firefox - and now the same thing is true for this latest gimmick.
Because it is flat. That is what I meant by grinding. Killing 1000 enemies of the same kind is quite a bit less interesting and challenging than killing, say, 10 enemies each of 100 different kinds. It is a question of how much mental agility you have to excercise.
How is it flat if they are always at or above your level? As you improve the enemies improve as well.
Because the challenge gets out of it when you know exactly what to do and it becomes a matter of pressing the right buttons in the right sequence at the right time - that is a different and simpler challenge than figuring those buttons out in the first place.
You are making a large assumption here and seem to be applying it to a very limited subset of games. If it gets harder as I get better then I still have to go through the process of figuring things out.
You start off saying that auto-adapting is the reason for games being boring and then go on to say you want more of it.
I also don't see how a game that is always at or just above your level cannot be challenging or interesting. If I have to die lots of times at the same section to hone my skills I don't see how that is more challenging than if I hardly ever died across a larger number of ever-increasing sections.
The Hollywoodization of the games industry has killed it in my opinion.
Killed it in what sense? I would rather be a gamer in the current generation than in any previous one. Some of the stuff that was released during the 8-bit and 16-bit days was just awful.
How is it deliberately broken? The requirements for getting the extra armour are that you pre-order the game. If you don't fulfill those requirements then you don't get the armour.
I bought an Asus Windows 7 laptop as a present for someone the other week and ended up spending a few hours making it useable. There was a lot of Asus-branded shite that had to be removed, plus some Oberon media games, plus Trend Micro virus scan trial and then the Office 2007 trial.
Lastly I did the creation of the recovery discs and it took nearly two sodding hours or so to burn the FOUR DAMN DVDS! What the hell is on there?!?
Surely most people will still be spending roughly the same amount on games that they always have. If stuff gets too expensive then they will just buy less extras and do something else instead.
That's correct as far as it goes... but the bottom line is you can take the best console FPS player in the world and a mediocre to decent PC player will destroy the top tier console player. There simply is no competition between a game pad and a keyboard/mouse combo. Couple that with crappy graphics and console are just ass for quality gaming when it comes to FPS and 4X or RTS games.
You are an idiot.
There are plenty of of quality console FPS games available. Just because you don't have the dexterity to use a controller properly doesn't mean other people don't.
Name one and show me a video and I might believe that. So far you have brought zero evidence to the table.
It's called physics. If you need a video evidence for this then there isn't much point even discussing this.
A lawsuit, consumer org investigations and a whole bunch of Youtube videos.
From your link "However, a further test which attempted to simulate normal household vibrations produced a disc scratch on the previously problematic console."
So in all the tests they managed to produce the grand total of one scratched disc.
Name another console that scratches discs . If its so common sense and totally to be expected that discs get scratched that shouldn't be to hard, right?
Any device with a spinning disc inside is liable to scratch the discs if it is moved.
And your argument is based on what data? Some earlier Xbox360 models scratched discs even when the console was not moved at all, so I wouldn't exactly trust that a disc-scratching Slim would not scratch discs on minor bumps.
It is not about need, it is about stuff that happens in real life use. Cats might bump into it, people might trip over cables or maybe you just bump the console a little while you try to insert a USB connector. Just see the destructoid video, guy wants to get a closer look, lifts it up, Alan Wake goes bye-bye. He shouldn't have done it, but neither should the Xbox360 destroyed the disc.
If you lift a console up whilst a disc is spinning inside it then no-one is at fault other than the person who lifted it. No discs are getting scratched from people bumping their console slightly either.
You are assuming it's for mass-consumption. Take a look at the actual post, and you'll see it's an internal application
Looking at the actual post he is asking what is the best browser for what he wants to do. Your "bollocks to IE" answer is not a 'real world' answer at all.
Nintendo may have used bullying tactics but Nintendo respected the gamer and the gaming community.
This would be the same Nintendo that stopped developers making games on other systems, was found guilty of price fixing and purposefully restricted the supply of their games to drive up demand I take it?
Sony has never respected the gamer or the gaming community and only has ever cared about profits. The quality of their games never mattered, the quality of their hardware never mattered with overheating issues and other nonsense
Sony were the first console maker to make an official budget line of games available with their Platinum line and Nintendo had plenty of nonsense with the 'blinking' NES problem, the Nintedo R.O.B. and the Virtual Boy.
I say it's payback. Sony came into the gaming world with little to no respect for developers or the gaming community as a whole. Sony put the focus in on the 3d, and the specs, and the commercialism that we come to expect in the gaming world of today. The gaming world of yesterday had an entirely different ecosphere which in my opinion was better for the developer and the gamers. The gaming industry used to be able making quality games, fun games, which may not have been 3d but which were much more fun because they weren't
This is nothing but bitterness and misguided nostalgia.
Off the top of my head Nintendo were the first ones to use various bullying tactics to get their own way in the videogaming marketplace and had no respect for anyone or anything other than their profits.
As for those who say that the gaming industry used to about making fun games can any of you point to when this changed? After all, ET and Pac Man for the Atari 2600 were appalling cash-ins and the likes of the Commodore 64 were awash with legions of horrendously bad games.
I barely even notice most adverts really. It's either some annoying pop-up style advert that annoys me enough to close the window down immediately (so I don't really look at what is being advertised) or I just filter them out like I filter out background noise.
I don't get it - why do people go through that extra step of going to the Google homepage to begin searching? My browsers' home pages are set to about:blank; and when I want to Google something, I use the Search Bar in FF and the address bar in Chrome (I don't use IE if I can help it but even that has a search bar!).
- It's what I am used to.
- Clicking in the search bar and then pressing ALT+ENTER to make the search open in a new window isn't all that much easier and quicker than just going to the Google homepage.
I have a few friends that play games this much. On consoles. The thing is, however, that it doesnt make them good. Console players IME tend to have a lot less 'skill'; ie- twitch reflexes and battlefield awareness.
Moral of the story, play PC games if you want to have a challenge. Consoles are fun if you like games with stories.
Have you ever actually played on a console before? Fighting games like Street Fighter and arcade shooters like Mutant Storm Reloaded depend entirely on having good twitch reflexes.
With World of Warcraft you are playing on Blizzard's servers and with thousands of other people. This sort of 'bot screws things up and Blizzard have a right to stop people using it whilst using their servers.
Even whilst armed with this information there is little that could realisticly be done to minimise the impact of it. The area effected is too large and the timescale given is too vague. I would imagine that even a country like the US, with the sheer amount of resources available to it, would struggle to deal with such a thing.
The problem with having to kill monsters to get somewhere in an MMO is the inevitable trip back once you have complete the quest - those same monsters have respawned meaning you have to kill them again. Whilst this is an inherent design in current MMOs it pretty much punishes the player if they want to hang around an area to explore.
This is partly why so many players are in a 'rush' to get to max level.
Once upon a time, long ago there existed a service called Xbox Live. It was free and children played hapily, until the EVIL LORD GATES decided that he would monetise the service and the free version went away if you wanted to play on line
Xbox Live was not free on the original Xbox. On the 360 they changed it so you only had to pay if you wanted to play online.
Bang goes your boring conspiracy story.
It is antics like this that are the reason I remain a PC gamer. To be nickled and dimed for such basic service like online multiplayer and internet chat is ridiculous to me
As a generic gamer who quite happily plays on the PC and game consoles without any problem it seems ridiculous to me that people purposefully restrict themselves over small details like this.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are you still screaming about the forums ? We already WON that battle - the company listened to their users and changed their stance ! What the hell more do you want from a company ?
This article is about them listening to users regarding the in-game version and adding features people wanted. The one you're getting vitriolic about and cussing over is one I already mentioned. These latest changes show them being responsive to people's concerns - even if clearly they are not getting the kind of high developer priority you demand - some of us think that what with having cataclysm in beta their developer resources may be a just a tad strained at the moment. It's a positive sign and promising with regard to getting the other features we would like in the near future.
Can't you be happy about that?
Happy about them implementing a half-harsed feature? If their resources really were stretched that much they wouldn't have even made Real ID in the first place.
Don't get me wrong I like some of the features of Real ID but the fact that it shows your real name to everyone along with them being able to see everyone else on your Real ID list is completely ridiculous. There is no excuse for that.
But if you are going to pay $60 for a game, wouldn't you want to be able to pick up and play it, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years from now and it be just as fun as it was the day it was released? Quite honestly, I think that is the mark of a really great game, if you can't do that, its not that great. For example, Super Mario Bros. is a great example, its just as much fun today as it was when it was released. Final Fantasy VII is also another great game that stood the test of time, barring the load times, its a very fun game. Same thing with Yoshi's Island and Doom. If you have to see the game in rose tinted glasses with a qualifier with "for its time..." the game failed. Super Mario Bros wasn't a great platformer for its time, it was a great platformer. Final Fantasy VII wasn't a great RPG for its time, it is simply a great RPG. Etc.
If I'm going to buy a game for full price on launch day, it better be a classic or close to one. and not a tech-demo style game emphasizing graphics or temporary features over long-term fun. I'm not going to be impressed with HD graphics 20 years from now, I'm not going to be enjoying a multiplayer feature that no longer exists, however, if the game is fun, it will be just as great as when it came out.
Whilst that would be nice it doesn't work like that in reality. Games evolve too fast for me to be concerned about playing it in 5, 10, 25, etc. years time and I really cannot think of any game from 25 years ago that I still want to play. Super Mario Bros may still be a fun game but the desperately aged graphics would put me off and I would probably choose a different game to play instead.
FFVII isn't great either and I would get bored of Doom fairly quickly.
Because there is no change in the challenge. Let me illustrate by a simplified example: Your enemies have always 100 hitpoints more than you do. That means the challenge is always, unchanging, "do 100 points more damage to them than they do to me". Once you've figured it out, it is purely repetitive, because the difference between you and them never changes. Only numbers change - instead of hitting them 2 times, you may have to hit them 5 or 20 times, but aside from that it is the same.
You also lose all sense of accomplishment. If there are some enemies that are almost impossible at level 2, challenging at level 5 and easy at level 10 - then you can have the feeling of finally having "conquered" those enemies, of having become clearly better. If everyone in the game world levels with you, then what is the point of levelling at all? I could complete the game while staying level 1, and it would be the same experience.
You are assuming that everyone plays with the same motivations that you do. There are plenty of games that are excellent regardless of how difficult they are, not to mention the fact a player cannot keep improving forever - at some point they will reach the limit at which they can play so the challenge remains.
In which game? Where is the difference? In most implementations, the enemy now has 200 instead of 100 hitpoints. But you do now 20 instead of 10 points of damage. Zero difference, it takes 10 hits to kill them.
Auto-levelling is just a lazy shortcut by developers who are afraid of the player becoming bored because he is "too good". There are better ways to handle that.
And, frankly, it is highly satisfying to be able to walk all over those enemies that gave you trouble 10 levels back.
Again, you are making huge assumptions here. Auto-levelling worked fine in Baldurs Gate 2 and there is nothing lazy about that game.
Most people do. I have to open a new tab anyway even if I use the Google search bar so it makes hardly any difference either way.
Is there a good reason why these new Google toys don't work in Opera by default? Neither the background image option or that swirling ball trick from the other day worked in Opera until you set it in the options for Opera to mask itself as IE or Firefox - and now the same thing is true for this latest gimmick.
Because it is flat. That is what I meant by grinding. Killing 1000 enemies of the same kind is quite a bit less interesting and challenging than killing, say, 10 enemies each of 100 different kinds. It is a question of how much mental agility you have to excercise.
How is it flat if they are always at or above your level? As you improve the enemies improve as well.
Because the challenge gets out of it when you know exactly what to do and it becomes a matter of pressing the right buttons in the right sequence at the right time - that is a different and simpler challenge than figuring those buttons out in the first place.
You are making a large assumption here and seem to be applying it to a very limited subset of games. If it gets harder as I get better then I still have to go through the process of figuring things out.
You start off saying that auto-adapting is the reason for games being boring and then go on to say you want more of it.
I also don't see how a game that is always at or just above your level cannot be challenging or interesting. If I have to die lots of times at the same section to hone my skills I don't see how that is more challenging than if I hardly ever died across a larger number of ever-increasing sections.
The Hollywoodization of the games industry has killed it in my opinion.
Killed it in what sense? I would rather be a gamer in the current generation than in any previous one. Some of the stuff that was released during the 8-bit and 16-bit days was just awful.
How is it deliberately broken? The requirements for getting the extra armour are that you pre-order the game. If you don't fulfill those requirements then you don't get the armour.
I bought an Asus Windows 7 laptop as a present for someone the other week and ended up spending a few hours making it useable. There was a lot of Asus-branded shite that had to be removed, plus some Oberon media games, plus Trend Micro virus scan trial and then the Office 2007 trial.
Lastly I did the creation of the recovery discs and it took nearly two sodding hours or so to burn the FOUR DAMN DVDS! What the hell is on there?!?
Surely most people will still be spending roughly the same amount on games that they always have. If stuff gets too expensive then they will just buy less extras and do something else instead.
That's correct as far as it goes... but the bottom line is you can take the best console FPS player in the world and a mediocre to decent PC player will destroy the top tier console player. There simply is no competition between a game pad and a keyboard/mouse combo. Couple that with crappy graphics and console are just ass for quality gaming when it comes to FPS and 4X or RTS games.
You are an idiot. There are plenty of of quality console FPS games available. Just because you don't have the dexterity to use a controller properly doesn't mean other people don't.
Name one and show me a video and I might believe that. So far you have brought zero evidence to the table.
It's called physics. If you need a video evidence for this then there isn't much point even discussing this.
A lawsuit, consumer org investigations and a whole bunch of Youtube videos.
From your link "However, a further test which attempted to simulate normal household vibrations produced a disc scratch on the previously problematic console."
So in all the tests they managed to produce the grand total of one scratched disc.
Name another console that scratches discs . If its so common sense and totally to be expected that discs get scratched that shouldn't be to hard, right?
Any device with a spinning disc inside is liable to scratch the discs if it is moved.
And your argument is based on what data? Some earlier Xbox360 models scratched discs even when the console was not moved at all, so I wouldn't exactly trust that a disc-scratching Slim would not scratch discs on minor bumps.
And your argument is based on what data?
It is not about need, it is about stuff that happens in real life use. Cats might bump into it, people might trip over cables or maybe you just bump the console a little while you try to insert a USB connector. Just see the destructoid video, guy wants to get a closer look, lifts it up, Alan Wake goes bye-bye. He shouldn't have done it, but neither should the Xbox360 destroyed the disc.
If you lift a console up whilst a disc is spinning inside it then no-one is at fault other than the person who lifted it. No discs are getting scratched from people bumping their console slightly either.
You are assuming it's for mass-consumption. Take a look at the actual post, and you'll see it's an internal application
Looking at the actual post he is asking what is the best browser for what he wants to do. Your "bollocks to IE" answer is not a 'real world' answer at all.
Nintendo may have used bullying tactics but Nintendo respected the gamer and the gaming community.
This would be the same Nintendo that stopped developers making games on other systems, was found guilty of price fixing and purposefully restricted the supply of their games to drive up demand I take it?
Sony has never respected the gamer or the gaming community and only has ever cared about profits. The quality of their games never mattered, the quality of their hardware never mattered with overheating issues and other nonsense
Sony were the first console maker to make an official budget line of games available with their Platinum line and Nintendo had plenty of nonsense with the 'blinking' NES problem, the Nintedo R.O.B. and the Virtual Boy.
I say it's payback. Sony came into the gaming world with little to no respect for developers or the gaming community as a whole. Sony put the focus in on the 3d, and the specs, and the commercialism that we come to expect in the gaming world of today. The gaming world of yesterday had an entirely different ecosphere which in my opinion was better for the developer and the gamers. The gaming industry used to be able making quality games, fun games, which may not have been 3d but which were much more fun because they weren't
This is nothing but bitterness and misguided nostalgia.
Off the top of my head Nintendo were the first ones to use various bullying tactics to get their own way in the videogaming marketplace and had no respect for anyone or anything other than their profits.
As for those who say that the gaming industry used to about making fun games can any of you point to when this changed? After all, ET and Pac Man for the Atari 2600 were appalling cash-ins and the likes of the Commodore 64 were awash with legions of horrendously bad games.
I barely even notice most adverts really. It's either some annoying pop-up style advert that annoys me enough to close the window down immediately (so I don't really look at what is being advertised) or I just filter them out like I filter out background noise.
I don't get it - why do people go through that extra step of going to the Google homepage to begin searching? My browsers' home pages are set to about:blank; and when I want to Google something, I use the Search Bar in FF and the address bar in Chrome (I don't use IE if I can help it but even that has a search bar!).
- It's what I am used to.
- Clicking in the search bar and then pressing ALT+ENTER to make the search open in a new window isn't all that much easier and quicker than just going to the Google homepage.
I have a few friends that play games this much. On consoles. The thing is, however, that it doesnt make them good. Console players IME tend to have a lot less 'skill'; ie- twitch reflexes and battlefield awareness.
Moral of the story, play PC games if you want to have a challenge. Consoles are fun if you like games with stories.
Have you ever actually played on a console before? Fighting games like Street Fighter and arcade shooters like Mutant Storm Reloaded depend entirely on having good twitch reflexes.
With World of Warcraft you are playing on Blizzard's servers and with thousands of other people. This sort of 'bot screws things up and Blizzard have a right to stop people using it whilst using their servers.
Even whilst armed with this information there is little that could realisticly be done to minimise the impact of it. The area effected is too large and the timescale given is too vague. I would imagine that even a country like the US, with the sheer amount of resources available to it, would struggle to deal with such a thing.
The problem with having to kill monsters to get somewhere in an MMO is the inevitable trip back once you have complete the quest - those same monsters have respawned meaning you have to kill them again. Whilst this is an inherent design in current MMOs it pretty much punishes the player if they want to hang around an area to explore. This is partly why so many players are in a 'rush' to get to max level.
Once upon a time, long ago there existed a service called Xbox Live. It was free and children played hapily, until the EVIL LORD GATES decided that he would monetise the service and the free version went away if you wanted to play on line
Xbox Live was not free on the original Xbox. On the 360 they changed it so you only had to pay if you wanted to play online.
Bang goes your boring conspiracy story.
It is antics like this that are the reason I remain a PC gamer. To be nickled and dimed for such basic service like online multiplayer and internet chat is ridiculous to me
As a generic gamer who quite happily plays on the PC and game consoles without any problem it seems ridiculous to me that people purposefully restrict themselves over small details like this.