Seems Atari may have let the cat out of the bag when one of their staff mentioned upcoming sequels for both the Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights series in a posting on the official Atari forums.
Is this a sequel as in 'Neverwinter Nights 2' or just another expansion? Considering the sheer amount of (potential) content the original game had (read : downloadable mods) and its crazy history of delay after delay (I still remember the occasional joke made about it before its release during table-top RP sessions) just makes the talk of NWN2 being made raises my doubts.
But then maybe I'm just being too pessimistic. Woo hoo! NWN2!
"We thought it was all about making the best game in the world, but in reality it's all about making your publisher think you're making the best game in the world"
In other words:
"We forgot to make enough eye candy to fool our publisher."
Its about time more and more systems are beginning to package -real- games with their systems now. Remember the old days of the SNES when you could buy the system, get TWO controller, a REAL game, and no need for a memory card? Looks like Nintendo and Microsoft are going back to those days. The PS2 offers a similar package, but lets face it, their choice of free games are no Halos or Zeldas.
So in otherwords you want a PC, a Gamecube or Xbox, and games which require you to spend 30 minutes reconfiguring all the buttons for your own setup before you even start playing.
More memory? PCs use 256 megs of RAM as the base standard now. Far more than the PS2's 32 megs. Progressive scan? Try a Gamecube. Or better yet, a Xbox which is HD compatible. Joysticks with trackballs? Yeah, good luck trying to convert millions of users who have accustomed themselves to analog sticks, which are miniature joysticks, controllers would have to be stationary on a table for stability and ruin the gameplay of almost every genre for video games.
Xbox does look slightly better then the PS2 from what I've seen, but both suck greatly if you have ever played a modern 3D game using a GF4 or some other nice video card with 128M+ video memory.
Hmm... simple $150~179 console system guaranteed to work vs a $300+ video card UPGRADE which might not even work well on your computer. Great logic there. I have yet to see a PC game, and gaming rig, let me play a great looking game such as Panzer Dragoon Orta, MGS2, or Final Fantasy X without a single framerate drop either.
As any traveller will tell you, a portable gadget is only as reliable as its durability. When you're talking about a $2000+ gadget that weighs anywhere between 5 to 13 pounds, is constructed of weak plastic, silicon, and an LCD screen that costs half of the entire system alone, people are very, very wary of actually using a system such as this for its intended purpose. Hardcore gaming while travelling.
Dog tags in the game are useless other than bragging rights but, maybe they'll make a side-award for someone who can do something similar (obviously with slightly more time) while getting all the dog tags...
While we're on the topic of 'perfect runs', Konami did that web ranking system system maybe they'll do the same with MGS3. They did for MGS2/Substance, so its not out of the question..
"With video games, I think you can be more neutral. You can say, this is the environment. Go and experience what it was like and then come up with your own verdict of what you think of war."
True, if a game is really well made a developer can leave the verdict of the actions in a game to be justifiable or not. But the problem is, as long as human beings form these ARTIFICIAL ENVIRONMENTS, there will always be the insertion of bias into the game.
Take Battlefield : Vietnam. Why don't American players find strung up dead allies in the middle of the jungles as warning? If I was a soldier in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam and I saw that I'd think the Vietnamese were savages. Vice versa, why don't vietnamese players start off as lowly peasants and only 'graduate' to guns after watching their village 'accidentally' get bombed by the U.S.? You don't see this because its not what the developers WANT you to see.
The developers want you to see a war with no goals, no black, no white, just a lot of greys. If I made a Vietnam game where 90% of the missions involved rescuing American P.O.W.s after they've been imprisoned and tortured for years, you'd think the U.S. was justified (And yes, there would be lots of gore). On the other hand, if I made a Vietnam game with 50% of the game having the player be nothing more than a rice farmer sneak past American soldiers killing and taking away innocent villagers, you'd think its only right that the Vietnamese were justified.
The whole idea of looking at a war through someone else's vision is misleading at least, and propaganda at most. Wheres the gore? Where the years in POW camps? Where are the villages being napalmed?
WWII events are captured well in WWII games (other than obviously the Holocaust and the Pacific theatre but thats changing). Air raids? Got that. Seemingly out of nowhere artillery attacks? Got that. Charging machine-guns nests while your buddies go down? Got that. Tank battles? Got that. This is why people have generally let WWII games off with such ease. They knew what happened, they knew how it happened, and developers knew enough to put those events into the games. They didn't skimp on the details whenever possible and the public respected them for that, even if they avoided topics such as the Holocaust, and the Russian and Pacific theatres until recently.
And who cares about building Spearmen and stuff, let them start off with today's technology, and see where they take it.
Actually I tried that before. I built up my empire and then waited an extra 50 turns, insulted them so they would form an alliance (coalition?) against me, and then had them declare war on me. After breaking through their main force of Infantry (the best defender before Mech. Infantry) I demolished their Modern Tanks with Cruise Missles and rolled into Rome facing... over a dozen outdated units because the AI never upgraded them.. Whoopie..
This is coming from a country which makes dating sims. This sort of gameplay is a step back towards reality.
On a more serious note, to be honest the game just looks like a largely expanded version of Animal Crossing's being able to make a snowman. Not very creative with that said. (Basicly what you did in Animal Crossing was start with a snowball and roll it around until it was big enough for the bottom, the middle, and the head part of a snowman.)
While I can't answer any of the questions directly, I can give infomation for two of them, at least to an extent.
-What percentage of people have unusable games (because of scratches, etc) that they don't replace because of the high price?
For the first one, at some retailers (most notably EBGames), if you purchase a used game and find that it doesn't work you can refund it or have it exchanged for another copy/game. Course this assumes you kept the reciept and/or the store has another copy of the game (*cough*Dreamcast/PS1/N64 games*cough*). To make this even more difficult, it does not apply for new purchases so if by some freak accident the disc was to get crushed while inside the case during shipping, you're screwed.
Replace 'by some freak accident the disc was to get crushed while inside the case during shipping' with 'your PC decides to mess up the registry of your computer upon installation of game due to a bug' and well... I guess that one reason why video game piracy on the PC is so embedded.
-Do the console makers offer a free/nominal cost replacement service for damaged discs?
I don't think console makers are responsible for game disc errors unless theres a problem with the system causing it (PS2 and the Xbox both had these problems.) To answer your question, no. They don't replace/repair your damaged discs. See above.
On a further note, the same holds true for your console system. If your console was to breakdown/mess up/not read right due to a manufacturing flaw or something *cough*PS2*cough*, they STILL won't replace/repair your system without having to cough up some money.
Too bad each Civilization game turn takes between one to forty years.
The year is 1795 and the people of New York are angry. Next turn, its now 1800 people are happy again with no damage whatsoever to the city over that five YEAR period.
Reality sim Civilization isn't. Last time I checked Modern Tanks don't lose to Aztec Riflemen Concripts either, nor does the declaration of war cause an entire nation to grind to a halt due to widespread riots. For a 13 year old looking to learn basic managing skills, sure. For anyone over the age of 18, get a job and try handling taxes, job, school, and time. Far more difficult.
By that logic Nintendo will announce their next-gen system (other than the DS) because of the Gamecube's rockbottom cost and lack of first-party licenses to fall back on.
Also the PS2 should be able to run for another 4 years because it can maintain a price of $179, its getting ANOTHER Final Fantasy game, and EA continues to release sports games annually.
What defines an 'indie' game for you, and should there be a maximum budget for IGF-entered games?
In about 5 more years, any game not published by EA Games would be an 'indie' game.
On a more serious note : a maximum budget? No way, no chance. There are a number of issues that come up when you try to put something like that in place. For one you have inflation/depression in money value. Another is the fact that some of these 'indie' games are developed by teams which literally span the globe. A $500,000 USD budget limit may seem low for an American developer trying to break into the mainstream, but convert that into say Iraqi dollars and that budget limit might not even be reachable after 3 years of development.
Fighting the hordes of palette-swapped enemies that DQ subjects you to with the limited amount of innovation that the DQ series has just isn't all that fun anymore.
As far as I was concerned with the early Dragon Warrior/Quest games (I played 1-4 on the NES) the game was never about innovation but about telling a storyline that did sound like something out of a 9 year old kid's book report.
The Final Fantasy series hasn't done much innovation in comparison either. Sure they've tried all sorts of different ideas (Materia, Draw system, Abilites from items, Sphere system, etc) but those were all just hit-or-miss experiments since they've never reused them. 'Innovation' is a very, very strong word. Granted the DQ/DW are no independently developed games when it comes to trying new things, but it has had its moments. (DW/DQ 3 hiring system and 4's viewing of the storyline from different characters were the best IMO. At least given the time.)
One person cannot forcefully overthrow a government alone.
True, but one person in the right place at the right time can cause the outbreak of a war with a single bullet. (The assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand prior to WWI.)
True some PS1 titles still get sold, but look at what games are sold. Either they are Greatest Hits games or they're worthless games Cat in the Hat which aren't even mentioned or even listed on some video game review sites.
Just because Sony CAN milk the PS2 until 2010 doesn't mean they'll be making anything/much. It'll be like milking dead cow.
If the bullet penetrates and exits, at most a small spray is produced, which would be near invisible at the detail level in games. Most of the time, blood just wells up around the entrance wound, staining clothes.
So if I'm running around in the jungle wearing farmer's clothes and I take a couple dozen bursts of helicopter mounted M60 machinegun in my chest, my blood is going to just well up around the entrance wounds? What if I get hit by a mortar round? Does my body just fly up in the air and slide across the ground with almost no regard to friction?
Damn, no wonder the U.S. lost the Vietnam War. Those Vietnamese are tough mofos!
True, on some level it is a historical account, but is that level high/low enough? BF:Vietnam doesn't have blood because of EA's insane attempts to get a 'T' rating (C&C:Generals had a 'T' rating as well even though you could kill civilians with anthrax and get money for doing so). So at what level does a game have to reach in order to allowed to emulate a historical event? A few paragraphs on a few battles while removing all the blood? By that logic, C&C:Red Alert should've been philosophical for its time travel and 'what if Hitler never came to power' storyline.
As consoles systems move farther and farther away from their original purpose of playing video games, I think the term Entertainment Wars would be a more appropiate title for this report.
I just might want to dig out the old SNES and play some classic Super Metroid.
I think the problem for gamers regarding this topic is the fact that most gamers are just lacking the time to clean up such minor things. Think about it : The average console RPG these days goes for roughly 30-70 hours without trying to do things like unlock every secret in the game. (Or try to unlock every ending in Chrono Trigger which can take over 100 hours just leveling up/playing through over and over.) PC RPGs are even longer (Neverwinter Nights, Morrowind, KOTOR) thanks to the insane amount of content in them, not to mention downloadable mods. After sitting down for hours watching FMVs, saving the world from destruction, and tracking down the last hidden item : are you going to go to sleep or are you going to spend time cleaning up piles of mini-discs, DVDs, CDs, strategy guides, and whatever else you had laying around?
That is unless Joe is an average gamer who doesn't know squat about gaming news, doesn't read reviews, and doesn't even bother to ask the sales associate for his opinion on the game (assuming the sales associate plays video games). It'd be like walking into a candy shop and deciding on what to buy.
Do you reach for the classic tried-and-true Hershey chocolate bar at $1, or do you go for the no-name store made brand which no one seems to buy at $0.25? In cases like these, most people are willing to reach for the tried and true brand names of things rather than try things new in some cases.
And on top of that, there are advertising factors, appearance of box art, and the popularity of the type of game genre you're talking about. (We all expected Quake 2 to blow away Half-Life since it was id Software. Boy, were we wrong!)
As has been discussed in length already, it is impossible to trust the client unless you send each frame prerendered to every client pixel for pixel.
Actually Halo PC actually uses this type of netcode. What the netcode does is require all client information to be sent to the server where it will then be double-checked before it is actually intiated in the game. This way if you were to send double packets (speed hack) or send bad video rendering infomation causing you to see a wireframe of the map (see through walls hack) the server would immediately recognize it and kick you from the server. The problem with this method is lag.
With all of the data being sent back and forth from the server (and god forbid its non-dedicated) games with more than 8 players in Halo PC are lag filled to the brim. Anti-cheat effective? Very. Gameplay effective? Hell no, especially with Halo PC's insane hardware problems.
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Is this a sequel as in 'Neverwinter Nights 2' or just another expansion? Considering the sheer amount of (potential) content the original game had (read : downloadable mods) and its crazy history of delay after delay (I still remember the occasional joke made about it before its release during table-top RP sessions) just makes the talk of NWN2 being made raises my doubts.
But then maybe I'm just being too pessimistic. Woo hoo! NWN2!
In other words :
"We forgot to make enough eye candy to fool our publisher."
Its about time more and more systems are beginning to package -real- games with their systems now. Remember the old days of the SNES when you could buy the system, get TWO controller, a REAL game, and no need for a memory card? Looks like Nintendo and Microsoft are going back to those days. The PS2 offers a similar package, but lets face it, their choice of free games are no Halos or Zeldas.
More memory? PCs use 256 megs of RAM as the base standard now. Far more than the PS2's 32 megs.
Progressive scan? Try a Gamecube. Or better yet, a Xbox which is HD compatible.
Joysticks with trackballs? Yeah, good luck trying to convert millions of users who have accustomed themselves to analog sticks, which are miniature joysticks, controllers would have to be stationary on a table for stability and ruin the gameplay of almost every genre for video games.
Xbox does look slightly better then the PS2 from what I've seen, but both suck greatly if you have ever played a modern 3D game using a GF4 or some other nice video card with 128M+ video memory.
Hmm... simple $150~179 console system guaranteed to work vs a $300+ video card UPGRADE which might not even work well on your computer. Great logic there. I have yet to see a PC game, and gaming rig, let me play a great looking game such as Panzer Dragoon Orta, MGS2, or Final Fantasy X without a single framerate drop either.
As any traveller will tell you, a portable gadget is only as reliable as its durability. When you're talking about a $2000+ gadget that weighs anywhere between 5 to 13 pounds, is constructed of weak plastic, silicon, and an LCD screen that costs half of the entire system alone, people are very, very wary of actually using a system such as this for its intended purpose. Hardcore gaming while travelling.
While we're on the topic of 'perfect runs', Konami did that web ranking system system maybe they'll do the same with MGS3. They did for MGS2/Substance, so its not out of the question..
True, if a game is really well made a developer can leave the verdict of the actions in a game to be justifiable or not. But the problem is, as long as human beings form these ARTIFICIAL ENVIRONMENTS, there will always be the insertion of bias into the game.
Take Battlefield : Vietnam. Why don't American players find strung up dead allies in the middle of the jungles as warning? If I was a soldier in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam and I saw that I'd think the Vietnamese were savages. Vice versa, why don't vietnamese players start off as lowly peasants and only 'graduate' to guns after watching their village 'accidentally' get bombed by the U.S.? You don't see this because its not what the developers WANT you to see.
The developers want you to see a war with no goals, no black, no white, just a lot of greys. If I made a Vietnam game where 90% of the missions involved rescuing American P.O.W.s after they've been imprisoned and tortured for years, you'd think the U.S. was justified (And yes, there would be lots of gore). On the other hand, if I made a Vietnam game with 50% of the game having the player be nothing more than a rice farmer sneak past American soldiers killing and taking away innocent villagers, you'd think its only right that the Vietnamese were justified.
The whole idea of looking at a war through someone else's vision is misleading at least, and propaganda at most. Wheres the gore? Where the years in POW camps? Where are the villages being napalmed?
WWII events are captured well in WWII games (other than obviously the Holocaust and the Pacific theatre but thats changing). Air raids? Got that. Seemingly out of nowhere artillery attacks? Got that. Charging machine-guns nests while your buddies go down? Got that. Tank battles? Got that. This is why people have generally let WWII games off with such ease. They knew what happened, they knew how it happened, and developers knew enough to put those events into the games. They didn't skimp on the details whenever possible and the public respected them for that, even if they avoided topics such as the Holocaust, and the Russian and Pacific theatres until recently.
Actually I tried that before. I built up my empire and then waited an extra 50 turns, insulted them so they would form an alliance (coalition?) against me, and then had them declare war on me. After breaking through their main force of Infantry (the best defender before Mech. Infantry) I demolished their Modern Tanks with Cruise Missles and rolled into Rome facing... over a dozen outdated units because the AI never upgraded them.. Whoopie..
On a more serious note, to be honest the game just looks like a largely expanded version of Animal Crossing's being able to make a snowman. Not very creative with that said. (Basicly what you did in Animal Crossing was start with a snowball and roll it around until it was big enough for the bottom, the middle, and the head part of a snowman.)
-What percentage of people have unusable games (because of scratches, etc) that they don't replace because of the high price?
For the first one, at some retailers (most notably EBGames), if you purchase a used game and find that it doesn't work you can refund it or have it exchanged for another copy/game. Course this assumes you kept the reciept and/or the store has another copy of the game (*cough*Dreamcast/PS1/N64 games*cough*). To make this even more difficult, it does not apply for new purchases so if by some freak accident the disc was to get crushed while inside the case during shipping, you're screwed.
Replace 'by some freak accident the disc was to get crushed while inside the case during shipping' with 'your PC decides to mess up the registry of your computer upon installation of game due to a bug' and well... I guess that one reason why video game piracy on the PC is so embedded.
-Do the console makers offer a free/nominal cost replacement service for damaged discs?
I don't think console makers are responsible for game disc errors unless theres a problem with the system causing it (PS2 and the Xbox both had these problems.) To answer your question, no. They don't replace/repair your damaged discs. See above.
On a further note, the same holds true for your console system. If your console was to breakdown/mess up/not read right due to a manufacturing flaw or something *cough*PS2*cough*, they STILL won't replace/repair your system without having to cough up some money.
The year is 1795 and the people of New York are angry. Next turn, its now 1800 people are happy again with no damage whatsoever to the city over that five YEAR period.
Reality sim Civilization isn't. Last time I checked Modern Tanks don't lose to Aztec Riflemen Concripts either, nor does the declaration of war cause an entire nation to grind to a halt due to widespread riots. For a 13 year old looking to learn basic managing skills, sure. For anyone over the age of 18, get a job and try handling taxes, job, school, and time. Far more difficult.
Also the PS2 should be able to run for another 4 years because it can maintain a price of $179, its getting ANOTHER Final Fantasy game, and EA continues to release sports games annually.
In about 5 more years, any game not published by EA Games would be an 'indie' game.
On a more serious note : a maximum budget? No way, no chance. There are a number of issues that come up when you try to put something like that in place. For one you have inflation/depression in money value. Another is the fact that some of these 'indie' games are developed by teams which literally span the globe. A $500,000 USD budget limit may seem low for an American developer trying to break into the mainstream, but convert that into say Iraqi dollars and that budget limit might not even be reachable after 3 years of development.
When AOL doesn't have to pay millions of dollars in manufacturing, packaging, and postage most of which never pays off.
Yet...(?)
As far as I was concerned with the early Dragon Warrior/Quest games (I played 1-4 on the NES) the game was never about innovation but about telling a storyline that did sound like something out of a 9 year old kid's book report.
The Final Fantasy series hasn't done much innovation in comparison either. Sure they've tried all sorts of different ideas (Materia, Draw system, Abilites from items, Sphere system, etc) but those were all just hit-or-miss experiments since they've never reused them. 'Innovation' is a very, very strong word. Granted the DQ/DW are no independently developed games when it comes to trying new things, but it has had its moments. (DW/DQ 3 hiring system and 4's viewing of the storyline from different characters were the best IMO. At least given the time.)
True, but one person in the right place at the right time can cause the outbreak of a war with a single bullet. (The assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand prior to WWI.)
Just because Sony CAN milk the PS2 until 2010 doesn't mean they'll be making anything/much. It'll be like milking dead cow.
So if I'm running around in the jungle wearing farmer's clothes and I take a couple dozen bursts of helicopter mounted M60 machinegun in my chest, my blood is going to just well up around the entrance wounds? What if I get hit by a mortar round? Does my body just fly up in the air and slide across the ground with almost no regard to friction?
Damn, no wonder the U.S. lost the Vietnam War. Those Vietnamese are tough mofos!
No its not. Unreal Tournament 2004 was released last Monday. Whats this about Valve releasing games?
True, on some level it is a historical account, but is that level high/low enough? BF:Vietnam doesn't have blood because of EA's insane attempts to get a 'T' rating (C&C:Generals had a 'T' rating as well even though you could kill civilians with anthrax and get money for doing so). So at what level does a game have to reach in order to allowed to emulate a historical event? A few paragraphs on a few battles while removing all the blood? By that logic, C&C:Red Alert should've been philosophical for its time travel and 'what if Hitler never came to power' storyline.
As consoles systems move farther and farther away from their original purpose of playing video games, I think the term Entertainment Wars would be a more appropiate title for this report.
I think the problem for gamers regarding this topic is the fact that most gamers are just lacking the time to clean up such minor things. Think about it : The average console RPG these days goes for roughly 30-70 hours without trying to do things like unlock every secret in the game. (Or try to unlock every ending in Chrono Trigger which can take over 100 hours just leveling up/playing through over and over.) PC RPGs are even longer (Neverwinter Nights, Morrowind, KOTOR) thanks to the insane amount of content in them, not to mention downloadable mods. After sitting down for hours watching FMVs, saving the world from destruction, and tracking down the last hidden item : are you going to go to sleep or are you going to spend time cleaning up piles of mini-discs, DVDs, CDs, strategy guides, and whatever else you had laying around?
Do you reach for the classic tried-and-true Hershey chocolate bar at $1, or do you go for the no-name store made brand which no one seems to buy at $0.25? In cases like these, most people are willing to reach for the tried and true brand names of things rather than try things new in some cases.
And on top of that, there are advertising factors, appearance of box art, and the popularity of the type of game genre you're talking about. (We all expected Quake 2 to blow away Half-Life since it was id Software. Boy, were we wrong!)
Actually Halo PC actually uses this type of netcode. What the netcode does is require all client information to be sent to the server where it will then be double-checked before it is actually intiated in the game. This way if you were to send double packets (speed hack) or send bad video rendering infomation causing you to see a wireframe of the map (see through walls hack) the server would immediately recognize it and kick you from the server. The problem with this method is lag.
With all of the data being sent back and forth from the server (and god forbid its non-dedicated) games with more than 8 players in Halo PC are lag filled to the brim. Anti-cheat effective? Very. Gameplay effective? Hell no, especially with Halo PC's insane hardware problems.