Seriously, without using licensed characters (Spiderman being the most notable) what character are they going to use? EA is most notable for its line of sports games and team based PC games (Battlefield 1942 of course). This is not a Capcom or Nintendo company which has a very broad cast of characters to choose from.
Not only that, look more carefully at the title.
EA Vs. Marvel Fighting Games Announced
Games, impling more than one. What are they going to do for an EA Vs. Marvel 2 game? "Now fight using the Battlefield Vietnam grunt and the generals from C&C:Generals Zero Hour!"
Spider-Man comes to mind (the point of the game is to kill the bad guys).
Since when did Spider-Man start killing people?
Considering the many, many violent and older audience aimed games (any FPS game, some RTS games, and a good number of 3rd person shooters) I think the ESRB is doing a good job at rating games. If you think the game Spider-Man casts the player killing bad guys (he doesn't), you'll have to resort to pre-school educational games.
IMO, the amount of time the DC guys put into their work is just the tip of the iceburg. What about other expenses? I'm sure these guys didn't make this happen using 2 year old computers, using dial-up, and without causing their real life to falter (school grades dropping, decreased job performance, etc). Don't forget about bandwidth either (gotta host it somewhere in the beginning. As nice as people may be online, a mod like this no doubt sucked up some serious bandwidth to get this much attention.)
As for the business factor, I'd like to ask one simple question. Why not hire a bunch of low cost temporary developers (read : 99.9% of all mod makers) to make add-ons or expansions to their games? If the mod does well, the dev team gets a real bonus and possibly gets hired full time. Those who screw up get tossed. Either way the parent company, say EAGames, loses a few bucks (a couple thousand is pocket change to them) or they could make a bunch of money and a new source of good, proven developers. Worst case scenario : the company gets free advertisement as the press talk about the new idea.
just as at the time Warcraft I was the pinnacle of RTS
Um, not really. The only reason I picked up Warcraft I was because a friend gave me his copy. Warcraft I was a step BACKWARD compared to Dune 2 (which was developed by Westwood, Blizzard's rival during Warcraft II) all things considered.
At the time Dune 2 was FRIKIN AMAZING. THREE (relatively) distinctive sides, a constant threat which could f*** up your entire game (sandworm attacks were NOT alerted to the player, so you could lose an entire fleet of harvesters and not realize it) and unfair challenges kept players on their toes (on some of the harder levels it was common for the enemy to attack you so quickly you had to build troops and towers before building a refinery).
Now looking at Warcraft I, the game would often times give you starting units removing the initial game tension of the fear of being bumrushed (it still exists in RTS games these days, but most RTS games don't force you to fight off tanks/knights with infantry units). The problem was they didn't really improve the AI. It was fairly common to level half an enemy base with just 2 or 3 catapults and a dozen archers/spearmen since units weren't smart enough to defend buildings that were being attacked. To top it all off, the AI outside of the campaign was even worse. Normally you expect AI in skrimish games to "cheat" by removing whatever limitations the developers put on them during the campaign in exchange for their overly large bases. Instead, it was possible to go spend 20 minutes in a skrimish without attacking the enemy and be attacked only once or twice.
Try downloading Dune 2 (cracked copies of the game are fairly easy to find, finding a computer slow enough to run it is another thing) and then try Warcraft I. See which game is the superior one without considering their sequels (strange how it ended up though, Dune 2 sequels sucked while Warcraft I sequels rocked).
Well unless you're a Chinese game player, you're obviously a load of shit.
Just because graphics aren't the selling point doesn't mean they don't like good graphics. Unlike their U.S. counterparts, they don't make hundreds of dollars a week to spend on games and hardware (8 dollars an hour * 40 hours a week = $320 before expenses). Cheap, but effective graphics are the trade-off for a good online experience. Unlike games like Everquest 2 which seems to be aiming for the 'will cripple your top-end computer' feature.
Warcraft 2 should've been on the list but Warcraft 1? I'm thinking you have jaded memories.
Warcraft 1 lacked ease of use compared to Warcraft 2. Most notable point : No ability to right click movement. Thats right, everytime you wanted a group, which was limited to FOUR, you had to click 'M', and left click. Not only that you couldn't group units using the now standard Ctrl-# method, so juggling troops in the middle of a battle was a near impossibility. There was no "attack movement" either so strategies generally degraded into throwing armies at your opponent and then spending time telling each unit to engage the enemy over and over. Warcraft 1 was the equal of Warcraft 2 in an Alpha stage, a shoddy piece of crap which kept people playing because of the art and graphics. It didn't help that the only differences were their spells either, or the fact that all your building had to be connected to your town hall by ROADS... which had to be built (read : waste of money) INDIVIDUALLY (read : the computer will unfairly bum rush you).
To say every game before Warcraft 3 on the list is crap is ignorant. Dune 2 crap? Yeah, ignorant.
This guy is just trying to bully small companies into paying him with these patents. If he actually tried pushing this on bigger companies, they trash his life, buy it from him, and then trash it some more.
The games do not require a manual dealer and in one embodiment, played in a gaming establishment using low cost gaming stations.
Do not require a manual dealer? Played in a gaming establishment using low cost gaming stations? Sounds like casinos to me.
After watching so many MMORPGs hit the market in the past few years (Ultima Online, Everquest, Asheron's Call 1/2, Anarchy Online, Star Wars Galaxy, Final Fantasy XI etc) I don't think developers have solved the first problem to making a MMORPG.
How to give a player a role in a larger world without forcing him into it and without belitting everyone else.
The last three letter in MMORPG stand for Role Playing Game. We already know the single player RPGs are coming to a crossroads with the East (Japan) sticking to painfully linear storylines and characters while the West (U.S.A. and Europe) are going with the non-linear development of games. The problem with making a MMORPG is the storyline. Any quest any developer thinks of for a game is quickly blown through by players (even "super" monsters are being taken down by parties/guilds numbering in the hundreds). As such, developers are left with this one option, constantly and quickly add new content on a regular basis. The best successful example of this is Final Fantasy XI.
However, note that I said 'best' not 'only' or 'most'. The reason I point this out is because Final Fantasy XI has not been regularly releasing content that is pertant to the storyline except in irregularly released expansion packs (which non-Japanese players got as part of the original game). However I state that Final Fantasy XI is doing well because they have been successfully holding special events regularly on holidays and have already annouced an expansion which (at least the title) is related to the storyline.
Until a MMORPG successfully manages to constantly release content (free or not) containing quests related to the storyline, current MMO"RPG"s will be nothing more than leveling up or hording phat l3wt games since players will quickly go through whatever quests related to the storyline in a few weeks.
How would you like to see voice control in videogames evolve, going forward?
First, how about we expand the average gamer's vocabulary beyond the words; f***, s*** or homosexual terms. Then I'll consider wearing a headset with some stranger online talking to me in a game.
Otherwise I'll just stick to talking on the phone and playing with someone I know. Or better yet, play at a LAN party.
Realism in gaming is a trend thats only been started more recently in the late 1990s. Prior to 1990s, pretty much a huge majority of all games (console or PC) were insanely unrealistic. Zelda, pretty much every adventure game, Pac-Man, etc were all unrealistic yet some are still played to this day.
Even mid-1990s games avoided the "realism" fad thats still going around today. Half-Life is probably the most recent and clear example of this fact, a scientist with knowledge on weapons ranging from pistol, to rocket launchers, to alien weapons saves the world from alien invasion while fighting off U.S. military forces and special op soldiers with a crowbar in hand. Not exactly America's Army realism there.
Um Half-Life and Duke Nukem 3D never casted you as a soldier on a foreign planet (except for the last part of Half-Life). Both games took place on or around Earth. Doom II also took place on Earth (for about the first 10 or so levels) before going down to Hell. So out of your 6 examples, 3 of which (partially) take place on Earth.
Some better examples would've been the entire Quake series, the entire Unreal and Unreal Tournament series, and Hidden and Dangerous. If you ask me, its more recent games that are moving away from Earth as a setting. I think Halo 2 is gonna serve as inspiration to developers for years since they're doing so much work on designing massive maps of a futuristic Earth.
Yeah the capital ships are impressive with their beam cannons... that is until you get caught in their crossfire and get killed. (Get hit by one of the main beam cannons basicly meant instant death since they aren't supposed to target you, only other capital ships.)
As for fighting a nebula so you can see anything, don't forget the LAST mission where you have to run from (MAJOR SPOILER).
1. It could be a 1st person perspective. We just don't have enough information. Bungie could've simply disabled the HUD and had the picture taker have no weapons at the time. Simple as that. Considering its a shot taken by the developers, disabling the HUD is very very simple (they also had it disabled during the E3 gameplay screening).
2. 'Well composed' pictures are always used for media purposely. When you publicise a game, do you show the screenshot of the player crawling through a vent slowly, or do you show the screenshot of the player running away from a horde of hideous looking monsters while they tear the walls down?
3. I don't know how or why you managed to come to that conclusion. Its fairly clear that the red player on the right is shooting the blue player (with the shield effect) since there is no blur of yellow on his back (which in Halo 1 indicated a hit on a shield).
4. Um, thats not a motion blur. If it was then the machinegun shell would have had to rotate in midair because blur is facing from upper right to lower left, while the shell itself is facing upper left to lower right.
5. The antenna is wobbling back and forth. Go play Halo 1 and drive the Scorpion tank around, its antenna wobbles as well. If the image was resampled, why the hell would they make a mistake like that?
Everything you pointed is something that a quick, careless look would pick up. Not a 1st person perspective? Almost like they paused the game and the moved the camera? It was taken by the developing team, they could've added a "Midget" character in the game to obtain a very very low perspective point and we wouldn't know it. These points are really unfounded and unsupportable.
I wonder why they don't just release Halo 2 directly to the PC at the same time as they release it on the Xbox. Oh right, nobody would buy it for the Xbox.
No, thats called 'shovelware' and no one would buy it because the console version would run better than a computer, would be filled with bugs, and lack cool features like the ability to crank up the resolution up to 1600*1200 with a bunch of fancy graphic effects. As well as have crappy net code because the Xbox version would be made for broadband players only, would have to resort to third-party anti-cheating software because the Xbox has no cheaters, and would piss off millions of Xbox owners for not having the sequel to their greatest game being non-exclusive.
Just buy a Xbox and quit shunning it just because the Xbox is owned by Microsoft.
Unless you take the personal time to read through the chapters that aren't covered yourself, no book of any size (except for maybe a dictionary) is worth the extra cost. On average, about what percentage of chapters do you actually use in a textbook? My average is roughly 7 chapters, yet some of the books I use go up to 12 (I have a friend who has a book that goes up to 18).
This doesn't exactly relate to the news report but, some games have messages or alerts that tells a player that he/she should stop playing. This may be a unique case but in the game Dungeon Keeper 2, if you set your computer clock to some insane time like 3 AM in the morning and play some of the messages were basicly along the lines of "Even dungeon keepers need to rest. Go to bed."
Who knows? Maybe games like The Sims 2 will feature a similar messages or MMORPGs for players who remain active for long periods of time without being passive for X amount of time, presumably to eat and use the bathroom. (Loading times don't count)
Is weak sales when launching outside the holiday season a genuine problem, or just a self-perpetuating myth?
I don't think superstition is really the root of the problem here. I think its an issue of trust and communications between the developers and their marketing department. Old traditional marketing research dictates that "Christmas Release = More Sales" no matter what market (unless you work in something like the swimsuit industry). However, this is not true in the case of video games. With successful marketing a game like Neverwinter Nights, Starcraft, or Half-Life could all sell well even if they weren't release near Christmas season.
I chose these three games as examples because : Neverwinter Nights was released in June, pretty much as far away as Christmas as you can get but was insanely marketed for its modding systems. Starcraft was not an existing franchise and was a deviation from Warcraft 2's, two side system as well as a change in "universes" and was pushed by Blizzard. And Half-Life was developed by a company (Valve) no one had ever heard of prior to its release but was pumped with talk (relatively) smart AI and implementation of a strong storyline.
I don't know about Onimusha and Resident Evil, but I don't think the Megaman sequels are lacking in creativity. Rather, I think they Capcom is doing a good job at using the well established Megaman series to experiment with new gameplay. The Megaman Zero series on the GBA experimented with the use of Cyber Elves and leveling up your weapons through use but kept the traditional insane difficulty of the old school games. They took the Megaman series to the N64 with Megaman Legends, but that wasn't a very good experiment. They're also trying Megaman Battle Network on the GBA, Megaman Network Transmission on the GC, and now they're redoing the old ones on the GC and the PS2. Capcom may not be managing their other serieses too well, but I think the Megaman series is being handled quite well.
What if you were to buy just one copy of MS's software and just keep using it, nearly endlessly? I know there are thousands of people out there who still use Windows 98 (I do) and some even use Windows 95. With this in mind, where is MS getting their money? Certainly not from software thanks to weak systems against installation on multiple computers. Not every computer is on the internet either, so there are some people who never patch their software or download new utilities (I have a computer still running DirectX 3.0).
Companies such as MS don't really make money off of their software thanks to individuals like me and Joe Average. Companies make money off of huge distributers like Dell or Gateway who have to pay MS for every computer they build and send off with Windows installed on it.
Its simple economics. Whats going to be a better deal? The 5000 individual consumers who buy your software for $500 each? Or the one big company who buys 50000 copies of your software for $300 and signs a contract stating that they'll use only your OS for the next 5 years?
Actually, I didn't say there were no good RTS games this year. I just said there was no news about future ones and how the expansion for C&C:Generals was a "should've been".
Wasn't Starcraft based off the Warhammer 40,000 universe? Eschaton is basicly doing the same thing as Savage already did (and Natural Selection but I haven't played it so no comment). The game play information page even makes reference to those two games.
Eschaton: Chain of Command joins the growing number of multiplayer games such as Natural Selection and Savage that combine RTS commanders with FPS action players.
Wouldn't it be nice if there was an alternate Battle.net clone for people who want to play on a huge network but don't want to deal with Blizzard's rules?
You mean like Diablo 2's Open Battle.net which is run largely by hacked characters? Yeah, I tried it before. It sucks. People either cheat or hack... and then they kill you... repeatedly.
I can understand not wanting people to mess up the ladders. So why not have ladder bans? There are systems for this that can work without keeping people off B.net as a whole.
Because its not just the ladders. Have you even played Warcraft III online? All regular melee games are setup so that you're randomly assigned teammates and opponents. YOU DON'T GET TO PICK YOUR TEAMMATES. If you're playing a 4v4 and your teammates decide to be assholes and force attack your base, tough luck you just wasted about 20 minutes of time and lost the game. Its not like Starcraft where everyone gets dropped into a room beforehand and can chat it out before starting.
Banning a huge sum of players on the off chance that other players will have a better time is a flawed business model, and no competent business would ever do it.
It WOULD be a flawed business model if you weren't ignorant. In this case; Step one, YOU buy the game. Step two, YOU go on Battle.net and get yourself banned. Step three, YOU are now screwed. Now where does Blizzard get YOUR money? The answer: Step one.
Battle.net is NOT a pay-to-play model. Once you get past Step one, Blizzard doesn't care if you decide to destroy the CD in a microwave, they already have YOUR money. If it wasn't for the advertisement banners and the low bandwidth necessary to run the servers, Blizzard would be in deep financial trouble considing the fact that people are STILL playing Diablo 1 on Battle.net for FREE.
Not really. On maps like Gold Rush, 2 or 3 fieldops on the Axis team can bottleneck the entire Allied team since they have to escort the tank literally less one coordinate away from the Axis spawn. I've seenen airstrikes called in by the Axis which take out 3 or 4 players all at once. Running away from it is not an option due to the tank's slow speed.
Its the same with other maps. Rail Gun? 2 soldiers can completely stop the tug with a panzerfaust into the tug driving controls. Oasis? Airstrike the old city wall and set up MGs in the water tunnels. Seawall Fortress? I call it the Omaha Beach map:P. The last two can bottleneck the Allies with a few MG positions, none of which can be targetted easily from the outside.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, without using licensed characters (Spiderman being the most notable) what character are they going to use? EA is most notable for its line of sports games and team based PC games (Battlefield 1942 of course). This is not a Capcom or Nintendo company which has a very broad cast of characters to choose from.
Not only that, look more carefully at the title.
EA Vs. Marvel Fighting Games Announced
Games, impling more than one. What are they going to do for an EA Vs. Marvel 2 game?
"Now fight using the Battlefield Vietnam grunt and the generals from C&C:Generals Zero Hour!"
Define "best" in this situation.
Since when did Spider-Man start killing people?
Considering the many, many violent and older audience aimed games (any FPS game, some RTS games, and a good number of 3rd person shooters) I think the ESRB is doing a good job at rating games. If you think the game Spider-Man casts the player killing bad guys (he doesn't), you'll have to resort to pre-school educational games.
As for the business factor, I'd like to ask one simple question. Why not hire a bunch of low cost temporary developers (read : 99.9% of all mod makers) to make add-ons or expansions to their games? If the mod does well, the dev team gets a real bonus and possibly gets hired full time. Those who screw up get tossed. Either way the parent company, say EAGames, loses a few bucks (a couple thousand is pocket change to them) or they could make a bunch of money and a new source of good, proven developers. Worst case scenario : the company gets free advertisement as the press talk about the new idea.
With so many big companies afraid to try out new ideas, it seems like independent developers and modders are the only ones trying out new ideas.
Um, not really. The only reason I picked up Warcraft I was because a friend gave me his copy. Warcraft I was a step BACKWARD compared to Dune 2 (which was developed by Westwood, Blizzard's rival during Warcraft II) all things considered.
At the time Dune 2 was FRIKIN AMAZING. THREE (relatively) distinctive sides, a constant threat which could f*** up your entire game (sandworm attacks were NOT alerted to the player, so you could lose an entire fleet of harvesters and not realize it) and unfair challenges kept players on their toes (on some of the harder levels it was common for the enemy to attack you so quickly you had to build troops and towers before building a refinery).
Now looking at Warcraft I, the game would often times give you starting units removing the initial game tension of the fear of being bumrushed (it still exists in RTS games these days, but most RTS games don't force you to fight off tanks/knights with infantry units). The problem was they didn't really improve the AI. It was fairly common to level half an enemy base with just 2 or 3 catapults and a dozen archers/spearmen since units weren't smart enough to defend buildings that were being attacked. To top it all off, the AI outside of the campaign was even worse. Normally you expect AI in skrimish games to "cheat" by removing whatever limitations the developers put on them during the campaign in exchange for their overly large bases. Instead, it was possible to go spend 20 minutes in a skrimish without attacking the enemy and be attacked only once or twice.
Try downloading Dune 2 (cracked copies of the game are fairly easy to find, finding a computer slow enough to run it is another thing) and then try Warcraft I. See which game is the superior one without considering their sequels (strange how it ended up though, Dune 2 sequels sucked while Warcraft I sequels rocked).
Just because graphics aren't the selling point doesn't mean they don't like good graphics. Unlike their U.S. counterparts, they don't make hundreds of dollars a week to spend on games and hardware (8 dollars an hour * 40 hours a week = $320 before expenses). Cheap, but effective graphics are the trade-off for a good online experience. Unlike games like Everquest 2 which seems to be aiming for the 'will cripple your top-end computer' feature.
Warcraft 1 lacked ease of use compared to Warcraft 2. Most notable point : No ability to right click movement. Thats right, everytime you wanted a group, which was limited to FOUR, you had to click 'M', and left click. Not only that you couldn't group units using the now standard Ctrl-# method, so juggling troops in the middle of a battle was a near impossibility. There was no "attack movement" either so strategies generally degraded into throwing armies at your opponent and then spending time telling each unit to engage the enemy over and over. Warcraft 1 was the equal of Warcraft 2 in an Alpha stage, a shoddy piece of crap which kept people playing because of the art and graphics. It didn't help that the only differences were their spells either, or the fact that all your building had to be connected to your town hall by ROADS... which had to be built (read : waste of money) INDIVIDUALLY (read : the computer will unfairly bum rush you).
To say every game before Warcraft 3 on the list is crap is ignorant. Dune 2 crap? Yeah, ignorant.
The games do not require a manual dealer and in one embodiment, played in a gaming establishment using low cost gaming stations.
Do not require a manual dealer? Played in a gaming establishment using low cost gaming stations? Sounds like casinos to me.
How to give a player a role in a larger world without forcing him into it and without belitting everyone else.
The last three letter in MMORPG stand for Role Playing Game. We already know the single player RPGs are coming to a crossroads with the East (Japan) sticking to painfully linear storylines and characters while the West (U.S.A. and Europe) are going with the non-linear development of games. The problem with making a MMORPG is the storyline. Any quest any developer thinks of for a game is quickly blown through by players (even "super" monsters are being taken down by parties/guilds numbering in the hundreds). As such, developers are left with this one option, constantly and quickly add new content on a regular basis. The best successful example of this is Final Fantasy XI.
However, note that I said 'best' not 'only' or 'most'. The reason I point this out is because Final Fantasy XI has not been regularly releasing content that is pertant to the storyline except in irregularly released expansion packs (which non-Japanese players got as part of the original game). However I state that Final Fantasy XI is doing well because they have been successfully holding special events regularly on holidays and have already annouced an expansion which (at least the title) is related to the storyline.
Until a MMORPG successfully manages to constantly release content (free or not) containing quests related to the storyline, current MMO"RPG"s will be nothing more than leveling up or hording phat l3wt games since players will quickly go through whatever quests related to the storyline in a few weeks.
First, how about we expand the average gamer's vocabulary beyond the words; f***, s*** or homosexual terms. Then I'll consider wearing a headset with some stranger online talking to me in a game.
Otherwise I'll just stick to talking on the phone and playing with someone I know. Or better yet, play at a LAN party.
Even mid-1990s games avoided the "realism" fad thats still going around today. Half-Life is probably the most recent and clear example of this fact, a scientist with knowledge on weapons ranging from pistol, to rocket launchers, to alien weapons saves the world from alien invasion while fighting off U.S. military forces and special op soldiers with a crowbar in hand. Not exactly America's Army realism there.
Because if it does then we've got plenty of games that demonstrate complex emotions.
Some better examples would've been the entire Quake series, the entire Unreal and Unreal Tournament series, and Hidden and Dangerous. If you ask me, its more recent games that are moving away from Earth as a setting. I think Halo 2 is gonna serve as inspiration to developers for years since they're doing so much work on designing massive maps of a futuristic Earth.
As for fighting a nebula so you can see anything, don't forget the LAST mission where you have to run from (MAJOR SPOILER).
2. 'Well composed' pictures are always used for media purposely. When you publicise a game, do you show the screenshot of the player crawling through a vent slowly, or do you show the screenshot of the player running away from a horde of hideous looking monsters while they tear the walls down?
3. I don't know how or why you managed to come to that conclusion. Its fairly clear that the red player on the right is shooting the blue player (with the shield effect) since there is no blur of yellow on his back (which in Halo 1 indicated a hit on a shield).
4. Um, thats not a motion blur. If it was then the machinegun shell would have had to rotate in midair because blur is facing from upper right to lower left, while the shell itself is facing upper left to lower right.
5. The antenna is wobbling back and forth. Go play Halo 1 and drive the Scorpion tank around, its antenna wobbles as well. If the image was resampled, why the hell would they make a mistake like that?
Everything you pointed is something that a quick, careless look would pick up. Not a 1st person perspective? Almost like they paused the game and the moved the camera? It was taken by the developing team, they could've added a "Midget" character in the game to obtain a very very low perspective point and we wouldn't know it. These points are really unfounded and unsupportable.
No, thats called 'shovelware' and no one would buy it because the console version would run better than a computer, would be filled with bugs, and lack cool features like the ability to crank up the resolution up to 1600*1200 with a bunch of fancy graphic effects. As well as have crappy net code because the Xbox version would be made for broadband players only, would have to resort to third-party anti-cheating software because the Xbox has no cheaters, and would piss off millions of Xbox owners for not having the sequel to their greatest game being non-exclusive.
Just buy a Xbox and quit shunning it just because the Xbox is owned by Microsoft.
Unless you take the personal time to read through the chapters that aren't covered yourself, no book of any size (except for maybe a dictionary) is worth the extra cost. On average, about what percentage of chapters do you actually use in a textbook? My average is roughly 7 chapters, yet some of the books I use go up to 12 (I have a friend who has a book that goes up to 18).
Who knows? Maybe games like The Sims 2 will feature a similar messages or MMORPGs for players who remain active for long periods of time without being passive for X amount of time, presumably to eat and use the bathroom. (Loading times don't count)
I don't think superstition is really the root of the problem here. I think its an issue of trust and communications between the developers and their marketing department. Old traditional marketing research dictates that "Christmas Release = More Sales" no matter what market (unless you work in something like the swimsuit industry). However, this is not true in the case of video games. With successful marketing a game like Neverwinter Nights, Starcraft, or Half-Life could all sell well even if they weren't release near Christmas season.
I chose these three games as examples because : Neverwinter Nights was released in June, pretty much as far away as Christmas as you can get but was insanely marketed for its modding systems. Starcraft was not an existing franchise and was a deviation from Warcraft 2's, two side system as well as a change in "universes" and was pushed by Blizzard. And Half-Life was developed by a company (Valve) no one had ever heard of prior to its release but was pumped with talk (relatively) smart AI and implementation of a strong storyline.
I don't know about Onimusha and Resident Evil, but I don't think the Megaman sequels are lacking in creativity. Rather, I think they Capcom is doing a good job at using the well established Megaman series to experiment with new gameplay. The Megaman Zero series on the GBA experimented with the use of Cyber Elves and leveling up your weapons through use but kept the traditional insane difficulty of the old school games. They took the Megaman series to the N64 with Megaman Legends, but that wasn't a very good experiment. They're also trying Megaman Battle Network on the GBA, Megaman Network Transmission on the GC, and now they're redoing the old ones on the GC and the PS2. Capcom may not be managing their other serieses too well, but I think the Megaman series is being handled quite well.
Companies such as MS don't really make money off of their software thanks to individuals like me and Joe Average. Companies make money off of huge distributers like Dell or Gateway who have to pay MS for every computer they build and send off with Windows installed on it.
Its simple economics. Whats going to be a better deal? The 5000 individual consumers who buy your software for $500 each? Or the one big company who buys 50000 copies of your software for $300 and signs a contract stating that they'll use only your OS for the next 5 years?
Wasn't Starcraft based off the Warhammer 40,000 universe? Eschaton is basicly doing the same thing as Savage already did (and Natural Selection but I haven't played it so no comment). The game play information page even makes reference to those two games.
Eschaton: Chain of Command joins the growing number of multiplayer games such as Natural Selection and Savage that combine RTS commanders with FPS action players.
You mean like Diablo 2's Open Battle.net which is run largely by hacked characters? Yeah, I tried it before. It sucks. People either cheat or hack... and then they kill you... repeatedly.
I can understand not wanting people to mess up the ladders. So why not have ladder bans? There are systems for this that can work without keeping people off B.net as a whole.
Because its not just the ladders. Have you even played Warcraft III online? All regular melee games are setup so that you're randomly assigned teammates and opponents. YOU DON'T GET TO PICK YOUR TEAMMATES. If you're playing a 4v4 and your teammates decide to be assholes and force attack your base, tough luck you just wasted about 20 minutes of time and lost the game. Its not like Starcraft where everyone gets dropped into a room beforehand and can chat it out before starting.
Banning a huge sum of players on the off chance that other players will have a better time is a flawed business model, and no competent business would ever do it.
It WOULD be a flawed business model if you weren't ignorant. In this case; Step one, YOU buy the game. Step two, YOU go on Battle.net and get yourself banned. Step three, YOU are now screwed. Now where does Blizzard get YOUR money? The answer: Step one.
Battle.net is NOT a pay-to-play model. Once you get past Step one, Blizzard doesn't care if you decide to destroy the CD in a microwave, they already have YOUR money. If it wasn't for the advertisement banners and the low bandwidth necessary to run the servers, Blizzard would be in deep financial trouble considing the fact that people are STILL playing Diablo 1 on Battle.net for FREE.
Its the same with other maps. Rail Gun? 2 soldiers can completely stop the tug with a panzerfaust into the tug driving controls. Oasis? Airstrike the old city wall and set up MGs in the water tunnels. Seawall Fortress? I call it the Omaha Beach map :P. The last two can bottleneck the Allies with a few MG positions, none of which can be targetted easily from the outside.