Wait, what? Doom's story is exactly this: "A gate to hell opens on Mars and demons appear. Kill them". And Halo's story: "Humans are at war against the Covenant, a conglomeration of several alien races following a religious prophecy that requires them to activate and fire the different halos spread around the galaxy/universe. Firing those halos will kill all sentient life in the galaxy, but they don't know it. The installations were setup by the Forerunners to destroy the Flood, a parasitic alien race that consumes all life forms. You are Master Chief Petty Officer Spartan 117, and you're thrown into the mix."
Doom: Demons are coming, kill them before they fuck up the world
Halo: Aliens are inadvertantly going to fuck up the world, kill them.
Sure, the writers at bungie might have made the story more involved and interesting, but there is no denying that the base plot is still about killing aliens before they can fuck your shit up, which is exactly the same as Doom. iD just had a developer write their story, rather than a team of writers.
As much as I'm for tinkering, it's not like Nintendo's really promoting openess on their systems. Why should the modding community expect it? I feel the same way about the XBox and PS3 (although the PS3 not as much; Sony promoted the Linux part quite a bit).
The P
The modding community "expects it" because you own the goddamned hardware, it should be yours to tinker in whichever way you like.
You expect Nintendo so support and promote homebrew tinkering to the Wii just because you own the hardware? What sort of mind bending justification is that? They are under no obligation to support any changes to their hardware. You tinker, you void your warrenty and therefore any and all support from Nintendo.
Go ahead and have a blast tinkering, but expecting Nintendo to give you the thumbs up and still support you is idiotic.
I'm not interested in shelling out my cash for a game that could well turn into a paperweight (and a poor one at that) somewhere down the line when the activation server goes away. Or when I've installed for the Nth + 1 time, or whatever. When I buy a game, I want to know that that game will continue to work.
From one of the linked interviews:
Now putting this PC issue to rest. Is there anything you'd like to add that we wouldn't know to ask you or you'd like to add?
There have been some concerns that the copy protection was something nobody had ever seen before, except for the online procedure, there's nothing different. There's nothing wacky going on there, at some point we'll move back from online activation. If people want to play BioShock ten years from now, they'll be able to play it. We have a commitment from 2K that that is going to happen and we'll hold them to that commitment and they're serious about it, we'll make that happen.
Another irrational fear. While the rest of your points may hold some weight, the fear that it will become a paper weight just because it has online activation is laughable.
If Comcast sets a public limit, most users will try to get to that limit just to get the money's worth, and this tends to increase overall usage.
No they won't. The only customers that will try and reach a publicly stated limit are those that already reach or go past the limit. Joe Average that does 15 gig a month browsing, some youtube and maybe some online games for the kids isn't suddenly going to lose his head and try and download 100 gig a month, every month, just because that is the limit. Yours is a very irrational fear.
Here in Australia, it is virtually impossible to find a DSL/Cable provider that does not have a cap. Those that do offer true unlimited either fold quickly, raise the price to a level most people will not pay, or introduce caps, as it is not sustainable. Despite this, you can talk to any provider and you will find the amount of people that regularly hit their highest caps (100-150gig depending where you go) is a very small minority. This is somewhat offset by most ISPs hosting local mirrors and gaming servers which are not counted towards your cap, making it easier to get popular content without blowing your cap.
Most people will never hit the highest caps any ISP offer, stated or unstated, because most people are not high data users. Its just that simple.
I don't like this development. Soon we'll just have games developed and published by EA, 2K, Sony or Ubisoft. Kind of like if movies were primarily identified with the studio that released them, as opposed to the director, writer, producers and actors.
When the starting credits sequence rolls on movies, it is almost universal that the movie and production studios that were involved in the title have their logos appear on screen first, before even the actors names. I dare say what you suggest is exactly what the movie studios would want.
Apparently this is what really makes the number jump, counting those in Asian countries that haven't really "bought" the game.
It matters not one bit if you have actually purchased a copy of the game. In much of Asia, buying a copy of an MMO like we do here in the western world (Buy your boxed copy, create your account and start playing) is apparently quite a foreign concept to them, which is why the game is run on a different model. They basically pay very little for a cd-key, get the game for nothing, and pay by the minute, rather than a standard flat fee per month.
100,000 people playing from game houses still equates to 100,000 subscriptions, as they all need their own account to access the game, and it is the accounts themselves that generate the continuing money, not selling cd-keys or boxed copies.
Blizzard itself now has a WoW Database online. It has a lot of functionality and unique aspects.. the only thing it's missing is exact percentage of drop rates. I wonder if a third-party database is worth anything outside of advertising for gold sellers. I'm guessing Wowhead owners saw this as their chance to get while the gettings good.
Wowhead currently has 3 things that trump the Blizzard Armory:
1) It is a hell of alot faster
2) It has all the quests, which is one of the most important things for many people. If you get stuck on a quest, they have it all there, with user comments usually directing you to exactly where you need to go.
3) Everything you could want to know about all the professions. What skill level you need for what recipes, where they drop, roughly how rare the drop is etc
I fully expect Blizzard will eventually integrate quests into the Armory, along with more profession information, though i doubt you will ever see user comments on it. Also while the frontend remains horribly slow, people will still flock to Wowhead, no matter what bells and whistles it includes. I must say though, the 'find an upgrade' feature is well worth a look.
Except that this game is a direct RTS sequal to one of the most respected RTS of all time. Few games of any genre have the longevity and active player base that Starcraft has managed.
It is certainly not a given, but considering people wouldn't still be playing starcraft if Blizzard didn't get it dead right, i am still confident that Blizzard will nail this one as well.
In fact, the opposite is true- Blizzard wants to make it harder to get to level 70.
Either you don't play the game or you don't own the expansion. Level 60-70 is an absolute breeze, without any of the tough spots people would run into in 1-60 if they quested the majority of the time. No, Blizzard want you at the cap so that they can focus their efforts on the end game raids.
But updates? I'm sorry, but game updates are Blizzard's weakest point on WoW. And the primary reason is their horrible patching method. If someone created another game just like WoW, and had a better patcher and no login queues, Blizzard could have problems.
How would you suggest they do it then? Sure, their patching method may not be great, but it avoids the "Oh great, another patch" feeling you get when a company patches every single day of the week in response to bugs. Logging on every day to 1 meg patches quickly gets more annoying than living with the bugs and patching once a month or even once a week.
Ontop of that, how would you suggest they distribute patches (sometimes over 60-70 megs when its a major content patch) to 8 million people better than P2P?
Unlike EU players who make their own willing decision to use US servers - we are REQUIRED to use these servers. We simply have no other choice.
To be fair, back before WoW was released, Oceania players were basically asked which option they wanted: Play on US based servers and have the game virtually from the day it went live, or wait for Oceania based servers which would mean (as said at the time) up to a year or longer delay before we could play.
Have a guess which option most people chose?
Whilst the player base of Oceanic isn't quite as large as the US, it's still significant. I think we have what, 5 servers dedicated to us at the moment? And they are all full to the brim, every time Blizzard puts in a new one, it's full within days.
To assume everyone on the oceania servers are from the oceania region would be naive though. I can imagine many US shift workers that get to play during US Offpeak would also be on them. Also, alot of people just wanting a fresh start will jump onto them instead of waiting for new US timed servers.
I honestly don't mind the downtime. I tune into WoWRadio, chat with some people, or just play something else for awhile. Seeing as it ends after i have usually gone to bed, it has little effect on me.
Nintendo might of course still provide some deep and interesting games on the Wii and the new controller definitvly has a lot of potential, but to using that potential it takes third-parties, many of them, so far I however see none that are trying to push a big game onto the Wii, instead its all mini- and party-game kind of stuff, which is of course all good and fine, but not when you look for a deep, intensive gaming experience.
That might have something to do with the fact the Wii gives developers the chance to innovate and explore other ideas instead of creating another FPS iteration.
You are still missing the point. The reason the toolset and DM client of NWN is put on a pedestal compared to other games is that they were the big focus. The single player campaign was very much tacked on as almost a tech demo of what you could make in the toolset. Bioware set out to make tools that would give the community as close to the tabletop feel as they could. Heck, they even had a beta preview of the toolset that they made avaliable to everyone.
Most other games, the main focus is on the game itself, not the tools that made the game. NWN (the original at least) put the main focus on the tools, not the game.
Maybe they can get an MMORPG right since there's no ending to screw up (like they did with NWN2 and KOTOR2).
Both endings were not up to what they should have been thanks to publisher constraints placed on Obsidian Entertainment. The first was Lucasarts (surprise surprise) wanting it out the door on Xbox to catch the Christmas '04 period in the US. In the case of NWN2, it was purely due to the fact Atari was in a very precarious financial position and needed the injection of cash they knew NWN2 was going to give them.
Obsidian make great games (apart from its ending, KoToR2 topped the original in every way), they are just unlucky enough to get stuck with some careless publishers who care more about dollar signs than quality.
Considering the major reason the PS3 is so expensive is so that Sony could use it as its main driver for Blu-Ray, you cannot really say that it does well what it was intended to do. We wont know that for some months and/or years.
Re:Article autor has it very wrong. Explanation:
on
The Lameness of Warcraft
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
While it could be considered a world event, the term "event" Is the wrong term to use for what was little more than massive grinding and farming by the more hardcore players.
That you failed to take advantage of the situation doesn't lessen that it did involve much of the community to achieve. Sure, it could have been better, but like everything thats happened in WoW since it began, Blizzard are new to it. Molten Core is so pathetically boring mainly due to the fact that its the first raid they ever designed. BWL is better, as is AQ and Naxx (even if many wont get that far). The world even for the opening of Naxx was an improvement, though still needed work. I am personally very interested in seeing how they do the event that will open the Dark Portal just before BC is released.
Back when my server had this event (Proudmoore US, 10th to open the gates) i was not in a raiding guild, but i quickly realised that the people that desperately wanted these 2 instances opened were the raiders, and they would pay to do it. I spent alot of time grinding for cloth and leather and selling it for the inflated prices all the required commodities jumped up to. Also considering i was on alliance, even a level 20 could capitalise since Alliance had Copper Bars (lowest kind) Light Leather (Lowest kind) and linen bandages (lowest kind). I basically paid for my characters epic mount by level 40 due to how i chose to get involved with the event.
Also, had your server community wanted to do it, it could have become quite a large social event. Medivh US, the first server to complete the event, went about it as a coordinated server wide community event. While some of their methods may have gone against the whole "War" part of the game (ie the large alliance population funnelling what the horde required through the neutral AH for cheap) it brought their entire community together,and most were damn proud when they came out on top.
Yes, it could have been better, much much better really, but i wouldn't call it pointless simply because you or your server chose not to participate in the ways that were open to you.
Interesting poll from the bioware boards of NWN players - 54% of NWN1 players ran Linux compared to 44% Windows and 16% on OS X (multiple select was allowed).
Wow, you should be in PR with skewing like that. The poll was open to the entire bioware community, not strictly to neverwinter nights players. Ontop of that, NWN sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and that poll had 13,000 responses. While its a good size sample, how many little jimmys who got NWN for windows from their mom that never visited the bioware site do you think exist?
Atari/Obsidian dropped plans for Linux and Mac support for purely financial reasons. Atari don't see enough profit in it, and for a company thats been teetering on the edge, its not really surprising.
Depending on when this poll was taken it's fairly believable. Later on in the lifecycle NWN was far more heavilly played by Linux users (well, it was newer for them by a year:P) and I suspect it was mostly Linux users who brought the expansion modules (competition? what competition?).
Is there anything to back this up, or is this just wild speculation based on the people you personally know? I know many slashdotters are very pro linux, but claims like this are a bit over the top without some provable basis.
MMOs all follow the same pattern - grind, grind, grind.
FPS' all follow the same pattern - shoot, upgrade, shoot.
Uhh, honestly, what do you expect? It might be a bit anal here, but:
1) For MMOs, when it comes down to it, subscribers will consume content far far far quicker than you can make, test and deploy it, so MMOs need something repeatable that offers rewards after x repeats to keep people playing. No matter how much innovation you do, youll eventually hit this wall. If you cant keep your players playing, it doesnt matter how many awesome advancements you have made, your players will leave. The real trick is making the grind enjoyable. WoW has dismally failed in some cases (Cenarion Circle) and succeeded in others (IMO Argent Dawn rep succeeds, since there are 2 zones to earn it off normal mobs while levelling, 2 5 mans and a 40 man instance that gives rep)
2) Well...duh. Pure FPS games have always been shoot shoot shoot upgrade and shoot some more. Its what a pure FPS is. Its when you start mixing genres that the formula changes, but then, your not talking straight FPS games anymore.
How is this GWB's fault? I'm all for criticizing when appropriate (see laundry list of details from Gitmo to secret prisons), but the little parting shot at the end just seems inflammatory.
FYI - Signed in 1994
Uhhh...yeah, so that link has absolutely nothing to do with the Australia United States Free Trade Agreement that was signed in May 2004 and came into force in January 2005 that this article actually talks about.
Not with EA in control of the pursestrings it wont. Regardless of what anyone from Mythic or EA say, you know the big boys in EA will be looking between WoW and Warhammer and going "Why dont you have this? WoW has it, and look where WoW is!"
As Gabe said, looks like world of warhammer...online...craft;)
only a 3 year development cycle?
you sure you're not being over generous with that estemate?
It has been well known for almost a year that Blizzard have 2 or 3 other titles they are working on that have yet to be announced. So thats a 4 year cycle. How long were the titles in development before even that tidbit came out? Add on some more time.
Aside from that, 2010 seems a bit far down the line. I get the feeling that WoW has certainly taught Blizzard not to make any big announcements until what they want to annouce is fairly close to completion. I would not be surprised if whatever they announced next year made it for a 2008 release, if not Christmas 2007 (depending on when the announcement comes).
Slashdot Mirror
Halo: Aliens are inadvertantly going to fuck up the world, kill them.
Sure, the writers at bungie might have made the story more involved and interesting, but there is no denying that the base plot is still about killing aliens before they can fuck your shit up, which is exactly the same as Doom. iD just had a developer write their story, rather than a team of writers.
Go ahead and have a blast tinkering, but expecting Nintendo to give you the thumbs up and still support you is idiotic.
No they won't. The only customers that will try and reach a publicly stated limit are those that already reach or go past the limit. Joe Average that does 15 gig a month browsing, some youtube and maybe some online games for the kids isn't suddenly going to lose his head and try and download 100 gig a month, every month, just because that is the limit. Yours is a very irrational fear.
Here in Australia, it is virtually impossible to find a DSL/Cable provider that does not have a cap. Those that do offer true unlimited either fold quickly, raise the price to a level most people will not pay, or introduce caps, as it is not sustainable. Despite this, you can talk to any provider and you will find the amount of people that regularly hit their highest caps (100-150gig depending where you go) is a very small minority. This is somewhat offset by most ISPs hosting local mirrors and gaming servers which are not counted towards your cap, making it easier to get popular content without blowing your cap.
Most people will never hit the highest caps any ISP offer, stated or unstated, because most people are not high data users. Its just that simple.
100,000 people playing from game houses still equates to 100,000 subscriptions, as they all need their own account to access the game, and it is the accounts themselves that generate the continuing money, not selling cd-keys or boxed copies.
1) It is a hell of alot faster
2) It has all the quests, which is one of the most important things for many people. If you get stuck on a quest, they have it all there, with user comments usually directing you to exactly where you need to go.
3) Everything you could want to know about all the professions. What skill level you need for what recipes, where they drop, roughly how rare the drop is etc
I fully expect Blizzard will eventually integrate quests into the Armory, along with more profession information, though i doubt you will ever see user comments on it. Also while the frontend remains horribly slow, people will still flock to Wowhead, no matter what bells and whistles it includes. I must say though, the 'find an upgrade' feature is well worth a look.
Except that this game is a direct RTS sequal to one of the most respected RTS of all time. Few games of any genre have the longevity and active player base that Starcraft has managed.
It is certainly not a given, but considering people wouldn't still be playing starcraft if Blizzard didn't get it dead right, i am still confident that Blizzard will nail this one as well.
Is that because the gameplay does not appeal to you, or because you simply have an aversion to having to pay monthly to play?
For just over the cost of a single movie ticket, you get as much game play every single month. I would call that value for money
How would you suggest they do it then? Sure, their patching method may not be great, but it avoids the "Oh great, another patch" feeling you get when a company patches every single day of the week in response to bugs. Logging on every day to 1 meg patches quickly gets more annoying than living with the bugs and patching once a month or even once a week.
Ontop of that, how would you suggest they distribute patches (sometimes over 60-70 megs when its a major content patch) to 8 million people better than P2P?
To be fair, back before WoW was released, Oceania players were basically asked which option they wanted: Play on US based servers and have the game virtually from the day it went live, or wait for Oceania based servers which would mean (as said at the time) up to a year or longer delay before we could play.
Have a guess which option most people chose?
To assume everyone on the oceania servers are from the oceania region would be naive though. I can imagine many US shift workers that get to play during US Offpeak would also be on them. Also, alot of people just wanting a fresh start will jump onto them instead of waiting for new US timed servers.
I honestly don't mind the downtime. I tune into WoWRadio, chat with some people, or just play something else for awhile. Seeing as it ends after i have usually gone to bed, it has little effect on me.
You are still missing the point. The reason the toolset and DM client of NWN is put on a pedestal compared to other games is that they were the big focus. The single player campaign was very much tacked on as almost a tech demo of what you could make in the toolset. Bioware set out to make tools that would give the community as close to the tabletop feel as they could. Heck, they even had a beta preview of the toolset that they made avaliable to everyone.
Most other games, the main focus is on the game itself, not the tools that made the game. NWN (the original at least) put the main focus on the tools, not the game.
Yet another reason to praise and remember the Anzacs!
Obsidian make great games (apart from its ending, KoToR2 topped the original in every way), they are just unlucky enough to get stuck with some careless publishers who care more about dollar signs than quality.
Considering the major reason the PS3 is so expensive is so that Sony could use it as its main driver for Blu-Ray, you cannot really say that it does well what it was intended to do. We wont know that for some months and/or years.
Oh, and just for you, since you seem to be ontop of the whole Supply and Demand thing: http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=212
Back when my server had this event (Proudmoore US, 10th to open the gates) i was not in a raiding guild, but i quickly realised that the people that desperately wanted these 2 instances opened were the raiders, and they would pay to do it. I spent alot of time grinding for cloth and leather and selling it for the inflated prices all the required commodities jumped up to. Also considering i was on alliance, even a level 20 could capitalise since Alliance had Copper Bars (lowest kind) Light Leather (Lowest kind) and linen bandages (lowest kind). I basically paid for my characters epic mount by level 40 due to how i chose to get involved with the event.
Also, had your server community wanted to do it, it could have become quite a large social event. Medivh US, the first server to complete the event, went about it as a coordinated server wide community event. While some of their methods may have gone against the whole "War" part of the game (ie the large alliance population funnelling what the horde required through the neutral AH for cheap) it brought their entire community together,and most were damn proud when they came out on top.
Yes, it could have been better, much much better really, but i wouldn't call it pointless simply because you or your server chose not to participate in the ways that were open to you.
Atari/Obsidian dropped plans for Linux and Mac support for purely financial reasons. Atari don't see enough profit in it, and for a company thats been teetering on the edge, its not really surprising.
Is there anything to back this up, or is this just wild speculation based on the people you personally know? I know many slashdotters are very pro linux, but claims like this are a bit over the top without some provable basis.
Anyone renting it for the actual movie is out of their mind, you rent it to watch Kate Beckinsale jumping around in skin tight leather.
1) For MMOs, when it comes down to it, subscribers will consume content far far far quicker than you can make, test and deploy it, so MMOs need something repeatable that offers rewards after x repeats to keep people playing. No matter how much innovation you do, youll eventually hit this wall. If you cant keep your players playing, it doesnt matter how many awesome advancements you have made, your players will leave. The real trick is making the grind enjoyable. WoW has dismally failed in some cases (Cenarion Circle) and succeeded in others (IMO Argent Dawn rep succeeds, since there are 2 zones to earn it off normal mobs while levelling, 2 5 mans and a 40 man instance that gives rep)
2) Well...duh. Pure FPS games have always been shoot shoot shoot upgrade and shoot some more. Its what a pure FPS is. Its when you start mixing genres that the formula changes, but then, your not talking straight FPS games anymore.
Not with EA in control of the pursestrings it wont. Regardless of what anyone from Mythic or EA say, you know the big boys in EA will be looking between WoW and Warhammer and going "Why dont you have this? WoW has it, and look where WoW is!"
;)
As Gabe said, looks like world of warhammer...online...craft
Aside from that, 2010 seems a bit far down the line. I get the feeling that WoW has certainly taught Blizzard not to make any big announcements until what they want to annouce is fairly close to completion. I would not be surprised if whatever they announced next year made it for a 2008 release, if not Christmas 2007 (depending on when the announcement comes).