You must be stupid or just enjoy posting false information...
A TRIAL account cannot trade, send mail or use the auction house. All the gold or items that a TRIAL bot might gather are confined to that character, there's no way to transfer gold or items to others. That makes using them for botting totally pointless.
And that "reason to do an instance again" is exactly the problem. Why do you want people to do the same thing over and over again, no matter how much they hate it?
If you hate it, then don't do it. Then also live with the fact that you decided not to have the items that drop there.
Instances are fun, and are an experience and accomplishment every time you do it. From the low level ones like SM to the endgame ones, it's always fun even if you have done it several times before. It's like watching a movie several times. Some people watch movies many times because they like them every time, others see them once and feel they are done with them. You are another category, the one that has to sit through a boring one on the couch with his girlfriend in order to have sex with her afterwards. You don't enjoy the movie at all, but only want the reward for suffering through it for a few hours.
The Economy in WoW does have a problem.. but it's the same problem every MMORPG has eventually.. too many capped out players running around in instances grinding for top-loot incedentally picking up HUGE volumes of gold for which they have no purpose but to sell it, or hand it down to lower level alts. This is why the economy will inflate, with, or without bots and gold famers.
That's strange, everywhere you go and everyone you ask seems to say that raiding is a moneysink for repaircost and potions/consumables. You must be about the only person existing that claims that the top level players raiding or doing instances are gathering massive amounts of gold.
I disagree. You only have to look at some of the above comments to see that bots annoy thier customers, and thus might hurt thier profits due to cancellations. They could sue for damages from lost revenue.
First of all, annoying others doesn't seem to be an offense. If it was then PVP servers (where the sole purpose is to try to ruin the game for others) wouldn't exist. It would also mean they would have to ban all the LFG spammers and the 'lol ure gay' kids.
Second, any sane lawyer would just point out that Blizzard themselves chose not to do business with a customer when they cancel their account for cheating, so the loss of revenue is voluntarily and cannot be blamed on a third party.
You're about the 10th person who says this. But never mind, don't forget that women will go on a date, get appalled with the geek on the other side and say "that was fun, we should do it again sometime". Which means in womanese "this wasn't fun, I'd rather not see you again". If a woman wants a second date she'll ask about dates and when you have time, she won't say "soon" or "maybe". She will probably go on a next date, and a next date with different people, while the emo guy sits home alone playing, crying, posting bitter long stories on forums only geeks read and complain on IRC and will probably have his next date after 12 months or so.
This is obviously the fault of the developer, who should have simply maintained, "It will take 24 months."
Sure, but this developer might soon be unemployed. Of course, within a company you should be firm towards managers. But in the game industry there are two parties involved. The publisher wants a game, say a first-person shooter. They contact a developer, who says he can make that game in 18 months. The publisher says 'OK, here's 20 million dollar, go make that game'.
The opposite happens too, that a game studio has a good idea and needs a publisher to fund 18 months of employing 50 people to make the game. If the publisher says "we want these features and we want it in 18 months", you can't really remain strict and insist that you will need 24 months. Just cut some features and levels. This might not fit the idea that's inside your head, but life's full of compromises anyway.
People will always play creatively, finding ways to gain an advantage.
The leveling system isn't like many people describe. AFAIK you have level 1, 6, 11, 16, 21 etc. monsters, goblins, animals, daedra, etc. If you're level 8 you'll mainly be fighting (level 6) scamps instead of level 1 stunted scamps or level 11 flaming atronachs. The only bad thing is that the game is easy at say level 13,14,15 and pretty hard at level 16,17 because you meet a new class of monsters that will dominate you.
But it's not like the enemy is always equally strong. A rat is a rat and that's nowadays a one-hit kill. What you notice is that once you can easily kill those black bears you will run into brown bears more often who will kick your ass.
I'm level 16 now, and I noticed that humans don't really level, they just get better armor and weapons. But it becomes easier all the time to kill them with bow&arrow, and the loot is amazing, elven/glass/orc weapons and armor to sell for 300-800 each. I'm forever in the mines like echo mine where you have bandits and can make 5000 gold if you clear it out. Mines with goblins are a waste of time, they have nothing but lockpicks on them and maybe 50 gold in the end chest.
But not leveling means that you'll forever be clearing caves and mines with weak bandits and hauling their iron and steel weapons off to the shop for 10-30 gold each. You'll never be able to loot anything decent like glass stuff, and the shops will keep on offering only leather and iron gear. That's not something I would like.
No, western RPG's are about adult looking fighter/mage/rogue characters, and lots of trolls/goblins/ogres etc. Eastern RPG's are about cartoony looking kids with spiky hair wielding absurdly large swords, and lots of dragons.
Use some better filesystem then. ReiserFS can group small files so they won't take that much space.
And if you read a tail end of a file, or a very small file, it still has to read the block, mask out the other data and shift it to the beginning of a block in memory and then return it.
Worse, a normal block write is just a write, but a small block write needs a read, an update in memory and a write.
With 300 GB disks the space saved is probably $0.0001 cent worth, the slow speed remains. If you keep 100 Gb free space anyway, wouldn't you want to turn off this 'useful' feature ?
This is nonsense. All OS'es allocate space by the cluster, typically 4K up to 32K for fat32. The driver talks to the drive in 512-byte sectors, something which is never visible to the end user.
If the sector size changes from 512 bytes to 4K it would have no effect on any Windows version, wastage would remain the same. Only harddisks and drivers would become more efficient and maybe a little faster.
The only users affected would be people using fdisk-like tools that allow you to work in head/track/sector notation.
I've been playing it in the weekend, and left the beginner island at level 21.
The problem I have is that there seems to be absolutely nothing outside of the new town (aeldreth). I've walked outside it for an hour, and it's just empty. There's nothing to fight there.
The beginner island looks small on the map, but it's big, it also takes ages to run from A to B there. As an amateur game programmer I know that heightmaps are cheap and easy to program, but just terrain with no content is just boring. And even though there are now many new players because it's totally free, it could be a problem for a PvP game if 80% of the users are on the newbie island and the others are scattered in an empty but huge world where you never really meet anyone else.
When he said 'like Elite' I think he meant a space trading/fighting game, where you fly around in spaceships.
Planeshift is a joke, it's been around for years and years and is nothing more than a tech demo. There is no game in it. The designers only care that it works like it was specified in technical terms. The complaint that it's no fun to play is usually greeted with comments like 'stfu loser' and 'it's free so you have no right to complain'. Every detail of the game just feels wrong, starting with the controls and the slow turning speed.
To make a game is more than being able to program one. Factors like gameplay, whether the user enjoys playing it, balance, etc. are not a concern to the programmers. Another thing they forget is that once you allow outsiders to play your game, you cannot claim anymore that it will become a game when it is finally finished, and that before that date you cannot expect anything. When others can play it, it IS the game. What use is it to work on a game for 10 years and then finally finish it and have it look like 2002's Morrowind ? That game is for sale in the shops here in Holland for 1 euro now ! And it shares many of PlaneShift's features, promising but eventually shallow visuals, a boring barren depressing looking terrain, the slow walking speed, boring fights, a feeling that you're just wandering alone in a world where nothing happens.
Some things are not planeshift's fault. Diablo I/II show for RPG's like WoW did for MMORPG's that they can be fun action-packed games that are fun right from the start. At the same time they strengthened the belief of hard-core rpg nuts that they were not 'real games'. The true hardcore player still believes that RPG's should be slow and boring, and that there can be games that are no fun in the beginning because they promise the player that they will be fun later on and that before that moment you will just have to work to get there.
Maybe the problem is that you have expectations about the comments on slashdot. Don't expect an army of experts to give many useful tips and comments after every article. In reality it's full of chumps here who jump to the chance to flame, bring up their own favorite unrelated soapbox item, try to score points with cheap and obvious comments, and to shamelessly start talking about themselves. The latter is especially annoying here, everyone starts talking about themselves, what they want and dislike and what they have just bought. The words "who cares" come to mind.
What's Team Fortress 2 about anyway ? I guess a soldier-based shooter, where you fight each other in squads lead by a squad leader, while the whole team is commander by the commander. Oh wait, Battlefield 2 has totally armageddoned the need for this game. It has deleted the reason for this game to even exist. Maybe if they improve TF2 by allowing you to ride various vehicles, or fly planes ? No sorry, BF2 has that as well.
It's a trend I see in every aspect of computer hardware. For example, in 1995 I had a computer with an 80 meg HDD. The driver for the ethernet device in the latest motherboard I purchased was 35 megs. I highly, highly doubt that the network capabilities of my new computer really requires a jump from a few K to drive the device up to 35 megabytes; I simply think that the party that designed the driver produced a bloated driver because it was. . . well, easier.
Drivers nowadays are usually unified packages, composed of utilities and dozens of drivers for the hundreds of possible cards using the components. Nowadays if you have a VIA chipset or nVidia 3D card you just download one big driver and install, the installer will decide whether you need the TNT2, Geforce 2 GTS or Ti4200 files.
That's a lot better than the old daysm when you took out your network card, saw that it was a 1234 chipset, booted, downloaded a driver, noticed it doesn't work, then found out that you had a 1234-B revision 3. Then you downloaded that one and then noticed that it was for the coax version and that you needed the combo drivers because you had both coax and UTP.
All of those variations and revisions had their own drivers, sure they might be small but it was just a pain.
They key word you are missing (or maybe you're deliberately acting ignorant here to score karma points) is conspiracy. Even conspiracy to do nothing can get you years in jail. It's not unusual to see that X has for example a 1 year maximum while conspiracy to commit X carries a 3 year maximum.
Can someone post a link or two that might help explain who John is and what he has done?
That's simple. 10 years ago John Romero and John Carmack made games for ID software. Romero did the gameplay and design, Carmack did the graphics and coding. The combination resulted in great games, Return to castle Wolfenstein and Doom I/II. Then Romero left during or after Quake 1, and since then Carmack has been making games that are great in graphics but sorely lacking in gameplay. Romero has been thinking up games that have great design and gameplay, but have been plagued with technical difficulties actually writing the code and graphics code. They're both lacking what the other used to provide, and it shows.
Having such a hot and well known company pick up Linux is very good.
Years ago Novell picked up Linux. Companies like Redhat picked up Linux. A few years ago IBM picked up Linux bigtime. What good has come out of that ? It may be good for themselves, but it has gives almost nothing back to Linux.
Besides, Linux zealots shun capitalism anyway. When Redhat was free, people shouted rpm is a great system, then Redhat became big and people shouted rpm's are evil and switched to alternatives. Any company that gets too closely involved with Linux will get burned, and become massively impopular. People seem to shun solidly engineered products and years of experience, and switch to the newest and latest obscure fad distributions that are released by some drunken geeks in a dorm room, like Ubuntu.
Google has a great search engine, a decent advertisment business, and some sideprojects like gmain, google photo, google earth etc to burn some extra cash. Apart from that, the main asset that Google has is money, loads of money. And isn't the point of 99% of the people that are opposed to Microsoft that MS has too much money and a virtual monopoly ? If Google Linux becomes a standard, don't we then get what we least want, an OS controlled by a large company with billions of dollars that can muscle any opponent off the market ?
The last time 4-issue was used was in the AMD K5. It offered no significant performance benefit, and it had lots of problems. Design and production problems held it back, and AMD released the K5-133 a full year later than the Pentium 133, even though it ran at 100 MHz. The K5 tends to get very hot, also because it requires 3.52 V core voltage. It was designed for the 3.3 V Socket 5 pentium socket, but stability issues forced AMD to up the core voltage. If your motherboard didn't offer 3.5 V next to the standard 3.3 V, you were out of luck. The K5 was never popular due to stability issues and poor overclock potential. A 100 MHz K5 rarely runs reliably at 110 MHz, if it does it produces a massive amount of heat.
After this fiasco both Intel and AMD abandoned the idea of 4-issue and continued with 3-issue ever since.
Here's an idea - write new games that everyone can run, working to the lowest common denominator. No more competing to bring out the game with best-graphics-ever, and cheaper overall to bring out a game.
Did you see the article, especially the last pages ? Games do that, although it's probably not obvious. People blasted Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 before it was released, critisizing them for forcing people to buy $500 video cards. But talk is cheap and meaningless, especially on slashdot, and those people never revised their opinion, despite the fact that those games (and others released since) all have smart feature-detection systems that turn off features and use different shaders depending on the hardware. There's a tremendous difference between an 8500 and x850, or a GF3 and 6800GT, yet you can play on all of those cards with acceptable framerates. It just looks a little bit different, shadows and reflections might be missing on older/cheaper cards. But you have to draw the line somewhere, you cannot support ancient stuff like the TNT1.
The time you describe has already happened. The Quake 3 engine ruled between 1999 and 2003, with dozens of games released which were based on that engine. They just treated all cards as really fast TNT cards, with just 2-texture rendering (a texture and a lightmap), not using lighting features of the card. DirectX 8 cards like the Radeon 8500 were introduced in 2001, with vertex and pixel shaders, yet nobody actually used those features, thanks to the 'Hey I can get 250 FPS in Q3 with this card!' junkies.
Luckily the game industry finally dumped the ancient Q3 limitations and started releasing games like Far Cry that actually used shaders.
GTA does the same on the PC of course. And there are games that do streamload the environment, Dungeon Siege is a fine example. The world is made up of small patches which are streamed in if they are required and dropped by the LRU scheduler. You never see a 'loading' message, there are no pauses.
The original B&W was a great concept, but suffered from bugs, a lack of direction and some balance issues. Although the game promised you can play it as a good deity or a nasty tyrant, becoming evil wrecks the building process, drains your resources, forcing you into early retirement. It's something you do for fun, and then you don't save.
Games like civilization and age of empires provide more control, even though in those games you are supposed to be the king/leader/president. But in both games you watch your population from above, build structures and monitor the grain/wood supply. At least the strategy games don't have you waving your hands all over the place like a rapper, and luckily there's no tall fool walking on the map that shits all over the land.
Slashdot Mirror
A TRIAL account cannot trade, send mail or use the auction house. All the gold or items that a TRIAL bot might gather are confined to that character, there's no way to transfer gold or items to others. That makes using them for botting totally pointless.
If you hate it, then don't do it. Then also live with the fact that you decided not to have the items that drop there.
Instances are fun, and are an experience and accomplishment every time you do it. From the low level ones like SM to the endgame ones, it's always fun even if you have done it several times before. It's like watching a movie several times. Some people watch movies many times because they like them every time, others see them once and feel they are done with them. You are another category, the one that has to sit through a boring one on the couch with his girlfriend in order to have sex with her afterwards. You don't enjoy the movie at all, but only want the reward for suffering through it for a few hours.
That's strange, everywhere you go and everyone you ask seems to say that raiding is a moneysink for repaircost and potions/consumables. You must be about the only person existing that claims that the top level players raiding or doing instances are gathering massive amounts of gold.
First of all, annoying others doesn't seem to be an offense. If it was then PVP servers (where the sole purpose is to try to ruin the game for others) wouldn't exist. It would also mean they would have to ban all the LFG spammers and the 'lol ure gay' kids.
Second, any sane lawyer would just point out that Blizzard themselves chose not to do business with a customer when they cancel their account for cheating, so the loss of revenue is voluntarily and cannot be blamed on a third party.
You're about the 10th person who says this. But never mind, don't forget that women will go on a date, get appalled with the geek on the other side and say "that was fun, we should do it again sometime". Which means in womanese "this wasn't fun, I'd rather not see you again". If a woman wants a second date she'll ask about dates and when you have time, she won't say "soon" or "maybe". She will probably go on a next date, and a next date with different people, while the emo guy sits home alone playing, crying, posting bitter long stories on forums only geeks read and complain on IRC and will probably have his next date after 12 months or so.
Sure, but this developer might soon be unemployed. Of course, within a company you should be firm towards managers. But in the game industry there are two parties involved. The publisher wants a game, say a first-person shooter. They contact a developer, who says he can make that game in 18 months. The publisher says 'OK, here's 20 million dollar, go make that game'.
The opposite happens too, that a game studio has a good idea and needs a publisher to fund 18 months of employing 50 people to make the game. If the publisher says "we want these features and we want it in 18 months", you can't really remain strict and insist that you will need 24 months. Just cut some features and levels. This might not fit the idea that's inside your head, but life's full of compromises anyway.
The leveling system isn't like many people describe. AFAIK you have level 1, 6, 11, 16, 21 etc. monsters, goblins, animals, daedra, etc. If you're level 8 you'll mainly be fighting (level 6) scamps instead of level 1 stunted scamps or level 11 flaming atronachs. The only bad thing is that the game is easy at say level 13,14,15 and pretty hard at level 16,17 because you meet a new class of monsters that will dominate you. But it's not like the enemy is always equally strong. A rat is a rat and that's nowadays a one-hit kill. What you notice is that once you can easily kill those black bears you will run into brown bears more often who will kick your ass.
I'm level 16 now, and I noticed that humans don't really level, they just get better armor and weapons. But it becomes easier all the time to kill them with bow&arrow, and the loot is amazing, elven/glass/orc weapons and armor to sell for 300-800 each. I'm forever in the mines like echo mine where you have bandits and can make 5000 gold if you clear it out. Mines with goblins are a waste of time, they have nothing but lockpicks on them and maybe 50 gold in the end chest.
But not leveling means that you'll forever be clearing caves and mines with weak bandits and hauling their iron and steel weapons off to the shop for 10-30 gold each. You'll never be able to loot anything decent like glass stuff, and the shops will keep on offering only leather and iron gear. That's not something I would like.
No, western RPG's are about adult looking fighter/mage/rogue characters, and lots of trolls/goblins/ogres etc.
Eastern RPG's are about cartoony looking kids with spiky hair wielding absurdly large swords, and lots of dragons.
And if you read a tail end of a file, or a very small file, it still has to read the block, mask out the other data and shift it to the beginning of a block in memory and then return it.
Worse, a normal block write is just a write, but a small block write needs a read, an update in memory and a write.
With 300 GB disks the space saved is probably $0.0001 cent worth, the slow speed remains. If you keep 100 Gb free space anyway, wouldn't you want to turn off this 'useful' feature ?
This is nonsense. All OS'es allocate space by the cluster, typically 4K up to 32K for fat32. The driver talks to the drive in 512-byte sectors, something which is never visible to the end user. If the sector size changes from 512 bytes to 4K it would have no effect on any Windows version, wastage would remain the same. Only harddisks and drivers would become more efficient and maybe a little faster. The only users affected would be people using fdisk-like tools that allow you to work in head/track/sector notation.
I've been playing it in the weekend, and left the beginner island at level 21. The problem I have is that there seems to be absolutely nothing outside of the new town (aeldreth). I've walked outside it for an hour, and it's just empty. There's nothing to fight there. The beginner island looks small on the map, but it's big, it also takes ages to run from A to B there. As an amateur game programmer I know that heightmaps are cheap and easy to program, but just terrain with no content is just boring. And even though there are now many new players because it's totally free, it could be a problem for a PvP game if 80% of the users are on the newbie island and the others are scattered in an empty but huge world where you never really meet anyone else.
An lb is about 450 gram, 400 mg is 1/1000 of that.
Planeshift is a joke, it's been around for years and years and is nothing more than a tech demo. There is no game in it. The designers only care that it works like it was specified in technical terms. The complaint that it's no fun to play is usually greeted with comments like 'stfu loser' and 'it's free so you have no right to complain'. Every detail of the game just feels wrong, starting with the controls and the slow turning speed.
To make a game is more than being able to program one. Factors like gameplay, whether the user enjoys playing it, balance, etc. are not a concern to the programmers. Another thing they forget is that once you allow outsiders to play your game, you cannot claim anymore that it will become a game when it is finally finished, and that before that date you cannot expect anything. When others can play it, it IS the game. What use is it to work on a game for 10 years and then finally finish it and have it look like 2002's Morrowind ? That game is for sale in the shops here in Holland for 1 euro now ! And it shares many of PlaneShift's features, promising but eventually shallow visuals, a boring barren depressing looking terrain, the slow walking speed, boring fights, a feeling that you're just wandering alone in a world where nothing happens.
Some things are not planeshift's fault. Diablo I/II show for RPG's like WoW did for MMORPG's that they can be fun action-packed games that are fun right from the start. At the same time they strengthened the belief of hard-core rpg nuts that they were not 'real games'. The true hardcore player still believes that RPG's should be slow and boring, and that there can be games that are no fun in the beginning because they promise the player that they will be fun later on and that before that moment you will just have to work to get there.
Maybe the problem is that you have expectations about the comments on slashdot. Don't expect an army of experts to give many useful tips and comments after every article. In reality it's full of chumps here who jump to the chance to flame, bring up their own favorite unrelated soapbox item, try to score points with cheap and obvious comments, and to shamelessly start talking about themselves. The latter is especially annoying here, everyone starts talking about themselves, what they want and dislike and what they have just bought. The words "who cares" come to mind.
What's Team Fortress 2 about anyway ? I guess a soldier-based shooter, where you fight each other in squads lead by a squad leader, while the whole team is commander by the commander. Oh wait, Battlefield 2 has totally armageddoned the need for this game. It has deleted the reason for this game to even exist. Maybe if they improve TF2 by allowing you to ride various vehicles, or fly planes ? No sorry, BF2 has that as well.
Drivers nowadays are usually unified packages, composed of utilities and dozens of drivers for the hundreds of possible cards using the components. Nowadays if you have a VIA chipset or nVidia 3D card you just download one big driver and install, the installer will decide whether you need the TNT2, Geforce 2 GTS or Ti4200 files. That's a lot better than the old daysm when you took out your network card, saw that it was a 1234 chipset, booted, downloaded a driver, noticed it doesn't work, then found out that you had a 1234-B revision 3. Then you downloaded that one and then noticed that it was for the coax version and that you needed the combo drivers because you had both coax and UTP. All of those variations and revisions had their own drivers, sure they might be small but it was just a pain.
They key word you are missing (or maybe you're deliberately acting ignorant here to score karma points) is conspiracy. Even conspiracy to do nothing can get you years in jail. It's not unusual to see that X has for example a 1 year maximum while conspiracy to commit X carries a 3 year maximum.
That's simple. 10 years ago John Romero and John Carmack made games for ID software. Romero did the gameplay and design, Carmack did the graphics and coding. The combination resulted in great games, Return to castle Wolfenstein and Doom I/II.
Then Romero left during or after Quake 1, and since then Carmack has been making games that are great in graphics but sorely lacking in gameplay. Romero has been thinking up games that have great design and gameplay, but have been plagued with technical difficulties actually writing the code and graphics code. They're both lacking what the other used to provide, and it shows.
Years ago Novell picked up Linux. Companies like Redhat picked up Linux. A few years ago IBM picked up Linux bigtime. What good has come out of that ? It may be good for themselves, but it has gives almost nothing back to Linux.
Besides, Linux zealots shun capitalism anyway. When Redhat was free, people shouted rpm is a great system, then Redhat became big and people shouted rpm's are evil and switched to alternatives. Any company that gets too closely involved with Linux will get burned, and become massively impopular. People seem to shun solidly engineered products and years of experience, and switch to the newest and latest obscure fad distributions that are released by some drunken geeks in a dorm room, like Ubuntu.
Google has a great search engine, a decent advertisment business, and some sideprojects like gmain, google photo, google earth etc to burn some extra cash. Apart from that, the main asset that Google has is money, loads of money. And isn't the point of 99% of the people that are opposed to Microsoft that MS has too much money and a virtual monopoly ?
If Google Linux becomes a standard, don't we then get what we least want, an OS controlled by a large company with billions of dollars that can muscle any opponent off the market ?
The last time 4-issue was used was in the AMD K5. It offered no significant performance benefit, and it had lots of problems. Design and production problems held it back, and AMD released the K5-133 a full year later than the Pentium 133, even though it ran at 100 MHz. The K5 tends to get very hot, also because it requires 3.52 V core voltage. It was designed for the 3.3 V Socket 5 pentium socket, but stability issues forced AMD to up the core voltage. If your motherboard didn't offer 3.5 V next to the standard 3.3 V, you were out of luck. The K5 was never popular due to stability issues and poor overclock potential. A 100 MHz K5 rarely runs reliably at 110 MHz, if it does it produces a massive amount of heat.
After this fiasco both Intel and AMD abandoned the idea of 4-issue and continued with 3-issue ever since.
Did you see the article, especially the last pages ? Games do that, although it's probably not obvious. People blasted Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 before it was released, critisizing them for forcing people to buy $500 video cards. But talk is cheap and meaningless, especially on slashdot, and those people never revised their opinion, despite the fact that those games (and others released since) all have smart feature-detection systems that turn off features and use different shaders depending on the hardware. There's a tremendous difference between an 8500 and x850, or a GF3 and 6800GT, yet you can play on all of those cards with acceptable framerates. It just looks a little bit different, shadows and reflections might be missing on older/cheaper cards. But you have to draw the line somewhere, you cannot support ancient stuff like the TNT1.
The time you describe has already happened. The Quake 3 engine ruled between 1999 and 2003, with dozens of games released which were based on that engine. They just treated all cards as really fast TNT cards, with just 2-texture rendering (a texture and a lightmap), not using lighting features of the card. DirectX 8 cards like the Radeon 8500 were introduced in 2001, with vertex and pixel shaders, yet nobody actually used those features, thanks to the 'Hey I can get 250 FPS in Q3 with this card!' junkies.
Luckily the game industry finally dumped the ancient Q3 limitations and started releasing games like Far Cry that actually used shaders.
GTA does the same on the PC of course. And there are games that do streamload the environment, Dungeon Siege is a fine example. The world is made up of small patches which are streamed in if they are required and dropped by the LRU scheduler. You never see a 'loading' message, there are no pauses.
The original B&W was a great concept, but suffered from bugs, a lack of direction and some balance issues. Although the game promised you can play it as a good deity or a nasty tyrant, becoming evil wrecks the building process, drains your resources, forcing you into early retirement. It's something you do for fun, and then you don't save.
Games like civilization and age of empires provide more control, even though in those games you are supposed to be the king/leader/president. But in both games you watch your population from above, build structures and monitor the grain/wood supply. At least the strategy games don't have you waving your hands all over the place like a rapper, and luckily there's no tall fool walking on the map that shits all over the land.
This joke is so stale ... vintage 1995
Too bad UNIX geeks have a bad sense of humor in general.