So let's give Ubisoft the benefit of the doubt for a moment. I'm not going to slate them for the fact that you need a top-end graphics card to get good performance with all the bells and whistles. I actually quite like to see developers showing a bit of ambition when it comes to pushing the envelope on PC graphics. Let's even assume that something went badly wrong in the AMD optimisation. It's not completely unknown for things to go wrong with a GPU manufacturer at the last moment - the PC version of Rage was a hideous mess on PCs with Nvidia cards when it released, because a driver update that was anticipated between the game going golden-master and hitting the shelves turned out not to be what the developer was expecting.
But even allowing for that, how does it explain the console versions being such a mess? There are detailed performance analysis reports out there showing frankly shocking levels of performance on both of the console platforms (Playstation 4 and Xbox One - no last-gen releases for this game). Both platforms fail to hold even a consistent 30 fps, with the Playstation 4 version (which in theory should be the better of the two, as the console does have a little bit more horsepower) having some truly shocking moments where the framerate dips into the teens.
If you're used to playing games on a PC, this might not sound too shocking. After all, unless you have a particularly old PC, you can almost always salvage a playable framerate by dropping your graphics quality. But that option isn't there on a console. For action oriented games on a console, a locked 60 fps rate is the "gold standard" and is becoming almost mandatory for twitch-shooters, precision driving games and other genres that rely on rapid response times. The popularity of the Call of Duty series, generally inexplicable to PC gamers, has largely been driven by the fact that the series has long adhered to the 60 fps standard on the consoles, meaning that it has felt tighter and more precise than its competitors.
But if you can't manage a locked 60 framerate, then the general consensus is that a locked 30 framerate is an acceptable fallback. It won't feel as precise, but it at least eliminates the disconcerting impact of framerate fluctuations (particularly unpleasant when you're playing on a controller). For a console action-game to fail to manage even a locked 30 fps is pretty shocking these days. For it to be dipping into the teens suggests either misguided design choices or terrible optimisation (or both).
Plus, yeah, the whole "falling through the floor" thing is happening on consoles as well as PC. The game's broken and it's not (entirely or chiefly) down to a particular brand of graphics card.
Agree with you, until your final sentence. EA makes some utter crap. They also make some fantastic games. EA published Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect 2 and Dead Space, which were some of the finest games in recent memory. Dead Space, in particular, was a huge commercial risk and the kind of game that only a company with deep enough pockets to experiment would dare to take.
They also put out some utter crap, as well as their lazy annualised franchises and unfinished spunkgargleweewee like Battlefield 4. They also, at times, behave like complete shits in their attitude to their workforce and their willingness to push the boundaries on issues such as DRM and pay-to-win mechanics (though the latter seems to be dying now, thank god).
But they're a big company; big enough and containing enough people that trying to tar the whole thing with a single brush is a bit futile.
I think of EA as being a bit like the National Lottery we have here in the UK. Almost all of its players are from the lowest rungs of our social and educational ladders. And a fair proportion of the money it raises is used to subsidise the kind of "high art" (opera, theater, galleries) that struggles to be commercially viable on its own. So it's basically a tax on stupidity that funds some pretty great stuff as a by-product. Yeah... that's EA.
In fairness, while they'll probably get away with it this time, recent history suggests that with major franchises, you can fool people once, but you pay the price on the next game. Some examples here:
Final Fantasy XIII: sold extremely well on the basis of hype and the brand. Was a terrible game in almost every respect. Final Fantasy XIII-2 is a rather better game. Lightning Returns (the third installment) is actually a very good game. Both sold terribly, due to reputational damage from their predecessor.
Resident Evil 6: near-universally panned. Sold pretty well on the basis of a massive marketing campaign. Resident Evil releases since then have had a much better critical reception, but much lower sales.
Call of Duty: Ghosts: Its predecessor, Black Ops 2, was actually a pretty interesting game, integrating RTS elements and branching storylines. Ghosts was a lazy, by the numbers pile of spunkgargleweewee. Its sales weren't fantastic by Call of Duty standards, but were still insane. The latest installment, Advanced Warfare, is much better, but is the slowest selling installment in the franchise in years.
So if Ubisoft put out another Assassin's Creed next year, expect it to tank in sales terms, no matter how good it is.
There's certainly plenty of evidence by now to suggest that games with review embargoes tend to be poor, or at least not as good as they've been hyped as. Aliens: Colonial Marines was the big example from last year - review embargo until launch, then reviews mostly in the 4/10 to 6/10 range (with a fair few even lower). More recently, Destiny (critical consensus "fairly good but not even close to justifying the hype") and Driveclub (barely works, and underwhelming even when it does work) have been good examples.
By contrast, when a game is sent for review well in advance of release, the reception is usually much more positive. Recent examples include Bayonetta 2 (reviews 3 weeks early in some cases, near-universal praise), Alien: Isolation (America hates it, rest of the world loves it) and Dragon Age: Inquisition (not actually released yet, but reviews near universal in their praise).
The lack of pre-release reviews is generally a very strong indication in its own right that a game is not going to be good.
That's how London Underground, as well as other highly congested services in London (Overground, DLR and, increasingly, some of the short-distance "heavy rail" commuter trains) are configured. Crowding levels during the morning peak are intense and removing seats is a way to cram more people on.
By and large, the way it works is that if you are commuting from one of the outer zones (5 or 6) into the center, your train won't be as busy when you get on it and you should be able to get one of those seats, which is lucky as with the Tube being a full-stopping service, you are in for a long journey. If you're commuting from one of the more central zones (2 or 3) you are much more likely to have to stand, but on the other hand, you do have a shorter journey.
Obviously, it works better on some parts of the network than others. And it's a fairly brutal environment to commute in, particularly if you have a particular reason (disability, pregnancy) that makes standing uncomfortable - somebody might offer you a seat, but it's the exception rather than the norm at rush hour. Personally, I think people who live in north London and commute via the Tube are mad. I'm south of the river in Zone 5 and get a seat on a nice, non-stop "heavy rail" train that gets me to the center in 20 minutes or so every morning.
London also has driverless trains on its (more recent) Docklands Light Railway.
The reason it's news when driverless trains head to the Tube is nothing to do with technology and everything to do with industrial relations. London's Tube Drivers are extremely militant - it's normal to have a couple of strikes per year (sometimes over "normal" industrial disputes like pay, sometimes because, I suspect, they just want to remind people they can do it).
The current Mayor, who has been in post for around 6 years now and who is, to put it mildly, no friend of the unions, has been making threats about automation on and off ever since he was first elected. It's a dangerous game to play, because even the mention of automation is sometimes enough to trigger strikes - you can get rid of the drivers eventually (though probably keeping - lower paid - train attendants), but they can cause you a hell of a lot of pain during the transition.
From an intellectual standpoint, I agree with you.
From a real-world standpoint, the problem of the political response in terms of adaptations and mitigations isn't going anywhere and means that almost nobody will do what you suggest. You may not care about the politics, but in practical terms, they are probably the most important thing. With a range of responses in the public debate from "do nothing" at one extreme to "throw away Western civilisation, start living in organic yurts spending our evenings knitting underwear out of hemp" at the other, there's a lot of emotion and political capital invested in this debate. It's only made worse by the number of people who have latched onto the issue as a means to push almost-entirely-unrelated political agendas, mostly far-left, but a few far-right as well.
So in practical terms, this report provides a touch of ammunition to the "do nothing" camp and has the potential to slide opinion slightly in their direction. But, as you say, this time tomorrow, the position may well be reversed and the "organic yurtists" may hold the advantage.
And the last thing either side is going to display is a touch of humility. Useful though that might be.
I've noticed one big difference between the "professional" reviews on major sites and user reviews on Steam/Amazon etc.
By and large, the professional game reviews tend to cluster their scores in the 6/10 - 8/10 range. You have to be exceptionally good to get above that level or exceptionally bad to fall below it. You also - in most cases - get relatively little variation between professional review scores. A game might be 8/10 on one site and 9/10 on another, but it is rare to see a gap larger than 2 or at most 3 points. It does happen - Alien Isolation has had professional reviews ranging from 4/10 to 10/10 - but generally only with unusual games that go outside the usual templates (like Alien Isolation).
User reviews on the other hand, tend to be much more polarised. It's by no means unusual for games to pick up 10/10s from some users and 1/10s for another. Personal biases are much more likely to feature in user reviews ("I'm giving this game a 1/10 because I don't like something the developer said on twitter" or "I'm giving this game a 10/10 because I've spent the last 2 years boring everybody rigid about how good it is going to be and don't want to backtrack"). Often, the scores tend to average out in more or less the same place as the professional reviews once you have enough of both, but with much more divergence on the user reviews.
So which is more useful?
By and large - and with some important caveats - I find the professional reviews more honest and useful. A lot of people complain about the clustering of scores in the 6/10 to 8/10 range, but the nature of the modern games industry (quite risk-averse, with a lot of project oversight) means that most commercially produced games tend to fall into that range. If you assume a 6/10 is "not great, but overall more good than bad" and an 8/10 is "high enjoyable but not ground-breaking", then you're left with a spectrum into which most major releases fit. The industry does throw out the occasional piece of brilliance - which is usually recognised. And sometimes, things go wrong and it throws out the odd turkey (Aliens: Colonial Marines being perhaps the most recent example). When those things happen, most of the big review sites do seem to reflect them.
But those caveats I mentioned before are important. The first is that at the end of the day, the people doing the professional reviews are still human and they still have their own biases, preconceptions and agendas. True, they have people watching them to make sure that they don't give free reign to those... but occasionally, those checks and balances fail. In fact, most of the big review sites have a few known quirks that you learn to watch for. Eurogamer, for instance (which despite the criticism I'm about to hand out, I do, in general, rate highly), has a real Nintendo-nostalgia fetish and a habit of over-scoring first party Nintendo games. At the same time, until fairly recently, it went through a phase of trying to shoehorn political correctness into its reviews and marking down a few games which committed real or perceived transgressions (though I've noticed less of this recently).
The next big caveat with professional reviews is around bugs. The big review sites are often given pre-release copies of games, so that the reviews can go live before release. Indeed, a lack of pre-release reviews is often an early sign that a game will be a turkey (again... Aliens: Colonial Marines had a review embargo until its release day). Thing is, sometimes those review copies are unfinished code. And sometimes they aren't. But regardless, there is a tendancy for professional reviewers to either ignore or to be instructed to ignore bugs, on the basis that "they'll be fixed for release". And, surprise surprise, they often aren't fixed for release. User reviews are often your first warning that a game is a buggy mess - though on PC you do have to try to separate out the inevitable complaints that pop up on every new release's forms to the effect that "it won't run on my 8 year old PC running a
I'm not at my home PC right now, so I can't check, but I think this is one of those sim-games that gets annual-ish auto-updates for everybody who already bought it. If it's in any way related to Railworks, then it certainly is.
What occasionally happens in cases like that is that a version "upgrade" turns out to be a less than positive experience, as long-established features break or are removed. But Steam doesn't reset your "time played" count in those cases. So it's quite possible that these are people who have been playing the game for years and are complaining about the latest forced-update.
On the other hand, we're talking about rail enthusiasts here... so maybe it does just take 800 hours for them to start getting bored.
Actually, lots of people wanted an Xbox One at launch. The XB1's sales curve has been really weird.
It had pretty great month-1 sales. It would have had the fastest month-1 sales of any console in history - if it hadn't launched alongside the PS4 (which broke the previous records by an even larger margin). But some time shortly after Christmas, the sales basically flatlined. First MS switched to talking about "units shipped" rather than "units sold" and then it stopped issuing new numbers at all.
By piecing together bits and pieces of retailer and regional sales data, it's possible to get a broad understanding of where the console stands now. Having originally been tipped to pass the Wii-U and take second-place in current gen sales somewhere around April, it appears that it probably only did so some time in September (and indeed, it certainly hasn't officially been announced yet, so there's at least an outside chance it's still in third). It's had several significant sales blips, driven first by the price cut when Kinnect was removed and then again by Destiny, but background sales outside of these blips have been generally very slow throughout 2014.
It's actually pretty similar to (though marginally better than) the sales profile for the Wii-U. That console actually sold well during its first 6 weeks or so on sale, before flatlining. Each first-party Nintendo game since then has caused a small 1-week spike in sales, but after Mario Kart, diminishing returns appear to be kicking in.
In regional terms, The Xbox One appears to be in a fairly solid second place in the US (behind the PS4), a distant second place in Europe (again behind the PS4) and third place in Japan. Indeed, the PS4 is also doing badly in Japan - home console gaming is dying in that market and even the Wii-U (which holds first place there) is doing badly compared to the last gen consoles.
The Xbox One does still have a few big irons in the fire and isn't quite in a Wii-U style Last Chance Saloon yet (if Smash Bros and Bayonetta 2 don't turn around the Wii-U's fortunes this Christmas, the console essentially can be considered dead). Forza Horizon 2 is a fairly big draw and Halo 5 will be a bigger one. But MS have certainly gone backwards since the days of the 360, when they dominated the US and managed a reasonable draw with Sony in Europe. In marketshare terms, the Xbox One looks a lot more like the original Xbox.
Though in general terms, this has been an extremely boring year for console games anyway. People get excited about new console releases, forgetting that they tend to be followed by 12 months during which there isn't much worth playing for them. It's always the later years of the cycle that are more fun in terms of game releases.
By any measurable metric, the US economy has rebounded from recession far better than the Eurozone. GDP growth, unemployment... take your pick.
And the comparable growth rates you cite since 1989 are based, in Argentina's case on a "percentage of fuck all".
Military coups are the kind of thing that happen in a society that does not abide by the rule of law and respect property rights - which is exactly the kind of society you have been advocating. The moment the US embarked upon a programme of nationalisation of industries like Microsoft would be the moment that the US economy crashed with a speed (and irreversibility) that would take the world by shock. You think you have new solutions? They're the same failed "solutions" that have been tried for a hundred years or so around the world, leaving nothing but disaster in their wake.
Or rather, a Government which showed it was happy to nationalise a private company's assets on such flimsy pretences as you put forward would forfeit its nation's ability to do any kind of business on the world stage. Nobody would care about doing business in the US when it became clear that the moment the US Government didn't like them, it would nationalise their assets.
So the US dollar would quickly reach (and then fall below) parity with the Mexican Peso.
Because that wouldn't have any wider consequences at all...
Like perhaps a total flight from the US of almost every other significant business (on the grounds that "we might be next"), a total economic collapse and a catastrophic reduction in living standards.
Certain parts of South America are performing this particular experiment for our education at the moment. Watch how that pans out before wishing to see it replicated in your own country.
Legal tax-loopholes generally come into being because lawmakers decide that they want to use taxation to do something other than raise the funds they require. Countries/states with very simple tax-systems generally tend to have fewer such loopholes. But when lawmakers decide that they want to use the tax system to encourage X type of business or discourage Y behavior, they add complexity. Over time, that complexity reaches the point where companies can design themselves so as to maximize the discounts they qualify for and minimize the penalties. And once they can do so, the board of a PLC actually have a duty to their shareholders to do so.
If you lawmakers (and the voters who elect them) accept that tax is just a tool for revenue raising and not an instrument of social policy, then such situations can be avoided and overall revenues increased.
In technical terms, Quake multiplayer was groundbreaking. But in gameplay terms, even by the standards of its time, it was extremely conservative. It was straightforward "shoot the other player in the face with a basic selection of weapons" deathmatch that hadn't really evolved since Doom. In contrast to the almost Spy-vs-Spy-like multiplayer in DN3D, it was extremely barebones stuff.
Plenty of people did more interesting things in mods, of course.
I've never liked Quake 3. To be honest, aside from the singleplayer modes of Quakes 2 and 4, I've never much enjoyed the Quake series. Admired them as technological accomplishments? Sure. Enjoyed other games built on the engines? Absolutely. But liked the games? No. Compared with their contemporary competitors such as Duke Nukem 3d, Unreal, Half-Life and so on, they've always felt very shallow and conservative.
But hey, I am not the final arbiter of gaming taste. A lot of people do like the series. But by and large, they like it because it is so conservative. Quake 3/Quake Live's players are basically the people who have looked at everything in modern gaming and said "no thanks". To an extent, I sympathise. There are aspects of some modern shooters, such as 2-weapon limits, modern military settings, regenerating health systems and corridor-levels that I'm also bored to death of (though not everything is like that). But this is an audience that defines itself pretty much by its resistance to change.
So why bother pushing changes like this? Your existing players are not only going to hate it, but they are going to compete with each other to see who can shout that they hate it the loudest (proving yourself more "hardcore" and "oldschool" than anybody else is a big part of how you navigate the social pecking order around niche games like this). And new players? It's still, under those minor changes, the same old game it always once and still both feels and looks like a legacy from another era. Counter-Strike edged out Quake 3 as the main competitive fps for good reasons. Plus it's a legacy from another era with a really, really hostile-to-beginners culture to go with it.
If all of the above sounds hostile... it's not really meant to be. It's absolutely a good thing that there are niche games like this out there. But by and large, the absolute worst thing the developers of those long-standing niche games can do is to try to take them "mainstream". It usually just alienates the old audience without attracting a new one.
As somebody who spent most of the day yesterday on the sofa with his PS3 and PS4...
- First of all, this wasn't just the US. Europe was affected as well.
- Disc-based games were working fine all day on both consoles. I've seen FUD above suggesting that always-online connections may be required for these. They aren't. Certainly, MS wanted to do that until the 2013 E3 (and I'll bet Sony gave it a lot of thought as well), but it never actually happened. Single-player modes of disc-based games were fine all day.
- Providing the console you were using was set as one of your primary consoles, then downloaded games (including PS+ games) were also fine all day.
- Basic login was down at first but came back after a couple of hours. Barring a couple of glitchy periods, it was mostly up through the rest of the day. Cloud save functions were working whenever basic login was up.
- Online matchmaking also came online a few times during the afternoon, though never really for long enough for a proper multiplayer session.
- The PS Store and Account Management features were off until quite late last night, When basic login was up, trying to access these gave a "this service is currently undergoing maintenance" error message, implying Sony had taken them down deliberately as part of the effort to keep basic login and matchmaking working. With Account Management offline, the option to re-download content you'd already purchased was also offline.
As of this morning, everything seems to be fine again. What was interesting was how the timing (on a Sunday, and a Sunday followed by a public holiday in several parts of the world) affected both the Sony response (which in communications terms was extremely slow) and the media-coverage (which was virtually non-existent for most of yesterday).
TFA has some interesting stats, but not much narrative to go with them. I would say that there are two big over-arching themes that are driving changes behind "who plays games".
1) The first generation to grow up playing games is now moving into its 30s and even early 40s. Moreover, while this reflects my personal prejudices only (hey, at least I'm upfront about it), I suspect that with many of the first generation of gamers being academic and nerdy types, they are disproportionately well-paid now compared to their wider generation. So the people who grew up with games in the 1980s and early 1990s now have a lot of spending power. For some years now, the 30-40 year old age group has been the most lucrative in gaming.
This is partly why Japan's importance as a market for (as opposed to a producer of) games has plummeted. Aside from "quick blast on the train" mobile games, gaming in Japan is in a very unhealthy state. Domestic production in Japan, when it targets domestic audiences, increasingly plays for children (eg. Nintendo), teenagers (Capcom) or the unemployed/under-employed "otaku" demographic living off its parents' income (Gust, Nippon Ichi, Cave etc).
This is largely because Japan doesn't have the market of relatively well-paid adult gamers that the West has. Some of that is down to social stigma (games being a "kids' thing"), but much more of it is down to working cultures. Maintaining a middle-class lifestyle in Japan requires the kind of office-hours that would make even a Western games-development house in crunch-time blush.
So yeah... in the Western gaming market, oldies increasingly hold the purse-strings, while Japan is increasingly falling out of the mainstream.
2) There is no longer one single "games industry" any more. If... indeed... there ever was. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the games industry split neatly into two halves marked "console" and "computer", with very little cross-over. These days, that distinction has almost vanished (most console games bar first-party exclusives come to PC, Valve increasingly act as the platform-curator for the PC). But at the same time, there is a growing divide between "core" and "casual" gaming, with the latter not looking much like traditional gaming at all.
Facebook games and mobile titles like Candy Crush Saga draw nothing but contempt from "core" gamers (including many of those affluent 30-40 year-olds mentioned above). But they have drawn in a vast market which would never touch a "core" game - and that market is heavily female. So the demographic of the gaming population in general is skewing to reflect that.
There's also what almost constitutes a third tier somewhere in the middle - the "dudebro" gamer (which is overwhelmingly, though not entirely, male). These are the guys who spend a lot of time gaming, but almost all of it goes into Madden/FIFA (delete as appropriate depending on whether in the US or not) and Call of Duty/Battlefield (delete as appropriate depending on favoured brand of spunkgargleweewee). This is a big demographic, but as MS learned when it pitched the Xbox One at them heavily, it isn't a big-spending demographic or one that's particularly sensitive to technological advances.
Prey and Duke Nukem Forever fall into the exact same category. Games which were pitched as "we will make the content on somebody else's engine", but which felt they had to play catch-up on engine tech.
When id released Quake 2, they caused an absolute cataclysm for many developers. In terms of looks, it was way ahead of the Quake 1 engine, particularly for people with new-fangled 3d video cards. Lots of people were out there making games on the Quake 1 engine, with contracts that gave them cheap access to the Quake 2 engine once available. The assumption had always been that porting from one to the other would be easy.
It wasn't.
So several studios, including those making Daikatana, Prey, Half-Life and Duke Nukem Forever had a choice between putting out a game on the old engine or restarting a lot of their work from scratch on the new one.
The ones who went for the latter option ended up in engine hell. Only Valve came through it reasonably well. They took a hit on Half-Life's release date, but basically hacked around the Quake 1 engine to replicate some Q2 features and to make the (highly successful) bastardisation that became known as the Half-Life engine.
As others have said; Final Fantasy XIV. Candidate for the "most improved game in history", following a disaster of a launch a few years ago.
The current incarnation is possibly the only MMO around to be able to go toe-to-toe with WoW in terms of features, content and polish. The update cycle which adds new content is at least on a par with WoW's (if not slightly better) and, unlike games such as Lord of the Rings Online and Star Wars: Old Republic, it isn't afraid to do things differently to WoW in some respects.
In particular, the class/job system is much more flexible than WoW's. The crafting system is infinitely more sophisticated, particularly at the higher levels (I know people in-game who only rarely play combat classes). The PvP modes are hived off entirely from PvE, with their own stats and abilities, meaning that PvE players don't get messed around by constant PvP balance changes. The game is also much more accommodating for casual players than Pandaria-era WoW, avoiding WoW's obsession with locking casuals into an endless, tedious grind of daily quests as an alternative to raid content. But it does this without compromising the experience for the hardcore; the Coil raid and the extreme-mode Primals are on a par with top-end WoW content.
With player numbers reputed to be closing in on 2 million and still rising, it feels like the first MMO since WoW to have a chance of equalling WoW's success - despite much less mainstream media hype.
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So let's give Ubisoft the benefit of the doubt for a moment. I'm not going to slate them for the fact that you need a top-end graphics card to get good performance with all the bells and whistles. I actually quite like to see developers showing a bit of ambition when it comes to pushing the envelope on PC graphics. Let's even assume that something went badly wrong in the AMD optimisation. It's not completely unknown for things to go wrong with a GPU manufacturer at the last moment - the PC version of Rage was a hideous mess on PCs with Nvidia cards when it released, because a driver update that was anticipated between the game going golden-master and hitting the shelves turned out not to be what the developer was expecting.
But even allowing for that, how does it explain the console versions being such a mess? There are detailed performance analysis reports out there showing frankly shocking levels of performance on both of the console platforms (Playstation 4 and Xbox One - no last-gen releases for this game). Both platforms fail to hold even a consistent 30 fps, with the Playstation 4 version (which in theory should be the better of the two, as the console does have a little bit more horsepower) having some truly shocking moments where the framerate dips into the teens.
If you're used to playing games on a PC, this might not sound too shocking. After all, unless you have a particularly old PC, you can almost always salvage a playable framerate by dropping your graphics quality. But that option isn't there on a console. For action oriented games on a console, a locked 60 fps rate is the "gold standard" and is becoming almost mandatory for twitch-shooters, precision driving games and other genres that rely on rapid response times. The popularity of the Call of Duty series, generally inexplicable to PC gamers, has largely been driven by the fact that the series has long adhered to the 60 fps standard on the consoles, meaning that it has felt tighter and more precise than its competitors.
But if you can't manage a locked 60 framerate, then the general consensus is that a locked 30 framerate is an acceptable fallback. It won't feel as precise, but it at least eliminates the disconcerting impact of framerate fluctuations (particularly unpleasant when you're playing on a controller). For a console action-game to fail to manage even a locked 30 fps is pretty shocking these days. For it to be dipping into the teens suggests either misguided design choices or terrible optimisation (or both).
Plus, yeah, the whole "falling through the floor" thing is happening on consoles as well as PC. The game's broken and it's not (entirely or chiefly) down to a particular brand of graphics card.
Agree with you, until your final sentence. EA makes some utter crap. They also make some fantastic games. EA published Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect 2 and Dead Space, which were some of the finest games in recent memory. Dead Space, in particular, was a huge commercial risk and the kind of game that only a company with deep enough pockets to experiment would dare to take.
They also put out some utter crap, as well as their lazy annualised franchises and unfinished spunkgargleweewee like Battlefield 4. They also, at times, behave like complete shits in their attitude to their workforce and their willingness to push the boundaries on issues such as DRM and pay-to-win mechanics (though the latter seems to be dying now, thank god).
But they're a big company; big enough and containing enough people that trying to tar the whole thing with a single brush is a bit futile.
I think of EA as being a bit like the National Lottery we have here in the UK. Almost all of its players are from the lowest rungs of our social and educational ladders. And a fair proportion of the money it raises is used to subsidise the kind of "high art" (opera, theater, galleries) that struggles to be commercially viable on its own. So it's basically a tax on stupidity that funds some pretty great stuff as a by-product. Yeah... that's EA.
In fairness, while they'll probably get away with it this time, recent history suggests that with major franchises, you can fool people once, but you pay the price on the next game. Some examples here:
Final Fantasy XIII: sold extremely well on the basis of hype and the brand. Was a terrible game in almost every respect. Final Fantasy XIII-2 is a rather better game. Lightning Returns (the third installment) is actually a very good game. Both sold terribly, due to reputational damage from their predecessor.
Resident Evil 6: near-universally panned. Sold pretty well on the basis of a massive marketing campaign. Resident Evil releases since then have had a much better critical reception, but much lower sales.
Call of Duty: Ghosts: Its predecessor, Black Ops 2, was actually a pretty interesting game, integrating RTS elements and branching storylines. Ghosts was a lazy, by the numbers pile of spunkgargleweewee. Its sales weren't fantastic by Call of Duty standards, but were still insane. The latest installment, Advanced Warfare, is much better, but is the slowest selling installment in the franchise in years.
So if Ubisoft put out another Assassin's Creed next year, expect it to tank in sales terms, no matter how good it is.
There's certainly plenty of evidence by now to suggest that games with review embargoes tend to be poor, or at least not as good as they've been hyped as. Aliens: Colonial Marines was the big example from last year - review embargo until launch, then reviews mostly in the 4/10 to 6/10 range (with a fair few even lower). More recently, Destiny (critical consensus "fairly good but not even close to justifying the hype") and Driveclub (barely works, and underwhelming even when it does work) have been good examples.
By contrast, when a game is sent for review well in advance of release, the reception is usually much more positive. Recent examples include Bayonetta 2 (reviews 3 weeks early in some cases, near-universal praise), Alien: Isolation (America hates it, rest of the world loves it) and Dragon Age: Inquisition (not actually released yet, but reviews near universal in their praise).
The lack of pre-release reviews is generally a very strong indication in its own right that a game is not going to be good.
The two are hardly competing for the same market. Waitrose is aiming for the aspirational middle classes. Asda is... not.
If you have the kind of household budget which means you shop at Asda, then making the switch to Waitrose is probably not a realistic option.
Though on the few occasions I've eaten Asda food, their meat has had this weird texture, like it's already been digested once.
That's how London Underground, as well as other highly congested services in London (Overground, DLR and, increasingly, some of the short-distance "heavy rail" commuter trains) are configured. Crowding levels during the morning peak are intense and removing seats is a way to cram more people on.
By and large, the way it works is that if you are commuting from one of the outer zones (5 or 6) into the center, your train won't be as busy when you get on it and you should be able to get one of those seats, which is lucky as with the Tube being a full-stopping service, you are in for a long journey. If you're commuting from one of the more central zones (2 or 3) you are much more likely to have to stand, but on the other hand, you do have a shorter journey.
Obviously, it works better on some parts of the network than others. And it's a fairly brutal environment to commute in, particularly if you have a particular reason (disability, pregnancy) that makes standing uncomfortable - somebody might offer you a seat, but it's the exception rather than the norm at rush hour. Personally, I think people who live in north London and commute via the Tube are mad. I'm south of the river in Zone 5 and get a seat on a nice, non-stop "heavy rail" train that gets me to the center in 20 minutes or so every morning.
London also has driverless trains on its (more recent) Docklands Light Railway.
The reason it's news when driverless trains head to the Tube is nothing to do with technology and everything to do with industrial relations. London's Tube Drivers are extremely militant - it's normal to have a couple of strikes per year (sometimes over "normal" industrial disputes like pay, sometimes because, I suspect, they just want to remind people they can do it).
The current Mayor, who has been in post for around 6 years now and who is, to put it mildly, no friend of the unions, has been making threats about automation on and off ever since he was first elected. It's a dangerous game to play, because even the mention of automation is sometimes enough to trigger strikes - you can get rid of the drivers eventually (though probably keeping - lower paid - train attendants), but they can cause you a hell of a lot of pain during the transition.
Really?
Because personal freedoms, including the freedom to pursue "wants" as well as "needs" are kind of a cornerstone of Western civilisation.
From an intellectual standpoint, I agree with you.
From a real-world standpoint, the problem of the political response in terms of adaptations and mitigations isn't going anywhere and means that almost nobody will do what you suggest. You may not care about the politics, but in practical terms, they are probably the most important thing. With a range of responses in the public debate from "do nothing" at one extreme to "throw away Western civilisation, start living in organic yurts spending our evenings knitting underwear out of hemp" at the other, there's a lot of emotion and political capital invested in this debate. It's only made worse by the number of people who have latched onto the issue as a means to push almost-entirely-unrelated political agendas, mostly far-left, but a few far-right as well.
So in practical terms, this report provides a touch of ammunition to the "do nothing" camp and has the potential to slide opinion slightly in their direction. But, as you say, this time tomorrow, the position may well be reversed and the "organic yurtists" may hold the advantage.
And the last thing either side is going to display is a touch of humility. Useful though that might be.
I've noticed one big difference between the "professional" reviews on major sites and user reviews on Steam/Amazon etc.
By and large, the professional game reviews tend to cluster their scores in the 6/10 - 8/10 range. You have to be exceptionally good to get above that level or exceptionally bad to fall below it. You also - in most cases - get relatively little variation between professional review scores. A game might be 8/10 on one site and 9/10 on another, but it is rare to see a gap larger than 2 or at most 3 points. It does happen - Alien Isolation has had professional reviews ranging from 4/10 to 10/10 - but generally only with unusual games that go outside the usual templates (like Alien Isolation).
User reviews on the other hand, tend to be much more polarised. It's by no means unusual for games to pick up 10/10s from some users and 1/10s for another. Personal biases are much more likely to feature in user reviews ("I'm giving this game a 1/10 because I don't like something the developer said on twitter" or "I'm giving this game a 10/10 because I've spent the last 2 years boring everybody rigid about how good it is going to be and don't want to backtrack"). Often, the scores tend to average out in more or less the same place as the professional reviews once you have enough of both, but with much more divergence on the user reviews.
So which is more useful?
By and large - and with some important caveats - I find the professional reviews more honest and useful. A lot of people complain about the clustering of scores in the 6/10 to 8/10 range, but the nature of the modern games industry (quite risk-averse, with a lot of project oversight) means that most commercially produced games tend to fall into that range. If you assume a 6/10 is "not great, but overall more good than bad" and an 8/10 is "high enjoyable but not ground-breaking", then you're left with a spectrum into which most major releases fit. The industry does throw out the occasional piece of brilliance - which is usually recognised. And sometimes, things go wrong and it throws out the odd turkey (Aliens: Colonial Marines being perhaps the most recent example). When those things happen, most of the big review sites do seem to reflect them.
But those caveats I mentioned before are important. The first is that at the end of the day, the people doing the professional reviews are still human and they still have their own biases, preconceptions and agendas. True, they have people watching them to make sure that they don't give free reign to those... but occasionally, those checks and balances fail. In fact, most of the big review sites have a few known quirks that you learn to watch for. Eurogamer, for instance (which despite the criticism I'm about to hand out, I do, in general, rate highly), has a real Nintendo-nostalgia fetish and a habit of over-scoring first party Nintendo games. At the same time, until fairly recently, it went through a phase of trying to shoehorn political correctness into its reviews and marking down a few games which committed real or perceived transgressions (though I've noticed less of this recently).
The next big caveat with professional reviews is around bugs. The big review sites are often given pre-release copies of games, so that the reviews can go live before release. Indeed, a lack of pre-release reviews is often an early sign that a game will be a turkey (again... Aliens: Colonial Marines had a review embargo until its release day). Thing is, sometimes those review copies are unfinished code. And sometimes they aren't. But regardless, there is a tendancy for professional reviewers to either ignore or to be instructed to ignore bugs, on the basis that "they'll be fixed for release". And, surprise surprise, they often aren't fixed for release. User reviews are often your first warning that a game is a buggy mess - though on PC you do have to try to separate out the inevitable complaints that pop up on every new release's forms to the effect that "it won't run on my 8 year old PC running a
I'm not at my home PC right now, so I can't check, but I think this is one of those sim-games that gets annual-ish auto-updates for everybody who already bought it. If it's in any way related to Railworks, then it certainly is.
What occasionally happens in cases like that is that a version "upgrade" turns out to be a less than positive experience, as long-established features break or are removed. But Steam doesn't reset your "time played" count in those cases. So it's quite possible that these are people who have been playing the game for years and are complaining about the latest forced-update.
On the other hand, we're talking about rail enthusiasts here... so maybe it does just take 800 hours for them to start getting bored.
Actually, lots of people wanted an Xbox One at launch. The XB1's sales curve has been really weird.
It had pretty great month-1 sales. It would have had the fastest month-1 sales of any console in history - if it hadn't launched alongside the PS4 (which broke the previous records by an even larger margin). But some time shortly after Christmas, the sales basically flatlined. First MS switched to talking about "units shipped" rather than "units sold" and then it stopped issuing new numbers at all.
By piecing together bits and pieces of retailer and regional sales data, it's possible to get a broad understanding of where the console stands now. Having originally been tipped to pass the Wii-U and take second-place in current gen sales somewhere around April, it appears that it probably only did so some time in September (and indeed, it certainly hasn't officially been announced yet, so there's at least an outside chance it's still in third). It's had several significant sales blips, driven first by the price cut when Kinnect was removed and then again by Destiny, but background sales outside of these blips have been generally very slow throughout 2014.
It's actually pretty similar to (though marginally better than) the sales profile for the Wii-U. That console actually sold well during its first 6 weeks or so on sale, before flatlining. Each first-party Nintendo game since then has caused a small 1-week spike in sales, but after Mario Kart, diminishing returns appear to be kicking in.
In regional terms, The Xbox One appears to be in a fairly solid second place in the US (behind the PS4), a distant second place in Europe (again behind the PS4) and third place in Japan. Indeed, the PS4 is also doing badly in Japan - home console gaming is dying in that market and even the Wii-U (which holds first place there) is doing badly compared to the last gen consoles.
The Xbox One does still have a few big irons in the fire and isn't quite in a Wii-U style Last Chance Saloon yet (if Smash Bros and Bayonetta 2 don't turn around the Wii-U's fortunes this Christmas, the console essentially can be considered dead). Forza Horizon 2 is a fairly big draw and Halo 5 will be a bigger one. But MS have certainly gone backwards since the days of the 360, when they dominated the US and managed a reasonable draw with Sony in Europe. In marketshare terms, the Xbox One looks a lot more like the original Xbox.
Though in general terms, this has been an extremely boring year for console games anyway. People get excited about new console releases, forgetting that they tend to be followed by 12 months during which there isn't much worth playing for them. It's always the later years of the cycle that are more fun in terms of game releases.
By any measurable metric, the US economy has rebounded from recession far better than the Eurozone. GDP growth, unemployment... take your pick.
And the comparable growth rates you cite since 1989 are based, in Argentina's case on a "percentage of fuck all".
Military coups are the kind of thing that happen in a society that does not abide by the rule of law and respect property rights - which is exactly the kind of society you have been advocating. The moment the US embarked upon a programme of nationalisation of industries like Microsoft would be the moment that the US economy crashed with a speed (and irreversibility) that would take the world by shock. You think you have new solutions? They're the same failed "solutions" that have been tried for a hundred years or so around the world, leaving nothing but disaster in their wake.
Back in the first half of the 20th Century, Argentina was tipped to become one of the wealthiest countries in the world.
Then the people who think like you do got into power...
Yes! Why not kill off all of the major companies in one of the shrinking number of industries in which the US remains a world leader?
That will help massively.
And 20 years later, the Indians will be complaining about cheap illegal immigrants from the US taking all of the menial jobs in their country.
Currency has nothing to do with it.
Or rather, a Government which showed it was happy to nationalise a private company's assets on such flimsy pretences as you put forward would forfeit its nation's ability to do any kind of business on the world stage. Nobody would care about doing business in the US when it became clear that the moment the US Government didn't like them, it would nationalise their assets.
So the US dollar would quickly reach (and then fall below) parity with the Mexican Peso.
It will, of course, never happen. Thank god.
Nintendo OS?
I hope you're looking forward to only being able to post to slashdot using a sequence of happy-face emoticons.
Sad-face emoticons might upset people, so those are banned.
And words? Words?!?! Won't somebody think of the children?
Because that wouldn't have any wider consequences at all...
Like perhaps a total flight from the US of almost every other significant business (on the grounds that "we might be next"), a total economic collapse and a catastrophic reduction in living standards.
Certain parts of South America are performing this particular experiment for our education at the moment. Watch how that pans out before wishing to see it replicated in your own country.
Exactly...
Legal tax-loopholes generally come into being because lawmakers decide that they want to use taxation to do something other than raise the funds they require. Countries/states with very simple tax-systems generally tend to have fewer such loopholes. But when lawmakers decide that they want to use the tax system to encourage X type of business or discourage Y behavior, they add complexity. Over time, that complexity reaches the point where companies can design themselves so as to maximize the discounts they qualify for and minimize the penalties. And once they can do so, the board of a PLC actually have a duty to their shareholders to do so.
If you lawmakers (and the voters who elect them) accept that tax is just a tool for revenue raising and not an instrument of social policy, then such situations can be avoided and overall revenues increased.
In technical terms, Quake multiplayer was groundbreaking. But in gameplay terms, even by the standards of its time, it was extremely conservative. It was straightforward "shoot the other player in the face with a basic selection of weapons" deathmatch that hadn't really evolved since Doom. In contrast to the almost Spy-vs-Spy-like multiplayer in DN3D, it was extremely barebones stuff.
Plenty of people did more interesting things in mods, of course.
I've never liked Quake 3. To be honest, aside from the singleplayer modes of Quakes 2 and 4, I've never much enjoyed the Quake series. Admired them as technological accomplishments? Sure. Enjoyed other games built on the engines? Absolutely. But liked the games? No. Compared with their contemporary competitors such as Duke Nukem 3d, Unreal, Half-Life and so on, they've always felt very shallow and conservative.
But hey, I am not the final arbiter of gaming taste. A lot of people do like the series. But by and large, they like it because it is so conservative. Quake 3/Quake Live's players are basically the people who have looked at everything in modern gaming and said "no thanks". To an extent, I sympathise. There are aspects of some modern shooters, such as 2-weapon limits, modern military settings, regenerating health systems and corridor-levels that I'm also bored to death of (though not everything is like that). But this is an audience that defines itself pretty much by its resistance to change.
So why bother pushing changes like this? Your existing players are not only going to hate it, but they are going to compete with each other to see who can shout that they hate it the loudest (proving yourself more "hardcore" and "oldschool" than anybody else is a big part of how you navigate the social pecking order around niche games like this). And new players? It's still, under those minor changes, the same old game it always once and still both feels and looks like a legacy from another era. Counter-Strike edged out Quake 3 as the main competitive fps for good reasons. Plus it's a legacy from another era with a really, really hostile-to-beginners culture to go with it.
If all of the above sounds hostile... it's not really meant to be. It's absolutely a good thing that there are niche games like this out there. But by and large, the absolute worst thing the developers of those long-standing niche games can do is to try to take them "mainstream". It usually just alienates the old audience without attracting a new one.
As somebody who spent most of the day yesterday on the sofa with his PS3 and PS4...
- First of all, this wasn't just the US. Europe was affected as well.
- Disc-based games were working fine all day on both consoles. I've seen FUD above suggesting that always-online connections may be required for these. They aren't. Certainly, MS wanted to do that until the 2013 E3 (and I'll bet Sony gave it a lot of thought as well), but it never actually happened. Single-player modes of disc-based games were fine all day.
- Providing the console you were using was set as one of your primary consoles, then downloaded games (including PS+ games) were also fine all day.
- Basic login was down at first but came back after a couple of hours. Barring a couple of glitchy periods, it was mostly up through the rest of the day. Cloud save functions were working whenever basic login was up.
- Online matchmaking also came online a few times during the afternoon, though never really for long enough for a proper multiplayer session.
- The PS Store and Account Management features were off until quite late last night, When basic login was up, trying to access these gave a "this service is currently undergoing maintenance" error message, implying Sony had taken them down deliberately as part of the effort to keep basic login and matchmaking working. With Account Management offline, the option to re-download content you'd already purchased was also offline.
As of this morning, everything seems to be fine again. What was interesting was how the timing (on a Sunday, and a Sunday followed by a public holiday in several parts of the world) affected both the Sony response (which in communications terms was extremely slow) and the media-coverage (which was virtually non-existent for most of yesterday).
TFA has some interesting stats, but not much narrative to go with them. I would say that there are two big over-arching themes that are driving changes behind "who plays games".
1) The first generation to grow up playing games is now moving into its 30s and even early 40s. Moreover, while this reflects my personal prejudices only (hey, at least I'm upfront about it), I suspect that with many of the first generation of gamers being academic and nerdy types, they are disproportionately well-paid now compared to their wider generation. So the people who grew up with games in the 1980s and early 1990s now have a lot of spending power. For some years now, the 30-40 year old age group has been the most lucrative in gaming.
This is partly why Japan's importance as a market for (as opposed to a producer of) games has plummeted. Aside from "quick blast on the train" mobile games, gaming in Japan is in a very unhealthy state. Domestic production in Japan, when it targets domestic audiences, increasingly plays for children (eg. Nintendo), teenagers (Capcom) or the unemployed/under-employed "otaku" demographic living off its parents' income (Gust, Nippon Ichi, Cave etc).
This is largely because Japan doesn't have the market of relatively well-paid adult gamers that the West has. Some of that is down to social stigma (games being a "kids' thing"), but much more of it is down to working cultures. Maintaining a middle-class lifestyle in Japan requires the kind of office-hours that would make even a Western games-development house in crunch-time blush.
So yeah... in the Western gaming market, oldies increasingly hold the purse-strings, while Japan is increasingly falling out of the mainstream.
2) There is no longer one single "games industry" any more. If... indeed... there ever was. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the games industry split neatly into two halves marked "console" and "computer", with very little cross-over. These days, that distinction has almost vanished (most console games bar first-party exclusives come to PC, Valve increasingly act as the platform-curator for the PC). But at the same time, there is a growing divide between "core" and "casual" gaming, with the latter not looking much like traditional gaming at all.
Facebook games and mobile titles like Candy Crush Saga draw nothing but contempt from "core" gamers (including many of those affluent 30-40 year-olds mentioned above). But they have drawn in a vast market which would never touch a "core" game - and that market is heavily female. So the demographic of the gaming population in general is skewing to reflect that.
There's also what almost constitutes a third tier somewhere in the middle - the "dudebro" gamer (which is overwhelmingly, though not entirely, male). These are the guys who spend a lot of time gaming, but almost all of it goes into Madden/FIFA (delete as appropriate depending on whether in the US or not) and Call of Duty/Battlefield (delete as appropriate depending on favoured brand of spunkgargleweewee). This is a big demographic, but as MS learned when it pitched the Xbox One at them heavily, it isn't a big-spending demographic or one that's particularly sensitive to technological advances.
Prey and Duke Nukem Forever fall into the exact same category. Games which were pitched as "we will make the content on somebody else's engine", but which felt they had to play catch-up on engine tech.
When id released Quake 2, they caused an absolute cataclysm for many developers. In terms of looks, it was way ahead of the Quake 1 engine, particularly for people with new-fangled 3d video cards. Lots of people were out there making games on the Quake 1 engine, with contracts that gave them cheap access to the Quake 2 engine once available. The assumption had always been that porting from one to the other would be easy.
It wasn't.
So several studios, including those making Daikatana, Prey, Half-Life and Duke Nukem Forever had a choice between putting out a game on the old engine or restarting a lot of their work from scratch on the new one.
The ones who went for the latter option ended up in engine hell. Only Valve came through it reasonably well. They took a hit on Half-Life's release date, but basically hacked around the Quake 1 engine to replicate some Q2 features and to make the (highly successful) bastardisation that became known as the Half-Life engine.
As others have said; Final Fantasy XIV. Candidate for the "most improved game in history", following a disaster of a launch a few years ago.
The current incarnation is possibly the only MMO around to be able to go toe-to-toe with WoW in terms of features, content and polish. The update cycle which adds new content is at least on a par with WoW's (if not slightly better) and, unlike games such as Lord of the Rings Online and Star Wars: Old Republic, it isn't afraid to do things differently to WoW in some respects.
In particular, the class/job system is much more flexible than WoW's. The crafting system is infinitely more sophisticated, particularly at the higher levels (I know people in-game who only rarely play combat classes). The PvP modes are hived off entirely from PvE, with their own stats and abilities, meaning that PvE players don't get messed around by constant PvP balance changes. The game is also much more accommodating for casual players than Pandaria-era WoW, avoiding WoW's obsession with locking casuals into an endless, tedious grind of daily quests as an alternative to raid content. But it does this without compromising the experience for the hardcore; the Coil raid and the extreme-mode Primals are on a par with top-end WoW content.
With player numbers reputed to be closing in on 2 million and still rising, it feels like the first MMO since WoW to have a chance of equalling WoW's success - despite much less mainstream media hype.