I played World of Warcraft on and off for a few years. I was a pretty hardcore player from the launch of Burning Crusade through to near the end of Lich King and came back casual for a while for late Cataclysm and early Pandaria. I know the game pretty well and have friends who still play it.
So I can say with confidence that you would be absolutely mad to pay for a boost up to level 90 with prices like that (and if you are a new player, mad to pay at all).
There are two types of people now who might be starting out at level 1; new (or returning-after-a-gap-of-years) players starting their first characters, or veterans levelling an "alt" (a secondary - or indeed tertiary or beyond - character).
If you are a new player, then going through the level-up process is important and you should not skip it. First of all, this is where you learn how to play your character. Most end-game content involves group-play and if you have a brand new player at the level cap staring at a hotbar full of unfamiliar abilities, it will be a long time before you are actually competent enough to play alongside others. The level-up process, during which you are introduced to abilities one or two at a time, takes you at least part of the way along that learning curve for your character. It also exposes you to a lot of the game's lore, if that's your bag (I always found WoW's lore a bit boring and juvenile, but some people like it).
And if you're a veteran player, then there are lots and lots of things you can do to accelerate the level-up process for an alt without handing over real-money. I levelled up three alts while never taking them out of "rested" state (meaning they were getting double xp from kills). Heirlooms allow you to boost the rate of xp gain even faster, to the point where 1-80, by the launch of Pandaria, was just stupidly fast. I doubt even a brand new character takes over 100 hours of game time (or indeed, anything like it). Alts certainly take much less.
So yeah, I can't imagine Blizzard would have too many takers for this. Or at least, I hope they won't.
The point about France was regarding the fact that the country has an official regulator for its language. A regulator which has quasi-legal (though thankfully no longer legal) powers to prohibit the use of languages other than French in public communications in France.
The blasphemy laws point has been an active point of debate in many EU countries over the last few years - ever since the mohammed-cartoons controversy. There was a major debate in the UK around the Racial and Religous Hatred Act 2006, which, in its original form, would effectively have criminalised any speech that offended somebody on religious grounds. Happily, the bill was amended (against the Government's wishes) as it went through Parliament and ended up somewhat diluted; though it still arguably has a chilling effect. There are still active campaigns by religious groups (primarily though not exclusively Islamic) for legislation that would duplicate the intention of the original bill.
The last time Germany had the presidency of the EU in 2007, it used that power to ensure the Commission (a terrifyingly unaccountable organisation) began the process of introducing legislation that would have effectively made Germany's censorship of video-game content mandatory Europe-wide. Happily, the clock ran out on it and the Portuguese presidency which followed was, depending on who you listen to, either more liberal-minded or more distracted by the looming economic crisis, so the whole thing dropped. Germany doesn't get another Presidency until 2020, but the smart money would be on them trying again - or leaning on another country to try again. Particularly if the Eurozone financial crisis does blow over, allowing social issues like this to return to the prominence they had in the middle part of the last decade.
I'm extremely familiar with the workings of EU institutions and, indeed, have spent time working in Brussels. They do have some positives and produce the occasional outbreak of common sense, but if you wish to delude yourself that they are perfect - or even more good than bad - then that's your mistake.
Another person making a snarky comment about Atlas Shrugged while clearly never having read it.
John Galt is a major proponent of the gold standard. As in, seriously major. It's one of the main economic themes of the book. Bitcoin would have horrified him (had he been real).
Atlas Shrugged may not be "right", but it is much harder to dismiss than the average college undergrad leftie assumes.
Actually, we're generally much more prone to censorship here in Europe. Many of the countries in the EU have hang-ups on particular issues for historical reasons (eg. Germany on Nazi imagery and violence, France on the use of other languages). Many countries are also developing exciting new hang-ups and things they can censor, driven mainly by the three prongs of the Islamic far-right (pushing hard for new blasphemy laws), the authoritarian left (in thrall to both multiculturalism and radical feminism, both of which depend upon censorship) and an overbearing security culture (well... see pretty much 50% of slashdot's front page stories). And the general approach taken by the EU is to adopt the most draconian elements of each member nation's policies. If we get through the next German presidency of the EU without its ridiculous censorship standards being forced on the whole of Europe, we shall be extremely lucky.
Individuals and corporates in the US certainly practice self-censorship. But you are much more likely to encounter state-censorship in Europe - and it's getting more likely all the time.
But we're generally ok with swearing. So it's all absolutely fine.
Everybody's blaming Germany, but the nature of the content that was actually cut might imply that the cause is elsewhere. Not that I want for a moment to excuse Germany's censorship policies, which are ludicrous.
But the cut content is basically - anal probe aside - mostly abortion related. The EU still contains some very, very Catholic countries. In Spain in particular, it's a real no-go topic. Also in the Republic of Ireland and Poland to some degree (though less so there than it would have been a couple of years ago). It's quite possible the EU version was censored due to fears about reaction in one or more of those countries.
What we have in a lot of cities - and London is an absolute exemplar of this (New York isn't quite as bad) - is a model of urban development which, through pricing and housing availability, forces most people to live in suburbs but commute to work in the city centre.
There are big, big drawbacks to that model.
First, your average citizen wastes a lot of time commuting. While travel-time isn't necessarily dead time in either productivity or leisure terms, the nature of commuter mass-transit makes it worse than most other types of journeys. People are crammed into high density vehicles, may not have a seat and may need to make frequent changes of bus/train. It's not enjoyable and it's very hard to be productive while going through it.
Second, it places huge strains on your transport networks. It channels most of your commuter traffic into two huge peaks (usually a very sharp morning peak and a longer but still significant evening peak). Road travel generally just can't cope with the resultant congestion. Railways (including underground and light rail) are more effective at moving large numbers of people but have very high fixed infrastructure costs (a mile of railway costs many times more per annum to maintain than a mile of road), meaning they inevitably require large taxpayer subsidies. Worse still, because of the "peaky" nature of commuter traffic, you have to spec your mass-transit systems to handle the peaks and accept that they'll be pulling around mostly fresh air for at least 18 hours every day.
And all of that congestion? Pretty terrible for the environment. High carbon emissions and, if you're relying on cars, buses or diesel trains, horrible for air quality as well.
Ideally, you want people to live close to their workplaces. Some cities are better at that than others - ironically, often those which have evolved without much assistance from urban-planners (who historically have loved to neatly segment industrial, commercial and residential districts apart - a trend that SimCity hardly helped reduce).
So google-buses aren't necessarily fantastic either, if you're moving people a long distance to an out-of-town campus. They're probably better than the city-centre model, because their traffic is more likely to be contra-flow. But ideally, you might have small-to-medium sized business conglomerations around a city, each with appropriate housing nearby.
Pretty much any genre aside from party games is perfectly fine on the PC. And party-games is a genre that had a brief spike in popularity on the Wii but is now, mercifully, consigned back to oblivion. Everything else - from platformers to fighting games (ugh) to RPGs to shooters is perfectly fine on the PC. Almost all of them are fine on a home console (RTSes still don't quite work there and fpses will never be quite as good as on mouse and keyboard). Most are also fine on a Vita and, to a lesser extent, a 3DS.
The mobile platforms are not good for some types of game - yes. Touchscreen controls are poor for many types of game, in fact. But this isn't putting off mobile developers; if anything, the problem for iOS and Android is that the barriers to entry are too low. Quality indie games have a much better chance of success on Steam or the PSN, where they have to meet a certain quality filter for release.
I fundamentally don't buy into the idea that we need even more startups and indie-studios. Sure, the occasional gem comes from the indies (and thanks to the likes of Steam and the PSN, they tend to get the recognition and success they deserve), but mostly, we just get the kind of crud that jams up the stores on the mobile marketplaces. The best games, like it or not, continue to come from the mid-sized and major studios.
On app-lite and app-purchase models, I have no complaints. Rovio's means of selling Angry Birds is absolutely fine with me (and I adore Bad Piggies). But if you think that's still how most games on the mobile stores are pushed these days, you're at least 18 months behind the times. Rovio are, sad to say, an echo of an older, better time for mobile gaming (yes, this world moves fast).
And if you look around for other examples of games crippled by pay-to-win, they are legion. Dungeon Siege is just a recent high-profile example. The problem is that game mechanics are being actively stripped out in favour of mechanisms designed to get the player to pay more and more.
In the old days of arcade games, difficulty levels would be set very high so that players would have to put in more coins. Harsh? Yes, absolutely. But a skilled player could still go a long time off a single coin. The free to play mobile (and facebook) model these days has become one where, figuratively Pac-Man will DEFINITELY die after 15 seconds unless you put another coin in - but so long as you keep feeding those coins in, he's permanently under a power-pill effect.
I'm really not sure where you're going here - and I've lost track of what the first point you're trying to make is. With the days of Wii-shovelware behind us, there aren't really any party game developers other than Nintendo in the business any more anyway. I know full well that Nintendo is a horrible company to work with; they are certainly no more virtuous than Sony and MS (and in some respects less so) - but they always benefit from a "sympathy for the underdog" factor.
And no, demo + purchase is not the same as what's happening in mobile gaming now - if you think it is, then I can only suspect you haven't followed what's been happening on the mobile platforms at all.
Demo + Purchase is an old and established way of selling games. You give the customer a bit of it free, if they like it, they make a one-time purchase and buy the rest. If they don't, they move on. It's not a perfect system (I can think of games whose first levels - the bit used in the demo - have been far better than the rest of the game), but it is reasonably honest.
The mobile "free to pay/pay-to-win" and "paywall" models are very different. You can, in principle, play the whole game for free. But you will be forced to "grind" sections of the game for hours, or simply wait with the game idle for hours or even days between taking actions. At any time, you can spend money to speed things up. But you can never pay a fixed sum and "own" the game. There's always another paywall along in a few minutes.
Worse, any semblance of game design goes out the window. These games aren't designed to reward skill - quite the opposite. The last thing the developers want is for a skilled player to encounter the paywall less frequently. Rather, they are designed to form a direct correlation between success in the game and the amount of money you spend. More information and analysis is here.
Fighting games make it to PC pretty well, by and large. Certainly, the big titles (with the exception of Street Fighter) do. Party games tend to be limited to the Nintendo platforms. If you want them, go there. Most people are happy without them.
By "paywalled", I meant pay-to-win, or free-to-start-playing-but-pay-through-the-nose-if-you-want-to-play-for-more-than-ten-minutes. See the recent Dungeon Keeper "remake" (or rather, butchery) for mobiles - and many other examples as well.
I'd agree on Papers Please. It's absolutely no fun whatsoever, but it is also an absolutely fascinating experience. It has a real moral depth and complexity that really does show up how shallow the morality systems in the average Bioware RPG are.
It's slightly more traditionally game-like, but if you liked Papers Please, I'd urge you to try The Banner Saga. It does a similar thing about forcing the player to make difficult and morally ambiguous decisions without clear-cut consequences. Plus it has vikings, which is always a plus.
I disagree, however, on Gone Home. When I was in my first year at university, one of the guys on my hall was a member of a film club. One night, I got dragged along to see the film that they'd been working on for the last six months. I will never forgive him for the 90 minutes of my life spent watching people walking around slowly without saying anything and staring meaningfully at loaves of bread in a baker's window. Gone Home struck me as a similarly undergraduate pile of hipster rubbish.
Yes, I'd agree with that. AC4 would have been better still as a pure "pirate" game, without the Assassin's Creed trappings. The fact that you still have a stealth-based combat system at the heart of the game feels odd, when something a bit more swashbuckling would fit the bill better. And yes, the modern-day meta-story needs to die. It was always boring in the earlier AC games but really is outstaying its welcome now.
I own pretty much every gaming platform around (other than an Android platform, I suppose) and tend to manage to play a fairly good selection of releases.
The big pattern over much of 2013 for me was my declining use of the old "home" consoles, edged out by the PC and Vita. The PS3 still got some occasional use, spurred by a few decent late-cycle exclusives (Ni No Kuni, Disgaea 2 and so on), but the last game I put any serious time into on the 360 was Forza Horizon, way back at the end of 2012. MS really let the 360 twist in the wind for the final 12 months before it got replaced. I probably used the 360 more than the PS3 for most of its cycle (it was generally better for multiplatform games), but I felt few regrets when I traded it in against a new Xbox One the other week, while I couldn't yet imagine trading in my PS3.
The growth of importance of PC gaming has been a real trend recently. For much of the last console cycle, "multi-platform" meant "360 and PS3". These days, it's a brave developer who doesn't include the PC in their line-up. This was also, I suppose, a big part of the reason behind the decline in my use of the 360. It may have been better than the PS3 for most multiplatform games, but it had no chance against a modern gaming PC. On the PC, I've mostly been playing Borderlands 2, Final Fantasy 14 and I still go back for the odd blast of the superb Rayman Legends.
The Vita, for me, is the best little console that nobody owns and I regard its lack of success as a great shame. There are some fantastic games on it and I've put a lot of time into Persona 4: The Golden, Dragon's Crown, Soul Sacrifice and the many, many smaller and indie titles on the platform. The 3DS, meanwhile, I still find a hard platform to love, though I did quite enjoy Bravely Default until its later sections.
I now own both a PS4 and Xbox One. Neither has really produced a game to wow me yet - but then, that goes with the territory for early adopters. Killzone: Shadow Fall on the PS4 is much better than I had expected from previous Killzone games (having some fairly open levels and a better graphical style). I've also been enjoying Assassin's Creed 4 on the PS4 (more games need sea shanties). On the Xbox One, Dead Rising 3 is fairly good and Forza 5 has mostly been fixed after a disaster of a launch. Other than that, both platforms are currently fairly barren for traditional games - though Xbox Fitness is really impressive if you like that kind of thing (I do).
At least the PS4 and the Xbox One have the excuse of being new. The Wii-U remains a crushingly poor platform, with tired Nintendo exclusives being the only real releases of note. Zelda: Wind Waker looks fine at first - but then I remembered just how tedious I found it the first time around. Super Mario World 3d has some good moments, but is spoiled by poor 3d controls and level design that gets quite repetitive in the later stages.
And on iOS... ugh. I've almost entirely stopped using the iPad for gaming. I still fire it up for the odd session on a plane or train, but its games these days seem to split between paywalled crudware (generally not even games by any reasonable definition) and worthy-but-slightly-lacking ports of games better played on PC, like XCom and Baldur's Gate.
The financial shocks would be felt in every corner of the world. The impacts on Europe and the US would be significant, but are tricky to predict. What's much easier to predict are the impacts of those areas of Africa and South America where China is now the main overseas investor.
Yes... in so far as we can get any real idea of what's going on in China's economy, they appear to be heading for a crash at least on the kind of scale of what the West went through in 2008.
And the really interesting questions that will raise aren't primarily economic, but rather social and political. A few decades of the one-child policy combined with improving life-expectancy has meant that they have an aging population crisis in the pipeline (and starting to materialize) which makes Japan's look tame. They have a policy of turning a blind eye to gender selective abortion which means they have a very, very large number of frustrated, single young men. Said cohort of young men has been brought up with a combination of radical political ideology and ever-rising living standards. What happens when those living standards stop rising could get extremely unpleasant.
China's history would suggest that if it turns violent, it will likely take the form of civil rather than overseas war (China may be generally xenophobic, but over the last few millenia, it has very rarely gone to war outside of its borders). But that's certainly not guaranteed, particularly with the political leadership's attempts to deliberately direct their youth towards hatred of Japan in particular (but also other Asian neighbours).
Yeah... except... over the last few decades, technology advances like this at the cutting edge of racing technology have translated within a few years to increased fuel efficiency and so on in production cars.
Vehicle technology gets driven forward by the people who sink lots of money into vanity projects like this. We all end up benefiting from it.
Yes, there are some versions that can be upgraded to a firmware which (by some reports at least) fixes the problem. And there are others which aren't.
I bought a pair of drives within a month of each other off Amazon. The first came with the non-upgradable firmware. The second came with the fixable version. It really does seem to be pot luck.
I live in mortal terror of the Seagate Squeak. This is an intermittent sound that their 2 and 3 GB Barracudas sometimes start to make after a while, which sounds a little like a bird chirp. It's apparently caused by crap power management on the drive.
There's actually very little information out there on whether or not it is a definitive precursor of drive failure, or just something those drives start to do after a while. However, it's so unsettling that I've ended up pre-emptively replacing two drives in my home PC which developed it.
I've played MMORPGs on and off since 2003. If anything, the trend these days in MMOs in the West is very much against needing the kind of time commitment that was common in the early days of the genre.
In the days before WoW, MMOs generally required a very, very serious investment of time if you really wanted to get much out of them. In Final Fantasy XI, which was (by the most reliable metrics) the most successful pre-WoW MMORPG, simply reaching maximum level would require many months of playtime, most of which was spent grinding (killing enemies over and over again in a repetitive cycle). The end-game content would require many, many consecutive hours spent waiting for rare monsters to spawn. I was working a job with more or less 9-to-5 hours when I played it, which meant I could never get to the top ranks. But for the 18 months or so I played it seriously, it was by far my most time consuming leisure activity (probably peaking at around 30 hours a week).
Part of the reason behind WoW's success was that, by design, it eliminated much of the timesink component that had previously been associated with the genre. The level-up process was pretty fast; weeks rather than months for an average gamer (and probably only days when measured in time actually spent in-game). The days of camping timed monster spawns were largely gone, replaced by "instanced" end-game content that guilds could schedule at will. In theory, the time commitment required fell a lot with WoW - and almost every other global MMORPG since has followed WoW in this streamlining.
Of course, WoW certainly didn't end the "MMOs ate my life" stories. In fact, by opening the genre to a wider audience, it increased their frequency. WoW touched off a very competitive streak in a lot of people; and to be one of the most successful guilds in progress terms, you needed to put in a fairly serious schedule of raids (the instanced end-game dungeons). An average guild schedule would have 4 raids per week of 4 hours each, with a 75% attendance requirement for players. On top of this, most players would need to spend at least a couple more hours making in-game money to finance their raiding activities. And many players would have more than one character. So the time required to play at the high levels was still fairly severe. But at least players had the option of more casual play schedules, while still getting some measure of enjoyment out of the game.
And over the years, Blizzard (and their competitors) have actually worked to blunt the edges of the most punishing raid schedules and have, in essence, throttled access to end-game content so that there's much less point in sinking your whole life into the game. There are generally limits (sometimes hard, sometimes soft) on how much progress players can make in a week. You won't be locked out of the game after a certain period (outside of China, or unless parental controls are enabled), but you will rapidly run into diminishing returns. This holds true across most current MMOs; WoW, Old Republic, Lord of the Rings Online, Final Fantasy 14 and so on. The only possible exception (and I don't play it so I can't say for sure) is Eve Online.
So basically, if you are playing a modern "global" MMORPG and you are pumping your whole life into the game, you are playing it wrong. Of course, some people do still play it this way and some Asian MMORPGs are still designed around older mechanics that make a near-whole-life commitment essential. But the people who pumping their whole life into WoW, or who choose to play those Asian MMOs despite their many shortcomings compared to superior "global" offerings are almost certainly doing so because of other issues in their life rather than the game mechanics.
Actually, shareholders are often quite happy to see down-scaling from an under-performing company. In the West, where we tend to have more activist shareholders these days (in part a reaction to Enron, but also driven by other shareholder movements like the one that ousted Eisner from Disney), Nintendo would be getting a lot of visible pressure right now to shed the loss-making parts of its business.
That would almost inevitably mean the home console hardware.
I don't think that "doing a Sega" is the answer for Nintendo. There's certainly plenty of evidence that it wasn't the answer for Sega themselves.
I think there might, however, be something of a middle way for Nintendo here; but to get to that you've got to look at the company's strengths and weaknesses.
Nintendo is a poor console manufacturer. I don't necessarily mean that it makes poor hardware (though the Wii-U would seem to imply their powers here are in decline). Rather, I mean that they are poor at doing the other things that a console manufacturer needs to do. They are terrible at building industry links; while you can blame the lack of third party support for the Wii-U on the poor installed base. But the Wii? With its vast installed base? That was almost entirely because Nintendo are just plain nasty to deal with for other parties. Their licensing fees are high, their certification process is difficult (and often ineffective) and they don't make life easy for people they as in competition with their own first party titles.
Nintendo is a middling games developer. They do have some valuable franchises, but with the exception of Pokemon (which bizarely remains a handheld-only experience), these have a fairly narrow appeal. And contrary to popular belief, that narrow appeal isn't aimed at kids; it's more at the jaded 40-ish "ex-gamer" market (a market which does include a lot of game-reviewers). However, in many genres, their games are no longer really top of their field (hate to break it to you, but Mario Galaxy 2 isn't a patch on Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time). Without the benefit of being "the only thing on their platform worth playing", I'm not sure that Nintendo games would be all that successful commercially (the company has almost certainly lost a lot of money on Mario 3d World in the last couple of months).
What Nintendo are extremely good at is making toys; hardly surprising as they've been making toys for much longer than consoles or games for them. Their biggest successes - the Wii Mote and the handful of titles that accompanied it, the 3DS stylus, the odd peripherals they used to do back in the Gamecube generation - have basically been toys. Fun in short doses, able to be sold with a high mark-up and with a short-lived mass appeal. When they deviated from this with the Wii-U gamepad (which is absolutely not a toy), they went horribly wrong.
So perhaps the future for Nintendo is to work with platform holders (one or more of MS, Sony and Valve) to develop a series of mini platform-within-a-platform experiences. Relatively small scale agglomerations of a handful of games based around quirky and different toy-like peripherals.
By the end of the Wii's lifespan, everybody was heartily sick of motion controls (the Wii was wildly popular for its first 2-3 years then essentially stopped making money). But a shorter-lived, cheaper mini-platform based around the Wii-mote technology, compatible with both the 360 and the PS3? That might have been a more appealing proposition.
PS4 plays DVDs just fine (though I preferred the UI for DVD and BD playback on the PS3). Might want to check the validity of your FUD before you deploy it in public.
Except the 3DS sales have also had to be revised down from forecasts. Not by as much as the Wii-U's in percentage terms, but still by around a third. Plus 3DS hardware, even though it's now back to a profit on each sale, is bringing in nothing like the margin per unit Nintendo has historically been able to reap. Worse, the 3DS's sales have trended down over Christmas, implying the machine has passed its peak.
Sure, the machine has done fairly well on sales, but it is very much the "new PSP" rather than the "new DS". As in, a machine that sells pretty well all things considered (the PSP sold on a par with some of Nintendo's handhelds, though not the DS), but is very much dependent upon Japan for that success, with the rest of the world moving on from it quite quickly. That's ok (Sony would be delighted if the Vita were doing as well), but it's not giving Nintendo a financial replacement for the old DS's mega-success.
Perhaps more worryingly for them, a number of third party developers targeted at the 3DS have been finding life tough recently (the Rune Factory developer went under not long ago). The platform's wider eco-system is definitely losing out to a mixture of smartphones/tablets, the home consoles and even PC.
I've had similar experiences in the past, though I'd say it's specifically Japanese. I think a large part of the problem stems from how they teach English in their schools - it's actually compulsory right through to 18 (for those who stay in education that long) but is taught like Western schools teach Latin (ie. as an intellectual and linguistic exercise, not as a living, spoken language). I suspect that plays a big role in the decline of Japanese global competitiveness when compared to other East Asian societies (which teach English "normally").
On being unaware of Western trends - yes, that's very much true. It runs through a lot of their game developers too. Perhaps the worst example is Polyphony Digital, who when Gran Turismo 5 was nearing release confessed that nobody in the development team had played the Forza games (their biggest rivals). As a result, Gran Turismo 5 ends up feeling horribly dated in comparision to Forza 3, let alone 4 (even if it does have a bigger car list) and Forza 4 ends up becomig the de facto standard for console racing games. Even when Turn10 (the Forza developer) dropped the ball horribly with Forza 5, Polyphony still refused to learn from their mistakes and completely missed the opportunity to close the gap with Gran Turismo 6 by picking up a few key player-convenience features from the rival series.
The working-with-third-parties issue is, I think, more Nintendo-specific (Sony are quite good at it). Nintendo's arrogance in dealing with third party developers is legendary and you will certainly find many people in the industry who will privately confess that their feelings for the company verge on hatred. If they'd kept better relationships with third parties like Squaresoft, they could have done a lot to prevent the original Playstation from ever getting a serious toe in the market. I think part of the problem for Nintendo is that because their business model is so heavily built around games development (a more marginal activity for Sony and Microsoft), they forever see their third party developers more as rivals and partners (and love to mess them around via certification processes etc). If they can't figure out a way to square that circle, then they'd be best splitting the hardware (or software) business off entirely into a separate corporate entity.
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I played World of Warcraft on and off for a few years. I was a pretty hardcore player from the launch of Burning Crusade through to near the end of Lich King and came back casual for a while for late Cataclysm and early Pandaria. I know the game pretty well and have friends who still play it.
So I can say with confidence that you would be absolutely mad to pay for a boost up to level 90 with prices like that (and if you are a new player, mad to pay at all).
There are two types of people now who might be starting out at level 1; new (or returning-after-a-gap-of-years) players starting their first characters, or veterans levelling an "alt" (a secondary - or indeed tertiary or beyond - character).
If you are a new player, then going through the level-up process is important and you should not skip it. First of all, this is where you learn how to play your character. Most end-game content involves group-play and if you have a brand new player at the level cap staring at a hotbar full of unfamiliar abilities, it will be a long time before you are actually competent enough to play alongside others. The level-up process, during which you are introduced to abilities one or two at a time, takes you at least part of the way along that learning curve for your character. It also exposes you to a lot of the game's lore, if that's your bag (I always found WoW's lore a bit boring and juvenile, but some people like it).
And if you're a veteran player, then there are lots and lots of things you can do to accelerate the level-up process for an alt without handing over real-money. I levelled up three alts while never taking them out of "rested" state (meaning they were getting double xp from kills). Heirlooms allow you to boost the rate of xp gain even faster, to the point where 1-80, by the launch of Pandaria, was just stupidly fast. I doubt even a brand new character takes over 100 hours of game time (or indeed, anything like it). Alts certainly take much less.
So yeah, I can't imagine Blizzard would have too many takers for this. Or at least, I hope they won't.
Oh dear...
The point about France was regarding the fact that the country has an official regulator for its language. A regulator which has quasi-legal (though thankfully no longer legal) powers to prohibit the use of languages other than French in public communications in France.
The blasphemy laws point has been an active point of debate in many EU countries over the last few years - ever since the mohammed-cartoons controversy. There was a major debate in the UK around the Racial and Religous Hatred Act 2006, which, in its original form, would effectively have criminalised any speech that offended somebody on religious grounds. Happily, the bill was amended (against the Government's wishes) as it went through Parliament and ended up somewhat diluted; though it still arguably has a chilling effect. There are still active campaigns by religious groups (primarily though not exclusively Islamic) for legislation that would duplicate the intention of the original bill.
The last time Germany had the presidency of the EU in 2007, it used that power to ensure the Commission (a terrifyingly unaccountable organisation) began the process of introducing legislation that would have effectively made Germany's censorship of video-game content mandatory Europe-wide. Happily, the clock ran out on it and the Portuguese presidency which followed was, depending on who you listen to, either more liberal-minded or more distracted by the looming economic crisis, so the whole thing dropped. Germany doesn't get another Presidency until 2020, but the smart money would be on them trying again - or leaning on another country to try again. Particularly if the Eurozone financial crisis does blow over, allowing social issues like this to return to the prominence they had in the middle part of the last decade.
I'm extremely familiar with the workings of EU institutions and, indeed, have spent time working in Brussels. They do have some positives and produce the occasional outbreak of common sense, but if you wish to delude yourself that they are perfect - or even more good than bad - then that's your mistake.
Another person making a snarky comment about Atlas Shrugged while clearly never having read it.
John Galt is a major proponent of the gold standard. As in, seriously major. It's one of the main economic themes of the book. Bitcoin would have horrified him (had he been real).
Atlas Shrugged may not be "right", but it is much harder to dismiss than the average college undergrad leftie assumes.
Actually, we're generally much more prone to censorship here in Europe. Many of the countries in the EU have hang-ups on particular issues for historical reasons (eg. Germany on Nazi imagery and violence, France on the use of other languages). Many countries are also developing exciting new hang-ups and things they can censor, driven mainly by the three prongs of the Islamic far-right (pushing hard for new blasphemy laws), the authoritarian left (in thrall to both multiculturalism and radical feminism, both of which depend upon censorship) and an overbearing security culture (well... see pretty much 50% of slashdot's front page stories). And the general approach taken by the EU is to adopt the most draconian elements of each member nation's policies. If we get through the next German presidency of the EU without its ridiculous censorship standards being forced on the whole of Europe, we shall be extremely lucky.
Individuals and corporates in the US certainly practice self-censorship. But you are much more likely to encounter state-censorship in Europe - and it's getting more likely all the time.
But we're generally ok with swearing. So it's all absolutely fine.
Everybody's blaming Germany, but the nature of the content that was actually cut might imply that the cause is elsewhere. Not that I want for a moment to excuse Germany's censorship policies, which are ludicrous.
But the cut content is basically - anal probe aside - mostly abortion related. The EU still contains some very, very Catholic countries. In Spain in particular, it's a real no-go topic. Also in the Republic of Ireland and Poland to some degree (though less so there than it would have been a couple of years ago). It's quite possible the EU version was censored due to fears about reaction in one or more of those countries.
What we have in a lot of cities - and London is an absolute exemplar of this (New York isn't quite as bad) - is a model of urban development which, through pricing and housing availability, forces most people to live in suburbs but commute to work in the city centre.
There are big, big drawbacks to that model.
First, your average citizen wastes a lot of time commuting. While travel-time isn't necessarily dead time in either productivity or leisure terms, the nature of commuter mass-transit makes it worse than most other types of journeys. People are crammed into high density vehicles, may not have a seat and may need to make frequent changes of bus/train. It's not enjoyable and it's very hard to be productive while going through it.
Second, it places huge strains on your transport networks. It channels most of your commuter traffic into two huge peaks (usually a very sharp morning peak and a longer but still significant evening peak). Road travel generally just can't cope with the resultant congestion. Railways (including underground and light rail) are more effective at moving large numbers of people but have very high fixed infrastructure costs (a mile of railway costs many times more per annum to maintain than a mile of road), meaning they inevitably require large taxpayer subsidies. Worse still, because of the "peaky" nature of commuter traffic, you have to spec your mass-transit systems to handle the peaks and accept that they'll be pulling around mostly fresh air for at least 18 hours every day.
And all of that congestion? Pretty terrible for the environment. High carbon emissions and, if you're relying on cars, buses or diesel trains, horrible for air quality as well.
Ideally, you want people to live close to their workplaces. Some cities are better at that than others - ironically, often those which have evolved without much assistance from urban-planners (who historically have loved to neatly segment industrial, commercial and residential districts apart - a trend that SimCity hardly helped reduce).
So google-buses aren't necessarily fantastic either, if you're moving people a long distance to an out-of-town campus. They're probably better than the city-centre model, because their traffic is more likely to be contra-flow. But ideally, you might have small-to-medium sized business conglomerations around a city, each with appropriate housing nearby.
Pretty much any genre aside from party games is perfectly fine on the PC. And party-games is a genre that had a brief spike in popularity on the Wii but is now, mercifully, consigned back to oblivion. Everything else - from platformers to fighting games (ugh) to RPGs to shooters is perfectly fine on the PC. Almost all of them are fine on a home console (RTSes still don't quite work there and fpses will never be quite as good as on mouse and keyboard). Most are also fine on a Vita and, to a lesser extent, a 3DS.
The mobile platforms are not good for some types of game - yes. Touchscreen controls are poor for many types of game, in fact. But this isn't putting off mobile developers; if anything, the problem for iOS and Android is that the barriers to entry are too low. Quality indie games have a much better chance of success on Steam or the PSN, where they have to meet a certain quality filter for release.
I fundamentally don't buy into the idea that we need even more startups and indie-studios. Sure, the occasional gem comes from the indies (and thanks to the likes of Steam and the PSN, they tend to get the recognition and success they deserve), but mostly, we just get the kind of crud that jams up the stores on the mobile marketplaces. The best games, like it or not, continue to come from the mid-sized and major studios.
On app-lite and app-purchase models, I have no complaints. Rovio's means of selling Angry Birds is absolutely fine with me (and I adore Bad Piggies). But if you think that's still how most games on the mobile stores are pushed these days, you're at least 18 months behind the times. Rovio are, sad to say, an echo of an older, better time for mobile gaming (yes, this world moves fast).
And if you look around for other examples of games crippled by pay-to-win, they are legion. Dungeon Siege is just a recent high-profile example. The problem is that game mechanics are being actively stripped out in favour of mechanisms designed to get the player to pay more and more.
In the old days of arcade games, difficulty levels would be set very high so that players would have to put in more coins. Harsh? Yes, absolutely. But a skilled player could still go a long time off a single coin. The free to play mobile (and facebook) model these days has become one where, figuratively Pac-Man will DEFINITELY die after 15 seconds unless you put another coin in - but so long as you keep feeding those coins in, he's permanently under a power-pill effect.
I'm really not sure where you're going here - and I've lost track of what the first point you're trying to make is. With the days of Wii-shovelware behind us, there aren't really any party game developers other than Nintendo in the business any more anyway. I know full well that Nintendo is a horrible company to work with; they are certainly no more virtuous than Sony and MS (and in some respects less so) - but they always benefit from a "sympathy for the underdog" factor.
And no, demo + purchase is not the same as what's happening in mobile gaming now - if you think it is, then I can only suspect you haven't followed what's been happening on the mobile platforms at all.
Demo + Purchase is an old and established way of selling games. You give the customer a bit of it free, if they like it, they make a one-time purchase and buy the rest. If they don't, they move on. It's not a perfect system (I can think of games whose first levels - the bit used in the demo - have been far better than the rest of the game), but it is reasonably honest.
The mobile "free to pay/pay-to-win" and "paywall" models are very different. You can, in principle, play the whole game for free. But you will be forced to "grind" sections of the game for hours, or simply wait with the game idle for hours or even days between taking actions. At any time, you can spend money to speed things up. But you can never pay a fixed sum and "own" the game. There's always another paywall along in a few minutes.
Worse, any semblance of game design goes out the window. These games aren't designed to reward skill - quite the opposite. The last thing the developers want is for a skilled player to encounter the paywall less frequently. Rather, they are designed to form a direct correlation between success in the game and the amount of money you spend. More information and analysis is here.
Sorry, that should have been "with the exception of Mortal Kombat".
Fighting games make it to PC pretty well, by and large. Certainly, the big titles (with the exception of Street Fighter) do. Party games tend to be limited to the Nintendo platforms. If you want them, go there. Most people are happy without them.
By "paywalled", I meant pay-to-win, or free-to-start-playing-but-pay-through-the-nose-if-you-want-to-play-for-more-than-ten-minutes. See the recent Dungeon Keeper "remake" (or rather, butchery) for mobiles - and many other examples as well.
I'd agree on Papers Please. It's absolutely no fun whatsoever, but it is also an absolutely fascinating experience. It has a real moral depth and complexity that really does show up how shallow the morality systems in the average Bioware RPG are.
It's slightly more traditionally game-like, but if you liked Papers Please, I'd urge you to try The Banner Saga. It does a similar thing about forcing the player to make difficult and morally ambiguous decisions without clear-cut consequences. Plus it has vikings, which is always a plus.
I disagree, however, on Gone Home. When I was in my first year at university, one of the guys on my hall was a member of a film club. One night, I got dragged along to see the film that they'd been working on for the last six months. I will never forgive him for the 90 minutes of my life spent watching people walking around slowly without saying anything and staring meaningfully at loaves of bread in a baker's window. Gone Home struck me as a similarly undergraduate pile of hipster rubbish.
Yes, I'd agree with that. AC4 would have been better still as a pure "pirate" game, without the Assassin's Creed trappings. The fact that you still have a stealth-based combat system at the heart of the game feels odd, when something a bit more swashbuckling would fit the bill better. And yes, the modern-day meta-story needs to die. It was always boring in the earlier AC games but really is outstaying its welcome now.
I own pretty much every gaming platform around (other than an Android platform, I suppose) and tend to manage to play a fairly good selection of releases.
The big pattern over much of 2013 for me was my declining use of the old "home" consoles, edged out by the PC and Vita. The PS3 still got some occasional use, spurred by a few decent late-cycle exclusives (Ni No Kuni, Disgaea 2 and so on), but the last game I put any serious time into on the 360 was Forza Horizon, way back at the end of 2012. MS really let the 360 twist in the wind for the final 12 months before it got replaced. I probably used the 360 more than the PS3 for most of its cycle (it was generally better for multiplatform games), but I felt few regrets when I traded it in against a new Xbox One the other week, while I couldn't yet imagine trading in my PS3.
The growth of importance of PC gaming has been a real trend recently. For much of the last console cycle, "multi-platform" meant "360 and PS3". These days, it's a brave developer who doesn't include the PC in their line-up. This was also, I suppose, a big part of the reason behind the decline in my use of the 360. It may have been better than the PS3 for most multiplatform games, but it had no chance against a modern gaming PC. On the PC, I've mostly been playing Borderlands 2, Final Fantasy 14 and I still go back for the odd blast of the superb Rayman Legends.
The Vita, for me, is the best little console that nobody owns and I regard its lack of success as a great shame. There are some fantastic games on it and I've put a lot of time into Persona 4: The Golden, Dragon's Crown, Soul Sacrifice and the many, many smaller and indie titles on the platform. The 3DS, meanwhile, I still find a hard platform to love, though I did quite enjoy Bravely Default until its later sections.
I now own both a PS4 and Xbox One. Neither has really produced a game to wow me yet - but then, that goes with the territory for early adopters. Killzone: Shadow Fall on the PS4 is much better than I had expected from previous Killzone games (having some fairly open levels and a better graphical style). I've also been enjoying Assassin's Creed 4 on the PS4 (more games need sea shanties). On the Xbox One, Dead Rising 3 is fairly good and Forza 5 has mostly been fixed after a disaster of a launch. Other than that, both platforms are currently fairly barren for traditional games - though Xbox Fitness is really impressive if you like that kind of thing (I do).
At least the PS4 and the Xbox One have the excuse of being new. The Wii-U remains a crushingly poor platform, with tired Nintendo exclusives being the only real releases of note. Zelda: Wind Waker looks fine at first - but then I remembered just how tedious I found it the first time around. Super Mario World 3d has some good moments, but is spoiled by poor 3d controls and level design that gets quite repetitive in the later stages.
And on iOS... ugh. I've almost entirely stopped using the iPad for gaming. I still fire it up for the odd session on a plane or train, but its games these days seem to split between paywalled crudware (generally not even games by any reasonable definition) and worthy-but-slightly-lacking ports of games better played on PC, like XCom and Baldur's Gate.
The financial shocks would be felt in every corner of the world. The impacts on Europe and the US would be significant, but are tricky to predict. What's much easier to predict are the impacts of those areas of Africa and South America where China is now the main overseas investor.
Total collapse.
Yes... in so far as we can get any real idea of what's going on in China's economy, they appear to be heading for a crash at least on the kind of scale of what the West went through in 2008.
And the really interesting questions that will raise aren't primarily economic, but rather social and political. A few decades of the one-child policy combined with improving life-expectancy has meant that they have an aging population crisis in the pipeline (and starting to materialize) which makes Japan's look tame. They have a policy of turning a blind eye to gender selective abortion which means they have a very, very large number of frustrated, single young men. Said cohort of young men has been brought up with a combination of radical political ideology and ever-rising living standards. What happens when those living standards stop rising could get extremely unpleasant.
China's history would suggest that if it turns violent, it will likely take the form of civil rather than overseas war (China may be generally xenophobic, but over the last few millenia, it has very rarely gone to war outside of its borders). But that's certainly not guaranteed, particularly with the political leadership's attempts to deliberately direct their youth towards hatred of Japan in particular (but also other Asian neighbours).
Yeah... except... over the last few decades, technology advances like this at the cutting edge of racing technology have translated within a few years to increased fuel efficiency and so on in production cars.
Vehicle technology gets driven forward by the people who sink lots of money into vanity projects like this. We all end up benefiting from it.
Yes, there are some versions that can be upgraded to a firmware which (by some reports at least) fixes the problem. And there are others which aren't.
I bought a pair of drives within a month of each other off Amazon. The first came with the non-upgradable firmware. The second came with the fixable version. It really does seem to be pot luck.
I live in mortal terror of the Seagate Squeak. This is an intermittent sound that their 2 and 3 GB Barracudas sometimes start to make after a while, which sounds a little like a bird chirp. It's apparently caused by crap power management on the drive.
There's actually very little information out there on whether or not it is a definitive precursor of drive failure, or just something those drives start to do after a while. However, it's so unsettling that I've ended up pre-emptively replacing two drives in my home PC which developed it.
I've played MMORPGs on and off since 2003. If anything, the trend these days in MMOs in the West is very much against needing the kind of time commitment that was common in the early days of the genre.
In the days before WoW, MMOs generally required a very, very serious investment of time if you really wanted to get much out of them. In Final Fantasy XI, which was (by the most reliable metrics) the most successful pre-WoW MMORPG, simply reaching maximum level would require many months of playtime, most of which was spent grinding (killing enemies over and over again in a repetitive cycle). The end-game content would require many, many consecutive hours spent waiting for rare monsters to spawn. I was working a job with more or less 9-to-5 hours when I played it, which meant I could never get to the top ranks. But for the 18 months or so I played it seriously, it was by far my most time consuming leisure activity (probably peaking at around 30 hours a week).
Part of the reason behind WoW's success was that, by design, it eliminated much of the timesink component that had previously been associated with the genre. The level-up process was pretty fast; weeks rather than months for an average gamer (and probably only days when measured in time actually spent in-game). The days of camping timed monster spawns were largely gone, replaced by "instanced" end-game content that guilds could schedule at will. In theory, the time commitment required fell a lot with WoW - and almost every other global MMORPG since has followed WoW in this streamlining.
Of course, WoW certainly didn't end the "MMOs ate my life" stories. In fact, by opening the genre to a wider audience, it increased their frequency. WoW touched off a very competitive streak in a lot of people; and to be one of the most successful guilds in progress terms, you needed to put in a fairly serious schedule of raids (the instanced end-game dungeons). An average guild schedule would have 4 raids per week of 4 hours each, with a 75% attendance requirement for players. On top of this, most players would need to spend at least a couple more hours making in-game money to finance their raiding activities. And many players would have more than one character. So the time required to play at the high levels was still fairly severe. But at least players had the option of more casual play schedules, while still getting some measure of enjoyment out of the game.
And over the years, Blizzard (and their competitors) have actually worked to blunt the edges of the most punishing raid schedules and have, in essence, throttled access to end-game content so that there's much less point in sinking your whole life into the game. There are generally limits (sometimes hard, sometimes soft) on how much progress players can make in a week. You won't be locked out of the game after a certain period (outside of China, or unless parental controls are enabled), but you will rapidly run into diminishing returns. This holds true across most current MMOs; WoW, Old Republic, Lord of the Rings Online, Final Fantasy 14 and so on. The only possible exception (and I don't play it so I can't say for sure) is Eve Online.
So basically, if you are playing a modern "global" MMORPG and you are pumping your whole life into the game, you are playing it wrong. Of course, some people do still play it this way and some Asian MMORPGs are still designed around older mechanics that make a near-whole-life commitment essential. But the people who pumping their whole life into WoW, or who choose to play those Asian MMOs despite their many shortcomings compared to superior "global" offerings are almost certainly doing so because of other issues in their life rather than the game mechanics.
Actually, shareholders are often quite happy to see down-scaling from an under-performing company. In the West, where we tend to have more activist shareholders these days (in part a reaction to Enron, but also driven by other shareholder movements like the one that ousted Eisner from Disney), Nintendo would be getting a lot of visible pressure right now to shed the loss-making parts of its business.
That would almost inevitably mean the home console hardware.
Want to lobby Nintendo for DVD playback?
Or region unlocking?
I don't think that "doing a Sega" is the answer for Nintendo. There's certainly plenty of evidence that it wasn't the answer for Sega themselves.
I think there might, however, be something of a middle way for Nintendo here; but to get to that you've got to look at the company's strengths and weaknesses.
Nintendo is a poor console manufacturer. I don't necessarily mean that it makes poor hardware (though the Wii-U would seem to imply their powers here are in decline). Rather, I mean that they are poor at doing the other things that a console manufacturer needs to do. They are terrible at building industry links; while you can blame the lack of third party support for the Wii-U on the poor installed base. But the Wii? With its vast installed base? That was almost entirely because Nintendo are just plain nasty to deal with for other parties. Their licensing fees are high, their certification process is difficult (and often ineffective) and they don't make life easy for people they as in competition with their own first party titles.
Nintendo is a middling games developer. They do have some valuable franchises, but with the exception of Pokemon (which bizarely remains a handheld-only experience), these have a fairly narrow appeal. And contrary to popular belief, that narrow appeal isn't aimed at kids; it's more at the jaded 40-ish "ex-gamer" market (a market which does include a lot of game-reviewers). However, in many genres, their games are no longer really top of their field (hate to break it to you, but Mario Galaxy 2 isn't a patch on Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time). Without the benefit of being "the only thing on their platform worth playing", I'm not sure that Nintendo games would be all that successful commercially (the company has almost certainly lost a lot of money on Mario 3d World in the last couple of months).
What Nintendo are extremely good at is making toys; hardly surprising as they've been making toys for much longer than consoles or games for them. Their biggest successes - the Wii Mote and the handful of titles that accompanied it, the 3DS stylus, the odd peripherals they used to do back in the Gamecube generation - have basically been toys. Fun in short doses, able to be sold with a high mark-up and with a short-lived mass appeal. When they deviated from this with the Wii-U gamepad (which is absolutely not a toy), they went horribly wrong.
So perhaps the future for Nintendo is to work with platform holders (one or more of MS, Sony and Valve) to develop a series of mini platform-within-a-platform experiences. Relatively small scale agglomerations of a handful of games based around quirky and different toy-like peripherals.
By the end of the Wii's lifespan, everybody was heartily sick of motion controls (the Wii was wildly popular for its first 2-3 years then essentially stopped making money). But a shorter-lived, cheaper mini-platform based around the Wii-mote technology, compatible with both the 360 and the PS3? That might have been a more appealing proposition.
PS4 plays DVDs just fine (though I preferred the UI for DVD and BD playback on the PS3). Might want to check the validity of your FUD before you deploy it in public.
Except the 3DS sales have also had to be revised down from forecasts. Not by as much as the Wii-U's in percentage terms, but still by around a third. Plus 3DS hardware, even though it's now back to a profit on each sale, is bringing in nothing like the margin per unit Nintendo has historically been able to reap. Worse, the 3DS's sales have trended down over Christmas, implying the machine has passed its peak.
Sure, the machine has done fairly well on sales, but it is very much the "new PSP" rather than the "new DS". As in, a machine that sells pretty well all things considered (the PSP sold on a par with some of Nintendo's handhelds, though not the DS), but is very much dependent upon Japan for that success, with the rest of the world moving on from it quite quickly. That's ok (Sony would be delighted if the Vita were doing as well), but it's not giving Nintendo a financial replacement for the old DS's mega-success.
Perhaps more worryingly for them, a number of third party developers targeted at the 3DS have been finding life tough recently (the Rune Factory developer went under not long ago). The platform's wider eco-system is definitely losing out to a mixture of smartphones/tablets, the home consoles and even PC.
I've had similar experiences in the past, though I'd say it's specifically Japanese. I think a large part of the problem stems from how they teach English in their schools - it's actually compulsory right through to 18 (for those who stay in education that long) but is taught like Western schools teach Latin (ie. as an intellectual and linguistic exercise, not as a living, spoken language). I suspect that plays a big role in the decline of Japanese global competitiveness when compared to other East Asian societies (which teach English "normally").
On being unaware of Western trends - yes, that's very much true. It runs through a lot of their game developers too. Perhaps the worst example is Polyphony Digital, who when Gran Turismo 5 was nearing release confessed that nobody in the development team had played the Forza games (their biggest rivals). As a result, Gran Turismo 5 ends up feeling horribly dated in comparision to Forza 3, let alone 4 (even if it does have a bigger car list) and Forza 4 ends up becomig the de facto standard for console racing games. Even when Turn10 (the Forza developer) dropped the ball horribly with Forza 5, Polyphony still refused to learn from their mistakes and completely missed the opportunity to close the gap with Gran Turismo 6 by picking up a few key player-convenience features from the rival series.
The working-with-third-parties issue is, I think, more Nintendo-specific (Sony are quite good at it). Nintendo's arrogance in dealing with third party developers is legendary and you will certainly find many people in the industry who will privately confess that their feelings for the company verge on hatred. If they'd kept better relationships with third parties like Squaresoft, they could have done a lot to prevent the original Playstation from ever getting a serious toe in the market. I think part of the problem for Nintendo is that because their business model is so heavily built around games development (a more marginal activity for Sony and Microsoft), they forever see their third party developers more as rivals and partners (and love to mess them around via certification processes etc). If they can't figure out a way to square that circle, then they'd be best splitting the hardware (or software) business off entirely into a separate corporate entity.