DN3D came out when I was in my late teens, about 18 months before I went off to university and got a net connection good enough for online gaming. At the time, it was DN3D, rather than Quake, that was the LAN multiplayer game of choice for my friends and I.
Partly that was because of the actual gameplay. While Quake was a better twitch-shooter, DN3D had a real, nasty, sneaky dimension to its multiplayer. You could use the pipebombs and holoduke in particular to make traps for opponents that were just like something out of Spy vs Spy. Much more potential for hilarity than a simple rocket to the face.
But it was also the ease of level creation. Once we were bored of the levels that came with the game, it was trivially easy to fire up the bundled level editor and make new maps. We'd been doing that before with Doom and, if anything, despite having "2.5d" levels (as opposed to Doom's straightforward "2d" levels), DN3D level creation was even easier due to the quality of the tool. By contrast, creating "3d" Quake levels was massively more difficult and time consuming.
Once I went to University, of course, it became much easier to download new maps from the internet and the superior network infrastructure underpinning Quakeworld, Quake 2 and eventually Half-Life multiplayer moved my gaming in that direction instead.
Steam doesn't actually require an "always on" net connection. The offline mode "just works" these days (I know this having been dependant on it for a couple of weeks when I moved house last year). Offline mode got a bad rep in Steam's early years, because back then it would usually either just plain "not work", or work for a day or two and then demand to see a connection. It's not like that any more.
There are a small number of games sold over Steam that contain "always on" third party DRM, because the game's publisher insisted on having DRM above and beyond that built into Steam. Any such requirement is identified on the game's info page alongside the system requirements. There aren't too many of these; Ubisoft, which was the main publisher behind this, has actually caved in and removed it from a good number of games.
A few of the "vintage" games sold through Steam, such as the old id titles are actually DRM free - you can copy the games out of your Steam folder and launch them without Steam running if you want.
Also, worth clarifying your point on Steam bans. There are two types of ban here. Simple "bad behaviour" such as being a complete cock to other players, trolling the forums, cheating in online multiplayer etc will not lose you access to your games. It may lose you the ability to access the online modes of certain games and in others you may be restricted to playing alongside people who have engaged in similar behaviours. I cannot see any problem with this; it's actually good for legitimate players to be protected from the arseholes.
The second and more draconian level of ban does lose you access to your games, but this is reserved for activities such as credit card fraud or scamming/phishing other Steam users. There are occasional false positives here (eg. if somebody has an unexpected problem with their credit card at the bank's end) and Valve has a reputation for being slow to act on these, so I'm not trying to absolve Valve from blame completely. But you will not lose access to your games (barring some multiplayer modes) for simple "lame behaviour".
Anybody have any info on the All Pakistan CD, DVD, Audio Casette Traders and Manufacturers Association? If I google it, all I get are links to different versions of this story. If a shopkeeper or group of shopkeepers decide they don't want to stock particular titles, that's a commercial decision they are perfectly entitled to take and - if they are part of a competitive marketplace and have competition who might decide differently - it doesn't really raise any freedom or censorship issues. Certainly, supermarkets in the US/UK have decided at times not to stock games which have the highest age-ratings, because they don't fit with their brand image or perceived clientelle. It doesn't matter, because you can still get the games from Amazon or another high-street retailer.
If, on the other hand, this Association is some kind of Government standards-body, or if it's a trade-association which you have to be a member of if you want to sell games (giving it genuine market-control) then that's more serious.
And as an aside, I'd note that plenty of games have sold well in the US despite having the Americans as either morally ambiguous or outright baddies (indeed, not to defend Call of Duty, but most of its games fall into the first of those categories) - and that here in the UK, being made into the baddies in games and films is pretty much standard fare.
I've not understood MS's strategy around gaming for years now. Don't get me wrong, I owned an original Xbox and liked it, I own a 360 now and like it a lot - but I've never understood why MS would choose to move into the console market.
I'd have thought that there's much more of an incentive for them to make Windows work as a gaming platform. After all, what's one of the biggest reasons that people shy away from switching OSes? The games. Running modern commercial games consistently and in a relatively hassle-free manner is - and has for quite a long time - been one of the things you can do on Windows that you just can't do on other OSes.
So they launch the original Xbox which is basically - at launch at least - the console that runs games you'd otherwise have expected to be focussed on the PC (Halo and Knights of the Old Republic were both from genres that the PC utterly dominated at the time). Then the 360 comes along and - for quite a long time - if the only reason you stick with Windows is gaming... then why not just buy a 360?
And then as we get to the late-cycle point where PC gaming really starts to outstrip what the consoles can do (even on a bargain-bucket PC), they go and foul it all up with Windows 8.
It's like MS is determined to take one of its biggest advantages in the OS market and hammer it into oblivion.
They make periodic efforts to "get serious" about the PC as a gaming platform, but these tend to be inconsistent, badly thought through and horribly unsuccessful. Games for Windows Live, anybody? With Valve looking at the PC gaming market in a distinctly predatory manner, MS should be seriously worried.
And while it's not such a major matter, they've also made some really odd choices with their internally developed games. First they shut down the Flight Simulator series - a brand with immense loyalty from its enthusiast following - abandoning the market to competitors. Then they try to come back with Flight - a free-to-play-pay-to-actually-do-anything monstrosity that discards the series's historic strengths.
Selling off their entertainment division? At the point where they're finally making a profit from console gaming? It would fit...
This is a good thing. By all accounts, the game is awful. However, it is also squarely the kind of game that wouldn't have been given a 15 rating under the old system (and hence would have been denied release). So it's an indication that the new 18 rating is an actual 18 rating, rather than an excuse to just mark games that would previously have been 15s even more harshly, while still keeping many games out of the country.
Actually, I think while there could be a wide range of factors behind the problems, there are three big ones:
1) The rise in development costs. Watch the credits for a game released in the last year or two. Compare them with the credits for a PS2 era game. Then with an even older game. There are a lot more names there these days. If you want to look at all competitive in the mainstream commercial market, you have to invest a hell of a lot in development. I remember when Wing Commander 3 was launched, people cooed over its $4 million budget (a lot of which had gone on paying its acting cast). £4 million doesn't buy you much in games development terms today.
2) Prices have fallen in real terms. When my parents moved house a couple of years ago, I cleared out a load of my old stuff from their attic, including a load of 90s video games - many of which still had their price tags on. Games like X-Wing and Gunship 2000 - for the PC, not consoles (so no licence fee to be factored into the price) - were sold for 45GBP. You wouldn't pay that for a PC game even in a high street store these days. On Steam, you very rarely pay beyond 30GBP even for a brand new title. Factor in inflation and that's a huge real-terms price cut for the average game.
Now, those two themselves wouldn't be fatal - they were true to an extent during the PS2 era. But there's a third aggravating factor now:
3) The market isn't growing at the speed it once was. From the launch of the original Playstation through to around 2008 or so, the gamer demographic went through a massive expansion, breaking comprehensively out of the kids-and-nerds niche (and expanding within that niche as well). That expansion hasn't quite stopped now, but it has slowed considerably. For a moment it looked as though the original Wii might pressage a further quantum shift in the size of the gaming demographic, but instead the tide rolled back a bit - many of the non-gamers who bought a Wii reverted to being non-gamers after a couple of weeks.
This slowing in the rate of expansion is probably due to the economy to an extent, but also due to the fact that the low hanging fruit - the people with the capacity to enjoy gaming - has already been largely picked.
Having development costs soaring, prices at the till falling and the market's growth slowing is a recipie for disaster.
There's a lot of Sony-hate swirling around the comments on this story. Believe me, I can understand that. This isn't exactly the most pro-consumer technology ever to have been patented (though as yet, Sony haven't said they intend to actually use the technology).
However, I actually see this as symtomatic of a wider problem for the video games industry; very few people are making money from it. Sony makes some pretty thumping losses these days; their gaming division is one of the better performing parts of the company, but it's still a long way from where it was in the last console generation. Nintendo's making some pretty big losses; it had to overturn a long-held hardware-at-a-profit business model to get any kind of installed base for the 3DS, has had to continue to sell at a loss on the Wii-U and faces an uncertain future of the Wii-U doesn't get traction. MS's situation isn't quite so bad, but its stock price has been flat for a decade and if it had the same currency issues that its Japanese competitors face, then its situation might be just as bad as theirs.
The situation's hardly any better in the land of games development. Big developers like EA struggle to turn a profit despite trying every trick they can think of (day-one DLC, online passes, season passes etc). Their few guaranteed cash-cows like the annualised sports series and modern military shooters are basically the only reason that the more interesting games they put out can continue to appear. Mid-sized shops like THQ which don't have those cash cows are in very unpleasant places indeed. A couple of companies like Zynga and Rovio manage to get-rich-quick on the basis of low-budget titles that strike it lucky with the zeitgeist, but they increasingly look like one-hit wonders. And for every indie studio that produces a hit, there are 99 that produce forgettable garbage before vanishing into obscurity. It's even worse over in Japan, where all but a few of their developers have given up on true global competition, focussing instead on the same domestic kids-and-otaku market that most anime is produced for. Some people are clutching at free-to-play/pay-to-win as a potential solution, but that bubble's already bursting.
And retail? Here in the UK, our biggest specialised retailer (Game) went into administration during 2012. Sure, it got rescued, but it doesn't seem to be doing particularly well since then either. Its most direct competitor (HMV) looks like it won't survive the next few months.
Make no mistake, stuff like this latest Sony patent isn't thought up by plutocrats sipping champagne as they lounge on top of a Scrooge McDuck style lake of gold. These are desperate moves to stay afloat in what's become, over the last 3 years or so, a very unfriendly industry.
People moan about the price of games, but these are, in real terms, substantially lower than they were a couple of decades ago, when development costs were a fraction of what they are today. What I'd actually welcome is a company which is prepared to say: "We won't do any of this evil stuff like anti-resale measures or day-one DLC - but for those games with high development costs, we will accordingly charge a higher price than you've gotten used to paying". The prices of Wii-U games are noticably higher than those for the older platforms - but unfortunately, most of them are very thin pickings compared to other games, or are already available on other platforms with a much lower price.
They might have been ok if they'd started out actually trying to develop the game they ended up releasing. If I remember correctly, KOA:R broke over 1 million sales worldwide - that's the level that a "big budget" release normally requires to break even (though some of the mega-AAA releases now are starting to go higher). However, because they'd originally tried to make it an MMO, they ended up sinking a lot of time, effort and money into material that didn't get released.
Indeed, a quick glance at google shows that the game would have needed 3 million sales to break even. If you're not one of the big names sports series or modern military shooters, your chances of breaking over 3 million are not good. To give some context here - Dark Souls, last time I checked, managed around 2 million sales (possibly a bit more with Steam sales of the PC version added in, but probably still shy of 3 million). It's regarded as a massive, storming success by its publisher. That's a game of somewhat similar scope and genre to KOA:R (though personally, I think Dark Souls is the better game).
I don't think 38 Studios were killed by the game they released, I think they were killed by the money they wasted elsewhere.
Yes, I remember that and it was pretty good. Kind of slipped through the cracks for a lot of people because it appeared for consoles that were just about to be retired and the Xbox version wasn't on the initial back-compatibility list for the 360 (which was a staggering omission).
Yes, that was deeply odd in Starcraft (and is one of the reasons why I never warmed to the game). See, I can understand why you might not need to be able to select many units in some RTSes - the likes of Mech Commander or Dawn of War 2, where the emphasis is on making best use of a small number of units. In fact, if you're playing Dawn of War 2 on anything above Easy difficulty and you find yourself drag-clicking multiple units, you're doing something wrong.
But Starcraft is a "big army" game, particularly if you're playing as Zerg. Now, I know that at the top-tier competitive level, players are using insane amounts of micromanagement. But for your average player working through the singleplayer campaign, having to break armies up into 12 unit parcels in order to move them just felt odd and unnatural.
Quite possibly a side effect of the rushed development. As in, they might have intended to add a load of plot and dialogue about finding that skeleton and taking it to the NPC and might have put the basic triggers for the quest in place, but never actually had the time to put the flesh on the bones (no pun intended).
Right back to their earliest days, there have been odd little signposts here and there in Bioware games where you can see where they'd planned at one point to add more content. In most Bioware games, when you come across these, you treat it as a fun kind of Easter Egg, speculate briefly about what might have been intended to go there and move on.
But yes, in DA2, it feels like half the game is missing. Only KOTOR2 (which wasn't Bioware anyway) comes even close to that.
It's true for the Amiga version as well. And for the (little remembered) Genesis version. The game's whole UI and menu-bar system is designed around single unit control.
The other odd thing about Dune 2, compared to more modern RTSes, is that the fog of war doesn't get re-covered after being explored once. This was also true for C&C - the modern idea of RTS fog of war didn't get introduced until Warcraft 2, although the much earlier proto-RTS Battletech 2 did something similar, where the player could see all terrain, but could only see enemy units that were in line of sight or sensor range of one of his own.
In C&C multiplayer, of course, dashing a fast unit into the enemy's base early on so that you could see what he was building for the rest of the game was an essential strategy - as was working out which areas around your own base your opponent couldn't see yet. Alternatively, as all of my C&C1 multiplayer was done via LAN or serial cable, you could substitute a sneaky glance over your shoulder at your opponent's screen.
Except as I said before, there's no drag-clicking (or any other form of multiple unit selection). So if you want to send a large group of units across the map, you have to tell each one to move individually. Co-ordinated attacks in the later missions become all but impossible. The AI labours under no such restriction. Dune 2 was a stepping stone towards the modern RTS, C&C was the first true modern RTS.
It's amazing how many people swear blind that Dune 2 had drag-clicking - I suspect most of them are basing their memories on the later remake, Dune 2000, which updated Dune 2 onto the C&C interface (and added multiplayer). But if you look out the original, you'll find the truth - no multiple unit selection and no multiplayer.
Actually, disagree a bit on C&C. The original is a hugely important game. In many ways, it's more the "true" father of the modern RTS than Dune 2. While Dune 2 gets the credit in most accounts, what people forget is that it lacked two absolutely key, defining features of every RTS made since Command & Conquer - drag-click unit selection and multiplayer. Without drag-click selection, Dune 2 became a nightmare to play once your army grew in size beyond a dozen or so units.
However, despite its importance, I don't think C&C has aged all that well. Its left-click interface feels clumsy, unit design and balance are crude and the resource gathering mechanics are poor. It's an interesting historical artifact, but if you want to play an old-school RTS, then Starcraft and Total Annihilation are both better propositions.
Also worth bearing in mind that Westwood weren't exactly innocent victims in the C&C story. They did just as much as EA, if not more, to drive the franchise into the ground. C&C was revolutionary, Red Alert was fun but felt like treading water, while C&C2 and Red Alert 2 were both dreadful games. Their technology and game mechanics were both utterly obsolete by the time they launched, while the production values of the famous cutscenes had actually fallen since the first generation titles.
Also worth remembering that the (superb) C&C3 was an EA game. C&C4 may have been a train-wreck, but they really managed to do a very successful updating of the franchise with 3.
My big problem with the way they've taken Star Wars from the moment the prequels started to come out is that it stopped being a franchise about a neat dark-ish sci-fi fantasy world and became a story about magical space wizards.
Some of the best Star Wars games ever made (the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games and the original Dark Forces) didn't feature a single lightsabre. Returning to those roots feels like a step in the right direction.
Actually, I'm vaguely optimistic for Dragon Age 3. Some of the early preview stuff and developer interviews make me suspect that they've learned some hard lessons from their last couple of games.
Dragon Age 2 was undeniably a mistake. There was actually some interesting stuff in there (the story had a lot of potential), but it lacked a clear direction guiding the gameplay mechanics and it blatantly needed another 6 months at least of development time to get some additional content (particularly environments) in there.
Then there was Mass Effect 3 - some brilliant moments, but a distinctly underwhelming whole, due to a combination of bad writing at the moments where it really matters and shooter mechanics that aren't robust enough to survive the weight that's placed upon them.
I think and hope that EA realise that they're very close to killing any power left in the Bioware brand. 1 bad game can (and does) happen to any company. 2 bad games in a row starts to look like a trend and makes people nervous. 3 bad games in a row would be fatal. Early indications are that they know they've got to get this one right.
I did a big journal post on my favorite (and least favorite) games of 2012 here. Obviously, not all of the games I liked will be everybody's cup of tea, but there were a couple of absolute stand-out titles, such as Borderlands 2, Farcry 3 and XCom.
Also some crushing disappointments, of course, particularly Mass Effect 3, but that's true of any year.
Oh come on, you're 2 years out of whack here. The current mantra is "console gaming is dying at the hands of tablets/phones/handhelds/PCs/free-to-play/lego (delete as appropriate). We might have missed it at the end of the PS2 era, but that's actually the traditional chorus of the latter part of a console cycle.
If you want to sing a rousing chorus of "PC gaming is dying" then wait until after the launch of the next Sony and MS consoles - everybody else will join in at that point.
And it will be no truer then than it was when we heard it at the start of the PS3/360 era, or the PS2/Xbox era, or the PS1/N64 era, or the SNES/Genesis era.
No, I think this time, they may even have moved too late.
The shadow in the backdrop of the console cycle is PC gaming. People talk about console gaming killing PC gaming. It could, in theory, happen, but it hasn't to date. The reverse could also happen. And while it hasn't happened yet, we've been close at a couple of points in the past and are quite close now.
The PC had its first gaming surge at the end of the NES/Mastersystem era. That's when we got the likes of the original Wing Commander and Ultima 7, which left the console games of the time in the dirt. The SNES/Genesis narrowed the gap.
At the end of the SNES/Genesis era, console gaming came closer than people today tend to remember to dying completely. It was quite some time before a credible successor (the Playstation) emerged... and this was at a time when PC gaming's technology was moving on in leaps and bounds and Win95 was finally (to a small extent) starting to make PC gaming a little bit easier to get into for the newcomer.
The PC never really got a look-in during the PS2/Xbox/GC generation, because that generation ran quite short. By the time the PC was opening out a really serious technical gap (where even off-the-shelf $600 PCs could leave consoles in the dust), the next generation was already launching.
This time around, the PC has, for the last 12 months, been the format where there interesting stuff is happening. None of the current consoles can really handle Frostbite 2. Even a fully maxed-out Unreal 3 experience can only be delivered on the PC. Developers are bored by and constrained on current console hardware. PC versions of cross-platform games leave their console kin in the dust. $600 PCs can massively outperform the consoles - and can output quite easily to the living room TV as well as to a monitor.
Console gaming is under assault from 2 directions; from the mobile OSes and from the PC. If we don't get the next generation (and the Wii-U is not next generation) fast, then the PC and tablets could kill console gaming.
I don't mention consoles destroying PC gaming anywhere in my post. In so far as I do mention PC gaming, it is to say that it was on the back foot during the PS2/Xbox/GC era (which it was) and that it is resurgent towards the end of the PS3/360/Wii era (which it is).
Judging by your post history, you seem to have trouble reading posts over 3 lines in length. There is specialist adult education out there that might help you with this. I'd urge you to consider it.
Another account created today, making the same points as another rather... vehement.... poster in this thread.
I'd say it's a Sony shill, only it's doing Sony's reputation more harm than good. A crafty MS shill, perhaps?
Everquest was "the game to beat" for a long time. Final Fantasy XI was the first game to beat it (in terms of subscriber numbers). In fairness, Everquest was already very old when FFXI launched.
Then WoW came along and succeeded on a different order of magnitude to anything that had come before (and, in terms of subscription MMOs, anything that's come since as well).
Getting over 500k subscribers and staying there for years seems to be incredibly difficult. Everquest managed it for a while, FFXI managed it, EVE Online seems to have managed it. Not many others have done the same.
I was always lucky on the PS2 hardware front, for the most part. Had a "fat" UK model for several years which got very heavy use, which was later joined by a "slim" US model. Neither had any internal hardware failures. What did get irritating, however, was memory card corruption. I remember losing a Final Fantasy X save with about 70 hours of play-time on it to that. Not amusing.
I actually had worse luck with the Gamecube, where I had two of them fail on me, despite the fact they got much more limited use. One of them, admittedly, wasn't 100% the console's fault. I'd taken it home when visiting the family for Christmas and a cousin's young child had been a bit too... enthusiastic... opening up that little flippy lid on the top, snapping it off (though those lids were absurdly fragile). On the other unit, the disc drive just suddenly refused to read anything.
This time around, I've had a Wii fail on me (dead out of the box) and a 360 RROD on me. The 360 died following a firmware update just a few days out of the 3 year extended warrenty, so I wasn't best pleased (though in fairness, I'd been meaning to trade up to a later model with a larger HDD).
Latest external sources I can find show that as of September 2012, the 360 had shipped 70 million and the PS3 had shipped 70.2 million. It's a statistical dead-heat (though I don't know what sales will have been like over the Christmas just gone, the PS3 has been getting some seriously heavy advertising here in the UK).
The 360 has done that on the basis of almost no Japanese sales, so on balance, it seems to have "won" outside of Japan (and lost big in Japan). Even if there are indeed inaccuracies of "a couple of million" in the numbers, it doesn't affect the top line story.
Almost as pointless as the debate about whether the Xbox or the Gamecube secured second place last time around. From what I remember, the Xbox carried it in the end, but it really was a bit of a joke, given just how far they both were behind the PS2. This time around, at least, both PS3 and 360 have been closing the gap on the Wii quite quickly in the latter part of the cycle. The big question with the Xbox and Cube was whether either of them actually had any relevance at all; that's not the case with the 360 or PS3.
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DN3D came out when I was in my late teens, about 18 months before I went off to university and got a net connection good enough for online gaming. At the time, it was DN3D, rather than Quake, that was the LAN multiplayer game of choice for my friends and I.
Partly that was because of the actual gameplay. While Quake was a better twitch-shooter, DN3D had a real, nasty, sneaky dimension to its multiplayer. You could use the pipebombs and holoduke in particular to make traps for opponents that were just like something out of Spy vs Spy. Much more potential for hilarity than a simple rocket to the face.
But it was also the ease of level creation. Once we were bored of the levels that came with the game, it was trivially easy to fire up the bundled level editor and make new maps. We'd been doing that before with Doom and, if anything, despite having "2.5d" levels (as opposed to Doom's straightforward "2d" levels), DN3D level creation was even easier due to the quality of the tool. By contrast, creating "3d" Quake levels was massively more difficult and time consuming.
Once I went to University, of course, it became much easier to download new maps from the internet and the superior network infrastructure underpinning Quakeworld, Quake 2 and eventually Half-Life multiplayer moved my gaming in that direction instead.
A couple of parts of that aren't quite right.
Steam doesn't actually require an "always on" net connection. The offline mode "just works" these days (I know this having been dependant on it for a couple of weeks when I moved house last year). Offline mode got a bad rep in Steam's early years, because back then it would usually either just plain "not work", or work for a day or two and then demand to see a connection. It's not like that any more.
There are a small number of games sold over Steam that contain "always on" third party DRM, because the game's publisher insisted on having DRM above and beyond that built into Steam. Any such requirement is identified on the game's info page alongside the system requirements. There aren't too many of these; Ubisoft, which was the main publisher behind this, has actually caved in and removed it from a good number of games.
A few of the "vintage" games sold through Steam, such as the old id titles are actually DRM free - you can copy the games out of your Steam folder and launch them without Steam running if you want.
Also, worth clarifying your point on Steam bans. There are two types of ban here. Simple "bad behaviour" such as being a complete cock to other players, trolling the forums, cheating in online multiplayer etc will not lose you access to your games. It may lose you the ability to access the online modes of certain games and in others you may be restricted to playing alongside people who have engaged in similar behaviours. I cannot see any problem with this; it's actually good for legitimate players to be protected from the arseholes.
The second and more draconian level of ban does lose you access to your games, but this is reserved for activities such as credit card fraud or scamming/phishing other Steam users. There are occasional false positives here (eg. if somebody has an unexpected problem with their credit card at the bank's end) and Valve has a reputation for being slow to act on these, so I'm not trying to absolve Valve from blame completely. But you will not lose access to your games (barring some multiplayer modes) for simple "lame behaviour".
Anybody have any info on the All Pakistan CD, DVD, Audio Casette Traders and Manufacturers Association? If I google it, all I get are links to different versions of this story. If a shopkeeper or group of shopkeepers decide they don't want to stock particular titles, that's a commercial decision they are perfectly entitled to take and - if they are part of a competitive marketplace and have competition who might decide differently - it doesn't really raise any freedom or censorship issues. Certainly, supermarkets in the US/UK have decided at times not to stock games which have the highest age-ratings, because they don't fit with their brand image or perceived clientelle. It doesn't matter, because you can still get the games from Amazon or another high-street retailer.
If, on the other hand, this Association is some kind of Government standards-body, or if it's a trade-association which you have to be a member of if you want to sell games (giving it genuine market-control) then that's more serious.
And as an aside, I'd note that plenty of games have sold well in the US despite having the Americans as either morally ambiguous or outright baddies (indeed, not to defend Call of Duty, but most of its games fall into the first of those categories) - and that here in the UK, being made into the baddies in games and films is pretty much standard fare.
I've not understood MS's strategy around gaming for years now. Don't get me wrong, I owned an original Xbox and liked it, I own a 360 now and like it a lot - but I've never understood why MS would choose to move into the console market.
I'd have thought that there's much more of an incentive for them to make Windows work as a gaming platform. After all, what's one of the biggest reasons that people shy away from switching OSes? The games. Running modern commercial games consistently and in a relatively hassle-free manner is - and has for quite a long time - been one of the things you can do on Windows that you just can't do on other OSes.
So they launch the original Xbox which is basically - at launch at least - the console that runs games you'd otherwise have expected to be focussed on the PC (Halo and Knights of the Old Republic were both from genres that the PC utterly dominated at the time). Then the 360 comes along and - for quite a long time - if the only reason you stick with Windows is gaming... then why not just buy a 360?
And then as we get to the late-cycle point where PC gaming really starts to outstrip what the consoles can do (even on a bargain-bucket PC), they go and foul it all up with Windows 8.
It's like MS is determined to take one of its biggest advantages in the OS market and hammer it into oblivion.
They make periodic efforts to "get serious" about the PC as a gaming platform, but these tend to be inconsistent, badly thought through and horribly unsuccessful. Games for Windows Live, anybody? With Valve looking at the PC gaming market in a distinctly predatory manner, MS should be seriously worried.
And while it's not such a major matter, they've also made some really odd choices with their internally developed games. First they shut down the Flight Simulator series - a brand with immense loyalty from its enthusiast following - abandoning the market to competitors. Then they try to come back with Flight - a free-to-play-pay-to-actually-do-anything monstrosity that discards the series's historic strengths.
Selling off their entertainment division? At the point where they're finally making a profit from console gaming? It would fit...
This is a good thing. By all accounts, the game is awful. However, it is also squarely the kind of game that wouldn't have been given a 15 rating under the old system (and hence would have been denied release). So it's an indication that the new 18 rating is an actual 18 rating, rather than an excuse to just mark games that would previously have been 15s even more harshly, while still keeping many games out of the country.
Actually, I think while there could be a wide range of factors behind the problems, there are three big ones:
1) The rise in development costs. Watch the credits for a game released in the last year or two. Compare them with the credits for a PS2 era game. Then with an even older game. There are a lot more names there these days. If you want to look at all competitive in the mainstream commercial market, you have to invest a hell of a lot in development. I remember when Wing Commander 3 was launched, people cooed over its $4 million budget (a lot of which had gone on paying its acting cast). £4 million doesn't buy you much in games development terms today.
2) Prices have fallen in real terms. When my parents moved house a couple of years ago, I cleared out a load of my old stuff from their attic, including a load of 90s video games - many of which still had their price tags on. Games like X-Wing and Gunship 2000 - for the PC, not consoles (so no licence fee to be factored into the price) - were sold for 45GBP. You wouldn't pay that for a PC game even in a high street store these days. On Steam, you very rarely pay beyond 30GBP even for a brand new title. Factor in inflation and that's a huge real-terms price cut for the average game.
Now, those two themselves wouldn't be fatal - they were true to an extent during the PS2 era. But there's a third aggravating factor now:
3) The market isn't growing at the speed it once was. From the launch of the original Playstation through to around 2008 or so, the gamer demographic went through a massive expansion, breaking comprehensively out of the kids-and-nerds niche (and expanding within that niche as well). That expansion hasn't quite stopped now, but it has slowed considerably. For a moment it looked as though the original Wii might pressage a further quantum shift in the size of the gaming demographic, but instead the tide rolled back a bit - many of the non-gamers who bought a Wii reverted to being non-gamers after a couple of weeks.
This slowing in the rate of expansion is probably due to the economy to an extent, but also due to the fact that the low hanging fruit - the people with the capacity to enjoy gaming - has already been largely picked.
Having development costs soaring, prices at the till falling and the market's growth slowing is a recipie for disaster.
That's 330k in the US. Game did very well in Europe - topped the UK charts on release.
There's a lot of Sony-hate swirling around the comments on this story. Believe me, I can understand that. This isn't exactly the most pro-consumer technology ever to have been patented (though as yet, Sony haven't said they intend to actually use the technology).
However, I actually see this as symtomatic of a wider problem for the video games industry; very few people are making money from it. Sony makes some pretty thumping losses these days; their gaming division is one of the better performing parts of the company, but it's still a long way from where it was in the last console generation. Nintendo's making some pretty big losses; it had to overturn a long-held hardware-at-a-profit business model to get any kind of installed base for the 3DS, has had to continue to sell at a loss on the Wii-U and faces an uncertain future of the Wii-U doesn't get traction. MS's situation isn't quite so bad, but its stock price has been flat for a decade and if it had the same currency issues that its Japanese competitors face, then its situation might be just as bad as theirs.
The situation's hardly any better in the land of games development. Big developers like EA struggle to turn a profit despite trying every trick they can think of (day-one DLC, online passes, season passes etc). Their few guaranteed cash-cows like the annualised sports series and modern military shooters are basically the only reason that the more interesting games they put out can continue to appear. Mid-sized shops like THQ which don't have those cash cows are in very unpleasant places indeed. A couple of companies like Zynga and Rovio manage to get-rich-quick on the basis of low-budget titles that strike it lucky with the zeitgeist, but they increasingly look like one-hit wonders. And for every indie studio that produces a hit, there are 99 that produce forgettable garbage before vanishing into obscurity. It's even worse over in Japan, where all but a few of their developers have given up on true global competition, focussing instead on the same domestic kids-and-otaku market that most anime is produced for. Some people are clutching at free-to-play/pay-to-win as a potential solution, but that bubble's already bursting.
And retail? Here in the UK, our biggest specialised retailer (Game) went into administration during 2012. Sure, it got rescued, but it doesn't seem to be doing particularly well since then either. Its most direct competitor (HMV) looks like it won't survive the next few months.
Make no mistake, stuff like this latest Sony patent isn't thought up by plutocrats sipping champagne as they lounge on top of a Scrooge McDuck style lake of gold. These are desperate moves to stay afloat in what's become, over the last 3 years or so, a very unfriendly industry.
People moan about the price of games, but these are, in real terms, substantially lower than they were a couple of decades ago, when development costs were a fraction of what they are today. What I'd actually welcome is a company which is prepared to say: "We won't do any of this evil stuff like anti-resale measures or day-one DLC - but for those games with high development costs, we will accordingly charge a higher price than you've gotten used to paying". The prices of Wii-U games are noticably higher than those for the older platforms - but unfortunately, most of them are very thin pickings compared to other games, or are already available on other platforms with a much lower price.
They might have been ok if they'd started out actually trying to develop the game they ended up releasing. If I remember correctly, KOA:R broke over 1 million sales worldwide - that's the level that a "big budget" release normally requires to break even (though some of the mega-AAA releases now are starting to go higher). However, because they'd originally tried to make it an MMO, they ended up sinking a lot of time, effort and money into material that didn't get released.
Indeed, a quick glance at google shows that the game would have needed 3 million sales to break even. If you're not one of the big names sports series or modern military shooters, your chances of breaking over 3 million are not good. To give some context here - Dark Souls, last time I checked, managed around 2 million sales (possibly a bit more with Steam sales of the PC version added in, but probably still shy of 3 million). It's regarded as a massive, storming success by its publisher. That's a game of somewhat similar scope and genre to KOA:R (though personally, I think Dark Souls is the better game).
I don't think 38 Studios were killed by the game they released, I think they were killed by the money they wasted elsewhere.
Yes, I remember that and it was pretty good. Kind of slipped through the cracks for a lot of people because it appeared for consoles that were just about to be retired and the Xbox version wasn't on the initial back-compatibility list for the 360 (which was a staggering omission).
Yes, that was deeply odd in Starcraft (and is one of the reasons why I never warmed to the game). See, I can understand why you might not need to be able to select many units in some RTSes - the likes of Mech Commander or Dawn of War 2, where the emphasis is on making best use of a small number of units. In fact, if you're playing Dawn of War 2 on anything above Easy difficulty and you find yourself drag-clicking multiple units, you're doing something wrong.
But Starcraft is a "big army" game, particularly if you're playing as Zerg. Now, I know that at the top-tier competitive level, players are using insane amounts of micromanagement. But for your average player working through the singleplayer campaign, having to break armies up into 12 unit parcels in order to move them just felt odd and unnatural.
Quite possibly a side effect of the rushed development. As in, they might have intended to add a load of plot and dialogue about finding that skeleton and taking it to the NPC and might have put the basic triggers for the quest in place, but never actually had the time to put the flesh on the bones (no pun intended).
Right back to their earliest days, there have been odd little signposts here and there in Bioware games where you can see where they'd planned at one point to add more content. In most Bioware games, when you come across these, you treat it as a fun kind of Easter Egg, speculate briefly about what might have been intended to go there and move on.
But yes, in DA2, it feels like half the game is missing. Only KOTOR2 (which wasn't Bioware anyway) comes even close to that.
It's true for the Amiga version as well. And for the (little remembered) Genesis version. The game's whole UI and menu-bar system is designed around single unit control.
The other odd thing about Dune 2, compared to more modern RTSes, is that the fog of war doesn't get re-covered after being explored once. This was also true for C&C - the modern idea of RTS fog of war didn't get introduced until Warcraft 2, although the much earlier proto-RTS Battletech 2 did something similar, where the player could see all terrain, but could only see enemy units that were in line of sight or sensor range of one of his own.
In C&C multiplayer, of course, dashing a fast unit into the enemy's base early on so that you could see what he was building for the rest of the game was an essential strategy - as was working out which areas around your own base your opponent couldn't see yet. Alternatively, as all of my C&C1 multiplayer was done via LAN or serial cable, you could substitute a sneaky glance over your shoulder at your opponent's screen.
Except as I said before, there's no drag-clicking (or any other form of multiple unit selection). So if you want to send a large group of units across the map, you have to tell each one to move individually. Co-ordinated attacks in the later missions become all but impossible. The AI labours under no such restriction. Dune 2 was a stepping stone towards the modern RTS, C&C was the first true modern RTS.
It's amazing how many people swear blind that Dune 2 had drag-clicking - I suspect most of them are basing their memories on the later remake, Dune 2000, which updated Dune 2 onto the C&C interface (and added multiplayer). But if you look out the original, you'll find the truth - no multiple unit selection and no multiplayer.
Actually, disagree a bit on C&C. The original is a hugely important game. In many ways, it's more the "true" father of the modern RTS than Dune 2. While Dune 2 gets the credit in most accounts, what people forget is that it lacked two absolutely key, defining features of every RTS made since Command & Conquer - drag-click unit selection and multiplayer. Without drag-click selection, Dune 2 became a nightmare to play once your army grew in size beyond a dozen or so units.
However, despite its importance, I don't think C&C has aged all that well. Its left-click interface feels clumsy, unit design and balance are crude and the resource gathering mechanics are poor. It's an interesting historical artifact, but if you want to play an old-school RTS, then Starcraft and Total Annihilation are both better propositions.
Also worth bearing in mind that Westwood weren't exactly innocent victims in the C&C story. They did just as much as EA, if not more, to drive the franchise into the ground. C&C was revolutionary, Red Alert was fun but felt like treading water, while C&C2 and Red Alert 2 were both dreadful games. Their technology and game mechanics were both utterly obsolete by the time they launched, while the production values of the famous cutscenes had actually fallen since the first generation titles.
Also worth remembering that the (superb) C&C3 was an EA game. C&C4 may have been a train-wreck, but they really managed to do a very successful updating of the franchise with 3.
My big problem with the way they've taken Star Wars from the moment the prequels started to come out is that it stopped being a franchise about a neat dark-ish sci-fi fantasy world and became a story about magical space wizards.
Some of the best Star Wars games ever made (the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games and the original Dark Forces) didn't feature a single lightsabre. Returning to those roots feels like a step in the right direction.
Actually, I'm vaguely optimistic for Dragon Age 3. Some of the early preview stuff and developer interviews make me suspect that they've learned some hard lessons from their last couple of games.
Dragon Age 2 was undeniably a mistake. There was actually some interesting stuff in there (the story had a lot of potential), but it lacked a clear direction guiding the gameplay mechanics and it blatantly needed another 6 months at least of development time to get some additional content (particularly environments) in there.
Then there was Mass Effect 3 - some brilliant moments, but a distinctly underwhelming whole, due to a combination of bad writing at the moments where it really matters and shooter mechanics that aren't robust enough to survive the weight that's placed upon them.
I think and hope that EA realise that they're very close to killing any power left in the Bioware brand. 1 bad game can (and does) happen to any company. 2 bad games in a row starts to look like a trend and makes people nervous. 3 bad games in a row would be fatal. Early indications are that they know they've got to get this one right.
Fingers crossed.
I did a big journal post on my favorite (and least favorite) games of 2012 here. Obviously, not all of the games I liked will be everybody's cup of tea, but there were a couple of absolute stand-out titles, such as Borderlands 2, Farcry 3 and XCom.
Also some crushing disappointments, of course, particularly Mass Effect 3, but that's true of any year.
Oh come on, you're 2 years out of whack here. The current mantra is "console gaming is dying at the hands of tablets/phones/handhelds/PCs/free-to-play/lego (delete as appropriate). We might have missed it at the end of the PS2 era, but that's actually the traditional chorus of the latter part of a console cycle.
If you want to sing a rousing chorus of "PC gaming is dying" then wait until after the launch of the next Sony and MS consoles - everybody else will join in at that point.
And it will be no truer then than it was when we heard it at the start of the PS3/360 era, or the PS2/Xbox era, or the PS1/N64 era, or the SNES/Genesis era.
No, I think this time, they may even have moved too late.
The shadow in the backdrop of the console cycle is PC gaming. People talk about console gaming killing PC gaming. It could, in theory, happen, but it hasn't to date. The reverse could also happen. And while it hasn't happened yet, we've been close at a couple of points in the past and are quite close now.
The PC had its first gaming surge at the end of the NES/Mastersystem era. That's when we got the likes of the original Wing Commander and Ultima 7, which left the console games of the time in the dirt. The SNES/Genesis narrowed the gap.
At the end of the SNES/Genesis era, console gaming came closer than people today tend to remember to dying completely. It was quite some time before a credible successor (the Playstation) emerged... and this was at a time when PC gaming's technology was moving on in leaps and bounds and Win95 was finally (to a small extent) starting to make PC gaming a little bit easier to get into for the newcomer.
The PC never really got a look-in during the PS2/Xbox/GC generation, because that generation ran quite short. By the time the PC was opening out a really serious technical gap (where even off-the-shelf $600 PCs could leave consoles in the dust), the next generation was already launching.
This time around, the PC has, for the last 12 months, been the format where there interesting stuff is happening. None of the current consoles can really handle Frostbite 2. Even a fully maxed-out Unreal 3 experience can only be delivered on the PC. Developers are bored by and constrained on current console hardware. PC versions of cross-platform games leave their console kin in the dust. $600 PCs can massively outperform the consoles - and can output quite easily to the living room TV as well as to a monitor.
Console gaming is under assault from 2 directions; from the mobile OSes and from the PC. If we don't get the next generation (and the Wii-U is not next generation) fast, then the PC and tablets could kill console gaming.
I don't mention consoles destroying PC gaming anywhere in my post. In so far as I do mention PC gaming, it is to say that it was on the back foot during the PS2/Xbox/GC era (which it was) and that it is resurgent towards the end of the PS3/360/Wii era (which it is).
Judging by your post history, you seem to have trouble reading posts over 3 lines in length. There is specialist adult education out there that might help you with this. I'd urge you to consider it.
Another account created today, making the same points as another rather... vehement.... poster in this thread. I'd say it's a Sony shill, only it's doing Sony's reputation more harm than good. A crafty MS shill, perhaps?
Everquest was "the game to beat" for a long time. Final Fantasy XI was the first game to beat it (in terms of subscriber numbers). In fairness, Everquest was already very old when FFXI launched.
Then WoW came along and succeeded on a different order of magnitude to anything that had come before (and, in terms of subscription MMOs, anything that's come since as well).
Getting over 500k subscribers and staying there for years seems to be incredibly difficult. Everquest managed it for a while, FFXI managed it, EVE Online seems to have managed it. Not many others have done the same.
I was always lucky on the PS2 hardware front, for the most part. Had a "fat" UK model for several years which got very heavy use, which was later joined by a "slim" US model. Neither had any internal hardware failures. What did get irritating, however, was memory card corruption. I remember losing a Final Fantasy X save with about 70 hours of play-time on it to that. Not amusing.
I actually had worse luck with the Gamecube, where I had two of them fail on me, despite the fact they got much more limited use. One of them, admittedly, wasn't 100% the console's fault. I'd taken it home when visiting the family for Christmas and a cousin's young child had been a bit too... enthusiastic... opening up that little flippy lid on the top, snapping it off (though those lids were absurdly fragile). On the other unit, the disc drive just suddenly refused to read anything.
This time around, I've had a Wii fail on me (dead out of the box) and a 360 RROD on me. The 360 died following a firmware update just a few days out of the 3 year extended warrenty, so I wasn't best pleased (though in fairness, I'd been meaning to trade up to a later model with a larger HDD).
Latest external sources I can find show that as of September 2012, the 360 had shipped 70 million and the PS3 had shipped 70.2 million. It's a statistical dead-heat (though I don't know what sales will have been like over the Christmas just gone, the PS3 has been getting some seriously heavy advertising here in the UK).
The 360 has done that on the basis of almost no Japanese sales, so on balance, it seems to have "won" outside of Japan (and lost big in Japan). Even if there are indeed inaccuracies of "a couple of million" in the numbers, it doesn't affect the top line story.
Almost as pointless as the debate about whether the Xbox or the Gamecube secured second place last time around. From what I remember, the Xbox carried it in the end, but it really was a bit of a joke, given just how far they both were behind the PS2. This time around, at least, both PS3 and 360 have been closing the gap on the Wii quite quickly in the latter part of the cycle. The big question with the Xbox and Cube was whether either of them actually had any relevance at all; that's not the case with the 360 or PS3.