Blizzard really are doing very well at generating massive amounts of bad publicity for themselves on Diablo 3. They may have achieved some impressive early sales, but I still can't help but wonder whether they're not being self-defeating here.
I think a lot of this stems from their decision to cash-in on what had formerly been a "grey market" around their games, via the introduction of the official "real money" auction house. While it's easy to see things like the always-on connection requirement and the paranoid 3rd-party software detection as being driven by piracy concerns, I suspect the RMAH has at least as much to do with it.
Partly, this will be due to Blizzard wanting to protect their anticipated margins. But as much as that, it's about covering their legal backside. By mainstreaming real-money financial transactions between players for virtual goods like this, they're entering a legal minefield - in fact, more than that, they're entering a different legal minefield for every territory where the RMAH is available.
If a third party exploit reduces the value of the cash investment that players have made in an in-game item or commodity, are Blizzard, as the service-provider, liable? In ANY of the territories where the service is offered? Chances are, questions like this haven't even been tested in most of those territories. Blizzard therefore need to minimise their risk by being as paranoid as possible and accepting as inevitable any harm that they do to the player experience. For Blizzard, absolute control over the game client is now more important than ever.
Actually, even more interestingly, I wonder what this might mean over time for Blizzard's love of tweaking stats and balance. If Blizzard do something that reduces the value of a particular set of items or commodities, are they vulnerable to law-suits? In ANY of the territories where the RMAH is available. Blizzard have an absolute fixation with tweaking stats and balance in their games. In some ways, it would actually be good for this tendancy to get stomped on a bit; their constant meddling with my class was one of the biggest factors that drove me to quit World of Warcraft. But I do wonder whether their development teams might find themselves increasingly frustrated by constraints placed on them by legal and marketing.
I really do wish Blizzard had decided to stay well out of the real money trading thing. There was always a real money grey market in World of Warcraft (and, I gather, in Diablo 2). It was an occasional low-level irritation (mostly when the activities of gold-farmers started to impinge upon "genuine" players), but it was never catastrophic. You always knew that, on balance, it was likely that a good number of the players in your guild had bought gold at some point and that, in all likelihood, a small minority did so regularly. But you just got on and played the game.
Blizzard seem to want to have it both ways; the up-front profits from the "direct sale" model and the profits over time from the "pay to win" model. I always defended WoW's subscription model on the basis that your purchase of the game and its expansions covered "sunk" development costs and your subs covered the ongoing cost of maintaining and incrementally enhancing the game. I still believe that's correct. But I do hope that players don't let them get away with what they seem to be trying to achieve with Diablo 3.
I had two problems with the Mario Galaxy controls.
First, the analogue stick on the Nunchuck is not good - its range of motion is just plain unnatural. Why can't it be in a circular groove like the analogue sticks on proper controllers?
Second, the use of "waggle" as a button to activate spin-jump. Too messy and imprecise for a core control in a precision platformer. Every time I die on a jump because "waggle" fails to register, I curse the controllers.
The Mario Galaxy games had some great level design, but for a variety of reasons (including controls), I don't think they're a patch on the PS3 Ratchet & Clank titles.
I liked Republic Commando and have been surprised that it never got a sequel. I think it came out at the wrong time - a few months before the launch of the 360 and the start of the transition to the current generation of console hardware. It was very rapidly eclipsed by prettier (though often shallower) games (and its PC version suffered from being a less than stellar port of a game for old hardware).
Worse still, despite still being a fairly new release, it wasn't on the 360's backward-compatibility list at launch. They did patch it in a couple of years later, but by then, the chance of the game benefitting from any kind of "long tail" was dead. I think this is one case where they might have been better to hold back for a year or so and make the game an early wave 360 title (or even a launch title, where it would have blown away the competition).
Ok, I'll bite on this and admit that you have at least the bones of a reasonable argument there, and that a couple of your points are valid. However, I don't believe that taken as a whole, they amount to an argument against Diablo 3 needing an offline mode.
Over on the consoles, games that actually require online connectivity to play are few and far between. There are certainly games that lose a good bit of functionality if there's no internet connection present; Gran Turismo 5 on the PS3 and Your Shape 2012 on the 360/Kinect stand out as good examples. But the core gameplay is at least accessible offline. There are a couple of exceptions - mainly a few Capcom downloadable games on the PS3. Don't buy them. Certainly not after last summer's PSN outage made them unplayable for months.
Similarly, all of the iPad games that I have been willing to pay money for are playable offline. There are others that don't meet that criterion - and I don't buy them. Facebook gaming? Feels like a step back to me, not progress.
I don't think I've ever argued that all PC games must be playable offline. I excluded MMOs in my earlier post because the very nature of the game requires an always online connection. I suppose I could have excluded multiplayer-online FPSes as well, as they fall into the same category, but I don't buy those anyway (not for ethical reasons, but rather because deathmatch as a game-mode hasn't really appealed to me for 7 or 8 years now). In fact, even with those, I'd expect an offline bots-mode, as it's fairly trivial to implement.
But if a game is to require an always-on connection, then it needs to have features which are both essential to the gameplay and of benefit to the player. And Diablo 3 fails on both counts here. The big thing in Diablo 3 is the auction house - which has in-game currency and real-cash variants. The in-game currency auction house is of some benefit to the average player, but nothing I've seen thus far suggests it's even close to being essential for play. The real-money auction house is frankly only likely to be of benefit to a small hardcore and to Blizzard's coffers.
And I'd dispute that Diablo 2 was "miserable" offline. I moved house last month and spent about 5 days without a home internet connection while I waited for my ISP to hook my cable up. I used some of that time (when I wasn't unpacking boxes) to replay Diablo 2, to remind myself of the plot. The game hasn't aged all that well in some respects, but it was far from miserable. Certainly, it was more enjoyable than the 20 minutes I have just now spent copy-pasting my password over and over as I tried to login to Diablo 3's servers so I could play a singleplayer game.
Re:Hate to put a damper on the celebration
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Diablo III Released
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· Score: 5, Informative
I've had a general policy of not buying games for any platform if their PC version requires an always-on connection (aside from MMOs, which it would be unfair to penalise, as "always on" is the very nature of the game there). This means I've missed out on every Assassin's Creed game since the original and a few other titles to boot.
I agonised about Diablo 3. It did look, at face value, like a straightforward case of Ubisoft-style DRM. However, Blizzard did push quite hard the line that the game had integral features that meant they couldn't have done it without the always-on without making serious compromises to the game. I was... unconvinced. So I decided to wait and see how things went at launch.
As it happens, Blizzard then wheeled out that "subscribe to WoW for a year get Diablo 3 free" thing at just about the time when I was in the market to get back into an MMO. On balance, I decided that I might as well go for that.
Now that I've had a few hours with Diablo 3, I can conclude that if it hadn't been for the WoW special offer, this would still have been firmly in the "boycott" camp. I've yet to see any online features that could not have been made 100% optional at no expense to the player (though possibly at some expense to Blizzard through lost real-money auction house fees). If you're in the "undecided" camp on D3 over its DRM, my advice would be to avoid it.
"If you think you will be anything more than a very light user of it and don't have access to a supply of free USB sticks, the 4 gig model will inevitably end up either costing you more than the 250 gig model, or else you will have to put up with some annoying limitations."
Live is required for online play only. In fact - a clarification. A "gold" Live account is required to play games online and will get you certain discounts in the online store on occasion, as well as early access to the odd demo or trailer. Aside from online play, all features of the console can be used with a free "silver" Live account.
The model on offer here appears to be the more recent "slim" revision. This does come with wifi built in - rather than requiring the (expensive) external adaptor that the first 2 generations of the 360 hardware required.
That's great if you get to go to lots of conferences where you get free USB sticks. I've had a couple myself over the years.
Chances are that people who might be tempted by what's essentially a loan-purchase scheme like the one described in TFA don't get to go to those kinds of conferences.
For me, the big story of this generation has been how all three console manufacturers have abandoned the traditional console philosophy of "switch on, insert game, play".
First you have the proliferation of different hardware models for the 360 and PS3 (the Wii hasn't committed this particular sin, though it does suffer from a surfeit of peripherals that are essential for certain games).
Next you have the insistence on all 3 platforms on mandatory firmware updates if you want to use any online features. The PS3 is by far the worst offender here, with a truly objectionable cycle of slow, over-frequent firmware updates, most of which are simply behind-the-scenes tinkering with copy protection that add nothing for the user. The Wii is also fairly grim, though with the online features being less central to the console, you can at least get away with ignoring them until you next want to use the store. The 360 at least keeps its firmware updates fast and infrequent, though I still haven't forgiven MS for the new dashboard.
And finally, you have game patching. I know that as games get more complicated, this was always likely to find its way onto consoles in the end - but there are still a disappointing number of day 1 patches (particularly on the PS3, where they can sometimes be several gigs in size).
If the console developers want to shore up their market in the next generation, then I would suggest they try to move back towards the "switch on and play" mentality.
They're also not free. And if you use the thing a lot, you're either going to go through a lot of them or be perpetually reinstalling/redownloading content. So again, higher cost over time.
The biggest problem, of course, is that you're getting the model with the 4 gig hard drive. That could be a problem even if you don't intend to use the console online. First of all, you won't have the option of hard disk installs (which can make some games much more tolerable in the loading time stakes). Worse, there are a small number of games where you won't even be able to use all the features.
Forza Motorsport 3 and 4 have both shipped on two DVDs. Because the nature of the games doesn't make disk-swapping practical (unlike in an RPG like Blue Dragon or Lost Odyssey), the way Turn 10 managed this was by making the second DVD an optional "content" install. As I know myself from trying to set up a nephew's Christmas present one fraught Christmas morning, you can't actually do the full content install for the Ultimate Edition of Forza 3 or the full edition of Forza 4 on the 4 gig models. There's just not enough space for that and the various OS stuff that the console puts on there. So part of the game's content is unavailable.
The "irony" (and this isn't actually irony at all, I suspect it's fully deliberate) is that in Christmas 2010, a number of UK retailers were heavily pushing a 4 gig 360 + Forza 3 Ultimate Edition bundle (usually with Lego Harry Potter in there as well). They also had a nice stock of the 250 gig hard drives on sale. Of course, the cost of buying a 4 gig console and then the 250 gig hard drive for it was significantly greater than the cost of just buying the 250 gig console.
Sorry for the rant - that was a Christmas morning I'd rather forget. My key point - avoid the 4 gig model even for casual use. Hard drive installs are only getting more common as this generation goes on.
A lot of these problems could be resolved by having competent store managers, with flexibility to adjust pricing in response to local demand. I gather that GAME used to operate that - and Gamestation more recently still - but that it had been discarded in favour of (inept) central control in recent years.
I've seen the exact same thing in GAME stores in the UK. What generally happens is that there's a promotion running that reduces the price of new copies of the game - but the head office computer that makes pre-owned pricing decisions (any leeway was taken away from store managers some time ago) failed to realise that it needed to reduce the price of pre-owned titles as well.
I've seen staff confused by and apologetic over it - but there's nothing they can do about it.
Yes, I think you've got a good point about the condition of the stores. I've done a couple of fairly lengthy journal articles about the collapse - one on the causes here and one on the repercussions here.
I think the key thing for me is how little consideration GAME's management gave to what their key strengths ought to be set against supermarkets on the one hand and online retailers on the other.
You're clutching at straws. The Humble Bundle appeal to a small and specific section of the market (and while there are a couple of decent games that have been sold through them, they put out a lot of crap as well). I don't know what on earth makes you claim that Linux controls nearly 1/4 of the gaming market.
The bundles sell in the low hundreds of thousands, with a sales breakdown of roughly 50% Windows, 25% Mac, 25% Linux. The average price paid tends to be around $5. Even if you grant that Linux users are paying more on average than Windows users, they're still not handing over anything like the cost of a "full sized" commercially developed game.
Meanwhile, those "full sized" commercially developed games put out sales numbers that are better than those for the Humble Bundles on a weekly basis. I'd be very skeptical of Linux having more than a 1% share of the overall PC games market.
The trend in mainstream PC gaming is away from Linux, not towards it. Even historically Linux-friendly developers like id have dropped the platform for newer titles.
I think the problem for MS's competitors is that, as we saw with the Vista launch, even if MS get something badly wrong, they've got a market dominance safety margin because a) their older OSes are still out there and usable, barring some kind of actual kill-switch and b) the competition needs, in many key areas, a few years to catch up to them even if MS stands still.
Agree that Apple rather than Linux is the more dangerous competitor for MS, particularly if Apple starts to take gaming more seriously in a post-Jobs world. Don't underestimate how many people's OS choice is driven by the games that they and/or their kids play. And it's in gaming support that MS is currently many years ahead of the competition (gaming on Linux appears to have made little substantive progress over the last decade).
I don't think the answer here is about Linux, I think it's about Windows. Simply put, there isn't enough "wrong" with Windows these days.
There was, I felt, a moment where Linux had a chance to make a breakthrough onto the mainstream desktop. It was around the point where Windows ME was failing horribly and Windows 2000 had yet to get much public acceptance. At that point, there was a lot wrong with Windows. The technology underpinning 95/98/ME was creaking horribly. It's hard to believe now, but if you were a heavy PC user (particularly a gamer) back then, your Win98 machine would need daily reboots just to maintain basic performance and stability. Over on 2000, until it got a service pack or two, there were horrible compatibility issues with many applications, particularly those that required directx.
And then the moment passed. Windows 2000 got patched up and then Windows XP went on, after a rocky start, to become a stable, pleasant to use OS. Even the debacle of the Vista launch couldn't undermine the general dominance of Windows - because the major competition to Vista was coming from XP, not from Linux.
If you want to unseat the dominant market player, you have to not just be better than them, but be a lot better. It's not just that you have to have a few killer features; you have to be able to at least match the dominant player in every other significant respect as well. Linux is nowhere near that kind of position in respect of Windows these days (take gaming support as a case in point, but there are plenty of other examples).
Might be possible where you live. I'm in the UK and if you try to fire somebody here for "working too many hours" you will end up a) taken to the cleaners at a tribunal and b) as a comedy news item on page 7 of one of the morning freebie newspapers.
Partial exception for safety-critical roles, which have legal limits on the number of hours people are allowed to work.
I've not worked in Japan myself, but have heard similar stories from colleagues who have. I gather it's particularly bad for younger staff, who have "more to prove" to their employer. Without wanting to get too much into pop-sociology, you have to suspect a link between a work culture like that and Japan's birth-rate problems.
I do think that open plan offices are a big factor in making the "presentee-ism" problem even worse. I've only worked in one building that was definitively not open plan - it was a historic building subject to so many protection orders that, much to the frustration of senior management, even thinking about knocking an interior wall through would land you in jail. People either had their own offices, or worked in offices shared by 2-4 people.
By and large, people worked to the demands of the job. Our work there was highly prone to seasonal variations; you'd get months where you'd be doing 12 hour days and months where you'd be done in 6 - and people worked those hours, on the understanding that it all evened out. We took pride in our work and, by all indications, were good at it.
Shortly after I left, senior management found some open-plan accommodation in a newer building (which was more expensive - but the corporate drive in favour of open plan was so strong that mere cost wasn't allowed to stand as an obstacle) and relocated everybody there. According to my former colleagues, what followed was 2 years of hell and a serious drop in performance.
I've found there are three main reasons why people may end up working beyond their contracted hours:
1) The work that they have to do cannot be done during the hours they are contracted to work.
2) The work that they have to do can be done during the hours they are contracted to work, but the organisational or office culture puts pressure on people to be seen to be in the office outside those hours.
3) They have their own reasons for wanting to be working, which may range from a genuine passion for their work through to problems at home they would rather get away from.
Of these, 3) is generally not something the employer/manager should get involved in (unless home problems are starting to bleed over into the office).
I think that in most non-militant workplaces, people accept that 1) will occur from time to time and that, if it's for short periods, it's not a huge problem (particularly if the employer takes steps to recognise it and reward employees accordingly, be it financially, via time-in-lieu, or some other method). If it's not for short periods, then it absolutely will lead to morale and productivity problems and the employer/manager needs to think again about resourcing, or accept high staff turnover and problems with the quality of their outputs. This seems to be an endemic problem in certain industries (such as video games development) which are seen by outsiders as desirable places to work - meaning that there are always lots of eager young things waiting in the wings to replace burn-outs.
I suspect that the most common cause, however, is 2). Certainly, in the decade or so that I've been in full-time employment, I've come across quite a few offices where the work could be handled within contracted hours, but where the nature of the workplace culture meant that people were "padding" their working day; making tasks take longer than needed, or spending lots of time browsing the web in the afternoon. It's particularly noticable that workplaces like this seem to prize "being at your desk late in an evening" over "being there early in the morning". In part, I blame the shift to open-plan offices for this - there can be a "walk of shame" factor to leaving the office when your colleagues are still at their desks.
In one of my early management posts, I did try to tackle a culture like this in the office I was managing. I made a big thing about tracking how heavily loaded each team-member was and getting people to report when their workload reached the point where it would require them to work out of hours. I also made it gently but firmly clear that if your workload wasn't at that point, I expected you to get it done during normal office hours (happily, there was a wider organisational push at the time to reduce our power/lighting bills, which I could hook that onto).
For a while, it worked reasonably well. There was a bit of grumbling from a couple of people who, I suspect, thought that being seen in the office doing very long hours was a substitute for being any good at their job, but most people were happy to go along with it - and the quality of the office's work (which was mostly casework, requiring little creativity, but a lot of attention to detail) actually rose.
Then word got out (falsely, as it happened) that there may be redundancies headed in - and despite reassurances to the contrary, everybody assumed that they way to avoid being singled out was to be seen in the office every hour of the day - so all the work I'd done went to waste anyway. Overnight, things went back to being as bad as ever - and productivity fell off again.
That was always the obvious question, wasn't it? They even had a whole stat - resilience - which was useless in PvE but essential in PvP, to ensure that gear for the two play-types remained separate. Why they couldn't just go that one step further was always a mystery to me.
No, I was Holy Paladin, through the TBC and WotLK eras. To be honest, we had it less bad than many of the other classes, but even so, the extent to which holy shock, beacons and other mechanics got messed around with on a near-weekly basis to appease the PvP kiddies was exasperating.
I saw how Warlocks and Rogues suffered from it and just shuddered.
The endless tweaking was present in World of Warcraft as well and was one of the biggest factors that drove me out of the game. I was a PvE-only player, but my class was being constantly tweaked and overhauled to meet the ever-changing demands of PvP balance.
With PvP being absent from Diablo 3 at launch, I would hope (probably in vain) that Blizzard might want to stop and think whether they could stick a few more degrees of separation between PvE and PvP play.
Thing is, Square-Enix were wrong about the cost of producing an open(ish) world Final Fantasy game, with world map, side-quests, exploration and whatnot on a current-gen console. And they weren't just a little bit wrong, they were very wrong. Extravagantly wrong. Wrong with cherries on top.
See, it's been done - and pretty early in the console cycle. Lost Odyssey, from Mistwalker, was a game cut from exactly the same mold as the Playstation era Final Fantasies. It had a world map, controllable boats and airships, even some underwater exploration. It had hidden optional dungeons. It also had pretty cutscenes (some of them quite long) and generally high production values. It wasn't a huge commercial success - but the fact that it was a 360-exclusive JRPG (and hence doomed to fail in its home market) must surely have been a major factor there.
Seriously, if Lost Odyssey had a few chocobos stuck in it and the FF-series victory-fanfare at the end of fights, then it could have been released as Final Fantasy XIII and everybody would have been pretty happy. It was certainly a lot better than the FF13 we got.
Square-Enix's problem this generation has been that they seem to have had - until recently - nobody working on the Final Fantasy series who understands game design. They had vast legions of artists and animations, but nobody who knew how to bring a game together. By their own account, when creating FF13, they made more than twice the number of art-assets that were actually needed for the game before they even brought in any game designers or even writers to work out what the story was. FF13-2 is a better game and shows that they may be learning from their mistakes - but they've done a lot of damage to the franchise over the last few years.
A proper current-gen remake of Final Fantasy VII need not cost significantly more to make than Lost Odyssey. It might even cost less. Most of the non-game-engine cutscenes in FF7 are pretty short - and FF13-2 has shown that you can work marvels with in-engine cutscenes on Square-Enix's current technology.
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Blizzard really are doing very well at generating massive amounts of bad publicity for themselves on Diablo 3. They may have achieved some impressive early sales, but I still can't help but wonder whether they're not being self-defeating here.
I think a lot of this stems from their decision to cash-in on what had formerly been a "grey market" around their games, via the introduction of the official "real money" auction house. While it's easy to see things like the always-on connection requirement and the paranoid 3rd-party software detection as being driven by piracy concerns, I suspect the RMAH has at least as much to do with it.
Partly, this will be due to Blizzard wanting to protect their anticipated margins. But as much as that, it's about covering their legal backside. By mainstreaming real-money financial transactions between players for virtual goods like this, they're entering a legal minefield - in fact, more than that, they're entering a different legal minefield for every territory where the RMAH is available.
If a third party exploit reduces the value of the cash investment that players have made in an in-game item or commodity, are Blizzard, as the service-provider, liable? In ANY of the territories where the service is offered? Chances are, questions like this haven't even been tested in most of those territories. Blizzard therefore need to minimise their risk by being as paranoid as possible and accepting as inevitable any harm that they do to the player experience. For Blizzard, absolute control over the game client is now more important than ever.
Actually, even more interestingly, I wonder what this might mean over time for Blizzard's love of tweaking stats and balance. If Blizzard do something that reduces the value of a particular set of items or commodities, are they vulnerable to law-suits? In ANY of the territories where the RMAH is available. Blizzard have an absolute fixation with tweaking stats and balance in their games. In some ways, it would actually be good for this tendancy to get stomped on a bit; their constant meddling with my class was one of the biggest factors that drove me to quit World of Warcraft. But I do wonder whether their development teams might find themselves increasingly frustrated by constraints placed on them by legal and marketing.
I really do wish Blizzard had decided to stay well out of the real money trading thing. There was always a real money grey market in World of Warcraft (and, I gather, in Diablo 2). It was an occasional low-level irritation (mostly when the activities of gold-farmers started to impinge upon "genuine" players), but it was never catastrophic. You always knew that, on balance, it was likely that a good number of the players in your guild had bought gold at some point and that, in all likelihood, a small minority did so regularly. But you just got on and played the game.
Blizzard seem to want to have it both ways; the up-front profits from the "direct sale" model and the profits over time from the "pay to win" model. I always defended WoW's subscription model on the basis that your purchase of the game and its expansions covered "sunk" development costs and your subs covered the ongoing cost of maintaining and incrementally enhancing the game. I still believe that's correct. But I do hope that players don't let them get away with what they seem to be trying to achieve with Diablo 3.
I had two problems with the Mario Galaxy controls.
First, the analogue stick on the Nunchuck is not good - its range of motion is just plain unnatural. Why can't it be in a circular groove like the analogue sticks on proper controllers?
Second, the use of "waggle" as a button to activate spin-jump. Too messy and imprecise for a core control in a precision platformer. Every time I die on a jump because "waggle" fails to register, I curse the controllers.
The Mario Galaxy games had some great level design, but for a variety of reasons (including controls), I don't think they're a patch on the PS3 Ratchet & Clank titles.
I liked Republic Commando and have been surprised that it never got a sequel. I think it came out at the wrong time - a few months before the launch of the 360 and the start of the transition to the current generation of console hardware. It was very rapidly eclipsed by prettier (though often shallower) games (and its PC version suffered from being a less than stellar port of a game for old hardware).
Worse still, despite still being a fairly new release, it wasn't on the 360's backward-compatibility list at launch. They did patch it in a couple of years later, but by then, the chance of the game benefitting from any kind of "long tail" was dead. I think this is one case where they might have been better to hold back for a year or so and make the game an early wave 360 title (or even a launch title, where it would have blown away the competition).
PS. Even though I posted disagreeing with parent, the fact it's been modded down (and indeed, not modded up) irritates me profoundly.
If ever a reminder was needed that slashdot moderation options are not "+1 agree" and "-1 disagree".
Ok, I'll bite on this and admit that you have at least the bones of a reasonable argument there, and that a couple of your points are valid. However, I don't believe that taken as a whole, they amount to an argument against Diablo 3 needing an offline mode.
Over on the consoles, games that actually require online connectivity to play are few and far between. There are certainly games that lose a good bit of functionality if there's no internet connection present; Gran Turismo 5 on the PS3 and Your Shape 2012 on the 360/Kinect stand out as good examples. But the core gameplay is at least accessible offline. There are a couple of exceptions - mainly a few Capcom downloadable games on the PS3. Don't buy them. Certainly not after last summer's PSN outage made them unplayable for months.
Similarly, all of the iPad games that I have been willing to pay money for are playable offline. There are others that don't meet that criterion - and I don't buy them. Facebook gaming? Feels like a step back to me, not progress.
I don't think I've ever argued that all PC games must be playable offline. I excluded MMOs in my earlier post because the very nature of the game requires an always online connection. I suppose I could have excluded multiplayer-online FPSes as well, as they fall into the same category, but I don't buy those anyway (not for ethical reasons, but rather because deathmatch as a game-mode hasn't really appealed to me for 7 or 8 years now). In fact, even with those, I'd expect an offline bots-mode, as it's fairly trivial to implement.
But if a game is to require an always-on connection, then it needs to have features which are both essential to the gameplay and of benefit to the player. And Diablo 3 fails on both counts here. The big thing in Diablo 3 is the auction house - which has in-game currency and real-cash variants. The in-game currency auction house is of some benefit to the average player, but nothing I've seen thus far suggests it's even close to being essential for play. The real-money auction house is frankly only likely to be of benefit to a small hardcore and to Blizzard's coffers.
And I'd dispute that Diablo 2 was "miserable" offline. I moved house last month and spent about 5 days without a home internet connection while I waited for my ISP to hook my cable up. I used some of that time (when I wasn't unpacking boxes) to replay Diablo 2, to remind myself of the plot. The game hasn't aged all that well in some respects, but it was far from miserable. Certainly, it was more enjoyable than the 20 minutes I have just now spent copy-pasting my password over and over as I tried to login to Diablo 3's servers so I could play a singleplayer game.
I've had a general policy of not buying games for any platform if their PC version requires an always-on connection (aside from MMOs, which it would be unfair to penalise, as "always on" is the very nature of the game there). This means I've missed out on every Assassin's Creed game since the original and a few other titles to boot.
I agonised about Diablo 3. It did look, at face value, like a straightforward case of Ubisoft-style DRM. However, Blizzard did push quite hard the line that the game had integral features that meant they couldn't have done it without the always-on without making serious compromises to the game. I was... unconvinced. So I decided to wait and see how things went at launch.
As it happens, Blizzard then wheeled out that "subscribe to WoW for a year get Diablo 3 free" thing at just about the time when I was in the market to get back into an MMO. On balance, I decided that I might as well go for that.
Now that I've had a few hours with Diablo 3, I can conclude that if it hadn't been for the WoW special offer, this would still have been firmly in the "boycott" camp. I've yet to see any online features that could not have been made 100% optional at no expense to the player (though possibly at some expense to Blizzard through lost real-money auction house fees). If you're in the "undecided" camp on D3 over its DRM, my advice would be to avoid it.
Ok then, to slightly modify my original thesis:
"If you think you will be anything more than a very light user of it and don't have access to a supply of free USB sticks, the 4 gig model will inevitably end up either costing you more than the 250 gig model, or else you will have to put up with some annoying limitations."
Live is required for online play only. In fact - a clarification. A "gold" Live account is required to play games online and will get you certain discounts in the online store on occasion, as well as early access to the odd demo or trailer. Aside from online play, all features of the console can be used with a free "silver" Live account.
The model on offer here appears to be the more recent "slim" revision. This does come with wifi built in - rather than requiring the (expensive) external adaptor that the first 2 generations of the 360 hardware required.
That's great if you get to go to lots of conferences where you get free USB sticks. I've had a couple myself over the years.
Chances are that people who might be tempted by what's essentially a loan-purchase scheme like the one described in TFA don't get to go to those kinds of conferences.
For me, the big story of this generation has been how all three console manufacturers have abandoned the traditional console philosophy of "switch on, insert game, play".
First you have the proliferation of different hardware models for the 360 and PS3 (the Wii hasn't committed this particular sin, though it does suffer from a surfeit of peripherals that are essential for certain games).
Next you have the insistence on all 3 platforms on mandatory firmware updates if you want to use any online features. The PS3 is by far the worst offender here, with a truly objectionable cycle of slow, over-frequent firmware updates, most of which are simply behind-the-scenes tinkering with copy protection that add nothing for the user. The Wii is also fairly grim, though with the online features being less central to the console, you can at least get away with ignoring them until you next want to use the store. The 360 at least keeps its firmware updates fast and infrequent, though I still haven't forgiven MS for the new dashboard.
And finally, you have game patching. I know that as games get more complicated, this was always likely to find its way onto consoles in the end - but there are still a disappointing number of day 1 patches (particularly on the PS3, where they can sometimes be several gigs in size).
If the console developers want to shore up their market in the next generation, then I would suggest they try to move back towards the "switch on and play" mentality.
They're also not free. And if you use the thing a lot, you're either going to go through a lot of them or be perpetually reinstalling/redownloading content. So again, higher cost over time.
The biggest problem, of course, is that you're getting the model with the 4 gig hard drive. That could be a problem even if you don't intend to use the console online. First of all, you won't have the option of hard disk installs (which can make some games much more tolerable in the loading time stakes). Worse, there are a small number of games where you won't even be able to use all the features.
Forza Motorsport 3 and 4 have both shipped on two DVDs. Because the nature of the games doesn't make disk-swapping practical (unlike in an RPG like Blue Dragon or Lost Odyssey), the way Turn 10 managed this was by making the second DVD an optional "content" install. As I know myself from trying to set up a nephew's Christmas present one fraught Christmas morning, you can't actually do the full content install for the Ultimate Edition of Forza 3 or the full edition of Forza 4 on the 4 gig models. There's just not enough space for that and the various OS stuff that the console puts on there. So part of the game's content is unavailable.
The "irony" (and this isn't actually irony at all, I suspect it's fully deliberate) is that in Christmas 2010, a number of UK retailers were heavily pushing a 4 gig 360 + Forza 3 Ultimate Edition bundle (usually with Lego Harry Potter in there as well). They also had a nice stock of the 250 gig hard drives on sale. Of course, the cost of buying a 4 gig console and then the 250 gig hard drive for it was significantly greater than the cost of just buying the 250 gig console.
Sorry for the rant - that was a Christmas morning I'd rather forget. My key point - avoid the 4 gig model even for casual use. Hard drive installs are only getting more common as this generation goes on.
A lot of these problems could be resolved by having competent store managers, with flexibility to adjust pricing in response to local demand. I gather that GAME used to operate that - and Gamestation more recently still - but that it had been discarded in favour of (inept) central control in recent years.
I've seen the exact same thing in GAME stores in the UK. What generally happens is that there's a promotion running that reduces the price of new copies of the game - but the head office computer that makes pre-owned pricing decisions (any leeway was taken away from store managers some time ago) failed to realise that it needed to reduce the price of pre-owned titles as well.
I've seen staff confused by and apologetic over it - but there's nothing they can do about it.
Yes, I think you've got a good point about the condition of the stores. I've done a couple of fairly lengthy journal articles about the collapse - one on the causes here and one on the repercussions here.
I think the key thing for me is how little consideration GAME's management gave to what their key strengths ought to be set against supermarkets on the one hand and online retailers on the other.
You're clutching at straws. The Humble Bundle appeal to a small and specific section of the market (and while there are a couple of decent games that have been sold through them, they put out a lot of crap as well). I don't know what on earth makes you claim that Linux controls nearly 1/4 of the gaming market.
The bundles sell in the low hundreds of thousands, with a sales breakdown of roughly 50% Windows, 25% Mac, 25% Linux. The average price paid tends to be around $5. Even if you grant that Linux users are paying more on average than Windows users, they're still not handing over anything like the cost of a "full sized" commercially developed game.
Meanwhile, those "full sized" commercially developed games put out sales numbers that are better than those for the Humble Bundles on a weekly basis. I'd be very skeptical of Linux having more than a 1% share of the overall PC games market.
The trend in mainstream PC gaming is away from Linux, not towards it. Even historically Linux-friendly developers like id have dropped the platform for newer titles.
I think the problem for MS's competitors is that, as we saw with the Vista launch, even if MS get something badly wrong, they've got a market dominance safety margin because a) their older OSes are still out there and usable, barring some kind of actual kill-switch and b) the competition needs, in many key areas, a few years to catch up to them even if MS stands still.
Agree that Apple rather than Linux is the more dangerous competitor for MS, particularly if Apple starts to take gaming more seriously in a post-Jobs world. Don't underestimate how many people's OS choice is driven by the games that they and/or their kids play. And it's in gaming support that MS is currently many years ahead of the competition (gaming on Linux appears to have made little substantive progress over the last decade).
I don't think the answer here is about Linux, I think it's about Windows. Simply put, there isn't enough "wrong" with Windows these days.
There was, I felt, a moment where Linux had a chance to make a breakthrough onto the mainstream desktop. It was around the point where Windows ME was failing horribly and Windows 2000 had yet to get much public acceptance. At that point, there was a lot wrong with Windows. The technology underpinning 95/98/ME was creaking horribly. It's hard to believe now, but if you were a heavy PC user (particularly a gamer) back then, your Win98 machine would need daily reboots just to maintain basic performance and stability. Over on 2000, until it got a service pack or two, there were horrible compatibility issues with many applications, particularly those that required directx.
And then the moment passed. Windows 2000 got patched up and then Windows XP went on, after a rocky start, to become a stable, pleasant to use OS. Even the debacle of the Vista launch couldn't undermine the general dominance of Windows - because the major competition to Vista was coming from XP, not from Linux.
If you want to unseat the dominant market player, you have to not just be better than them, but be a lot better. It's not just that you have to have a few killer features; you have to be able to at least match the dominant player in every other significant respect as well. Linux is nowhere near that kind of position in respect of Windows these days (take gaming support as a case in point, but there are plenty of other examples).
Might be possible where you live. I'm in the UK and if you try to fire somebody here for "working too many hours" you will end up a) taken to the cleaners at a tribunal and b) as a comedy news item on page 7 of one of the morning freebie newspapers.
Partial exception for safety-critical roles, which have legal limits on the number of hours people are allowed to work.
I've not worked in Japan myself, but have heard similar stories from colleagues who have. I gather it's particularly bad for younger staff, who have "more to prove" to their employer. Without wanting to get too much into pop-sociology, you have to suspect a link between a work culture like that and Japan's birth-rate problems.
I do think that open plan offices are a big factor in making the "presentee-ism" problem even worse. I've only worked in one building that was definitively not open plan - it was a historic building subject to so many protection orders that, much to the frustration of senior management, even thinking about knocking an interior wall through would land you in jail. People either had their own offices, or worked in offices shared by 2-4 people.
By and large, people worked to the demands of the job. Our work there was highly prone to seasonal variations; you'd get months where you'd be doing 12 hour days and months where you'd be done in 6 - and people worked those hours, on the understanding that it all evened out. We took pride in our work and, by all indications, were good at it.
Shortly after I left, senior management found some open-plan accommodation in a newer building (which was more expensive - but the corporate drive in favour of open plan was so strong that mere cost wasn't allowed to stand as an obstacle) and relocated everybody there. According to my former colleagues, what followed was 2 years of hell and a serious drop in performance.
I've found there are three main reasons why people may end up working beyond their contracted hours:
1) The work that they have to do cannot be done during the hours they are contracted to work.
2) The work that they have to do can be done during the hours they are contracted to work, but the organisational or office culture puts pressure on people to be seen to be in the office outside those hours.
3) They have their own reasons for wanting to be working, which may range from a genuine passion for their work through to problems at home they would rather get away from.
Of these, 3) is generally not something the employer/manager should get involved in (unless home problems are starting to bleed over into the office).
I think that in most non-militant workplaces, people accept that 1) will occur from time to time and that, if it's for short periods, it's not a huge problem (particularly if the employer takes steps to recognise it and reward employees accordingly, be it financially, via time-in-lieu, or some other method). If it's not for short periods, then it absolutely will lead to morale and productivity problems and the employer/manager needs to think again about resourcing, or accept high staff turnover and problems with the quality of their outputs. This seems to be an endemic problem in certain industries (such as video games development) which are seen by outsiders as desirable places to work - meaning that there are always lots of eager young things waiting in the wings to replace burn-outs.
I suspect that the most common cause, however, is 2). Certainly, in the decade or so that I've been in full-time employment, I've come across quite a few offices where the work could be handled within contracted hours, but where the nature of the workplace culture meant that people were "padding" their working day; making tasks take longer than needed, or spending lots of time browsing the web in the afternoon. It's particularly noticable that workplaces like this seem to prize "being at your desk late in an evening" over "being there early in the morning". In part, I blame the shift to open-plan offices for this - there can be a "walk of shame" factor to leaving the office when your colleagues are still at their desks.
In one of my early management posts, I did try to tackle a culture like this in the office I was managing. I made a big thing about tracking how heavily loaded each team-member was and getting people to report when their workload reached the point where it would require them to work out of hours. I also made it gently but firmly clear that if your workload wasn't at that point, I expected you to get it done during normal office hours (happily, there was a wider organisational push at the time to reduce our power/lighting bills, which I could hook that onto).
For a while, it worked reasonably well. There was a bit of grumbling from a couple of people who, I suspect, thought that being seen in the office doing very long hours was a substitute for being any good at their job, but most people were happy to go along with it - and the quality of the office's work (which was mostly casework, requiring little creativity, but a lot of attention to detail) actually rose.
Then word got out (falsely, as it happened) that there may be redundancies headed in - and despite reassurances to the contrary, everybody assumed that they way to avoid being singled out was to be seen in the office every hour of the day - so all the work I'd done went to waste anyway. Overnight, things went back to being as bad as ever - and productivity fell off again.
Managament can be a pita at times.
That was always the obvious question, wasn't it? They even had a whole stat - resilience - which was useless in PvE but essential in PvP, to ensure that gear for the two play-types remained separate. Why they couldn't just go that one step further was always a mystery to me.
No, I was Holy Paladin, through the TBC and WotLK eras. To be honest, we had it less bad than many of the other classes, but even so, the extent to which holy shock, beacons and other mechanics got messed around with on a near-weekly basis to appease the PvP kiddies was exasperating.
I saw how Warlocks and Rogues suffered from it and just shuddered.
The endless tweaking was present in World of Warcraft as well and was one of the biggest factors that drove me out of the game. I was a PvE-only player, but my class was being constantly tweaked and overhauled to meet the ever-changing demands of PvP balance.
With PvP being absent from Diablo 3 at launch, I would hope (probably in vain) that Blizzard might want to stop and think whether they could stick a few more degrees of separation between PvE and PvP play.
Thing is, Square-Enix were wrong about the cost of producing an open(ish) world Final Fantasy game, with world map, side-quests, exploration and whatnot on a current-gen console. And they weren't just a little bit wrong, they were very wrong. Extravagantly wrong. Wrong with cherries on top.
See, it's been done - and pretty early in the console cycle. Lost Odyssey, from Mistwalker, was a game cut from exactly the same mold as the Playstation era Final Fantasies. It had a world map, controllable boats and airships, even some underwater exploration. It had hidden optional dungeons. It also had pretty cutscenes (some of them quite long) and generally high production values. It wasn't a huge commercial success - but the fact that it was a 360-exclusive JRPG (and hence doomed to fail in its home market) must surely have been a major factor there.
Seriously, if Lost Odyssey had a few chocobos stuck in it and the FF-series victory-fanfare at the end of fights, then it could have been released as Final Fantasy XIII and everybody would have been pretty happy. It was certainly a lot better than the FF13 we got.
Square-Enix's problem this generation has been that they seem to have had - until recently - nobody working on the Final Fantasy series who understands game design. They had vast legions of artists and animations, but nobody who knew how to bring a game together. By their own account, when creating FF13, they made more than twice the number of art-assets that were actually needed for the game before they even brought in any game designers or even writers to work out what the story was. FF13-2 is a better game and shows that they may be learning from their mistakes - but they've done a lot of damage to the franchise over the last few years.
A proper current-gen remake of Final Fantasy VII need not cost significantly more to make than Lost Odyssey. It might even cost less. Most of the non-game-engine cutscenes in FF7 are pretty short - and FF13-2 has shown that you can work marvels with in-engine cutscenes on Square-Enix's current technology.