It is an odd decision, for sure. At first glance, it seems counter-productive, because leaving aside any potential lost sales (and to be honest, I doubt too many of those will actually materialise), there must surely be more cost in providing some bespoke matchmaking system than in sticking in a server browser and letting people host dedicated servers. However, thinking about it, I can think of a few of the factors that are likely behind this. Note that I'm not saying I endorse them; just that I think these are the obvious candidates.
1) Piracy - a huge problem on the PC. This reminds me heavily of Blizzard's recent decision to drop LAN play from Starcraft 2. If you have a game which you know a lot of people will want for the multiplayer component, it makes sense to tie in said multiplayer component as tightly as you can with your anti-cheat.
2) Fear of adverse publicity from mods - when you are putting out a game which involves shooting people with realistic weapons, you probably live in fear that some kid is going to put out a mod where you shoot up his school. If he follows up on this in real life (and potentially even if he doesn't), you're in for a media storm. Sadly, we've seen time and time again that developers of easily-modded games are often held accountable in the public eye for the content of third party mods.
3) Platform standardisation - PC gaming is still a profitable market, but having to develop an entirely separate feature-set and multiplayer setup for the PC release is, in the eyes of many developers, an excessive cost. Look at how multiplayer was dropped from the PC version of the recent Ghostbusters game (which, incidentally, is the nastiest port I've seen in years).
It's a little unfair to say that all Star Trek games have been awful. The old 25th Anniversary adventure game which came out back in the 90s was decent. Perhaps not on the level of the Lucasarts adventures of the day, but it was certainly a game you could play, have fun with, and feel like you were doing something in the Star Trek universe. Starfleet Academy and Klingon Academy were good, if somewhat eccentric, space-shooters, while the Starfleet Command games were decent implementations of a tactical board-game which could have been excellent with a bit more polish.
Yes, there have been a good number of stinkers as well (particularly the FMV-adventure games), but let's look at the other franchise you name; Star Wars.
Back in the early and mid-90s, a Star Wars logo on a game was pretty much a sure sign of quality. On the PC, you had the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games and Dark Forces (by far the most intelligent product of the "Doom clone" generation of fpses). On the consoles, you had the Super Star Wars series, which were great (if perhaps overly difficult) platformers.
However, around about the time the sequels started appearing, the quality took a nose-dive. The Episode 1 games ranged from the mediocre and unoriginal (Pod Racer) to the downright awful (anything with Gungans in it). In fact, you could even argue that the rot set in earlier; Supremacy and Force Commander were very poor games, while X-Wing vs TIE Fighter was a disappointment to most people. The TIE-ins (no pun originally intended, but I found I'd typed that and decided to keep it) with the later prequels were no better.
Ok, the games have pulled back a little now from their Episode 1/Episode 2 nadir. KoTOR was excellent (though we can blame BioWare for that), Jedi Knight 2 was fairly good, a few of the RTSes have been ok and X-Wing Alliance repaired much of the damage done by XvT. But the Star Wars gaming franchise still has a pretty chequered history over the last decade, certainly as much so as Star Trek.
It can be done and has been done. Final Fantasy XI allows cross-platform play between PS2, Xbox 360 and PC. In fact, it breaks pretty much every supposed rule in the book, by not only allowing cross-platform play, but by 100% requiring console peripherals (hard disks for the PS2 and 360, though the 360 one is almost ubiquitous these days), and virtually requiring the use of a keyboard and mouse (which both . Despite all of this, it was the largest non-Korean MMO around prior to the World of Warcraft launch and maintains a large player-base today.
I think the message from this is that while console-manufacturers will resist cross-platform multiplayer releases, a strong 3rd party publisher (and Square-Enix have the kind of strength that can make or break a platform - just ask Nintendo about their experience with the N64) can force it through if they really want.
It does have disadvantages, though, when the PC is one of those platforms. PC technology has moved on a hell of a lot since the FFXI launch and the game feels awfully unfriendly on the PC these days, as the requirement to maintain cross-platform compatibility prevents the game from incorporating sensible UI and graphical changes on the scale that games like WoW can afford to make.
As a Brit who could never stand soccerball or the country's obsession with it, I suspect, following events in London this week, that Nintendo's best bet for putting out a simulation of that on the Wii is basically to start developing it as a Madworld mod. Only it'd need to be more violent.
A little wide of the mark, I suspect. I'm a WoW player, so I have a different perspective on this.
WoW is very, very profitable for Blizzard; no denying that. However, Blizzard have always underestimated the resources that are needed to sustain a product of WoW's scale. In the early days, it was hard to blame them too much. When WoW launched, its subscriber figures shot up within the first 48 hours to the kind of levels that no other MMO had been able to dream of. That Blizzard hadn't planned for this (and had a bumpy launch) is perhaps forgivable. In time, they came to manage the game better, although they still fall far short of some other MMO companies (particularly Square-Enix) when it comes to quality and consistency of service.
For a while now, however, we've seen Blizzard trying to see how far they can deprive WoW of resources without making the playerbase scream. When Wrath of the Lich King launched, it contained a pathetic amount of content and the patch that fixed this took far longer than anybody had expected to arrive. Server resources also started to feel strained, particularly instance servers.
What happened, of course, is that WoW started to shed players. I know plenty of people who quit through boredom or frustration while waiting for the 3.1 patch. While I don't have hard evidence to back it up, I suspect this trend was mirrored around the world. So Blizzard, in a flap as the goose that lays their golden eggs starts to look poorly, shift development resource back to WoW in a panic. We get more content added via 3.2 sooner than anybody had expected and we're getting promises of a fix for the server capacity problems that still blight 5-man dungeons. I think it's no coincidence that this happened at the same time that Starcraft 2 was suddenly hit by a big delay.
Personally, I think Blizzard are bored of WoW. They daren't stop developing it, because it brings in so much money. However, they're finding that keeping it going properly involves reinvesting a large amount of that money, as well as a lot of time from their most talented people. So they end up in a bit of a Catch 22. They'd probably like to stop putting the time, effort and money into WoW and into other games instead. But if they do that, their funding for those other games starts to get a lot thinner.
I think this is why we've just seen the announcement of a WoW expansion which is explicitely geared towards creating as much new content as possible out of existing resources.
And me... I hated Starcrap with a fiery passion that few other games can evoke (Total Annihilation blew it out of the water). I wouldn't care if I never saw a sequel to it. And Diablo? It was fun enough in its day but the world has moved on and I don't feel the need for another installment now. Warcraft 3 and WoW have been pretty much the only Blizzard games I've actively liked, so I know where I want to see them focussing.
Let's assume that in each case, we're talking about a bona-fide sequel or franchise reboot, rather than just a port of the original to Steam/Xbox Live/PSN. Just how much of a gap in the market is there for the games named in the summary?
Populous: This might work. However, the god-game genre has been through quite a few evolutionary steps since Populous kicked things off. I think a game that stuck too closely to the formula of the original (or Populous 2) would feel a bit dated and lacklustre now. A new installment in the series would need to either reflect the advances we've seen over the last couple of decades, or else have enough brand new ideas of its own that it could stand out from the crowd. If you're looking at old Bulldog franchises, I'd much rather they try to resurrect Syndicate.
Wing Commander: Yes please. The space-combat-sim genre has been sadly dormant for many years now and this is one franchise where a full reboot would be highly desirable. Take it back to the Kilrathi war, spend a fortune on the FMV cutscenes and recreate the sinking "I'm going to need a new PC" series that the old games were known and loved for.
Theme Park: This one I'm really not convinced by. There's been an absolute flood of Theme-Sim-Tycoon games in recent years, many of which have focussed around Theme Parks. The quality has varied wildly, and I'm not sure the genre's standing is particularly high. I'm really not sure that there's much room to reawaken this franchise without a distinct feeling that you're flogging a dead horse.
Road Rash: Fun enough games in their day, but I'm not really sure the old Road Rash titles really stand comparison to the other 3 franchises named above. Still, if they want to make a fun, arcadey motorcycle combat game and stick the Road Rash name on it, it certainly wouldn't do any harm.
It's not really an either/or. Schools and modern schooling methods are the largest single culprits, but advertising and Hollywood media messages certainly play large roles as well.
I remember pretty much gasping in astonishment (and being quite impressed) when that Pixar movie "The Incredibles" had the temerity to run with a message that not everybody is special after all. Talk about moving against the flow.
As Thompson sees it, any reasonable employer would pounce on an applicant with her academic credentials, which include a 2.7 grade-point average and a solid attendance record. But Monroe's career-services department has put forth insufficient effort to help her secure employment, she claims.
"They're supposed to say, 'I got this student, her attendance is good, her GPA is all right -- can you interview this person?' They're not doing that," she said.
Words fail me (briefly).
The best thing to come out of this story is that Ms. Thompson has sent out a nice big red-flag warning to any potential employers not to touch her with a barge pole. After all, if she does this, you can pretty much guarantee she'll sue her employer the moment she gets passed over for a promotion (after all, she shows up for work most days and her last project wasn't a total disaster).
"It doesn't make any sense: They went to school for four years, and then they come out working at McDonald's and Payless. That's not what they planned."
It might not be what they planned, but it is the reality of the job market. The huge expansion in higher education, along with widespread dumbing down of course material and grade inflation, has created a market where many apparently middling graduates just aren't going to have a chance at getting a job that genuinely requires graduate skills. A lot of students who 20 years ago would have been considered middling (but would have gone on to get graduate-level jobs) are now clustered around the top of the class.
At the same time, the self-esteem and all-must-have-prizes philosophies that now pervade much of education have convinced everybody that they deserve to walk right into their dream job, just because they've done nothing more than show up for class and turn in assignments most of the time. The entitlement mentality is right out on show in this story. I do a fair bit of recruitment for my employer and I see plenty more applicants who seem to feel the same way. They don't get very far.
There is an unfortunate side to this. A lot of teens and their parents are still duped into believing that a degree will still lead to a guaranteed "good" job. There's plenty of material out there to counter-act this view and show that in many (possibly even now a majority) of cases, it's a waste of time and money. Unfortunately, this usually gets dismissed as right wing ranting (which I will no doubt get accused of in the replies to this post). The other unfortunate side is that some employers with vacancies that could be filled by a bright high-school graduate seem to feel the need to advertise for a graduate just to "keep up with the Jonses", though I've noticed a slight reversal of this trend recently.
I'd advise Ms. Thompson that with her achievements and attitude, she needs to lower her expectations. She mentions McDonalds sneeringly, but the fact is that they have a general corporate policy of promoting most of their talent internally. If she is as capable as she thinks she is and went to work there with the intention of proving herself (and the attitude to match), she could have a perfectly reasonable career. The same is true of any number of other employers that she probably considers below her social status. Of course, she won't.
I was wondering the same thing. Certainly, for the "big budget" EA adaptation of the Inferno, I think that we're just going to get a God of War clone which lifts the names of its levels from Inferno.
I suspect you may be familiar with it already, but others reading this thread might not be, so I'm going to give a quick plug here to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's 1976 adaptation of Inferno. It distorts or subverts some of the key theological conceits of the original, but it's a fun and thought provoking read (which populates Hell with a more up-to-date cast). There's a more recent 2009 sequel to it, which, despite being rather luridly titled "Escape from Hell" is also pretty good. The amusing thing is that both books contain sections which will challenge/offend (depending on sensitivity) Christians and atheists alike.
Like I say, they're not perfect, but they're still a damned sight more faithful to the spirit of the Divine Comedy than what will inevitably turn out to be some action game where you press X, Circle, X, Square, X, Triangle in sequence during a quick-time event to make Dante decapitate the big Demon and springboard off the body onto a motorbike.
Talk of addiction to MMOs long-predates WoW. Another reply to your comment has already made the "Evercrack" point.
My own beliefs on the issue are a bit of a middle ground. I believe MMO addiction does exist, but I do think it's far rarer than is genuinely supposed. The problem is that a lot of people who've never really been into computers have always had trouble distinguishing between gaming as a hobby and an addiction to gaming.
I'm a fairly heavy gaming hobbyist. Always have been, ever since the mid 1980s. In recent years, I've played two MMOs, Final Fantasy XI and WoW, and played them quite extensively, but I don't think I've ever been addicted. With FFXI, I played it fairly heavily for about two and a half years, then my interest in it just started to wane. At the most extreme peak, I was logging into the game five, sometimes six days a weel. Then suddenly, I couldn't really be bothered before. I dropped to playing twice a week, then once a week, then just logging in every couple of weeks. My account's not been touched now for over a year.
With World of Warcraft, I started playing it a couple of months after I stopped playing FFXI. I started off fairly casually - maybe one night during the week and a few hours on a Saturday. Then I dinged 80, started raiding and ended up back to a 5 or 6 days per week play cycle. Then my enthusiasm waned somewhat. Unlike with FFXI, I haven't stopped playing. As a matter of fact, I raid with a fairly decent raiding guild (Ulduar 25, including a couple of hard modes, on farm, for those who know what that means). So I log in to raid 3 nights a week and spend a bit of time on a Saturday morning making the gold I'll need to fund my raiding. The rest of the week, I do other stuff, both on and off the computer, during my leisure time. I've been playing fairly stably at this level for around 12 months now. Sure, there was a brief spike in my play-time when Wrath of the Lich King hit, but that was over after about 3 weeks.
The real reason I know I'm not addicted is that every year, I spend a couple of weeks away from home. I don't see my parents very often (they live at the other end of the country), but to make up with this, I go on holiday with them every year. And while I'm away, I have no WoW and only fairly limited net access. And it doesn't bother me.
However, there are cases I've seen at first hand of people who've become hopelessly addicted. When I was a student, a friend of mine failed his second year exams and crashed and burned out because of an addiction to Planetarion (basically multiplayer Excel). There's also a guy in my WoW guild who is logged in 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, but he's the exception rather than the rule.
I think as a general rule, if you have a personality that tends towards addiction, and no over-riding factors in your life (such as a job, or a family to support) that constrain the time you can spend in game, MMO addiction is probably something you'd want to be aware of. For everybody else, however, the risk is very slight.
I love a story heavy fps. If a game wants to give me 30 minute cutscenes and throw the entire GDP of a small nation into its set-pieces, that's great with me. But you need to do it properly.
Give me a protagonist who is either a pre-defined character, no matter how shallow, with actual relationships to other characters, no matter how disfunctional, a la Gears of War, Resistance, Crysis etc, or give me a blank slate that I can shape myself, and let me actually do so through interactions.
Don't cast me as the Incedible Wooden Man, who everybody else in the game responds to in a completely implausible manner. It's a complete and utter immerson killer and I have never played an AAA-budget fps that's as low on immersion as Half-Life 2.
This doesn't necessarily follow. I was replaying Mechwarrior 4 Mercenaries recently and, for an experiment, I tried setting it up to work on a 360-style control pad. It was mostly fine, despite clearly having not been designed for it.. While games of the vintage of the older Mechwarrior games give you a lot of control options, half the time you don't need them all.
Let's think through what you really need, first in terms of analogue controllers:
- You need one analogue stick for controlling the movement of the legs, by which I mean walking forwards and backwards, and turning the mech left and right. This is slightly different to what you'd normally use WASD for in an fps - the Y-Axis is controlling a throttle, rather than direct movement, while the X-Axis actually adjusts the direction of travel, rather than sidestepping (which if I remember, most mechs can't do - at least not quickly enough for it to be useful in battle).
- You need one analogue stick for controlling the view, by which I mean rotating the torso left and right and tilting it up and down.
On these two points, the console controller is perfectly adequate, and, given both sticks are analogue, it's arguably superior to a traditional keyboard and mouse controller. And now, what you need in terms of buttons:
- Weapons control needs a few buttons. You need one to fire (always useful), one to toggle between your pre-set weapon groups (separate "next" and "last" controls are useful, but not actually essential) and while not 100% essential, an alpha-strike button is also nice. It's also handy to have a zoom control, for precise aiming. So let's say 4 buttons there. Let's just say, hypothetically speaking, that you use the 4 shoulder buttons for these.
- You need some targetting controls. This is where you can probably cut out a lot. At a minimum, you need "next enemy", "closest enemy", "target under reticle" and possibly "target objective". So again, 4 buttons there. Let's say you use the 4 face buttons for these.
- You need some way of giving commands to your lance. The basic commands you want are "attack my target", "attack at will", "form on me" and "hold your fire". You could bind these 4 to the 4 directions on the D-Pad, for whole lance controls. If you want to allow the issuing of orders to individual lancemates, you need to use a menu.
- You have a few other miscelaneous controls for your mech. You'll need jump-jets, but you could bind these quite happily to L3 (ie. click down on the left analogue stick). You'll also want a coolant-flood button... let's say R3.
- You'll probably also want a shut-down button, for missions requiring the player to go undetected, or for re-arming at pads. Put this on "back". It could also double as an "over-ride" shutdown button, for when players want to run the risk of fighting with high temperatures.
- Finally, you'll want a menu/pause/map button. Obviously, this is start. You can use the mid-mission menu for functions like detailed wingmen orders, or the hot-configuration of weapon groups.
If you've got those controls in, there's no reason why you can't, in theory, have a game with virtually all of the depth of the old Mechwarrior games.
Half-Life was a taut, lean game. It had remarkably little variation in its environments (at least until you got to Xen). It told a fairly minimalist story, and it used appropriate techniques to do so. There were no characters as such - just NPCs who didn't shoot at you and who sometimes told you where to go for the next objective. In the context of "immediate aftermath of a disaster", a mute protagonist works just fine.
Half-Life 2 is a much flabbier creation. Valve couldn't resist the temptation to go for the big cinematic set-pieces that have made their way into the genre since the original Half-Life came out (and have worked very well in some cases). It tried to tell a fairly trite big-budget-blockbuster storyline, with "characters" to match. It tried to make the protagonist out to be some kind of legendary super-hero inspirational resistance leader type. In this context, a mute protagonist doesn't work. You end up with an odd and uncomfortable hybrid of the original Half-Life with Medal of Honor or Gears of War or something. And it doesn't work. The whole experience is just jarring.
There's also the problem that in gameplay terms, Half-Life 2 is the kind of game which knows it has one original idea (the gravity gun) and is determined to flog it to death. Boring, badly designed gimmick sections of the game (like the vehicle sections, and that &%*"£&*% Ravenholme) go on for far too long, while the enjoyable bits which retain some of Half-Life's feel (like Nova Prospect) are over fairly quickly.
Guess what, the number 1 candidate I'd have named is getting a reboot. Mechwarrior. My head tells me that disappointment is still the likely outcome, but my hearts looks at the material they've put out so far and jumps for joy.
Other good candidates?
Wing Commander - it was the series that defined "cutting edge" gaming for a generation. I'd love to see this done properly on modern technology - including the heavy story emphasis and cheesy cutscenes.
Eye of the Beholder - this would need to be done properly. RPGs these days tend towards big open worlds, which can be great. But I'd love to see a decent, non-Diablo-style RPG which takes a classic, claustrophobic dungeon setting (running on a decent, modern engine) and places the emphasis firmly on survival and puzzle solving, rather than making friends and becoming the Grand Trademaster Caravanlord of Little Wizzlington.
Star Control - Pretend the third game never happened, just give us either a decent sequel or a franchise reboot in the style of the second game.
And finally (and this is what gets me flamed)... Half-Life. I didn't like Half-Life 2. I've replayed it a couple of times trying to "get" it and I still don't like it. The changes with the game-world of the first game are too jarring and badly explained. The idea of the mute protagonist just Does Not Work in the context of a more open-world game like Half-Life 2. It certainly doesn't work when you try to make said protagonist out to be some kind of a Messiah figure. Pretend HL2 never happened and go back to the feel of the original.
Oh dear, I do hope they aren't including Final Fantasy XI in that. Much as I used to love the game (and still get the odd pang of nostalgia for it), it would be a hilariously awful idea to include it on this. I guess you could interpret "beating it" as being "finishing the plot missions for all of the current expansions", but still...
"Here we are, going into day 217 of the challenge, and player 4 has just dinged 63. This, of course, marks the half-way point in his experience grind. Now over to Bob, who's going to tell us about that exciting episode earlier, where half of the players spent 7 hours trying to find a tank, who then left them after 20 minutes."
I had a strange experience the other week like this. I went back to some old CD-Rs, which would have ranged from about 7-10 years in age. Some were among the very first CDs I ever burned, on my old 2x drive, back in the days when the disks themselves cost £1.50 a pop here in the UK. The very oldest were actually fine. The slightly more recent ones (at the 7 year end of the range) were far more of a mixed bag. Around 1/3rd of them could be read only partially, or not at all. I'm pretty sure that the lower quality of these media (the newer CD-Rs would have only cost around 25% of the price of the older) was a big factor in that.
However, all was not lost. I have a very, very, old 2x CD-ROM drive that I keep lying around because it can read pretty much anything that isn't actually heavily and visibly scratched. So I plugged this in and, sure enough, it was (eventually, with a lot of grinding noises) able to get the data off the wonky CDs. I'm not quite sure why this should be; that a 15 year old CD Drive from the days when Rebel Assault and Mad Dog McRee were top of the line should be able to read disks that 3 modern drives (a Blu-Ray reader and two different DVD-RW drives) just gave up on, but I wasn't complaining.
On 1., while the world of Fallout is indeed pretty big (in theory, we know that the entire North American contintent at the very least is wasteland, probably the rest of the world as well - though you could argue this is left ambiguous), it is also pretty much entirely ruined. Pittsburg is, it is made clear, the biggest city left which is actually intact, in the physical sense. It has housing, factories, power, utilities, the lot, just waiting to be switched back on. Other settlements are usually clumps of people trying to survive in makeshift shacks and ruins, using up what's left of the remains of pre-war civilisation. If you want to rebuild an actual, functioning large pre-war style civilisation, as opposed to a network of subsistence level hovels (which is basically the kindest description you could give to the Capital Wasteland), given the lack of construction facilities, Pittsburg makes a lot of sense, provided you can do something about the contamination.
On 2., the slavers are not particularly securely entrenched. One of the big points in the story, which I forgot to cover in my original post, is that for the most part, the big "luxurious" former-hotel where the top bods reside is every bit as dilapidated as the rest of the city. The only section that's been repaired to a higher standard than the rest of the city is the science lab. The city's rulers are outnumbered and the slaves have makeshift but effective weapons. There are plenty of historical parallels for this. Most, if not all states dependant upon mass slavery (where the slave/serf population outnumbers the free population) have survived not on the basis of being able to put down a full-scale slave revolt at any given time, but on denying the slave population the ability to organise said revolt (through denying lines of communication, the use of divide-and-conquer tactics and so on). Once such a society reaches the stage of a wide-scale revolt, its survival can be touch and go.
On 3., yes, that's one possible moral choice. Personally, I disagreed (after some reflection). But the game gives you the option of making the opposing choice, and taking steps that will improve the condition of the current inhabitants right now. I think it's pretty impressive that a game can make me think like that. Of course, you can always choose not to take the quest in Fallout 3. The game gives you the option of just walking away a number of times, before you reach Pittsburg itself. If you do this, however, logic would suggest that one of the two possible outcomes outlined in my post above will eventually still come about; either the revolt will take place and happen, or else it will be quelled, or never take place at all (leaving the regime in power). You just lose the ability to have any influence over the outcome.
Fallout 3 is a mixed bag, perhaps. It has a few choices that are a bit too start "nuke Megaton or save it", but it also has some which are far more complex.
I think the best of these comes in the second downloadable content pack, "The Pitt". I'm about to spoiler this massively, so those who haven't yet played this, but think they might do so, look away now.
Yes, now.
Right now.
Here be spoilers.
Ok, for those who are still reading, here's the basic synopsis of The Pitt.
The Lone Wanderer picks up a distress call, from the North of the Capital Wastelands. He makes his way there, and comes to the assistance of Werhner, an escaped slave under attack by raiders. Werhner outlines his situation to the Lone Wanderer; he has escaped from slavery in Pittsburg, and wishes for the Lone Wanderer's help in returning there and liberating the slaves.
The Lone Wanderer travels with Werhner to Pittsburg. Unlike most major US cities, "The Pitt" did not receive any direct nuclear strikes during the war, so its buildings are largely intact (though crumbling somewhat after 200 years of neglect). Unfortunately, it wasn't spared the fallout, and the city is highly contaminated, with radiation poisoning, disease and mutation being rife, even by the general standards of the Fallout 3 world. The city is currenly in the grip of a plague that mutates sufferers into mindless, psychotic freaks. It is rumoured that Lord Ashur, the ruler of the Pitt, has developed a cure, but it has not been forthcoming. As part of his plan to free the slaves, Werhner wants you to steal the cure.
At first, the Lone Wanderer has relatively few choices. He follows Werhner's plan to infiltrate the city as a slave. Life in The Pitt is brutal and usually short. The slaves are brutally oppressed by the slavers, many of whom are essentially common thugs. Because the high levels of radiation and mutation in the Pitt make natural reproduction almost impossible, the slave population is maintained through kidnapping of new slaves, as well as trade with the slavers of the Capital Wastelands.
Eventually, the Lone Wanderer manages to win his freedom, through victory in a series of gladiatorial arena battles. As one of the few slaves to win his freedom in this manner, he is granted an audience with Lord Ashur. Werhner's plan is for the Lone Wanderer to use this as an opportunity to steel the cure (killing Lord Ashur if possible), and he has timed a slave uprising to coincide with it. With the city's leadership thrown into chaos by the Lone Wanderer, the slaves would be able to overthrow the regime and escape.
Ok... so far, it all seems simple enough. Oppressed slaves, a charismatic leader trying to win their freedom, and brutal oppressors. Not much of a moral choice here.
Then the Lone Wanderer meets Ashur. Ashur isn't some comic book villain. He's trying to build a functioning society. He doesn't want to use slavery, but so complete has been the collapse of civilisation that the only way to get the rebuilding process started is through force. Once conditions improve, the regime will be relaxed and slavery abolished. Of course, the Lone Wanderer doesn't have to believe Ashur; plenty of characters in Fallout 3 will lie to your face - but he does give the impression of being sincere.
On the subject of a cure, Ashur has more concrete proof. The basis for a cure exists; his own infant daughter, who has been born with natural immunity to the effects of radiation poisoning and the plague. Ashur's scientist wife is working to discern the factors that grant her this immunity, so that it can be replicated. The cure's not going to be able to help the current slaves, but it might be the salvation of the next generation.
Ashur also explains that Werhner is his own former Lieutenant, who turned against him because he wanted more power. Ashur knows that the Lone Wanderer has been sent by Werhner and offers him a choice; turn against Werhner and help surpress the slave revolt.
Bioshock was a competent game. It's biggest problem was that it had been massively over-sold. On the gameplay front, it was supposed to be the spiritual successor to System Shock 2, which, as you and others have noted, it wasn't. On the story front, it was supposed to set new standards for depth and intelligence in game story-telling. In truth, it wasn't anything like as clever as it thought it was, failing to rise above the level of pseudo-sophistication I'd expect from an overconfident political sciences undergraduate. The element of moral choice was so black and white as to be ludicrous; you could either be an angel or a demon, with nothing in between. If you want to see moral choices done properly, then turn to Fallout 3, not to Bioshock.
The gameplay was effectively a run and gun shooter with a few irritating-but-easy puzzle minigames and a bit of spellcasting thrown in. I don't actually blame console-ification for this; you can actually have some excellent, deep gameplay on the consoles. I think it was related more to lazy design and a serious underestimation of the capabilities of the target audience.
Of course, it was still a reasonable game, considered on its own terms. The combat was moderately fun, though it suffered from some balance issues that generally encouraged players to be very conservative in their combat tactics, ignoring the more creative ways of using the environment and the plasmids. Visually it was pretty nice, with the art deco theme being generally well realised.
So yes, not actively bad, but if they want to get me excited about a sequel, they need to make clear that they're going to be much more ambitious this time around.
Why should they be rolling around in their graves? The only Tiberian-universe game that was an insult to the original was C&C2, and I'm fairly sure that this was back when Westwood were still in control of the franchise.
C&C3 was, I thought, a pretty decent spritual successor to the original.
Yes, I was going to repond to the grandparent, but you've said it all better than I would have done. For me, the biggest defect of MW2, particularly Mercenaries, was the way that all of the mechs felt so generic once you got into the tweaking. They were basically all just slightly differently shaped shells with a set amount of capacity for weapons.
As you say, in Mechwarrior 4, your mech's function actually had to match its form to some degree. There were actually mechs that had a lot of versatile slots for their weapons, making them completely customisable, but these mechs tended to have glaring defects elsewhere.
It also meant that when I picked out my lance for the mission, I actually ended up arranging it so that the lance looked and felt plausible within the context of the fiction. If I wanted a long range support mech, I'd be using a Catapult or a Vulture, not a Zeus stuffed with invisible missile racks.
It's funny, really, how excited I am that they've gone back to an early time-line setting. I mean, I do hope the Clans show up at some point, even if only in the multiplayer, but my defining memories of Battletech and Mechwarrior games basically revolve around frantically scuttling about in a lance of Locust and Jenner type mechs, with a couple of SRMs and lasers, frantically trying to come up with a way to take down a Dragon.
Yes, that was great as well. I quite liked the balance they reached in MW4 with that, where you had room to tweak, but had to keep the categories of weapons etc vaguely in line with the original ethos of the chassis. So a laser-heavy mech might only be able to use energy weapons in a lot of its slots. It struck me as a good way of finding a balance between allowing for customisation, without turning it into a game of pure min/maxing.
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It is an odd decision, for sure. At first glance, it seems counter-productive, because leaving aside any potential lost sales (and to be honest, I doubt too many of those will actually materialise), there must surely be more cost in providing some bespoke matchmaking system than in sticking in a server browser and letting people host dedicated servers. However, thinking about it, I can think of a few of the factors that are likely behind this. Note that I'm not saying I endorse them; just that I think these are the obvious candidates.
1) Piracy - a huge problem on the PC. This reminds me heavily of Blizzard's recent decision to drop LAN play from Starcraft 2. If you have a game which you know a lot of people will want for the multiplayer component, it makes sense to tie in said multiplayer component as tightly as you can with your anti-cheat.
2) Fear of adverse publicity from mods - when you are putting out a game which involves shooting people with realistic weapons, you probably live in fear that some kid is going to put out a mod where you shoot up his school. If he follows up on this in real life (and potentially even if he doesn't), you're in for a media storm. Sadly, we've seen time and time again that developers of easily-modded games are often held accountable in the public eye for the content of third party mods.
3) Platform standardisation - PC gaming is still a profitable market, but having to develop an entirely separate feature-set and multiplayer setup for the PC release is, in the eyes of many developers, an excessive cost. Look at how multiplayer was dropped from the PC version of the recent Ghostbusters game (which, incidentally, is the nastiest port I've seen in years).
It's a little unfair to say that all Star Trek games have been awful. The old 25th Anniversary adventure game which came out back in the 90s was decent. Perhaps not on the level of the Lucasarts adventures of the day, but it was certainly a game you could play, have fun with, and feel like you were doing something in the Star Trek universe. Starfleet Academy and Klingon Academy were good, if somewhat eccentric, space-shooters, while the Starfleet Command games were decent implementations of a tactical board-game which could have been excellent with a bit more polish.
Yes, there have been a good number of stinkers as well (particularly the FMV-adventure games), but let's look at the other franchise you name; Star Wars.
Back in the early and mid-90s, a Star Wars logo on a game was pretty much a sure sign of quality. On the PC, you had the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games and Dark Forces (by far the most intelligent product of the "Doom clone" generation of fpses). On the consoles, you had the Super Star Wars series, which were great (if perhaps overly difficult) platformers.
However, around about the time the sequels started appearing, the quality took a nose-dive. The Episode 1 games ranged from the mediocre and unoriginal (Pod Racer) to the downright awful (anything with Gungans in it). In fact, you could even argue that the rot set in earlier; Supremacy and Force Commander were very poor games, while X-Wing vs TIE Fighter was a disappointment to most people. The TIE-ins (no pun originally intended, but I found I'd typed that and decided to keep it) with the later prequels were no better.
Ok, the games have pulled back a little now from their Episode 1/Episode 2 nadir. KoTOR was excellent (though we can blame BioWare for that), Jedi Knight 2 was fairly good, a few of the RTSes have been ok and X-Wing Alliance repaired much of the damage done by XvT. But the Star Wars gaming franchise still has a pretty chequered history over the last decade, certainly as much so as Star Trek.
It can be done and has been done. Final Fantasy XI allows cross-platform play between PS2, Xbox 360 and PC. In fact, it breaks pretty much every supposed rule in the book, by not only allowing cross-platform play, but by 100% requiring console peripherals (hard disks for the PS2 and 360, though the 360 one is almost ubiquitous these days), and virtually requiring the use of a keyboard and mouse (which both . Despite all of this, it was the largest non-Korean MMO around prior to the World of Warcraft launch and maintains a large player-base today.
I think the message from this is that while console-manufacturers will resist cross-platform multiplayer releases, a strong 3rd party publisher (and Square-Enix have the kind of strength that can make or break a platform - just ask Nintendo about their experience with the N64) can force it through if they really want.
It does have disadvantages, though, when the PC is one of those platforms. PC technology has moved on a hell of a lot since the FFXI launch and the game feels awfully unfriendly on the PC these days, as the requirement to maintain cross-platform compatibility prevents the game from incorporating sensible UI and graphical changes on the scale that games like WoW can afford to make.
As a Brit who could never stand soccerball or the country's obsession with it, I suspect, following events in London this week, that Nintendo's best bet for putting out a simulation of that on the Wii is basically to start developing it as a Madworld mod. Only it'd need to be more violent.
A little wide of the mark, I suspect. I'm a WoW player, so I have a different perspective on this.
WoW is very, very profitable for Blizzard; no denying that. However, Blizzard have always underestimated the resources that are needed to sustain a product of WoW's scale. In the early days, it was hard to blame them too much. When WoW launched, its subscriber figures shot up within the first 48 hours to the kind of levels that no other MMO had been able to dream of. That Blizzard hadn't planned for this (and had a bumpy launch) is perhaps forgivable. In time, they came to manage the game better, although they still fall far short of some other MMO companies (particularly Square-Enix) when it comes to quality and consistency of service.
For a while now, however, we've seen Blizzard trying to see how far they can deprive WoW of resources without making the playerbase scream. When Wrath of the Lich King launched, it contained a pathetic amount of content and the patch that fixed this took far longer than anybody had expected to arrive. Server resources also started to feel strained, particularly instance servers.
What happened, of course, is that WoW started to shed players. I know plenty of people who quit through boredom or frustration while waiting for the 3.1 patch. While I don't have hard evidence to back it up, I suspect this trend was mirrored around the world. So Blizzard, in a flap as the goose that lays their golden eggs starts to look poorly, shift development resource back to WoW in a panic. We get more content added via 3.2 sooner than anybody had expected and we're getting promises of a fix for the server capacity problems that still blight 5-man dungeons. I think it's no coincidence that this happened at the same time that Starcraft 2 was suddenly hit by a big delay.
Personally, I think Blizzard are bored of WoW. They daren't stop developing it, because it brings in so much money. However, they're finding that keeping it going properly involves reinvesting a large amount of that money, as well as a lot of time from their most talented people. So they end up in a bit of a Catch 22. They'd probably like to stop putting the time, effort and money into WoW and into other games instead. But if they do that, their funding for those other games starts to get a lot thinner.
I think this is why we've just seen the announcement of a WoW expansion which is explicitely geared towards creating as much new content as possible out of existing resources.
And me... I hated Starcrap with a fiery passion that few other games can evoke (Total Annihilation blew it out of the water). I wouldn't care if I never saw a sequel to it. And Diablo? It was fun enough in its day but the world has moved on and I don't feel the need for another installment now. Warcraft 3 and WoW have been pretty much the only Blizzard games I've actively liked, so I know where I want to see them focussing.
Are you telling me a 50 bugs price tag is too high to watch people suffer from both Bloaty Head and The Squits at the same time in high definition 3d?
Heathen.
Yes, yes, I meant to say "Bullfrog" rather than "Bulldog" there.
Let's assume that in each case, we're talking about a bona-fide sequel or franchise reboot, rather than just a port of the original to Steam/Xbox Live/PSN. Just how much of a gap in the market is there for the games named in the summary?
Populous: This might work. However, the god-game genre has been through quite a few evolutionary steps since Populous kicked things off. I think a game that stuck too closely to the formula of the original (or Populous 2) would feel a bit dated and lacklustre now. A new installment in the series would need to either reflect the advances we've seen over the last couple of decades, or else have enough brand new ideas of its own that it could stand out from the crowd. If you're looking at old Bulldog franchises, I'd much rather they try to resurrect Syndicate.
Wing Commander: Yes please. The space-combat-sim genre has been sadly dormant for many years now and this is one franchise where a full reboot would be highly desirable. Take it back to the Kilrathi war, spend a fortune on the FMV cutscenes and recreate the sinking "I'm going to need a new PC" series that the old games were known and loved for.
Theme Park: This one I'm really not convinced by. There's been an absolute flood of Theme-Sim-Tycoon games in recent years, many of which have focussed around Theme Parks. The quality has varied wildly, and I'm not sure the genre's standing is particularly high. I'm really not sure that there's much room to reawaken this franchise without a distinct feeling that you're flogging a dead horse.
Road Rash: Fun enough games in their day, but I'm not really sure the old Road Rash titles really stand comparison to the other 3 franchises named above. Still, if they want to make a fun, arcadey motorcycle combat game and stick the Road Rash name on it, it certainly wouldn't do any harm.
It's not really an either/or. Schools and modern schooling methods are the largest single culprits, but advertising and Hollywood media messages certainly play large roles as well.
I remember pretty much gasping in astonishment (and being quite impressed) when that Pixar movie "The Incredibles" had the temerity to run with a message that not everybody is special after all. Talk about moving against the flow.
As Thompson sees it, any reasonable employer would pounce on an applicant with her academic credentials, which include a 2.7 grade-point average and a solid attendance record. But Monroe's career-services department has put forth insufficient effort to help her secure employment, she claims.
"They're supposed to say, 'I got this student, her attendance is good, her GPA is all right -- can you interview this person?' They're not doing that," she said.
Words fail me (briefly).
The best thing to come out of this story is that Ms. Thompson has sent out a nice big red-flag warning to any potential employers not to touch her with a barge pole. After all, if she does this, you can pretty much guarantee she'll sue her employer the moment she gets passed over for a promotion (after all, she shows up for work most days and her last project wasn't a total disaster).
"It doesn't make any sense: They went to school for four years, and then they come out working at McDonald's and Payless. That's not what they planned."
It might not be what they planned, but it is the reality of the job market. The huge expansion in higher education, along with widespread dumbing down of course material and grade inflation, has created a market where many apparently middling graduates just aren't going to have a chance at getting a job that genuinely requires graduate skills. A lot of students who 20 years ago would have been considered middling (but would have gone on to get graduate-level jobs) are now clustered around the top of the class.
At the same time, the self-esteem and all-must-have-prizes philosophies that now pervade much of education have convinced everybody that they deserve to walk right into their dream job, just because they've done nothing more than show up for class and turn in assignments most of the time. The entitlement mentality is right out on show in this story. I do a fair bit of recruitment for my employer and I see plenty more applicants who seem to feel the same way. They don't get very far.
There is an unfortunate side to this. A lot of teens and their parents are still duped into believing that a degree will still lead to a guaranteed "good" job. There's plenty of material out there to counter-act this view and show that in many (possibly even now a majority) of cases, it's a waste of time and money. Unfortunately, this usually gets dismissed as right wing ranting (which I will no doubt get accused of in the replies to this post). The other unfortunate side is that some employers with vacancies that could be filled by a bright high-school graduate seem to feel the need to advertise for a graduate just to "keep up with the Jonses", though I've noticed a slight reversal of this trend recently.
I'd advise Ms. Thompson that with her achievements and attitude, she needs to lower her expectations. She mentions McDonalds sneeringly, but the fact is that they have a general corporate policy of promoting most of their talent internally. If she is as capable as she thinks she is and went to work there with the intention of proving herself (and the attitude to match), she could have a perfectly reasonable career. The same is true of any number of other employers that she probably considers below her social status. Of course, she won't.
I was wondering the same thing. Certainly, for the "big budget" EA adaptation of the Inferno, I think that we're just going to get a God of War clone which lifts the names of its levels from Inferno.
I suspect you may be familiar with it already, but others reading this thread might not be, so I'm going to give a quick plug here to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's 1976 adaptation of Inferno. It distorts or subverts some of the key theological conceits of the original, but it's a fun and thought provoking read (which populates Hell with a more up-to-date cast). There's a more recent 2009 sequel to it, which, despite being rather luridly titled "Escape from Hell" is also pretty good. The amusing thing is that both books contain sections which will challenge/offend (depending on sensitivity) Christians and atheists alike.
Like I say, they're not perfect, but they're still a damned sight more faithful to the spirit of the Divine Comedy than what will inevitably turn out to be some action game where you press X, Circle, X, Square, X, Triangle in sequence during a quick-time event to make Dante decapitate the big Demon and springboard off the body onto a motorbike.
Talk of addiction to MMOs long-predates WoW. Another reply to your comment has already made the "Evercrack" point.
My own beliefs on the issue are a bit of a middle ground. I believe MMO addiction does exist, but I do think it's far rarer than is genuinely supposed. The problem is that a lot of people who've never really been into computers have always had trouble distinguishing between gaming as a hobby and an addiction to gaming.
I'm a fairly heavy gaming hobbyist. Always have been, ever since the mid 1980s. In recent years, I've played two MMOs, Final Fantasy XI and WoW, and played them quite extensively, but I don't think I've ever been addicted. With FFXI, I played it fairly heavily for about two and a half years, then my interest in it just started to wane. At the most extreme peak, I was logging into the game five, sometimes six days a weel. Then suddenly, I couldn't really be bothered before. I dropped to playing twice a week, then once a week, then just logging in every couple of weeks. My account's not been touched now for over a year.
With World of Warcraft, I started playing it a couple of months after I stopped playing FFXI. I started off fairly casually - maybe one night during the week and a few hours on a Saturday. Then I dinged 80, started raiding and ended up back to a 5 or 6 days per week play cycle. Then my enthusiasm waned somewhat. Unlike with FFXI, I haven't stopped playing. As a matter of fact, I raid with a fairly decent raiding guild (Ulduar 25, including a couple of hard modes, on farm, for those who know what that means). So I log in to raid 3 nights a week and spend a bit of time on a Saturday morning making the gold I'll need to fund my raiding. The rest of the week, I do other stuff, both on and off the computer, during my leisure time. I've been playing fairly stably at this level for around 12 months now. Sure, there was a brief spike in my play-time when Wrath of the Lich King hit, but that was over after about 3 weeks.
The real reason I know I'm not addicted is that every year, I spend a couple of weeks away from home. I don't see my parents very often (they live at the other end of the country), but to make up with this, I go on holiday with them every year. And while I'm away, I have no WoW and only fairly limited net access. And it doesn't bother me.
However, there are cases I've seen at first hand of people who've become hopelessly addicted. When I was a student, a friend of mine failed his second year exams and crashed and burned out because of an addiction to Planetarion (basically multiplayer Excel). There's also a guy in my WoW guild who is logged in 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, but he's the exception rather than the rule.
I think as a general rule, if you have a personality that tends towards addiction, and no over-riding factors in your life (such as a job, or a family to support) that constrain the time you can spend in game, MMO addiction is probably something you'd want to be aware of. For everybody else, however, the risk is very slight.
I love a story heavy fps. If a game wants to give me 30 minute cutscenes and throw the entire GDP of a small nation into its set-pieces, that's great with me. But you need to do it properly.
Give me a protagonist who is either a pre-defined character, no matter how shallow, with actual relationships to other characters, no matter how disfunctional, a la Gears of War, Resistance, Crysis etc, or give me a blank slate that I can shape myself, and let me actually do so through interactions.
Don't cast me as the Incedible Wooden Man, who everybody else in the game responds to in a completely implausible manner. It's a complete and utter immerson killer and I have never played an AAA-budget fps that's as low on immersion as Half-Life 2.
This doesn't necessarily follow. I was replaying Mechwarrior 4 Mercenaries recently and, for an experiment, I tried setting it up to work on a 360-style control pad. It was mostly fine, despite clearly having not been designed for it.. While games of the vintage of the older Mechwarrior games give you a lot of control options, half the time you don't need them all.
Let's think through what you really need, first in terms of analogue controllers:
- You need one analogue stick for controlling the movement of the legs, by which I mean walking forwards and backwards, and turning the mech left and right. This is slightly different to what you'd normally use WASD for in an fps - the Y-Axis is controlling a throttle, rather than direct movement, while the X-Axis actually adjusts the direction of travel, rather than sidestepping (which if I remember, most mechs can't do - at least not quickly enough for it to be useful in battle).
- You need one analogue stick for controlling the view, by which I mean rotating the torso left and right and tilting it up and down.
On these two points, the console controller is perfectly adequate, and, given both sticks are analogue, it's arguably superior to a traditional keyboard and mouse controller. And now, what you need in terms of buttons:
- Weapons control needs a few buttons. You need one to fire (always useful), one to toggle between your pre-set weapon groups (separate "next" and "last" controls are useful, but not actually essential) and while not 100% essential, an alpha-strike button is also nice. It's also handy to have a zoom control, for precise aiming. So let's say 4 buttons there. Let's just say, hypothetically speaking, that you use the 4 shoulder buttons for these.
- You need some targetting controls. This is where you can probably cut out a lot. At a minimum, you need "next enemy", "closest enemy", "target under reticle" and possibly "target objective". So again, 4 buttons there. Let's say you use the 4 face buttons for these.
- You need some way of giving commands to your lance. The basic commands you want are "attack my target", "attack at will", "form on me" and "hold your fire". You could bind these 4 to the 4 directions on the D-Pad, for whole lance controls. If you want to allow the issuing of orders to individual lancemates, you need to use a menu.
- You have a few other miscelaneous controls for your mech. You'll need jump-jets, but you could bind these quite happily to L3 (ie. click down on the left analogue stick). You'll also want a coolant-flood button... let's say R3.
- You'll probably also want a shut-down button, for missions requiring the player to go undetected, or for re-arming at pads. Put this on "back". It could also double as an "over-ride" shutdown button, for when players want to run the risk of fighting with high temperatures.
- Finally, you'll want a menu/pause/map button. Obviously, this is start. You can use the mid-mission menu for functions like detailed wingmen orders, or the hot-configuration of weapon groups.
If you've got those controls in, there's no reason why you can't, in theory, have a game with virtually all of the depth of the old Mechwarrior games.
Half-Life was a taut, lean game. It had remarkably little variation in its environments (at least until you got to Xen). It told a fairly minimalist story, and it used appropriate techniques to do so. There were no characters as such - just NPCs who didn't shoot at you and who sometimes told you where to go for the next objective. In the context of "immediate aftermath of a disaster", a mute protagonist works just fine.
Half-Life 2 is a much flabbier creation. Valve couldn't resist the temptation to go for the big cinematic set-pieces that have made their way into the genre since the original Half-Life came out (and have worked very well in some cases). It tried to tell a fairly trite big-budget-blockbuster storyline, with "characters" to match. It tried to make the protagonist out to be some kind of legendary super-hero inspirational resistance leader type. In this context, a mute protagonist doesn't work. You end up with an odd and uncomfortable hybrid of the original Half-Life with Medal of Honor or Gears of War or something. And it doesn't work. The whole experience is just jarring.
There's also the problem that in gameplay terms, Half-Life 2 is the kind of game which knows it has one original idea (the gravity gun) and is determined to flog it to death. Boring, badly designed gimmick sections of the game (like the vehicle sections, and that &%*"£&*% Ravenholme) go on for far too long, while the enjoyable bits which retain some of Half-Life's feel (like Nova Prospect) are over fairly quickly.
Guess what, the number 1 candidate I'd have named is getting a reboot. Mechwarrior. My head tells me that disappointment is still the likely outcome, but my hearts looks at the material they've put out so far and jumps for joy.
Other good candidates?
Wing Commander - it was the series that defined "cutting edge" gaming for a generation. I'd love to see this done properly on modern technology - including the heavy story emphasis and cheesy cutscenes.
Eye of the Beholder - this would need to be done properly. RPGs these days tend towards big open worlds, which can be great. But I'd love to see a decent, non-Diablo-style RPG which takes a classic, claustrophobic dungeon setting (running on a decent, modern engine) and places the emphasis firmly on survival and puzzle solving, rather than making friends and becoming the Grand Trademaster Caravanlord of Little Wizzlington.
Star Control - Pretend the third game never happened, just give us either a decent sequel or a franchise reboot in the style of the second game.
And finally (and this is what gets me flamed)... Half-Life. I didn't like Half-Life 2. I've replayed it a couple of times trying to "get" it and I still don't like it. The changes with the game-world of the first game are too jarring and badly explained. The idea of the mute protagonist just Does Not Work in the context of a more open-world game like Half-Life 2. It certainly doesn't work when you try to make said protagonist out to be some kind of a Messiah figure. Pretend HL2 never happened and go back to the feel of the original.
Oh dear, I do hope they aren't including Final Fantasy XI in that. Much as I used to love the game (and still get the odd pang of nostalgia for it), it would be a hilariously awful idea to include it on this. I guess you could interpret "beating it" as being "finishing the plot missions for all of the current expansions", but still...
"Here we are, going into day 217 of the challenge, and player 4 has just dinged 63. This, of course, marks the half-way point in his experience grind. Now over to Bob, who's going to tell us about that exciting episode earlier, where half of the players spent 7 hours trying to find a tank, who then left them after 20 minutes."
I had a strange experience the other week like this. I went back to some old CD-Rs, which would have ranged from about 7-10 years in age. Some were among the very first CDs I ever burned, on my old 2x drive, back in the days when the disks themselves cost £1.50 a pop here in the UK. The very oldest were actually fine. The slightly more recent ones (at the 7 year end of the range) were far more of a mixed bag. Around 1/3rd of them could be read only partially, or not at all. I'm pretty sure that the lower quality of these media (the newer CD-Rs would have only cost around 25% of the price of the older) was a big factor in that.
However, all was not lost. I have a very, very, old 2x CD-ROM drive that I keep lying around because it can read pretty much anything that isn't actually heavily and visibly scratched. So I plugged this in and, sure enough, it was (eventually, with a lot of grinding noises) able to get the data off the wonky CDs. I'm not quite sure why this should be; that a 15 year old CD Drive from the days when Rebel Assault and Mad Dog McRee were top of the line should be able to read disks that 3 modern drives (a Blu-Ray reader and two different DVD-RW drives) just gave up on, but I wasn't complaining.
On 1., while the world of Fallout is indeed pretty big (in theory, we know that the entire North American contintent at the very least is wasteland, probably the rest of the world as well - though you could argue this is left ambiguous), it is also pretty much entirely ruined. Pittsburg is, it is made clear, the biggest city left which is actually intact, in the physical sense. It has housing, factories, power, utilities, the lot, just waiting to be switched back on. Other settlements are usually clumps of people trying to survive in makeshift shacks and ruins, using up what's left of the remains of pre-war civilisation. If you want to rebuild an actual, functioning large pre-war style civilisation, as opposed to a network of subsistence level hovels (which is basically the kindest description you could give to the Capital Wasteland), given the lack of construction facilities, Pittsburg makes a lot of sense, provided you can do something about the contamination.
On 2., the slavers are not particularly securely entrenched. One of the big points in the story, which I forgot to cover in my original post, is that for the most part, the big "luxurious" former-hotel where the top bods reside is every bit as dilapidated as the rest of the city. The only section that's been repaired to a higher standard than the rest of the city is the science lab. The city's rulers are outnumbered and the slaves have makeshift but effective weapons. There are plenty of historical parallels for this. Most, if not all states dependant upon mass slavery (where the slave/serf population outnumbers the free population) have survived not on the basis of being able to put down a full-scale slave revolt at any given time, but on denying the slave population the ability to organise said revolt (through denying lines of communication, the use of divide-and-conquer tactics and so on). Once such a society reaches the stage of a wide-scale revolt, its survival can be touch and go.
On 3., yes, that's one possible moral choice. Personally, I disagreed (after some reflection). But the game gives you the option of making the opposing choice, and taking steps that will improve the condition of the current inhabitants right now. I think it's pretty impressive that a game can make me think like that. Of course, you can always choose not to take the quest in Fallout 3. The game gives you the option of just walking away a number of times, before you reach Pittsburg itself. If you do this, however, logic would suggest that one of the two possible outcomes outlined in my post above will eventually still come about; either the revolt will take place and happen, or else it will be quelled, or never take place at all (leaving the regime in power). You just lose the ability to have any influence over the outcome.
Fallout 3 is a mixed bag, perhaps. It has a few choices that are a bit too start "nuke Megaton or save it", but it also has some which are far more complex.
I think the best of these comes in the second downloadable content pack, "The Pitt". I'm about to spoiler this massively, so those who haven't yet played this, but think they might do so, look away now.
Yes, now.
Right now.
Here be spoilers.
Ok, for those who are still reading, here's the basic synopsis of The Pitt.
The Lone Wanderer picks up a distress call, from the North of the Capital Wastelands. He makes his way there, and comes to the assistance of Werhner, an escaped slave under attack by raiders. Werhner outlines his situation to the Lone Wanderer; he has escaped from slavery in Pittsburg, and wishes for the Lone Wanderer's help in returning there and liberating the slaves.
The Lone Wanderer travels with Werhner to Pittsburg. Unlike most major US cities, "The Pitt" did not receive any direct nuclear strikes during the war, so its buildings are largely intact (though crumbling somewhat after 200 years of neglect). Unfortunately, it wasn't spared the fallout, and the city is highly contaminated, with radiation poisoning, disease and mutation being rife, even by the general standards of the Fallout 3 world. The city is currenly in the grip of a plague that mutates sufferers into mindless, psychotic freaks. It is rumoured that Lord Ashur, the ruler of the Pitt, has developed a cure, but it has not been forthcoming. As part of his plan to free the slaves, Werhner wants you to steal the cure.
At first, the Lone Wanderer has relatively few choices. He follows Werhner's plan to infiltrate the city as a slave. Life in The Pitt is brutal and usually short. The slaves are brutally oppressed by the slavers, many of whom are essentially common thugs. Because the high levels of radiation and mutation in the Pitt make natural reproduction almost impossible, the slave population is maintained through kidnapping of new slaves, as well as trade with the slavers of the Capital Wastelands.
Eventually, the Lone Wanderer manages to win his freedom, through victory in a series of gladiatorial arena battles. As one of the few slaves to win his freedom in this manner, he is granted an audience with Lord Ashur. Werhner's plan is for the Lone Wanderer to use this as an opportunity to steel the cure (killing Lord Ashur if possible), and he has timed a slave uprising to coincide with it. With the city's leadership thrown into chaos by the Lone Wanderer, the slaves would be able to overthrow the regime and escape.
Ok... so far, it all seems simple enough. Oppressed slaves, a charismatic leader trying to win their freedom, and brutal oppressors. Not much of a moral choice here.
Then the Lone Wanderer meets Ashur. Ashur isn't some comic book villain. He's trying to build a functioning society. He doesn't want to use slavery, but so complete has been the collapse of civilisation that the only way to get the rebuilding process started is through force. Once conditions improve, the regime will be relaxed and slavery abolished. Of course, the Lone Wanderer doesn't have to believe Ashur; plenty of characters in Fallout 3 will lie to your face - but he does give the impression of being sincere.
On the subject of a cure, Ashur has more concrete proof. The basis for a cure exists; his own infant daughter, who has been born with natural immunity to the effects of radiation poisoning and the plague. Ashur's scientist wife is working to discern the factors that grant her this immunity, so that it can be replicated. The cure's not going to be able to help the current slaves, but it might be the salvation of the next generation.
Ashur also explains that Werhner is his own former Lieutenant, who turned against him because he wanted more power. Ashur knows that the Lone Wanderer has been sent by Werhner and offers him a choice; turn against Werhner and help surpress the slave revolt.
This was, without a doubt, the most
And yes, I do realise the irony in making post claiming a game wasn't as smart as it thought, while writing "it's" for "its" in the first line.
Bioshock was a competent game. It's biggest problem was that it had been massively over-sold. On the gameplay front, it was supposed to be the spiritual successor to System Shock 2, which, as you and others have noted, it wasn't. On the story front, it was supposed to set new standards for depth and intelligence in game story-telling. In truth, it wasn't anything like as clever as it thought it was, failing to rise above the level of pseudo-sophistication I'd expect from an overconfident political sciences undergraduate. The element of moral choice was so black and white as to be ludicrous; you could either be an angel or a demon, with nothing in between. If you want to see moral choices done properly, then turn to Fallout 3, not to Bioshock.
The gameplay was effectively a run and gun shooter with a few irritating-but-easy puzzle minigames and a bit of spellcasting thrown in. I don't actually blame console-ification for this; you can actually have some excellent, deep gameplay on the consoles. I think it was related more to lazy design and a serious underestimation of the capabilities of the target audience.
Of course, it was still a reasonable game, considered on its own terms. The combat was moderately fun, though it suffered from some balance issues that generally encouraged players to be very conservative in their combat tactics, ignoring the more creative ways of using the environment and the plasmids. Visually it was pretty nice, with the art deco theme being generally well realised.
So yes, not actively bad, but if they want to get me excited about a sequel, they need to make clear that they're going to be much more ambitious this time around.
Why should they be rolling around in their graves? The only Tiberian-universe game that was an insult to the original was C&C2, and I'm fairly sure that this was back when Westwood were still in control of the franchise.
C&C3 was, I thought, a pretty decent spritual successor to the original.
Yes, I was going to repond to the grandparent, but you've said it all better than I would have done. For me, the biggest defect of MW2, particularly Mercenaries, was the way that all of the mechs felt so generic once you got into the tweaking. They were basically all just slightly differently shaped shells with a set amount of capacity for weapons.
As you say, in Mechwarrior 4, your mech's function actually had to match its form to some degree. There were actually mechs that had a lot of versatile slots for their weapons, making them completely customisable, but these mechs tended to have glaring defects elsewhere.
It also meant that when I picked out my lance for the mission, I actually ended up arranging it so that the lance looked and felt plausible within the context of the fiction. If I wanted a long range support mech, I'd be using a Catapult or a Vulture, not a Zeus stuffed with invisible missile racks.
It's funny, really, how excited I am that they've gone back to an early time-line setting. I mean, I do hope the Clans show up at some point, even if only in the multiplayer, but my defining memories of Battletech and Mechwarrior games basically revolve around frantically scuttling about in a lance of Locust and Jenner type mechs, with a couple of SRMs and lasers, frantically trying to come up with a way to take down a Dragon.
Yes, that was great as well. I quite liked the balance they reached in MW4 with that, where you had room to tweak, but had to keep the categories of weapons etc vaguely in line with the original ethos of the chassis. So a laser-heavy mech might only be able to use energy weapons in a lot of its slots. It struck me as a good way of finding a balance between allowing for customisation, without turning it into a game of pure min/maxing.