- It has been in development for almost 5 years, the team is completely different than Champions
Yes and no. The game WAS in development since 2004, but by a different company who went bankrupt and kept the code. Cryptic took over in 2008, without the code but with the license and art.
- Character animation looks pretty good to me, but what a minor thing to complain about. It'll get better over time too. I could personally care less if it uses ASCII graphics, as long as the gameplay is solid
The animations are terrible. Even Everquest animation was less ugly. The gameplay is certainly not good enough to make up for the graphics.
- Klingon faction is currently mostly PVP -- they want to add more content later. Big deal! In fact, some players will like this.
"more content later" is another way of saying "It's not done and may never be unless we maintain a certain level of subscriptions. Which they will not.
- There's a lot more going on than just tank / healer / etc. You can equip modules in any way you want to give your ship a versatile configuration. Seam with team members for away missions. It may not be the most revolutionary game around but, it does do something different. I for one look forward to trying out the strategic space combat.
In short, you can solo. But in a team you're still going to be in a cookie cutter configuration, just like everyone else. Nobody wants a funky ship or a furry speced warrior.
- It's only microtransaction in the same way that WoW is. You can buy items that don't really affect the gameplay. - Initial reviews and impressions are much more positive than with Cryptic's previous offerings..
Which isn't saying much really...
Who knows, maybe it will suck, maybe it won't. We don't know yet.
No. We don't know yet, but the outlook isn't all that good and the past products do not create much goodwill for the developer.
Yeah this game is going to be crap. It won't last more than 2 years, and really I don't think they expect it to. There is no high end content and the plans for it are unclear. The pvp is a joke, the pve is dull and repetitive. Space combat may seem fun at first but it gets old fast.
In fact the ancient Earth and Beyond had space combat that felt more polished and actually looked better.
The graphics in this game are horrible. I do mean horrible. Now don't get me wrong, a great game can have bad graphics. But seriously, this is the ugliest mainstream MMO out there. The ship explosions are ugly. Freespace 2 looked way better - and that was more than 10 years ago.
I don't understand how anyone can be excited about this game. My friends who are all WoW and EVE veterans have zero interest in STO after playing it.
You're missing the whole point it seems. Never mind that "the experience of going to the store" is pretty much always a negative. No I'm not antisocial but seriously, going to the store is just a hassle and in no way a positive.
When I buy an mp3. I'm not buying the mp3 I'm buying the song and supporting the artist. The format, be it a CD, a tape, or an mp3 is simply a matter of convenience. mp3s are easier for me. If I wanted a CD, I'd burn it on a CD - why I'd ever want anything on a CD is truly beyond me.
I couldn't possibly care less about the box art, the CD, the 'in store experience' or whatever other value added bullshit you can come up with when it comes to physical media.
Buying digital media is very convenient and fast plus it's safe. I can access it from anywhere in the world. I can take my music and games with me anywhere I go. I'd rather have that than a 5c CD case and a 10c CD.
Sorry but digital distribution is the future. Amazingly even such things as "digital collectors" editions are coming out and selling for as much as physical collectors editions. Just look at Dragons Age Origins.
This is only a non issue if the app itself is tiny. What about if the app is graphics intensive? I think "Defender Chronices" for the iPhone is 125Mb all by itself and Dungeon Hunter is 225Mb.
So to get around this stupid limitation an app would need to come with a loader that would then download the remaining data to the SD card.
Over hyped? Not if you play games. Either way it's a pretty stupid and a major design limitation.
I have over 1.3 Gigs of apps on my iPhone. It's not hard to use up that much space on an iPhone for apps. There are tons of apps out there that are well over 100mb.
Sure you may not play games, but then what about 3rd party mapping software which preloads all the maps to the phone.
Having only 190Mb for apps is a huge deal breaker for me.
Yeah I ended up working for the Gov after betting laid off from a.com. The.com had a 'free lunch', as in everyone got an $8 a day allowance to order from a set of restaurants for delivery. I loved it. But they got rid of that about 3 weeks after the layoffs hit.
Yeah being able to bring in your own coffee maker and microwave and fridge is nice - but seriously it's a little absurd. We have cubes that have mini kitchens in the corners. One of the guys here has a toaster oven, fridge, microwave , coffee maker, water boiler and a rice cooker.
Me? I got a water bottle. Sorry but cooking lunch at work doesn't appeal to me. Nor should it appeal to the employer to have their employees waste company time cooking lunch or going out to eat it.
Back at the.com we'd get our lunch and eat it at our desk. We didn't have "lunch time" as such. So really we all worked 9 hours instead of 8. We ended up working at least an extra hour for $8.
I dunno about you, but I think having a staff consisting entirely of college educated tech savvy people working an extra hour a day for $8 is a fantastic deal.
What really gets to me is when the expense report has to go through 4-5 layers of approval meaning it can take more than a month to get your money back. I don't get it. I have absurdly simple expense reports, car miles/flight, hotel accommodation, parking and per diem.
Here is a perfect example, I was gone from mid Sept to late Oct, so over a month of travel. Then in early Nov I left again for 2 more weeks.
I was only able to finally get reimbursed for my Sept-Oct travel AFTER I came back from the travel in Nov, 7 weeks later. In short I have to keep at least 3-5k in a checking account to cover the credit cards when they come due since it's not likely that the company will pay up in time.
Worse yet, I have to use the company AMEX card. I do not get any rewards from it. They do. Yet if they are late with the expense report, guess who is considered responsible for the bill being paid on time? Yeah...me.
Oh forget asking for an advance for all the per diem for a long trip. "We just don't do that." I can't wait for my Japan trip with the per diem being over $100. Yeah...I'm saving money for that one already.
A perfect example of a game that was marketed poorly to both genders is Dragons Age:Origins.
In fact it was just flat out marketed poorly.
Lets look at the possible appeals of the game: Old-school RPG. Strategic Combat. Good plot. Character Interaction. Decent Graphics.
What did they market? The violent combat and the graphics. Oh and the sex. That's it.
It's a huge fuck up because when my girlfriend saw me playing the game, and she's not a gamer, she was intrigued by the character interaction and the fantastic voice acting in the game. Yet not a single piece of marketing ever highlighted this side of the game.
The reason girls are drawn more to MMOs rather than FPS games is the social aspect. Even the girls that I played FPS with played them in a clan and were very social in the clan. You'd not see them log on to a public server to frag noobs - they'd be on the clan server with friends chatting.
I don't know many girls who were ever drawn to either an FPS or MMO due to the violence. In fact, during my time in Age of Conan, an intentionally over the top violent MMO, I didn't meet a single girl, not even in a 300 member guild...
Having played both EQ and WOW I noticed the following:
Almost all the female EQ players were over 25 and were housewives or married to a gamer. Out of the 20 or so women in our guild, just 1 was a single college girl. The rest were older women. Almost the entire guild leadership was taken over by women over time. The guild leader and two officers were male, 7 other officers were women. It made sense, they had more time for the game than the guys.
WoW girls were mostly college girls, very few housewives and several married to other guild members. In our guild we had around 25 girl and all but 6 were in college or grad school. 4 of the 6 that were not in school played with their husbands. (Oh and one of those 4 got divorced and married to another guild member - awkward.) In WoW we had 1 female officer out of 8. We tried to recruit more into an officer position but they'd burn out in a few months.
Oh and if it seems to you that the number of females for both guilds seems high. It is, and was intentional as part of our recruitment policy to have at least a 1/3 girl to guy ratio. We didn't lower requirements for girls since we were at least at the time an "uber guild" and best on the server but we would give an equal skilled female the slot over a male. Not fair I know. Life sucks like that. Guilds just function better when they're not a sausage fest.
I've been with a non gamer girl for 2 years now. Ok she plays Bejeweled but come on...
I have to admit, I miss having a gamer girl. Sad thing is the fact that she WAS a gamer girl was very much the reason for the break up. As in she'd rather spend time with me in game than in person. She was hopelessly addicted to WoW even after I quit. (Alright by Quit I mean I stared playing EVE instead.)
My gf doesn't have ANY interest in anything beyond casual gaming. Zero. She's nice enough to not pester me about my gaming or the amount of money I spend on games and hardware. She doesn't approve of it but lets me do what I want.
What I miss though is that I cannot talk to her about games. Don't get me wrong, we still have plenty of things in common to talk about, but gaming and computers in general are not a topic we can chat about and I miss it.
So in short, what I really want is a girl who plays games in moderation...which this article seems to imply do not exist...
Man you sure sound like a sexist douche. Not getting much? Ever?
Actually quite a few girl gamers that I've played with over the past decade did not make it a point to mention their gender. Two girls that I regularly played FPS with concealed their gender - which nowdays is pretty much impossible due to voice coms. For one this meant that she stopped playing multiplayer games all together due to the crap she had to deal with when guys knew that she was a girl. It didn't help that she had a very attractive voice. She'd get on Vent, say "Hi" and whatever every guy in the channel was talking about would instantly be forgotten and all attention was instantly turned to her. Guess what - many girls do not like that kind of attention. She didn't like the several private messages she'd get every time she logged in, she didn't like the fact that one of the guys kept sending her loot, she sent it back and he just resent with a "Please keep it, it's for you," like that makes it better.
Truth is most girl gamers are NOT interested in your attention. No really. They don't care about you. They are not interested in you and never will be. They are not looking for a relationship online and are not considering grouping with you the equivalent of a date and giving you loot is not a present.
Are there girls who love to point out that they are in fact girls? Sure - and they do it for loot. There are so many idiotic guys who somehow assume that every girl online wants their dick that it's downright sad. I've seen guys get scammed by girl in WoW and in EVE - as in to the point of buying gold/isk online in order to buy loot for the girls. It was pathetic.
But girls who play for attention are not the majority at all. There are plenty of girl attention whores, just like there are plenty of guy attention whores. It just so happens that being a girl in a game gets you a LOT of attention - and that's hardly the girls fault.
You make a sim, you lvl up your skills, you progress in your job, you get quests, you group with others. In the end you die and make a new character. Repeat.
It's an RPG. You do understand why people like RPGs right?
A lot of people claim that sims is a "time managment" game. That's simply not true, managing your time is just the backdrop for the main goal of character advancment.
Oh and guess what, Sims 3 is an amazing RPG in that it's completley open ended. You make your own story, do your own thing. You can play the entire game without ever getting a job, looting other peoples trash for money and sleeping in their homes. Or you can play a typical recluse and never leave the house, chat online for all social interaction and hack for money.
If you don't see what the appeal is of a game that lets you do whatever you want, I'm not sure I can help you.
My steam account has about $1,000 worth of games and yet most are not online games that I could have pirated.
Thing is, it's easier for me to get them on steam than it is to pirate them. I don't want to deal with cracks, patches, recracks, etc. Paying the $30-40 for a game on steam is worth it just for the fact that I can download it again in a few months or years when I get the itch to play it again.
The problem with your logic and that of most publishes is that you are trying to prevent a pirated copy from working. This is silly. What they should be trying to do is give incentives to buy a legitimate copy. A few free downloadable content packs that would require online registration is all that's needed to make a number of customers out of pirates. It works for Stardock.
Why wait? What's my incentive here? Oh right - I'd be doing something moraly right. No sorry. Not good enough.
People will always pick the easiest option. Excersising self control for 2 weeks isn't the easiest thing for most people.
If they could pay $50 and do a legitimate download I'm sure that at least 10% of the downloaders would have picked a legitimate copy.
I'm sure 90% would still have pirated it. But that's people who had no interest in buying the game in the first place but may want to mess around with it for a bit - they're not lost sales.
Wait that didn't come out right. Ok. How about it's EVE but you actually fly your ship, aim and shoot instead of clicking "Warp to", "Target" and "Activate".
They will not have the same skill systems and pvp system.
EVE has a lot more tedium and prep downtime than any other MMO I have ever played. It's a lot more "work" than other MMOs. Please don't try to argue with me, I've played EVE since release till about a year ago. EVE is a great game in what it does, but if you ever sit back and do the math on the number of hours you played EVE in the past week and how many of those hours were fun vs how many were preperation, you'd quit on the spot. I did.
"I pirated it because I couldn't buy it anywhere."
There. Done. I'm sure a number of people who pirated will end up buying a real copy once it's released so they can get the online content. But right now if you're itching to play the sims 3 or just see what it's like, you have no other options but to wait or pirate. Most people are quite impatient to say the least.
If you want to donate a PC you can always just buy a single PC for $199 and not bother with getting one for yourself.
They never wanted to make a machine that can compete with the other laptops. They wanted to make one that'd be good for kids in a 3rd world countries. Not one that'd be great in your living room. The only reason to get one has always been the uniqueness of it, not it's specs.
All UAW has done for the US industry is create incentives to move the jobs out of the US.
Not that I really care - my first car, a Chrysler was built in Canada, my second car, a Mazda, in Japan. Both are US owned brands, neither built in the US.
Ford and GM going belly up wouldn't magically cause them and their billions of assets, be it physical or intellectual to disappear.
What you'd have is companies breaking away from the main brand and being sold off. Ford would let Mazda go, GM Saab and so on.
What would die would be the GM/Ford brand names along with the pension plans and other UAW union benefits. Which frankly is a good thing for the US auto industry in the long run.
Yes...the demand is so very limited that they have preorders for every single car that's scheduled to roll off the assembly line till 2009.
Demand is not the issue at all.
The issue is that they cannot get loans. This means that their only way to survive is to become profitable now as opposed to take out loans that they'd fully be able to repay later.
It was Diablo 2 with guns - except it was worse than Diablo 2 gameplay in every way imaginable.
Itemization was worse. Skill tree was worse. Level design was worse. Look and feel was worse. Boss encounters were worse. Multiplayer was worse. (How many people did you group with?)
It was in no way any more innovative than a $20 budget bin Diablo clone.
This isn't entirely true. They made some very very bad design decisions early on that downright doubled the cost of content development.
The entire game was based on levels randomly put together from a set of tiles. This was the big appeal, unique levels.
The problem is that in order to have high and low quality settings, instead of having an engine that can scale high polygon models down to low polygon models, their engine requires them to make high quality AND low quality models and then because the HQ textures often simply no longer fit on the low polygon model, they needed to redo those also.
This doubled the amount of work needed to make any new tile sets.
Oh and all those memory related bugs that the game had for months after release. Yeah that was because they didn't have anyone on board who knew anything about how to handle the memory until a month before release.
There were very bad design decisions made from the very start of the game in terms of game play also. The entire itemization was broken with only + to all attributes gear being worth equipping and the the wear requirements and feed systems being both totally out of whack causing for total cookie cutter builds.
Worse yet, after lvl 50, the game became unplayable due to the way NM levels scaled.
I could go on - but the real problem is not that bad decisions were made. It's that Flagship studios did not acknowledge many of them in beta even though they were well aware of them for months, nor did they acknowledge them for months after release.
Slashdot Mirror
Apples and oranges. SW:ToR does not have space ships.
- It has been in development for almost 5 years, the team is completely different than Champions
Yes and no. The game WAS in development since 2004, but by a different company who went bankrupt and kept the code.
Cryptic took over in 2008, without the code but with the license and art.
- Character animation looks pretty good to me, but what a minor thing to complain about. It'll get better over time too. I could personally care less if it uses ASCII graphics, as long as the gameplay is solid
The animations are terrible. Even Everquest animation was less ugly. The gameplay is certainly not good enough to make up for the graphics.
- Klingon faction is currently mostly PVP -- they want to add more content later. Big deal! In fact, some players will like this.
"more content later" is another way of saying "It's not done and may never be unless we maintain a certain level of subscriptions. Which they will not.
- There's a lot more going on than just tank / healer / etc. You can equip modules in any way you want to give your ship a versatile configuration. Seam with team members for away missions. It may not be the most revolutionary game around but, it does do something different. I for one look forward to trying out the strategic space combat.
In short, you can solo. But in a team you're still going to be in a cookie cutter configuration, just like everyone else. Nobody wants a funky ship or a furry speced warrior.
- It's only microtransaction in the same way that WoW is. You can buy items that don't really affect the gameplay. .
- Initial reviews and impressions are much more positive than with Cryptic's previous offerings.
Which isn't saying much really...
Who knows, maybe it will suck, maybe it won't. We don't know yet.
No. We don't know yet, but the outlook isn't all that good and the past products do not create much goodwill for the developer.
Yeah this game is going to be crap. It won't last more than 2 years, and really I don't think they expect it to. There is no high end content and the plans for it are unclear. The pvp is a joke, the pve is dull and repetitive. Space combat may seem fun at first but it gets old fast.
In fact the ancient Earth and Beyond had space combat that felt more polished and actually looked better.
The graphics in this game are horrible. I do mean horrible. Now don't get me wrong, a great game can have bad graphics. But seriously, this is the ugliest mainstream MMO out there. The ship explosions are ugly. Freespace 2 looked way better - and that was more than 10 years ago.
I don't understand how anyone can be excited about this game. My friends who are all WoW and EVE veterans have zero interest in STO after playing it.
You're missing the whole point it seems. Never mind that "the experience of going to the store" is pretty much always a negative. No I'm not antisocial but seriously, going to the store is just a hassle and in no way a positive.
When I buy an mp3. I'm not buying the mp3 I'm buying the song and supporting the artist. The format, be it a CD, a tape, or an mp3 is simply a matter of convenience. mp3s are easier for me. If I wanted a CD, I'd burn it on a CD - why I'd ever want anything on a CD is truly beyond me.
I couldn't possibly care less about the box art, the CD, the 'in store experience' or whatever other value added bullshit you can come up with when it comes to physical media.
Buying digital media is very convenient and fast plus it's safe. I can access it from anywhere in the world. I can take my music and games with me anywhere I go. I'd rather have that than a 5c CD case and a 10c CD.
Sorry but digital distribution is the future. Amazingly even such things as "digital collectors" editions are coming out and selling for as much as physical collectors editions. Just look at Dragons Age Origins.
Anyway...sorry for treading all over your lawn..
This is only a non issue if the app itself is tiny. What about if the app is graphics intensive? I think "Defender Chronices" for the iPhone is 125Mb all by itself and Dungeon Hunter is 225Mb.
So to get around this stupid limitation an app would need to come with a loader that would then download the remaining data to the SD card.
Over hyped? Not if you play games. Either way it's a pretty stupid and a major design limitation.
I have over 1.3 Gigs of apps on my iPhone. It's not hard to use up that much space on an iPhone for apps. There are tons of apps out there that are well over 100mb.
Sure you may not play games, but then what about 3rd party mapping software which preloads all the maps to the phone.
Having only 190Mb for apps is a huge deal breaker for me.
Yeah I ended up working for the Gov after betting laid off from a .com. The .com had a 'free lunch', as in everyone got an $8 a day allowance to order from a set of restaurants for delivery. I loved it. But they got rid of that about 3 weeks after the layoffs hit.
Yeah being able to bring in your own coffee maker and microwave and fridge is nice - but seriously it's a little absurd. We have cubes that have mini kitchens in the corners. One of the guys here has a toaster oven, fridge, microwave , coffee maker, water boiler and a rice cooker.
Me? I got a water bottle. Sorry but cooking lunch at work doesn't appeal to me. Nor should it appeal to the employer to have their employees waste company time cooking lunch or going out to eat it.
Back at the .com we'd get our lunch and eat it at our desk. We didn't have "lunch time" as such. So really we all worked 9 hours instead of 8. We ended up working at least an extra hour for $8.
I dunno about you, but I think having a staff consisting entirely of college educated tech savvy people working an extra hour a day for $8 is a fantastic deal.
What really gets to me is when the expense report has to go through 4-5 layers of approval meaning it can take more than a month to get your money back. I don't get it. I have absurdly simple expense reports, car miles/flight, hotel accommodation, parking and per diem.
Here is a perfect example, I was gone from mid Sept to late Oct, so over a month of travel. Then in early Nov I left again for 2 more weeks.
I was only able to finally get reimbursed for my Sept-Oct travel AFTER I came back from the travel in Nov, 7 weeks later. In short I have to keep at least 3-5k in a checking account to cover the credit cards when they come due since it's not likely that the company will pay up in time.
Worse yet, I have to use the company AMEX card. I do not get any rewards from it. They do. Yet if they are late with the expense report, guess who is considered responsible for the bill being paid on time? Yeah...me.
Oh forget asking for an advance for all the per diem for a long trip. "We just don't do that." I can't wait for my Japan trip with the per diem being over $100. Yeah...I'm saving money for that one already.
A perfect example of a game that was marketed poorly to both genders is Dragons Age:Origins.
In fact it was just flat out marketed poorly.
Lets look at the possible appeals of the game:
Old-school RPG.
Strategic Combat.
Good plot.
Character Interaction.
Decent Graphics.
What did they market? The violent combat and the graphics. Oh and the sex. That's it.
It's a huge fuck up because when my girlfriend saw me playing the game, and she's not a gamer, she was intrigued by the character interaction and the fantastic voice acting in the game. Yet not a single piece of marketing ever highlighted this side of the game.
The reason girls are drawn more to MMOs rather than FPS games is the social aspect. Even the girls that I played FPS with played them in a clan and were very social in the clan. You'd not see them log on to a public server to frag noobs - they'd be on the clan server with friends chatting.
I don't know many girls who were ever drawn to either an FPS or MMO due to the violence. In fact, during my time in Age of Conan, an intentionally over the top violent MMO, I didn't meet a single girl, not even in a 300 member guild...
Having played both EQ and WOW I noticed the following:
Almost all the female EQ players were over 25 and were housewives or married to a gamer. Out of the 20 or so women in our guild, just 1 was a single college girl. The rest were older women. Almost the entire guild leadership was taken over by women over time. The guild leader and two officers were male, 7 other officers were women. It made sense, they had more time for the game than the guys.
WoW girls were mostly college girls, very few housewives and several married to other guild members. In our guild we had around 25 girl and all but 6 were in college or grad school. 4 of the 6 that were not in school played with their husbands. (Oh and one of those 4 got divorced and married to another guild member - awkward.) In WoW we had 1 female officer out of 8. We tried to recruit more into an officer position but they'd burn out in a few months.
Oh and if it seems to you that the number of females for both guilds seems high. It is, and was intentional as part of our recruitment policy to have at least a 1/3 girl to guy ratio. We didn't lower requirements for girls since we were at least at the time an "uber guild" and best on the server but we would give an equal skilled female the slot over a male. Not fair I know. Life sucks like that. Guilds just function better when they're not a sausage fest.
I've been with a non gamer girl for 2 years now. Ok she plays Bejeweled but come on...
I have to admit, I miss having a gamer girl. Sad thing is the fact that she WAS a gamer girl was very much the reason for the break up. As in she'd rather spend time with me in game than in person. She was hopelessly addicted to WoW even after I quit. (Alright by Quit I mean I stared playing EVE instead.)
My gf doesn't have ANY interest in anything beyond casual gaming. Zero. She's nice enough to not pester me about my gaming or the amount of money I spend on games and hardware. She doesn't approve of it but lets me do what I want.
What I miss though is that I cannot talk to her about games. Don't get me wrong, we still have plenty of things in common to talk about, but gaming and computers in general are not a topic we can chat about and I miss it.
So in short, what I really want is a girl who plays games in moderation...which this article seems to imply do not exist...
Man you sure sound like a sexist douche. Not getting much? Ever?
Actually quite a few girl gamers that I've played with over the past decade did not make it a point to mention their gender. Two girls that I regularly played FPS with concealed their gender - which nowdays is pretty much impossible due to voice coms. For one this meant that she stopped playing multiplayer games all together due to the crap she had to deal with when guys knew that she was a girl. It didn't help that she had a very attractive voice. She'd get on Vent, say "Hi" and whatever every guy in the channel was talking about would instantly be forgotten and all attention was instantly turned to her. Guess what - many girls do not like that kind of attention. She didn't like the several private messages she'd get every time she logged in, she didn't like the fact that one of the guys kept sending her loot, she sent it back and he just resent with a "Please keep it, it's for you," like that makes it better.
Truth is most girl gamers are NOT interested in your attention. No really. They don't care about you. They are not interested in you and never will be. They are not looking for a relationship online and are not considering grouping with you the equivalent of a date and giving you loot is not a present.
Are there girls who love to point out that they are in fact girls? Sure - and they do it for loot. There are so many idiotic guys who somehow assume that every girl online wants their dick that it's downright sad. I've seen guys get scammed by girl in WoW and in EVE - as in to the point of buying gold/isk online in order to buy loot for the girls. It was pathetic.
But girls who play for attention are not the majority at all. There are plenty of girl attention whores, just like there are plenty of guy attention whores. It just so happens that being a girl in a game gets you a LOT of attention - and that's hardly the girls fault.
It's an RPG without the geekyness.
There. Get it now?
You make a sim, you lvl up your skills, you progress in your job, you get quests, you group with others. In the end you die and make a new character. Repeat.
It's an RPG. You do understand why people like RPGs right?
A lot of people claim that sims is a "time managment" game. That's simply not true, managing your time is just the backdrop for the main goal of character advancment.
Oh and guess what, Sims 3 is an amazing RPG in that it's completley open ended. You make your own story, do your own thing. You can play the entire game without ever getting a job, looting other peoples trash for money and sleeping in their homes. Or you can play a typical recluse and never leave the house, chat online for all social interaction and hack for money.
If you don't see what the appeal is of a game that lets you do whatever you want, I'm not sure I can help you.
Speak for yourself.
My steam account has about $1,000 worth of games and yet most are not online games that I could have pirated.
Thing is, it's easier for me to get them on steam than it is to pirate them. I don't want to deal with cracks, patches, recracks, etc. Paying the $30-40 for a game on steam is worth it just for the fact that I can download it again in a few months or years when I get the itch to play it again.
The problem with your logic and that of most publishes is that you are trying to prevent a pirated copy from working. This is silly. What they should be trying to do is give incentives to buy a legitimate copy. A few free downloadable content packs that would require online registration is all that's needed to make a number of customers out of pirates. It works for Stardock.
Why wait? What's my incentive here? Oh right - I'd be doing something moraly right. No sorry. Not good enough.
People will always pick the easiest option. Excersising self control for 2 weeks isn't the easiest thing for most people.
If they could pay $50 and do a legitimate download I'm sure that at least 10% of the downloaders would have picked a legitimate copy.
I'm sure 90% would still have pirated it. But that's people who had no interest in buying the game in the first place but may want to mess around with it for a bit - they're not lost sales.
It's EVE with guns...
Wait that didn't come out right. Ok. How about it's EVE but you actually fly your ship, aim and shoot instead of clicking "Warp to", "Target" and "Activate".
They will not have the same skill systems and pvp system.
EVE has a lot more tedium and prep downtime than any other MMO I have ever played. It's a lot more "work" than other MMOs. Please don't try to argue with me, I've played EVE since release till about a year ago. EVE is a great game in what it does, but if you ever sit back and do the math on the number of hours you played EVE in the past week and how many of those hours were fun vs how many were preperation, you'd quit on the spot. I did.
VO is very much unpolished with absurdly difficult and twitchy controls.
There is very very little to do in VO and I'd hardly call it a complete and playable game.
Jumpgate will offer much more than VO, even if it ultimatley flops.
Ok. Let me try this excuse:
"I pirated it because I couldn't buy it anywhere."
There. Done. I'm sure a number of people who pirated will end up buying a real copy once it's released so they can get the online content. But right now if you're itching to play the sims 3 or just see what it's like, you have no other options but to wait or pirate. Most people are quite impatient to say the least.
If you want to donate a PC you can always just buy a single PC for $199 and not bother with getting one for yourself.
They never wanted to make a machine that can compete with the other laptops. They wanted to make one that'd be good for kids in a 3rd world countries. Not one that'd be great in your living room. The only reason to get one has always been the uniqueness of it, not it's specs.
All UAW has done for the US industry is create incentives to move the jobs out of the US.
Not that I really care - my first car, a Chrysler was built in Canada, my second car, a Mazda, in Japan. Both are US owned brands, neither built in the US.
Ford and GM going belly up wouldn't magically cause them and their billions of assets, be it physical or intellectual to disappear.
What you'd have is companies breaking away from the main brand and being sold off. Ford would let Mazda go, GM Saab and so on.
What would die would be the GM/Ford brand names along with the pension plans and other UAW union benefits. Which frankly is a good thing for the US auto industry in the long run.
Yes...the demand is so very limited that they have preorders for every single car that's scheduled to roll off the assembly line till 2009.
Demand is not the issue at all.
The issue is that they cannot get loans. This means that their only way to survive is to become profitable now as opposed to take out loans that they'd fully be able to repay later.
Where do you keep getting the idea that Flagship was forced to ship early.
This is simply not true. Nobody forced Flagship to ship early but their own lack of financial planning.
Flagship alone set the release date. They even said so themselves over and over.
There was nothing different about HGL.
It was Diablo 2 with guns - except it was worse than Diablo 2 gameplay in every way imaginable.
Itemization was worse.
Skill tree was worse.
Level design was worse.
Look and feel was worse.
Boss encounters were worse.
Multiplayer was worse. (How many people did you group with?)
It was in no way any more innovative than a $20 budget bin Diablo clone.
This isn't entirely true. They made some very very bad design decisions early on that downright doubled the cost of content development.
The entire game was based on levels randomly put together from a set of tiles. This was the big appeal, unique levels.
The problem is that in order to have high and low quality settings, instead of having an engine that can scale high polygon models down to low polygon models, their engine requires them to make high quality AND low quality models and then because the HQ textures often simply no longer fit on the low polygon model, they needed to redo those also.
This doubled the amount of work needed to make any new tile sets.
Oh and all those memory related bugs that the game had for months after release. Yeah that was because they didn't have anyone on board who knew anything about how to handle the memory until a month before release.
There were very bad design decisions made from the very start of the game in terms of game play also. The entire itemization was broken with only + to all attributes gear being worth equipping and the the wear requirements and feed systems being both totally out of whack causing for total cookie cutter builds.
Worse yet, after lvl 50, the game became unplayable due to the way NM levels scaled.
I could go on - but the real problem is not that bad decisions were made. It's that Flagship studios did not acknowledge many of them in beta even though they were well aware of them for months, nor did they acknowledge them for months after release.