These days its not so much the mods as it is the unofficial fixes, New Vegas would still be unplayable for me if it wasent for the fixed DX9 dll. Locked down console's restrict mods but more importantly they kill fixes.
VTM:Bloodlines is a good example, had it been a console game it would still be unplayable. Activision forced it out the door to compete with HL2 then Troika went bust and wrote a single patch (unpayed), the unofficial patches are in double digits.
For me the biggest thing that valve did with this apology was give a DETAILED ACCOUNT OF WHAT WENT WRONG, and how it was fixed. The the L4D2 giveaway is just icing, a nice gesture. Most companys would have flat out refused to admit it was their problem, nevermind apologise.
Always fancied the idea of an Intimate Multiplayer games myself, think fallout3 with a persistant world but only 8-16 players or so. Admittidly the logistics of such a thing would be tricky but the payoff would be a truly persistant world, rather than 100,000 persistant worlds running similtaniously.
For me though thats EXACTLY THE POINT. Steam is cool i have no problems with its drm because it is dual sided, it provides something to the devs and the publishers while also providing something to me, the customer. Its all about give and take, as are most things in life. All DRM outside of steam is about REMOVING things from the value equation to benifit the dev/pubs.
Its being swamped with accounts thats driving me mad at the moment. Ive got an xbox live account and a steam account...thats all good. However because of DLC and free bonus's i now have an xbox live account, a steam account, an EA account, A bioware account, a ubisoft account, an atari account and the list goes on and on. It completly defeats the point of steam/live/psn.
Couldent agree with you more, but even single player games ship unfinnished, im actually quite terrified by what an 'intentionally' unfinished game would be like, perhaps the main menu and and a wireframe tutorial level.
I Joined up 3 days ago, created a science officer and have been dissapointed that EVERY mission has me as a soldier, no exploration, no boldly going where no toon has gone before just travel to here, beam down, fight a 1 man war then rinse lather repeat. When i do get a mission thats not combat based it usually takes all of 5 mins for it to degenerate into a frag fest. Its a shame too as theres a lot of things it does well, but for me it completly misses the point that star trek is not star wars. Ive got 2 months to run and will stick with it till then as it does have potential but ill have to seriously think about carrying on when the time comes.
I love steam, i spend more money in a month on pc games than i used to in a year (but get a hell of a lot more for my money). If i have one complaint though it is the classic games sold on steam, they hardly ever work first time, in fact they usually require a lot of messing about with config files and various other tweaks and still rarly run as intended. Ive bought a lot of old games i loved when i was younger simply because steam is so cheap and convinent but ive learned my lesson on that score. Its partly my own fault as steam usually removes headaches and as such i just assumed they had been tested prior to sale but that is just not the case. Biggest example off the top of my head is manhunt which flat out does not run on multicore cpus, not even a mention of this on the store page, admittidly its been fixed now but it should have been fixed BEFORE it was put up for sale.
When i was growing up i always had consoles, i always had PC's but i never saw them as competitors. I saw them as complimentary to each other, action/arcade style games and sports title have always been console go to's. For something with a little more depth, complexity and dare i say it maturity it was PC all the way. I would play a few games of mario or sonic on my snes/megadrive, get bored then shift over to my pc for a bit of xcom, syndicate and dune 2. They were different platforms that catered for different tastes and i enjoyed both.
Fast forward a few years and FPS become the big thing, suddenly consoles are being built around their ability to play shooters. At this point the greedy publishers step in, they think to themselves these games are popular we must make boatloads of them. From there it was a short step to design them for consoles as its more profitable, its at this point the PC became their enemy. Now we have lost the level of depth that PC games used to specialise in, and i think thats what vexes the PC crowd. There are very few true PC games made anymore they are mearly console games that get ported, and regardless of the quality of the port they lack (in their very design) that special something that used to set PC games apart (fallout3 is a prime example of this, while a good game its not truely a fallout game).
This is obviously something that was developed parallel to the sims3 (at best) or removed from the sims3 (at worst) but it gives me a chance to rant so its all good hehe. I for one miss proper expansion packs, you can blame consoles and maybe thats true ( im leaning toward that opinion myself) but this DLC shit has got to stop. Slightly off topic i admit but....(and its a big, round full bodied but) Has any1 here actually bought a piece of dlc that they didnt regret (specifically X360). The mass effect addons were nothing short of theft as was the knothole island for fable and the extra skins for street fighter 4 and i could go on and on but i wont. My point is the only to DLC pack that i actually felt were worth the effort was "the lost and damned" and.....well thats it (althought criterion with burnout paradise are supposed to be quite good too) and that actually felt like a good old fashioned expasion pack (cost about the same too). Fallout3 immediatly comes to mind i mean please, weve had four out of five DLC's and what was added....nothing apart from a few maps that are totally independant of the wasteland and a few new weapons and enemys, which are nothing but reskins of existing assests. Dont get me wrong i love fallout but the fact remains that weve had what 2 may be 3 new enemys ( the albino radscorpion is just a reskin as are the feral reavers), same goes for weapons, bar the melee stuff from the pit its all just reskins of existing assests. Four content packs and the only new shit is the hellfire enclave and the super muties that look slightly different, nothing was added to the wasteland at all. If there was one game that could have been a shining light for DLC it is fallout but even that was just a get the money out of your account jobbie, and then we learn there will only be 5 DLC's*....its an insult as nearly all DLC's are.
*i know there working on fallout4 and are desperate to get it out the door as quickly as possible (given the state of fallout3 good help us) but fallout3 could have lasted for years if the additional content was done with any sort of care for the subject.
Removing lan from a game that has lasted over 10 years solely because of lan should tell you everything you need to know about the game and Blizzards opinion of you. I know im probably in the minority but the minute they officially confirmed that i cancelled both pre-orders (starcraft and diablo) as it was clear to me that Blizzard Entertainment was dead. This is truly a sad year as of all the numerous dev houses in the pc world only two had even a shred of respect and they were Blizzard and Valve and this year both have given the big fuck you to there fans (and more importantly their customers). Many people complain about consolitis and while those complaints had merit they were never blatantly shoved in your face till this year. PC gaming may have been dying but now i feel it is truly dead.....not only dead but desecrated, the two bastions of pc gaming are now openly pissing on its grave. if you have a pc i urge you to play half-life 1 and 2 / diablo 1 and 2/deus ex (original) starcraft and warcraft 1, 2 and 3 because unfortunaltly thoses games where the pinnicle of pc gaming and their parents have all but said that they will never be made again.
Joker1980 sheading a tear for all the PC games that were (balders gate/planetscape:torment/half-life/thief/diablo/system shock/warcraft/command and conquer/myst/grim fandango/dreamweb*/Broken sword/etc etc the list goes on and on) because we will never see there like again.
*Yeah i know it wasent a great game but the premise was and the art was and it sums up what PC games USED to be all about good games with good storys, and yeah they didnt always hit the mark but they made you think and that alone made em worth their wight in gold.
Toejam and Earl, not the horrible platformer versions. A remake of the original fully updated with huge maps and new crazy items/enemys and net based multiplayer would KICK ASS. Oh but leave the tunes alone, that game still to this day has one of the best soundtracks going.
Whats wrong with human controled drones and bot's, after all that would remove human casualties on your side...until the other side develops something similar. Thinking about it two armys of human controlled or autonomous bots would essentially turn war into a video game.
This will not work, as it is many peoples network services are handicapped by their ISP. Network relience with data limits will not work ever. Software is only getting bigger and going by most isp caps you will be paying twice, once for the games and again to be allowed to download them. In my opinion the isp's are holding EVERYTHING back and this is only going to get worse.
I completly agree with the right of resale when you buy a game. That said i do think something needs to be done about the way the retailers handle the used market. Over the last 2 weeks ive bought Fable2, Gears2, Prince of Persia and l4d and on each occasion after reaching the counter the guys in gamestation have recommend i buy it used. There basically encouraging their customers to pay them instead of the pub/devs/etc, now its debatable if file sharing is a lost sale but what gamestation are doing is definatly a stolen sale.
LOL this isn't bad at all, Slashdot has been blocked at work so god forgive me Ive ended up on Digg. This thread is like a discussion between Nobel laureates compared to that shit.
While i have no doubt piracy was an issue i do think its arrogant and extremly shortsighted to blame piracy for the lack of sales. The 360 is basically at its heart a PC dedicated to gaming. And for me at least that was the problem. I played gears to death on the 360, when it was released for the pc most of us were done with it and the additional content wasent enuff to justify buying a second copy of the same game. I will admit i downloaded the pc version but not with any intention of playing it. At the time i had just upgraded my gaming rig and was interested in running them side by side to see how much better (if any) it looked. The game was so full of bugs and glitches (not even mentioning Windows live, yuck) that i didnt even get that that far before i uninstalled and deleted it.
Now this is just my feelings (and my circle of friends) but as far as we see it gears PC was a lame attempted to squeese more cash out of us. it was ported at absolutely minimum expense, then when gamers went 'meh' Epic insulted the very people that got them where they are today.
If i were Nintendo and Microsoft i would be very tempted to do a backroom deal. Make a price cut for the Wii, and unofficially play up the Wii60 feeling that was floating around before launch. If you could buy both for the price of one high end console you really would have the best of both worlds (casual and hardcore). While the games will never be compatible you could easily make the messaging and Mii stuff crossover from WiiConnect to Xbox live (ala Msn and yahoo messengers). Not to mention it would absolutely kill Sony in this generation.
in the current climate i fear for the future of mods, games publishers are already trying to destroy the aspects they dont have control over, we have seen blizzard go after glider, sony's attempts to destroy the used game market and to a certain degree your actual ownership of the game you purchased (EA im looking at you). Its only a matter of time before extending the life of a game is akin to piracy.
Fanatics are the problem regardless of their clan. No matter which side of the fence they are on they simply use their beliefs as an excuse to justify an Ignorant pointless existence.
I personally think we need to stamp out all fanatasism, not just that of the religions the west dislikes.
Slightly off topic but i think its interesting none the less.
"In a somewhat humorous twist, Blizzard is somewhat notorious for.. shall we say.. liberally borrowing concepts from the Warhammer universe"
I don't think Blizzard have ever had an original idea but that's irrelevant as they have chosen to go down the quality route. They polish concepts to the highest levels then implement them superbly.
This shows two things, first while innovation is nice its possible to build a successful and respected business without it. Second its just goes to show how piss poor most (for example*) EA games are, another company that rarely if ever innovates. Compare an average EA game to an average Blizzard game and EA's offering really will feel like a beta.
* I'm just picking on EA but truth be told you could substitute them for most others and its still true.
I have broadband at home and an unlimted (yeah right) data plan on my phone, but it doesent allow tethering which is annoying. Id like service that i could use on my laptop but as i only use it once in a blue moon its not worth a subscription. This would seem like a nice solution but i would prefer it done by the GIG, say a fiver for 5 gig with no time limit, once that limits been used you just top it up.
Slashdot Mirror
These days its not so much the mods as it is the unofficial fixes, New Vegas would still be unplayable for me if it wasent for the fixed DX9 dll. Locked down console's restrict mods but more importantly they kill fixes.
VTM:Bloodlines is a good example, had it been a console game it would still be unplayable. Activision forced it out the door to compete with HL2 then Troika went bust and wrote a single patch (unpayed), the unofficial patches are in double digits.
For me the biggest thing that valve did with this apology was give a DETAILED ACCOUNT OF WHAT WENT WRONG, and how it was fixed. The the L4D2 giveaway is just icing, a nice gesture.
Most companys would have flat out refused to admit it was their problem, nevermind apologise.
I read that as Microsoft shows off "Milo Hoffman", was gonna say fair play for having a sense of humour......alas i reread it.
Always fancied the idea of an Intimate Multiplayer games myself, think fallout3 with a persistant world but only 8-16 players or so. Admittidly the logistics of such a thing would be tricky but the payoff would be a truly persistant world, rather than 100,000 persistant worlds running similtaniously.
For me though thats EXACTLY THE POINT. Steam is cool i have no problems with its drm because it is dual sided, it provides something to the devs and the publishers while also providing something to me, the customer. Its all about give and take, as are most things in life. All DRM outside of steam is about REMOVING things from the value equation to benifit the dev/pubs.
Its being swamped with accounts thats driving me mad at the moment. Ive got an xbox live account and a steam account...thats all good. However because of DLC and free bonus's i now have an xbox live account, a steam account, an EA account, A bioware account, a ubisoft account, an atari account and the list goes on and on. It completly defeats the point of steam/live/psn.
Couldent agree with you more, but even single player games ship unfinnished, im actually quite terrified by what an 'intentionally' unfinished game would be like, perhaps the main menu and and a wireframe tutorial level.
I Joined up 3 days ago, created a science officer and have been dissapointed that EVERY mission has me as a soldier, no exploration, no boldly going where no toon has gone before just travel to here, beam down, fight a 1 man war then rinse lather repeat. When i do get a mission thats not combat based it usually takes all of 5 mins for it to degenerate into a frag fest. Its a shame too as theres a lot of things it does well, but for me it completly misses the point that star trek is not star wars. Ive got 2 months to run and will stick with it till then as it does have potential but ill have to seriously think about carrying on when the time comes.
I love steam, i spend more money in a month on pc games than i used to in a year (but get a hell of a lot more for my money). If i have one complaint though it is the classic games sold on steam, they hardly ever work first time, in fact they usually require a lot of messing about with config files and various other tweaks and still rarly run as intended. Ive bought a lot of old games i loved when i was younger simply because steam is so cheap and convinent but ive learned my lesson on that score. Its partly my own fault as steam usually removes headaches and as such i just assumed they had been tested prior to sale but that is just not the case. Biggest example off the top of my head is manhunt which flat out does not run on multicore cpus, not even a mention of this on the store page, admittidly its been fixed now but it should have been fixed BEFORE it was put up for sale.
When i was growing up i always had consoles, i always had PC's but i never saw them as competitors. I saw them as complimentary to each other, action/arcade style games and sports title have always been console go to's. For something with a little more depth, complexity and dare i say it maturity it was PC all the way. I would play a few games of mario or sonic on my snes/megadrive, get bored then shift over to my pc for a bit of xcom, syndicate and dune 2. They were different platforms that catered for different tastes and i enjoyed both.
Fast forward a few years and FPS become the big thing, suddenly consoles are being built around their ability to play shooters. At this point the greedy publishers step in, they think to themselves these games are popular we must make boatloads of them. From there it was a short step to design them for consoles as its more profitable, its at this point the PC became their enemy. Now we have lost the level of depth that PC games used to specialise in, and i think thats what vexes the PC crowd. There are very few true PC games made anymore they are mearly console games that get ported, and regardless of the quality of the port they lack (in their very design) that special something that used to set PC games apart (fallout3 is a prime example of this, while a good game its not truely a fallout game).
This is obviously something that was developed parallel to the sims3 (at best) or removed from the sims3 (at worst) but it gives me a chance to rant so its all good hehe. I for one miss proper expansion packs, you can blame consoles and maybe thats true ( im leaning toward that opinion myself) but this DLC shit has got to stop. Slightly off topic i admit but....(and its a big, round full bodied but) Has any1 here actually bought a piece of dlc that they didnt regret (specifically X360). The mass effect addons were nothing short of theft as was the knothole island for fable and the extra skins for street fighter 4 and i could go on and on but i wont. My point is the only to DLC pack that i actually felt were worth the effort was "the lost and damned" and .....well thats it (althought criterion with burnout paradise are supposed to be quite good too) and that actually felt like a good old fashioned expasion pack (cost about the same too). Fallout3 immediatly comes to mind i mean please, weve had four out of five DLC's and what was added....nothing apart from a few maps that are totally independant of the wasteland and a few new weapons and enemys, which are nothing but reskins of existing assests. Dont get me wrong i love fallout but the fact remains that weve had what 2 may be 3 new enemys ( the albino radscorpion is just a reskin as are the feral reavers), same goes for weapons, bar the melee stuff from the pit its all just reskins of existing assests. Four content packs and the only new shit is the hellfire enclave and the super muties that look slightly different, nothing was added to the wasteland at all. If there was one game that could have been a shining light for DLC it is fallout but even that was just a get the money out of your account jobbie, and then we learn there will only be 5 DLC's*....its an insult as nearly all DLC's are.
*i know there working on fallout4 and are desperate to get it out the door as quickly as possible (given the state of fallout3 good help us) but fallout3 could have lasted for years if the additional content was done with any sort of care for the subject.
This reminds me of Token from south park
Removing lan from a game that has lasted over 10 years solely because of lan should tell you everything you need to know about the game and Blizzards opinion of you. I know im probably in the minority but the minute they officially confirmed that i cancelled both pre-orders (starcraft and diablo) as it was clear to me that Blizzard Entertainment was dead. This is truly a sad year as of all the numerous dev houses in the pc world only two had even a shred of respect and they were Blizzard and Valve and this year both have given the big fuck you to there fans (and more importantly their customers). Many people complain about consolitis and while those complaints had merit they were never blatantly shoved in your face till this year. PC gaming may have been dying but now i feel it is truly dead.....not only dead but desecrated, the two bastions of pc gaming are now openly pissing on its grave. if you have a pc i urge you to play half-life 1 and 2 / diablo 1 and 2 /deus ex (original) starcraft and warcraft 1, 2 and 3 because unfortunaltly thoses games where the pinnicle of pc gaming and their parents have all but said that they will never be made again.
Joker1980 sheading a tear for all the PC games that were (balders gate/planetscape:torment/half-life/thief/diablo/system shock/warcraft/command and conquer/myst/grim fandango/dreamweb*/Broken sword/etc etc the list goes on and on) because we will never see there like again.
*Yeah i know it wasent a great game but the premise was and the art was and it sums up what PC games USED to be all about good games with good storys, and yeah they didnt always hit the mark but they made you think and that alone made em worth their wight in gold.
END RANT
Toejam and Earl, not the horrible platformer versions. A remake of the original fully updated with huge maps and new crazy items/enemys and net based multiplayer would KICK ASS. Oh but leave the tunes alone, that game still to this day has one of the best soundtracks going.
Whats wrong with human controled drones and bot's, after all that would remove human casualties on your side...until the other side develops something similar. Thinking about it two armys of human controlled or autonomous bots would essentially turn war into a video game.
This will not work, as it is many peoples network services are handicapped by their ISP. Network relience with data limits will not work ever. Software is only getting bigger and going by most isp caps you will be paying twice, once for the games and again to be allowed to download them. In my opinion the isp's are holding EVERYTHING back and this is only going to get worse.
I completly agree with the right of resale when you buy a game. That said i do think something needs to be done about the way the retailers handle the used market. Over the last 2 weeks ive bought Fable2, Gears2, Prince of Persia and l4d and on each occasion after reaching the counter the guys in gamestation have recommend i buy it used. There basically encouraging their customers to pay them instead of the pub/devs/etc, now its debatable if file sharing is a lost sale but what gamestation are doing is definatly a stolen sale.
LOL this isn't bad at all, Slashdot has been blocked at work so god forgive me Ive ended up on Digg. This thread is like a discussion between Nobel laureates compared to that shit.
While i have no doubt piracy was an issue i do think its arrogant and extremly shortsighted to blame piracy for the lack of sales. The 360 is basically at its heart a PC dedicated to gaming. And for me at least that was the problem. I played gears to death on the 360, when it was released for the pc most of us were done with it and the additional content wasent enuff to justify buying a second copy of the same game. I will admit i downloaded the pc version but not with any intention of playing it. At the time i had just upgraded my gaming rig and was interested in running them side by side to see how much better (if any) it looked. The game was so full of bugs and glitches (not even mentioning Windows live, yuck) that i didnt even get that that far before i uninstalled and deleted it.
Now this is just my feelings (and my circle of friends) but as far as we see it gears PC was a lame attempted to squeese more cash out of us. it was ported at absolutely minimum expense, then when gamers went 'meh' Epic insulted the very people that got them where they are today.
Fuck Epic
If i were Nintendo and Microsoft i would be very tempted to do a backroom deal. Make a price cut for the Wii, and unofficially play up the Wii60 feeling that was floating around before launch. If you could buy both for the price of one high end console you really would have the best of both worlds (casual and hardcore). While the games will never be compatible you could easily make the messaging and Mii stuff crossover from WiiConnect to Xbox live (ala Msn and yahoo messengers). Not to mention it would absolutely kill Sony in this generation.
in the current climate i fear for the future of mods, games publishers are already trying to destroy the aspects they dont have control over, we have seen blizzard go after glider, sony's attempts to destroy the used game market and to a certain degree your actual ownership of the game you purchased (EA im looking at you). Its only a matter of time before extending the life of a game is akin to piracy.
Fanatics are the problem regardless of their clan. No matter which side of the fence they are on they simply use their beliefs as an excuse to justify an Ignorant pointless existence.
I personally think we need to stamp out all fanatasism, not just that of the religions the west dislikes.
Slightly off topic but i think its interesting none the less.
"In a somewhat humorous twist, Blizzard is somewhat notorious for.. shall we say.. liberally borrowing concepts from the Warhammer universe"
I don't think Blizzard have ever had an original idea but that's irrelevant as they have chosen to go down the quality route. They polish concepts to the highest levels then implement them superbly.
This shows two things, first while innovation is nice its possible to build a successful and respected business without it. Second its just goes to show how piss poor most (for example*) EA games are, another company that rarely if ever innovates. Compare an average EA game to an average Blizzard game and EA's offering really will feel like a beta.
* I'm just picking on EA but truth be told you could substitute them for most others and its still true.
I have broadband at home and an unlimted (yeah right) data plan on my phone, but it doesent allow tethering which is annoying. Id like service that i could use on my laptop but as i only use it once in a blue moon its not worth a subscription. This would seem like a nice solution but i would prefer it done by the GIG, say a fiver for 5 gig with no time limit, once that limits been used you just top it up.
The problem is we aren't on youtube were on thiertube.