...in that you call Ernst Adams a 'Designer'. If your main profession for over a decade hasn't been Game Design, then I think that term ceases to be relevant for you. Hopefully one day Gamasutra will realise that too.
I don't understand how this got published in Gamasutra - it's a rant by some guy who's clearly burnt out on WoW, with logic that defies explanation.
No skill in WoW? How do you explain the masses of PvP videos released everyday? How did names like Drakedog become famous? Dumb luck? The whole "lead programmer is awesome" analogy is flawed too, how many years experience do they have compared to your assistant programmers?
But this points to a bigger problem - how did this even get to Gamasutra? For years now, people like Ernst Adams have been publishing 'design articles' without actually playing games in the last few years, let alone working on them. While this guy has more experience at playing games and making them than Adams, the end point is that he's burnt out and doesn't like/can't get into 40-mans, and doesn't want to craft, or run DM, or PvP for fun instead of grinding (you know, like Street Fighter;p). His solution is to rant about it with flawed analogies like the one above, created just to prove his point and push some anti-WoW angst.
Gamasutra needs peer-review, to make sure that good articles get through, and rants are restricted to the letters page.
(Disclaimer: I'm a dirty foreigner caught in red tape)
I've had to go through a number of processes and trust me, H1B's are hardly "easy ways to get cheap labor" for employers.
Maybe you're forgetting that the usual visa cost for one of these is $20,000? Or that the visa only lasts for, at most, 5-6 years?
What about the fact that most cases where "dirty foreigners" are needed are in skilled creative fields like games, which also (suprise suprise) end up having lower salaries?
Or maybe that you have to apply about a year in advance, and that makes ultra-skilled people gravitate towards visas like the L-1 and the O-1(that can be renewed indefinitely), thereby skewing salary surveys?
If employers want cheap labor, they'll outsource to India, not go through years of government red tape and tens of thousands of dollars per employee.
Nice to see that this "pro consumer" attitude unfortunately doesn't extend to the video parts of the Xbox 360, which require a Windows Media Centre PC and only supports WMV.
If they'd just allowed the usual video formats, they'd have a sure fire winner. For now, I'm sticking to my Xbox with XBMC as my HTPC.
If I don't get AIDS treatment, I will die. If I don't get a DVD-Rip of Payback, the worst that will happen is that I'll watch something marginally more entertaining.
Last time I went to Google, it didn't have a big link saying "DOWNLOAD MOVIES FOR FREE HERE. ALSO, PLEASE UPLOAD TORRENTS TO ILLEGAL MOVIES AND GAMES HERE"
Google isn't actively asking for illegal software links, they just happen to find them while indexing the web. If Suprnova worked the same way, I'd agree with you, but they actively ask for people to create and host torrents with them. There's no possible 'accidental' way that someone would 'accidentally' post an illegal Xbox ISO in to their "Xbox ISO's" section, then 'accidentally' seed it.
I hate to break it to you guys, but not all companies are the same.
"Duh, but what happens when the servers go down?!". Well, we're talking about a company that releases game source for their products for people to modify. I'm pretty sure that Valve is more likely than anyone to release a "No-Steam" patch if they went out of business, just like they released a solution for WON being removed (remember that? HL1 had to log into a central server that doesn't exist anymore for multi, yet you're still playing that)
This is ignoring the fact that they'll be alive for at least another 5 years unless they blow all their money on coke, and that YOU CAN PLAY THE GAME OFFLINE ALREADY! So really, there's *no* situation where you won't be able to play the game.
What's funny is that the people the most pissed off about it haven't even bought it or don't know the facts behind it. I mean, it's way less restrictive than Apple's DRM on ITMS, for starters. I guess they're pissed that there's no Linux port and need a way to vent. It's okay. We understand.
Why buy the game and go through all of this shit when you can download a cracked version and play?
Okay, lets see my choices: * Buy legally by clicking on "Play Half-Life 2" in Steam and entering credit card, then best case play it in 5 minutes (if you pre-loaded), worst case play that afternoon (after it's downloaded, and saying that the auth servers are saturated)
* Find an IRC channel, then hunt around for a download site, find a torrent somewhere, wait for hours while there are too many peers and only one seed, have it slowly trickle down over a day or even more, unrar 50 different files, install it, find out that the crack that came with it didn't work, find a new crack, install, play, and then have a 50% that the developer can detect warez'ed versions and alter the game accordingly (see the new Vampire: The Masquerade game, which co-incidentally uses the same engine as HL2).
Knee-Jerking about anything that registers online and calling it DRM is just stupid.
Lets see what we've got - an online distribution method where you can download and play the game on as many computers as you want, where you can preload all the data before the game is released so that you don't have to download any data when the game is released, and where the artist gets the money instead of publishers and labels - and yet because you had to wait for half an hour to authenticate on the day after release (note: not when it was released), it's suddenly hellspawn on par with Microsoft DRM in music.
It sounds like he's basing his justifications for Player Death on his experiences on pen-and-paper roleplaying.
It doesn't work in a massively multiplayer setting, because:
In a P&P game, you're only playing for a few hours every week, and even those few hours are 10x slower than an MMORPG. If you speed it up to MMO speeds and consider that people play every day or every other day, you'd be dying at an incredible rate.
This doesn't even take into account the fact that in P&P games, you have a human controlling the other side, who can back off if they're leniant and don't want to wipe out an entire party - and can create an encounter to directly match your party strength from the start.
In a P&P game, the DM has the luxury of providing new content every time the group plays, whereas a MMORPG doesn't.
"It lets them play from other angles" is just plain designer railroading, forcing them to see the same content over and over again because, hell, you spent a lot of work on it! Everyone should see every nook and cranny of your work.
How about no? If I want to see it from other angles, I'll create multiple characters.
The 'default fiction' for real life is dying if you don't eat and drink in a few days. The 'default fiction' for the middle ages is that you die if you get any kind of major wound. These things aren't fun, which is the reason we play games.
While I agree that Player Death in MMORPG's at the moment leaves something to be desired, saying "These noobs have no idea, back in the day..." isn't a valid solution either.
As a long time game designer, why did you choose to go through the cliched "Skills and Levels in an RPG" route for COH, when there is such a huge gaping hole for MMO games that don't have their core game mechanics rooted in old-school tabletop mechanics?
When you have a game so aimed at realism, devices such as this to make the gameplay work become an annoyance.
Realism?
You're talking about a game where you're a military person in a science-based research lab, where they somehow manage to open a portal to hell that causes everyone to turn into demons and zombies, and that has convieniently placed guns and armor shards for you to add to yourself, and you're complaining that having to lower your torch to aim and fire with a shotgun or machine gun is unrealistic?
The problem on Telstra's side is increased by the fact that they have no idea how to run a mail server. That's scary when you remember they have a government-started monopoly.
This is the perfect time to point out Synergy. I've got a multimonitor surface with Windows running on one monitor and Linux on the other - although if you didn't know, you'd just assume that it was a regular multimonitor setup.
Your cursor travels between the computers, they blank and unblank at the same time, and you can even copy and paste between desktops - it's awesome, and I'd recommend it to anyone who wants a multimon-like desktop but has more than one PC on their desktop.
This only seems to work for small words - can you tell me what airoapmpitoxn, pirtaaranlinem, and coahtrbrdaeys are at a glance?
It also helps that it isn't just random letters, but appears to be pairs of letters as well.
Still, I wait excitedly for the Slashdot article "Check this out! It's a poll that tells you what your favourite colour would be if you were an 18th century russian author!"
True, but you'll notice that this is being released in countries that don't have access to TiVo. Not all of us have access to cool stuff like commercially-available PVR's yet.
ActiveX is nice, but what do you do for all of your Linux and OS X users? Or don't they exist/they have to get special permission to run on your network?
Sure logging in is secure, but every time I've gone to an internet cafe-like place at an airport somewhere, 90% of the time I will find the last person who visited still logged into Hotmail.
'Secure' is only as secure as your weakest link. I know that I've never accidentally seen someone else's POP mail via the "View POP mail" stuff they usually have at kiosks, that's for sure;p
Nope - Nintendo Europe have shelved all development on Euro Animal Crossing, which means that us aussies don't get a version either.
I imported AC from the US, and it was a good blast for a week or two, although it loses a lot of its charm when you can't trade stuff with your friends since they don't have a copy.
The US government sucks at covering up anything of importance.
I'd say that they managed to hide the development and creation of a nuclear weapon, on a project with thousands of staff, pretty well.
The problem with alien life is that there can never be any proof to say it never happened - after all, you can't prove nothing. The only way this would ever be resolved is if the US Government did end up doing something in Roswell, and then admit it sometime in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
...in that you call Ernst Adams a 'Designer'. If your main profession for over a decade hasn't been Game Design, then I think that term ceases to be relevant for you. Hopefully one day Gamasutra will realise that too.
Because, believe it or not, every person doesn't buy every SKU of the game. In fact, it'd be rare for someone to buy more than one SKU.
I don't understand how this got published in Gamasutra - it's a rant by some guy who's clearly burnt out on WoW, with logic that defies explanation.
;p). His solution is to rant about it with flawed analogies like the one above, created just to prove his point and push some anti-WoW angst.
No skill in WoW? How do you explain the masses of PvP videos released everyday? How did names like Drakedog become famous? Dumb luck? The whole "lead programmer is awesome" analogy is flawed too, how many years experience do they have compared to your assistant programmers?
But this points to a bigger problem - how did this even get to Gamasutra? For years now, people like Ernst Adams have been publishing 'design articles' without actually playing games in the last few years, let alone working on them. While this guy has more experience at playing games and making them than Adams, the end point is that he's burnt out and doesn't like/can't get into 40-mans, and doesn't want to craft, or run DM, or PvP for fun instead of grinding (you know, like Street Fighter
Gamasutra needs peer-review, to make sure that good articles get through, and rants are restricted to the letters page.
(Disclaimer: I'm a dirty foreigner caught in red tape)
I've had to go through a number of processes and trust me, H1B's are hardly "easy ways to get cheap labor" for employers.
Maybe you're forgetting that the usual visa cost for one of these is $20,000? Or that the visa only lasts for, at most, 5-6 years?
What about the fact that most cases where "dirty foreigners" are needed are in skilled creative fields like games, which also (suprise suprise) end up having lower salaries?
Or maybe that you have to apply about a year in advance, and that makes ultra-skilled people gravitate towards visas like the L-1 and the O-1(that can be renewed indefinitely), thereby skewing salary surveys?
If employers want cheap labor, they'll outsource to India, not go through years of government red tape and tens of thousands of dollars per employee.
Nice to see that this "pro consumer" attitude unfortunately doesn't extend to the video parts of the Xbox 360, which require a Windows Media Centre PC and only supports WMV.
If they'd just allowed the usual video formats, they'd have a sure fire winner. For now, I'm sticking to my Xbox with XBMC as my HTPC.
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/07/22/0820213.shtm l
Please, some noob says the same thing every console generation. It doesn't happen.
If I don't get AIDS treatment, I will die. If I don't get a DVD-Rip of Payback, the worst that will happen is that I'll watch something marginally more entertaining.
Last time I went to Google, it didn't have a big link saying "DOWNLOAD MOVIES FOR FREE HERE. ALSO, PLEASE UPLOAD TORRENTS TO ILLEGAL MOVIES AND GAMES HERE"
Google isn't actively asking for illegal software links, they just happen to find them while indexing the web. If Suprnova worked the same way, I'd agree with you, but they actively ask for people to create and host torrents with them. There's no possible 'accidental' way that someone would 'accidentally' post an illegal Xbox ISO in to their "Xbox ISO's" section, then 'accidentally' seed it.
I hate to break it to you guys, but not all companies are the same.
"Duh, but what happens when the servers go down?!". Well, we're talking about a company that releases game source for their products for people to modify. I'm pretty sure that Valve is more likely than anyone to release a "No-Steam" patch if they went out of business, just like they released a solution for WON being removed (remember that? HL1 had to log into a central server that doesn't exist anymore for multi, yet you're still playing that)
This is ignoring the fact that they'll be alive for at least another 5 years unless they blow all their money on coke, and that YOU CAN PLAY THE GAME OFFLINE ALREADY! So really, there's *no* situation where you won't be able to play the game.
What's funny is that the people the most pissed off about it haven't even bought it or don't know the facts behind it. I mean, it's way less restrictive than Apple's DRM on ITMS, for starters. I guess they're pissed that there's no Linux port and need a way to vent. It's okay. We understand.
I can't help but think if the news article has called the product a "simulation" or a "research tool" rather than a "game", this would be a non-issue.
Why buy the game and go through all of this shit when you can download a cracked version and play?
Okay, lets see my choices:
* Buy legally by clicking on "Play Half-Life 2" in Steam and entering credit card, then best case play it in 5 minutes (if you pre-loaded), worst case play that afternoon (after it's downloaded, and saying that the auth servers are saturated)
* Find an IRC channel, then hunt around for a download site, find a torrent somewhere, wait for hours while there are too many peers and only one seed, have it slowly trickle down over a day or even more, unrar 50 different files, install it, find out that the crack that came with it didn't work, find a new crack, install, play, and then have a 50% that the developer can detect warez'ed versions and alter the game accordingly (see the new Vampire: The Masquerade game, which co-incidentally uses the same engine as HL2).
Knee-Jerking about anything that registers online and calling it DRM is just stupid.
Lets see what we've got - an online distribution method where you can download and play the game on as many computers as you want, where you can preload all the data before the game is released so that you don't have to download any data when the game is released, and where the artist gets the money instead of publishers and labels - and yet because you had to wait for half an hour to authenticate on the day after release (note: not when it was released), it's suddenly hellspawn on par with Microsoft DRM in music.
It doesn't work in a massively multiplayer setting, because:
In a P&P game, you're only playing for a few hours every week, and even those few hours are 10x slower than an MMORPG. If you speed it up to MMO speeds and consider that people play every day or every other day, you'd be dying at an incredible rate.
This doesn't even take into account the fact that in P&P games, you have a human controlling the other side, who can back off if they're leniant and don't want to wipe out an entire party - and can create an encounter to directly match your party strength from the start.
In a P&P game, the DM has the luxury of providing new content every time the group plays, whereas a MMORPG doesn't.
"It lets them play from other angles" is just plain designer railroading, forcing them to see the same content over and over again because, hell, you spent a lot of work on it! Everyone should see every nook and cranny of your work.
How about no? If I want to see it from other angles, I'll create multiple characters.
The 'default fiction' for real life is dying if you don't eat and drink in a few days. The 'default fiction' for the middle ages is that you die if you get any kind of major wound. These things aren't fun, which is the reason we play games.
While I agree that Player Death in MMORPG's at the moment leaves something to be desired, saying "These noobs have no idea, back in the day..." isn't a valid solution either.
As a long time game designer, why did you choose to go through the cliched "Skills and Levels in an RPG" route for COH, when there is such a huge gaping hole for MMO games that don't have their core game mechanics rooted in old-school tabletop mechanics?
When you have a game so aimed at realism, devices such as this to make the gameplay work become an annoyance.
Realism?
You're talking about a game where you're a military person in a science-based research lab, where they somehow manage to open a portal to hell that causes everyone to turn into demons and zombies, and that has convieniently placed guns and armor shards for you to add to yourself, and you're complaining that having to lower your torch to aim and fire with a shotgun or machine gun is unrealistic?
What about Freedom Fighters? Ty the Tasmanian Tiger?
In the original GTA, there were three towns: Liberty City, San Andreas, and Vice City.
Liberty City was used in GTA3
Vice City was used in GTA:VC
That leaves San Andreas.
Personally, I think it's just Rockstar covering their asses, I'd be suprised if it actually was San Andreas.
This must be some fantasy land you're thinking of - Aussies can't download ISO's, they take up a big chunk of the standard 3gb/month download limit ;p
(yes, I know, some ADSL plans have 6-12gb plans, and there are some speed limited ADSL plans, but it's a far cry from unmetered)
The problem on Telstra's side is increased by the fact that they have no idea how to run a mail server. That's scary when you remember they have a government-started monopoly.
e pl ies
http://whirlpool.net.au/article.cfm/1199?show=r
This is the perfect time to point out Synergy. I've got a multimonitor surface with Windows running on one monitor and Linux on the other - although if you didn't know, you'd just assume that it was a regular multimonitor setup.
Your cursor travels between the computers, they blank and unblank at the same time, and you can even copy and paste between desktops - it's awesome, and I'd recommend it to anyone who wants a multimon-like desktop but has more than one PC on their desktop.
This only seems to work for small words - can you tell me what airoapmpitoxn, pirtaaranlinem, and coahtrbrdaeys are at a glance?
It also helps that it isn't just random letters, but appears to be pairs of letters as well.
Still, I wait excitedly for the Slashdot article "Check this out! It's a poll that tells you what your favourite colour would be if you were an 18th century russian author!"
True, but you'll notice that this is being released in countries that don't have access to TiVo. Not all of us have access to cool stuff like commercially-available PVR's yet.
ActiveX is nice, but what do you do for all of your Linux and OS X users? Or don't they exist/they have to get special permission to run on your network?
Sure logging in is secure, but every time I've gone to an internet cafe-like place at an airport somewhere, 90% of the time I will find the last person who visited still logged into Hotmail.
;p
'Secure' is only as secure as your weakest link. I know that I've never accidentally seen someone else's POP mail via the "View POP mail" stuff they usually have at kiosks, that's for sure
Nope - Nintendo Europe have shelved all development on Euro Animal Crossing, which means that us aussies don't get a version either.
I imported AC from the US, and it was a good blast for a week or two, although it loses a lot of its charm when you can't trade stuff with your friends since they don't have a copy.
I'd say that they managed to hide the development and creation of a nuclear weapon, on a project with thousands of staff, pretty well.
The problem with alien life is that there can never be any proof to say it never happened - after all, you can't prove nothing. The only way this would ever be resolved is if the US Government did end up doing something in Roswell, and then admit it sometime in the future.