Actually, non-subscribing players don't get a weekly stipend any more. If you shell out a tenner a month, you do get a certain amount of L$ per week, but not enough that you could cash it out to recoup your ten dollars at the end of the month.
Inventory management and transferring objects is still a huge fucking mess. As someone else said, the shirt you bought was probably in the box that you ended up wearing on your chest. Unfortunately, there's no way to move objects from a box in your inventory to another part of your inventory... you've got to put the box out in the world somewhere (I've taken to attaching it to my HUD, so nobody sees it) and interact with it from there. It's counterintuitive, to say the least.
The Sims Online was a massive failure for EA, not Sony. It had none of the attractions of the standalone game (like playing "house" with multiple households), and worse the only way to do anything revolved around stupid mini-games. The average Sims enthusiast wanted to play with their dolls, not pretend to be one of those dolls.
Linden Labs, on the other hand, is appealing to their users' greed by allowing them the opportunity to cash out in-game earnings-- with a tiny bit taken off the top for the service, of course. They also allow people to buy in-game currency with real-world money (there's even a hard-coded button that fires up the currency conversion web-page in the client). There are groups that shell out hundreds of dollars a month to the Lindens in virtual land fees, which indubitably keeps the company flush with money. You might be angry and frustrated with Linden Labs (and there's no shortage of reasons to be angry with them), but they do have a tidy little racket going on right now.
If I go to a technician I'm paying him to fix my machine, not to evangelize me. If I don't know you from Adam, do you really think that I'm going to be any more interested in your free software that I've never heard of before, than I would be in your theories about the 100 MPG carburetor, or whether the local sports team will make it to the playoffs? No. Christ, my schedule has been borked enough by having the machine fail, and now you're suggesting that I install unfamiliar software or worse, an utterly alien operating system to the one I'm used to-- an operating system that my ISP does not support, and that any other random tech will look at, shrug and explain that he only does Windows? I think not, thank you.
You're being paid to fix the machine. Using me as a captive audience for anything else is not just rude, it's downright insulting.
The problem is, users are all too quick to post the same content again. Even if Youtube started to use hashes to prevent that, the sneaky little gits will break the originals up into smaller chunks and do it again.
There's this funny thing about trademarks, intellectual property and the like. The owners are required to stomp unauthorized derivative works when they find out about them, or they run the very real risk of losing the rights to it.
But why didn't Microsoft do this before? There has been lots of noise about it!
MS is a big company. A very big company. Even if someone climbed over the wall at the Gates estate wearing nothing but printouts of screenshots from the Halogen project, it would still take a very long time to filter through to Microsoft's IP lawyers. Microsoft is large enough that not only doesn't the right hand know what the left is doing at all times, but the upper ventral tentacle is often left completely out of the loop.
Yes, and it's really easy too. Just go to the WoW webpage, track down the Account Management button, and select 'cancel billing'. Like any other open-ended game, you win WoW when you get bored and decide to go on to other pursuits. For me it was hitting 60 with my main, realizing that I didn't enjoy raiding, and subsequently realizing that the low-end game was not entertaining enough to plod through all over again.
While I agree with the anti-Blockbuster sentiment, they're not "playing the underdog" here. Netflix has proven that there is a definite market for mail-order video rentals and Blockbuster is trying to get a slice of that pie by providing a comparable experience. That's simple and entirely legal business sense, the kind that makes stockholders very happy because the proposition has already been proven to work.
The problem here is Netflix trying to leverage what looks for all the world like another patently ludicrous patent claim to protect its income, rather than adapting to a changing market and competition. This is the kind of thing that Slashdot posters regularly rail about... at least, when it's a big outfit like Microsoft.
One might think that the future is piecemeal, given the PhysX card, this thing and the even more ridiculous Killer(TM) NIC, but there's a few small things that the would-be bandwagoneers developing these things don't want to think about.
The first is money. A serious gamer who likes his bells and whistles might be expected to spend several hundred dollars every year or two, in order to make his games run at their prettiest and fastest. He still has a finite budget, though-- asking him to spend a similar amount on physics and AI hardware is unlikely to have the desired effect.
The second is developer support. Developers are stuck in an even bigger pickle: on the one hand, these devices (ideally and theoretically) provide new avenues for gameplay, but the moment that the hardware becomes necessary, they've eliminated a definite percentage of their market.
Three... are these things necessary, or even desirable? The original PhysX demo application, intended to show the effectiveness of the hardware by flinging crates around, ran perfectly smoothly on good hardware once hacked to remove the check for the PhysX processor. The Killer(TM) NIC is pretty much marketing snake-oil to anyone with any knowledge of networking. The 'need' for an AI coprocessor is pretty much obviated by faster main processors. Most games these days haven't been optimized for the multi-core processors that, unlike parlor tricks like PhysX, are actually growing in popularity. Wouldn't it be just that much easier for a developer to assign AI routines and meaningful physics interactions to idle processor cores, rather than constantly shuffling vital data back and forth between peripheral cards?
So... we've got a guy whose action figure designs border on the Liefeldian, another guy whose main claims to fame are writing about angsty fantasy icons that can kill you with little more than a look, and writing about dropping moons on other sci-fi icons... and a baseball mogul. There's a lot of money being brought into play here, yes, and names familiar to those interested in traditionally 'geeky' pursuits like comics and gaming... but I'm not convinced that any of them have any idea of how to manage a development house. Sure, they're 'superstars' in their own right, but so were John Romero, Stevie Case and Todd Porter... and they were steeped in the industry before squandering the megabucks invested in them.
If these guys can pull it off, great. We can always use another good, solid development house kicking games out. Unfortunately, there's still a world of difference between being an avid gamer and being a game developer, and a similar degree of difference between being an artist on paper and being an artist in three dimensions.
In the immortal words of a good friend of mine, an otherwise well-situated and well-adjusted adult: "Who's George Burns?"
It would be a fine idea if you were trying to keep access down to certain sub-cultures (ie, a captcha showing a picture of Linus Torvalds and one of Linus from Peanuts, asking what they have in common), but on a larger scale it just isn't going to work.
With the partial exception of rare situations like Project Entropia (which allows players to 'cash out' their in-game funds for real-world cash) or Second Life (which has a booming currency exchange and intellectual property rules), nothing actually belongs to the player in an MMOG. This is one of the reasons why Blizzard or SOE habitually ban accounts and reverse large money transfers in their games: you are breaking their rules, not the laws of whatever land their company or your PC is sitting in. If the devs have a problem with large-scale fraud (and other similar events in EVE suggest that they really don't care), then they'll make changes or bring out the ban hammer, it's as simple as that.
"Did you know that Sony has a built in sound?" he said. "Did you know that Toshiba has one?"
Does he know that Sony and Toshiba are selling hardware and not operating systems? As much as Microsoft would love to lay claim to everything x86, they're not the ones providing the hardware that the OS is running on.
Those suggestions the music dork gave are sublimely ridiculous, as well. Just how long is this startup sound going to be, that you can reach over and fiddle with the controls on your speakers? Are we supposed to hard-reset over and over, until the sound runs optimally? Jesus, people, give your end-users some fucking credit.
Of course, none of this really matters. Someone will have a hack to remove the damned thing within days of release, if not hours.
Funny thing is, around here we've still got a touch-tone surcharge. Originally it was to offset the cost of rolling touch-tone service out, but it's been squatting on the bills ever since.
You might be surprised, but there are still a lot of people out there with their phone lines (and phones) configured for pulse-dialing/rotary instead of touch-tone. Unfortunately, speaking from personal experience, they make getting through a traditional digit-entry interface impossible.
Personally, I haven't had any real trouble using the voice interaction services that my cable company provides. I do try to call from a quiet spot though, and do tend to have to speak more clearly and loudly than I do to the service rep that I eventually get.
I found Dreamfall (by Anarchy Online developer, Funcom) and Castle Marrach (by pay-for-play developer Skotos) in their lists of available games. I don't think that either of those companies counts as "indie"-- though the part where Castle Marrach's write-up calls the rest of the industry "philistines" certainly reflects an unfortunate indie stereotype. The rest, with the occasional exception like Crimsonland or Deadly Rooms of Death, looks like the kind of shareware crap you might find cluttering up download.com or the rotating jewel-case racks at your local EB. The whole thing looks more fanzine than manifesto.
The quoted comment contains absolutely no implications that Starcraft 2 is in the works. Sorry guys, but he's just saying that he loves the shit out of Starcraft, and will be wetting himself with glee when they can announce the sequel. Besides which, the consensus is always that they're going to announce Starcraft 2, because a major announcement could never be the launch of an entirely new franchise, a sequel to another of their games, or the revival of their classic titles. Really!
They could be a good excuse for more people to leave the Steam launcher sitting in the task tray, especially since they've finally got Steam's IM functions working again. Right-click the icon, pop the games launcher open almost instantly, and play a bit of Chuzzle. If someone you know wants to drag you into a CS match, you can switch over with ease.
Steam is associated with shooters and action games right now, but there's no reason why it has to stay that way. Its distribution system would be ideal for Popcap, because their games are small enough to download fairly quickly on dialup, and all of the authorizations are stored on the server side. Go over to a friend's place (or work) and download the Steam client, then download the games you've already purchased licenses for. Popcap doesn't have to worry about mailing media out, or people passing installer discs around to their friends, which saves on expenses.
The two services' pricing structures are already rather close. There are several expansions, episodes and mods available for less than a twenty, which is the same general range that Popcap games fall into. Near-instant gratification for a fairly low price is a very good way to separate people from their money.
It's in one of the cargo bays on the Command deck. Apparently the doors don't open until you've done something else on the deck, but you'll know the place when SHODAN tells you to stop dicking around.
I thought that if SHODAN wanted your brains scrambled, she could do it at any time during the last act of the game. Is it because she's too busy fiddling around with the Von Brauns hyperdrive to care?
That's a good point. From my perspective, if SHODAN has enough threads into you to wirelessly credit or delete cyber modules, then she's probably got enough to flatline or lobotomize you. My interpretation could be wrong, or it could be one of those flimsy plot points, like the Grove managing to drift all the way to Tau Ceti in less than seventy-five years.
Poppycock. For the first half of the game, she's wearing the voice of dead Doctor Polito, and treating you as a slightly more capable version of the psionic monkeys that chitter and scream in the Von Braun's corridors. When she reveals herself, the illusions of even that degree of care are gone. There is one point in particular, where you can find some upgrade software and information regarding her ultimate plans. She deletes the software in retaliation, and you can bet your ass that if she didn't need you fully functional, she'd have scrambled your brains while she was at it.
A collectible board game? Isn't that what Dragon Dice was, before TSR quietly smothered it in the night? Engineering and lots and lots of money aside, I think Dreamblade has a good chance of going the same way, not because of any complexity it might have, but for sheer fiddliness.
You can stick a deck of Magic cards in a pocket, but a game that requires you to tote a box of potentially fragile miniatures, maps and rules booklets really doesn't lend itself to the same sort of impulse buying or pick-up games. The lure of official prize-money tourneys might draw some... but how many people get into these games simply for that?
Amen to that. Seriously, given Molyneux' track record of late, the idea of him "re-imagining" classic Bullfrog titles should be taken with a grain of salt and treated with the same concerned horror as Spielberg editing E.T. or someone seriously considering a Casablanca remake.
Besides that, he's already "re-imagined" Populous, and we all know what a monochrome turd that turned out to be. Twice, even.
If it goes on for more than one year, I'd say three years, five at the outside before traditional games start to feel the squeeze.
The first year would be an utter clusterfuck. Confused patrons, clashing needs of exhibitors on both sides, and a con staff probably ill equipped to deal with the corporate culture clashes.
Second year, things are better. Gen-Con's staff and coordinators have wetted their metaphoric blades (and probably hired a few more consultants), so they know what to expect.
Third year, more of the video game industry and its hangers-on have applied for booth space. Many are limbs of massive multi-media corporations, with budgets that traditional games developers only wish they could approach. If this year's Comic-Con is any indication, the chatter of big money starts to drown the smaller outfits out.
I think the biggest concern in the short run would be Gen-Con's relative openness compared to E3 and other video game industry conventions, which are ostensibly supposed to be difficult for the great unwashed to get into.
Regarding Palladium, let's take it straight from the horse's ass.
SJG has massively scaled production and distribution back over the last three years. The warehousing they owned outside of Austin is gone. Their home-grown Ogre Miniatures and Macrotures line is dead, until such a time as someone can magically make it profitable. Their core lineup, the GURPS RPG system and its supplements, has dwindled from a steady flow of two or three books a month to two or three per year.FASA is long dead and its successors are doing sweet nothing with the book licenses they bought-- Wizkids' Shadowrun miniatures game flew like a lead balloon. White Wolf's house magazine has been out of print for years, and they annihilated their signature World of Darkness setting in an orgy of apocalyptic worldbooks. The WoD replacement books lack the same spark of popularity, making their world a rather dismal one indeed. Wizards, as noted, is concentrating mainly on CCGs and CRPG tie-ins (more hit than miss, when one compares the Temple of Elemental Evil and D&D Online to say, Baldur's Gate), with a trickle of generic fluff interspersed with the occasional bit of Eberron or Forgotten Realms material. The rest of the so-called industry is made up of boutique publishers clinging desperately to the open gaming license, or praying to become the next big core system.
Slashdot Mirror
Inventory management and transferring objects is still a huge fucking mess. As someone else said, the shirt you bought was probably in the box that you ended up wearing on your chest. Unfortunately, there's no way to move objects from a box in your inventory to another part of your inventory... you've got to put the box out in the world somewhere (I've taken to attaching it to my HUD, so nobody sees it) and interact with it from there. It's counterintuitive, to say the least.
The Sims Online was a massive failure for EA, not Sony. It had none of the attractions of the standalone game (like playing "house" with multiple households), and worse the only way to do anything revolved around stupid mini-games. The average Sims enthusiast wanted to play with their dolls, not pretend to be one of those dolls.
Linden Labs, on the other hand, is appealing to their users' greed by allowing them the opportunity to cash out in-game earnings-- with a tiny bit taken off the top for the service, of course. They also allow people to buy in-game currency with real-world money (there's even a hard-coded button that fires up the currency conversion web-page in the client). There are groups that shell out hundreds of dollars a month to the Lindens in virtual land fees, which indubitably keeps the company flush with money. You might be angry and frustrated with Linden Labs (and there's no shortage of reasons to be angry with them), but they do have a tidy little racket going on right now.
You're being paid to fix the machine. Using me as a captive audience for anything else is not just rude, it's downright insulting.
The problem is, users are all too quick to post the same content again. Even if Youtube started to use hashes to prevent that, the sneaky little gits will break the originals up into smaller chunks and do it again.
But why didn't Microsoft do this before? There has been lots of noise about it!
MS is a big company. A very big company. Even if someone climbed over the wall at the Gates estate wearing nothing but printouts of screenshots from the Halogen project, it would still take a very long time to filter through to Microsoft's IP lawyers. Microsoft is large enough that not only doesn't the right hand know what the left is doing at all times, but the upper ventral tentacle is often left completely out of the loop.
Yes, and it's really easy too. Just go to the WoW webpage, track down the Account Management button, and select 'cancel billing'. Like any other open-ended game, you win WoW when you get bored and decide to go on to other pursuits. For me it was hitting 60 with my main, realizing that I didn't enjoy raiding, and subsequently realizing that the low-end game was not entertaining enough to plod through all over again.
The problem here is Netflix trying to leverage what looks for all the world like another patently ludicrous patent claim to protect its income, rather than adapting to a changing market and competition. This is the kind of thing that Slashdot posters regularly rail about... at least, when it's a big outfit like Microsoft.
The first is money. A serious gamer who likes his bells and whistles might be expected to spend several hundred dollars every year or two, in order to make his games run at their prettiest and fastest. He still has a finite budget, though-- asking him to spend a similar amount on physics and AI hardware is unlikely to have the desired effect.
The second is developer support. Developers are stuck in an even bigger pickle: on the one hand, these devices (ideally and theoretically) provide new avenues for gameplay, but the moment that the hardware becomes necessary, they've eliminated a definite percentage of their market.
Three... are these things necessary, or even desirable? The original PhysX demo application, intended to show the effectiveness of the hardware by flinging crates around, ran perfectly smoothly on good hardware once hacked to remove the check for the PhysX processor. The Killer(TM) NIC is pretty much marketing snake-oil to anyone with any knowledge of networking. The 'need' for an AI coprocessor is pretty much obviated by faster main processors. Most games these days haven't been optimized for the multi-core processors that, unlike parlor tricks like PhysX, are actually growing in popularity. Wouldn't it be just that much easier for a developer to assign AI routines and meaningful physics interactions to idle processor cores, rather than constantly shuffling vital data back and forth between peripheral cards?
If these guys can pull it off, great. We can always use another good, solid development house kicking games out. Unfortunately, there's still a world of difference between being an avid gamer and being a game developer, and a similar degree of difference between being an artist on paper and being an artist in three dimensions.
It would be a fine idea if you were trying to keep access down to certain sub-cultures (ie, a captcha showing a picture of Linus Torvalds and one of Linus from Peanuts, asking what they have in common), but on a larger scale it just isn't going to work.
With the partial exception of rare situations like Project Entropia (which allows players to 'cash out' their in-game funds for real-world cash) or Second Life (which has a booming currency exchange and intellectual property rules), nothing actually belongs to the player in an MMOG. This is one of the reasons why Blizzard or SOE habitually ban accounts and reverse large money transfers in their games: you are breaking their rules, not the laws of whatever land their company or your PC is sitting in. If the devs have a problem with large-scale fraud (and other similar events in EVE suggest that they really don't care), then they'll make changes or bring out the ban hammer, it's as simple as that.
Those suggestions the music dork gave are sublimely ridiculous, as well. Just how long is this startup sound going to be, that you can reach over and fiddle with the controls on your speakers? Are we supposed to hard-reset over and over, until the sound runs optimally? Jesus, people, give your end-users some fucking credit.
Of course, none of this really matters. Someone will have a hack to remove the damned thing within days of release, if not hours.
What was the jingle, "It's like there's a Zerg rush in my mouth, and everyone's invited"?
Funny thing is, around here we've still got a touch-tone surcharge. Originally it was to offset the cost of rolling touch-tone service out, but it's been squatting on the bills ever since.
Personally, I haven't had any real trouble using the voice interaction services that my cable company provides. I do try to call from a quiet spot though, and do tend to have to speak more clearly and loudly than I do to the service rep that I eventually get.
I found Dreamfall (by Anarchy Online developer, Funcom) and Castle Marrach (by pay-for-play developer Skotos) in their lists of available games. I don't think that either of those companies counts as "indie"-- though the part where Castle Marrach's write-up calls the rest of the industry "philistines" certainly reflects an unfortunate indie stereotype. The rest, with the occasional exception like Crimsonland or Deadly Rooms of Death, looks like the kind of shareware crap you might find cluttering up download.com or the rotating jewel-case racks at your local EB. The whole thing looks more fanzine than manifesto.
The quoted comment contains absolutely no implications that Starcraft 2 is in the works. Sorry guys, but he's just saying that he loves the shit out of Starcraft, and will be wetting himself with glee when they can announce the sequel. Besides which, the consensus is always that they're going to announce Starcraft 2, because a major announcement could never be the launch of an entirely new franchise, a sequel to another of their games, or the revival of their classic titles. Really!
Steam is associated with shooters and action games right now, but there's no reason why it has to stay that way. Its distribution system would be ideal for Popcap, because their games are small enough to download fairly quickly on dialup, and all of the authorizations are stored on the server side. Go over to a friend's place (or work) and download the Steam client, then download the games you've already purchased licenses for. Popcap doesn't have to worry about mailing media out, or people passing installer discs around to their friends, which saves on expenses.
The two services' pricing structures are already rather close. There are several expansions, episodes and mods available for less than a twenty, which is the same general range that Popcap games fall into. Near-instant gratification for a fairly low price is a very good way to separate people from their money.
Biting the hand that feeds you does not typically result in extra treats or praise. Jesus, kids.
Poppycock. For the first half of the game, she's wearing the voice of dead Doctor Polito, and treating you as a slightly more capable version of the psionic monkeys that chitter and scream in the Von Braun's corridors. When she reveals herself, the illusions of even that degree of care are gone. There is one point in particular, where you can find some upgrade software and information regarding her ultimate plans. She deletes the software in retaliation, and you can bet your ass that if she didn't need you fully functional, she'd have scrambled your brains while she was at it.
You can stick a deck of Magic cards in a pocket, but a game that requires you to tote a box of potentially fragile miniatures, maps and rules booklets really doesn't lend itself to the same sort of impulse buying or pick-up games. The lure of official prize-money tourneys might draw some... but how many people get into these games simply for that?
Besides that, he's already "re-imagined" Populous, and we all know what a monochrome turd that turned out to be. Twice, even.
"Fifty percent of our hits are coming from Antarctica? Shit, quick, what do penguins buy?!"
The first year would be an utter clusterfuck. Confused patrons, clashing needs of exhibitors on both sides, and a con staff probably ill equipped to deal with the corporate culture clashes.
Second year, things are better. Gen-Con's staff and coordinators have wetted their metaphoric blades (and probably hired a few more consultants), so they know what to expect.
Third year, more of the video game industry and its hangers-on have applied for booth space. Many are limbs of massive multi-media corporations, with budgets that traditional games developers only wish they could approach. If this year's Comic-Con is any indication, the chatter of big money starts to drown the smaller outfits out.
I think the biggest concern in the short run would be Gen-Con's relative openness compared to E3 and other video game industry conventions, which are ostensibly supposed to be difficult for the great unwashed to get into.
SJG has massively scaled production and distribution back over the last three years. The warehousing they owned outside of Austin is gone. Their home-grown Ogre Miniatures and Macrotures line is dead, until such a time as someone can magically make it profitable. Their core lineup, the GURPS RPG system and its supplements, has dwindled from a steady flow of two or three books a month to two or three per year.FASA is long dead and its successors are doing sweet nothing with the book licenses they bought-- Wizkids' Shadowrun miniatures game flew like a lead balloon. White Wolf's house magazine has been out of print for years, and they annihilated their signature World of Darkness setting in an orgy of apocalyptic worldbooks. The WoD replacement books lack the same spark of popularity, making their world a rather dismal one indeed. Wizards, as noted, is concentrating mainly on CCGs and CRPG tie-ins (more hit than miss, when one compares the Temple of Elemental Evil and D&D Online to say, Baldur's Gate), with a trickle of generic fluff interspersed with the occasional bit of Eberron or Forgotten Realms material. The rest of the so-called industry is made up of boutique publishers clinging desperately to the open gaming license, or praying to become the next big core system.