I think fixing it so you don't have to go online to play SP game would be very simple, and should have been patched 3 months ago if valve wanted it that way. Saying "sometime in the future" isn't good enough. Less talk and more work, worked for the last 5 years... so why not go back to it.

Also Steam has ALWAYS tried to deleate hl when installing it. Personaly I hate having to go back and reinstall things from cd. Heck I hated having to dig out my cd for updates to games like UT/ut2k3. I like the fact that with Steam I won't have to worry about digging out cd's to play games... but it's not there yet.

I think they were still hoping to have the steam release on the 30th. I can see why they would delay up until now for the announcement. But you all need to remember that they havn't said they would release on the 30th since the game was announced what 4 months ago? All the interviews and such have said some like "Well we are hoping for the 30th, but holidays is a better guess"

Personaly the date i've been excepting it on was 11/30/2003. Which is what most websites you can buy it from list.

There's a whole forum topics on steam and NS... basicly there's a walk around way to get steam to see any mod. Something about creating folders with the mods names in the steam folder and making a few shortcuts.

Honestly I think NS is one of the few good mods left for HL, and I don't see myself moving to steam anytime soon if they keep things broken.

What about going to lans? Usally we just bring a cd full of patch's for people that havn't updated, but does this mean we will have to have a working internet connection for our lans to work with HL2 now?

Honestly, I think value is just blowing this one hard. They just need to SHUT UP, like the last 5 years, and work on the system. When the game ships, just ship your one box to the store and then say "Oh yea, you can also download it for 10 dollars less" or something along those lines. Basicly All they are doing right now is confusing and enraging their userbase. Learn from yourself and just shut the hell up until the game is released and you've got steam working 100%.

Personaly, I don't want Steam... i've got a great server browser, that has a GUI, so I don't need Steam for that. If I want to patch, i've got great places like Bluesnews to find out if the patch works/is out. And Honestly it sounds like now all they have to do is find out your Steam password to rule over ALL your value games instead of just hacking out CD keys...

Sadly i'm having flashs of Tribes2 and how they basicly tried too much too fast.

This sounds like the next step beyond SOF/SOF2's GHOUL system... that had very good hitbox's for players, but sometimes the levels just sucked because of that peak/shoot invisable thing. Hopefully that will be fixed along with having to hit curtain parts of monsters/players. Also look at it as a way to expand upon boss's and such, as you will have to find the "kinks" in the armor to kill some of them hopefully.

"PC owners will get a month of free online play, after which they will be required to pay a $12.95 per month subscription fee. Additional characters can be created for the charge of $1.00 per character per month."

I almost choked on my dinner when I was reading this. You pay 40-50 for the game, then 13 a month (Which is the high end of the MMO market) and then you have to pay 1 dollar per character per month extra if you want more then 1 guy/girl?!? WTF are they thinking!

Yea, that beta patch to fix the netcode in PS was god awfuly done. It's a lot better now from what I hear from friends that do play a bit, but still the nerfing is continueing to happen.

Both... another example of a great game ruined by lack of time/listening to testers, and moneygrabbers.

Take RO for example, when asked why they went PTP when the game wasn't even uptodate with the korean version. "We decided that 2 years was long enough to give people a free beta"

It's great... this is by far the best HL mod for teamplayers. Although I have to say the game time has been sped up in general you still sometimes get those 1 hours games.

Modding in Doom3 will be harder. NOT because of programing, but because of the ammount of work that needs to go into the levels/models/textures. I think that's what they ment when they said it will be harder to mod then Q3. Programming wise it will be about the same...

Source was built from the start with modders in mind... so if it isn't the easyist to mod then something went wrong.

The first games where more RPG.. and did have lots of storyline/talking. The latter ones(PSX/PS2 versions) have been leaning towards interactive movies. Which a lot of the fans don't like. While the improved graphics are great, the loss of some of the RPG roots and making them into simpler games (for more mass appeal according to Square) has been a sad point in the series.

As for minimal continuity, as Zar said, it's more like almost none. The ages of the theroy has never really been confirmed, and I can't really think of any of the first 6 games that kept the same story let alone the same characters. I think one of them continued with the previous games childern, but that was as close as you got as the storylines have always been totaly different.

Overall I'd have to say all RPGS are interactive movies in some way, they are just seperated by how much you can do between the storyline elements. I can only hope they go back to the more RPG side, but it always seems that the more space you take up with the cutscenes, and better graphics the less you will have for the storyline/scripting/world exploring.

Yea, one of the things that makes FF so great is that each game has almost nothing to do with the game in front of it. So you were in a totaly new world/storyline every time. Sadly this has been ruined by the hacked out FFX-2.

Also one of the great things about the early FF games was that the first one started bad in the stone age, and then each game was held in a new age... thus making people think that if it was the same world, there was just like 500 years or so between games. Each game having different gameplay mechanisms to it but staying near a basic formula for RPGs is also a big plus.

By far one of the better games to come out. Great to hear the reason why medics shoot me when i'm almost dead... although usally i'll hit fire and respawn just from frustration. Also along these lines of things we don't like to see in the game... i've seen medics that just start chopping people up in the start of the game so they can get exp faster. That dosn't help the team and usally get's complaints filed. I do have to agree that I don't seem to see lots of complaints filed on even public servers.

You had to download maps in T1/2 sometimes. Those were the good ones with custom buildings and such. Even the server side maps were downloaded, but they were only like 100k so it only took a few seconds.

Yes it's good that they fixed that bug in this patch. And that they are patching to get the bugs out. But like others in the beta, this game needs almost another 6 months of testing. Just to fix the current bugs/skills/content. Sadly we are seeing this more and more in MMO games.

Also they seem to say it's very scaleable... but my low end system couldn't even run the game over the course of the beta. (1200mhz, 758 megs of ram, geforce2mx 64megs and a geforce 3 card) Although I didn't try it out on this system for the last few patches, I know i've heard a lot of people with close to same specs saying they had big problems running it.

It's the same engine as SS... and same style gameplay. They tried to add in a few more things to make it interesting. You launch yourself on a catapult, things pop/crawl out of the ground instead of just appearing. Also you collect treasure that lets you buy(Costs 50 gold) powerups at an alter. You can use these latter buy hitting the key bound to it. Also killing different monsters with different weps has affects. So it's not always about using the most powerful wep. Some of them you shoot and they gib and then the gibs morph into litte more annoying versions of the monster you just killed(2 usally) So if you use, say the flame or acid wep they will burn/pop and not turn into the littler guys. Then again you've got 50 of these things coming at you and those weps fire insanely slow.

This demo is okay. Dosn't make me want to buy it though. I played through both the SS games, and even with these new things it dosn't seem like enough of a step. The weapon switching is NOT FAST ENOUGH for this type of game. If you use just next/prev wep to switch, instead of the number keys, you will be stuck waiting for your char to pull out the wep while your mowed down by the wave of guys. And you NEED to switch, because of said poping guys and having to kill things with different weps. Also it started getting annoying because you can't save anywhere.

Sadly these little things just get too damn annoying at times.

Honestly my problem with the way they have it set up is that if you talk, it get's heard. IF it was like HL and other VON games where you had to hit a key to talk this would work a lot better. Right now it even picks up speaker sounds on some peoples mics.

Probably will end up "Jedi Knight: (Insert some interesting subtitle here)" Since that seems to be a trend that keeps poping up. Also will help because it will not make it a direct sequal, but will use the brand name for marketing.

Well according to the different UT2003 sites, they are grabbing it right now off a private FTP and will have it up for public download in 1-3 hours. Looks like the 2pm thing was for releasing it to sites... which means another hour or 3 for all the rest of us. no big deal.

Morgan19: You'll notice that nobody is being really whiny as you put it. I think it's more a question of why is it so large. Although I was looking around and it looks like most good custom UT2003 maps are 11-20 megs. This is because of all the textures and statics that go into the map. Also looking at the screen shots show what kind of detail they are putting in there and thus why the size whould be so big.

It's nice that we are getting free stuff, and even better that the game can look this good. But having 6 gig's taken up by UT2003(Just one game) is just a huge part of the HD taken up. I'm wondering how big U2 turned out to be... I guess I just don't like the grow trend of having these huge installed games, not to mention that I still need the cd in the drive to play it. ^_^;;