The war article said alotta stuff I always thought about other kinds of media, not gaming. You can read LOTS of books and articles written by ex-Army people who talk about how their buddies thought they were John Wayne during the Vietnam War and ran into combat guns blazing.... only to get cut down instantly. Plus I always thought the anti-Japanese racist propaganda could've led kids to feel the same way towards the Vietnamese... after all, they were kids during WW2/Korea (40's/50's), and then went into war for Vietnam (60's) .... (ever see those war posters? Or the Bugs Bunny cartoons?).

Anyway, I hope war gaming and war media in general becomes less popular as entertainment. If it's going to be educational, then OK. Bottomline here is that the vast majority of veterans who have seen combat... do not enjoy having citizens use this stuff as entertainment. I used to read war books written by veterans all the time, because I spent all my high school leisure time playing war games, flight sims and the like. And none of them give you the impression that anything about war is remotely entertaining, and none of them seem to be saying "Hey! make a video game about this so my kid can smile and grin as he blows up people! That doesn't make the reality of war seem like a farce, nope nope." After all those books I got soured on war gaming, not that I don't love COD or DOD. Great games. But still....

Probably the only people who seem to ever feel great about combat are fighter pilots. Their books seem pretty easy-going about the affair. I guess the fact that you're alone in your plane, you don't get the feeling your survival relies on someeone else... as much as other forms of warfare. Meanwhile, you're a "Band of Brothers" when you're an infantryman. If you're a gunner on a bomber, watching dozens of other bombers being shot down.... the sense of your own mortality really sinks in.... so yeah, I guess that's why I can play flight sims without ever feeling weird about it in the slightest. :-P

just 3 weeks ago, soon after I bought Neverwinter Nights (Forgotten Realms), I thought "Why don't they make a D&D RTS?". Someone had told me that Warcraft 3 was a ripoff of D&D, and it sure seems like it. Many of the items and spells you can find in War3 are in NWN. And the basic tactics are there (archers > mage > melee > archer). So i thought.... well, why doesn't someone make a D&D RTS game? I hope they try to stick to the rules alot. Perhaps the mages will run out of spells, but then refresh them when the night cycles through (they have to remember them overnight to get more). That would be interesting.

The W. Brothers shoulda hired the Italian team behind the HL mod "The Specialists". That's the closest you'll ever get to Matrix-style gameplay. Instead it seems like they're going with this cruddy real-time turn-based hybrid RPG junk, which isn't quite as exciting as martial arts gun battles are supposed to be :-P

Maaaan, I've been waiting for a mission-based car-combat game for a while now. Too bad Auto Assault is gonna be an MMORPG, so no matter how good it is... I can't afford to play it. I was hoping for something along the structure of X-wing Alliance, but instead of ships.... in cars. Garage opens. 5 cars rumble out with machine gun and rocket attachments. Mission objective.. intercept transport convoy and disable their tires for cargo capture. Or.... attack enemy Mobile Defense Base....... like a Star Destroyer but with wheels. Cars driving all over the place, dodging fire, then turning around and shooting up the MDB...... boom boom boooooom. Vans, buses, and SUVs are considered "bombers", and they drive in formation, with gun turrets blasting out the back and sides. Japanese motorcycles are high speed scout vehicles... Harley motorcycles are slightly beefed up scouts.... Ford Mustangs, Camaros, Lamborghinis, Porsches, Mazda's RX-8's, Skylines, and all the other popular cars perform various combat roles as "road superiority fighters". Pick-up trucks become rocket-platforms. Homing missiles can be shot out at your target.... but a quick turn and deployment of countermeasures spoofs the missile, just like any flight sim. That would be sweeet.

I never played much I'76, but from the looks of it, it was more like a groovy Wing Commander then a real attempt at making a car combat game. And the Vigilante games were just too arcadey. "Cars with guns" is a theme that companies should think about more often. Afterall, the average American spends 90 minutes a day in one..... in anger-inducing nerve-wracking traffic...... urge to kill..... rising.... rising........!

This comment was edited on Apr 23, 17:39.

At first thought, this would seem like common sense. But it doesn't work for all sorts of intellectual property piracy, if you stop to think about it for a second. Question: When a porn movie is pirated, will more money make a better porn movie? Answer: Unless higher paid porn stars grow larger boobs because of better silicon implants....... not really.
Another example. Did Britney Spear's music make a massive jump of improved quality, when her album sales netted her $10 million, or $50 million? No, most people would see that there was no change whatsoever. Perhaps it sank considerably.
Example 3: The Matrix 1 made oodles of money, everyone loved it. They then took our money and wasted it on 2 sequels of steaming horse poo. Personally, I wish no one had went to see Matrix 1 in the theaters at all.... and instead have just pirated it like crazy on the Net. THAT way we would have never gotten these steaming piles of horse poo sequels. Cuz they'd have no money. But I digress.

My point is, not all games can really take massive amounts of money and do anything more interesting with it than with a small sum of money. Yes, you need to pay your programmers a good salary (65,000/yr). But if they get paid 200,000/yr... they are not going to suddenly grow ten more fingers to program faster with, a bigger brain, and become more imaginative to create better games with. Game design is an art form in all sorts of ways. And artistic ability, I think, is not going to improve after you reach a certain financial level of comfortable survival.

Here's another point that many in the PC gaming community may agree on. Electronic Arts. EA has a huge reputation for draining the creativity from its game designers, creating sequel and sequel.... all while being the most succesful game company in the world. Many gamers find EA's games to be steaming piles of horse poo. But why is this? It has more money than anyone else to pay game designers with. The Sims Online recieved far more investment money than the original Sims. And yet it flopped, stank, and just generallly turned into horse poo. Ultima Online, a game that is so out of date it's truly nothing more than an envolved piece of horse poo..... still charges people $10-15/hr to play the game. I guess all those people being ripped off should be glad they are giving more money to the company, since it means they will design Ultima X...the next online Ultima.. which, from the previews is going to be inferior to the FREE Guild Wars in every way, and just generally maintain the horse poo legacy. Did I mention Giuld Wars is being made by a tiny company of ex-Blizzard employees? Hardly the people with a massive capital base to build amazing games with.... but they're doing it.

Console games, to me, are the most unimaginative piles of cat poo out there. I recently read an article by some game industry study, that showed that something like 95% of all console game titles released in the past couple of years were SEQUELS. Only 5% of games were new original titles. Console games make faaaaaar more money than PC games, are pirated faaaaaar less. And yet the game quality is not rising in any significant ways, games aren't being revolutionised at all, in my view. And these guys are super rich.

Ironically, I would argue the best game experiences created in the past few years were all done by completely unpaid mod makers. Counter-strike didn't get picked up by Valve for at least 2 years, it became the god-of-FPS games without even any money to help those high school and college kids pay their tuition bills. Day of Defeat is my fav game of all time, and was entirely designed for free by a group of WW2 enthusiasts. Natural Selection is a pretty revolutionary game, and pulls off the concept of RTS/FPS hybrid better than anything else so far. I'd say it's TOO ignorant of market-demands... which leads to all these funky balance insanities and what not..... but it still remains, at its core, something the profit-hungry game companies completely avoid attempting to do: new stuff! Even the RTS/FPS hybrid Savage was designed by a small-time company. Half-Life itself came from a no-name designer, Valve, and still blew away every pile of cat poo that was coming out of the wealthy hands of John Romero (daikatana anyone? ahahahh) or the id software (Quake 3 Team Arena! Ohhhh so amazing. Uh huh.)

In the flight sim world, super poor nobody Russian Oleg Maddox comes along and creates the most respected flight sim of all time... IL-2 Sturmovik. Meanwhile, all the other established sim companies couldn't tear themselves away from the West ETO universe for the life of them, so under some dogmatic belief that NO ONE will play anything but an American-or-British centric flight sim. And what happened to all these companies? Dead, dead, dead.

The bottom line here is that game history has shown, time and time again, that underdogs often beat the hell out of the top cats. THESE companies deserve NOT to be pirated, their games deserve to succeed, and their creativity needs to be prolonged. Top cats, on the other hand. Pirate all the way, if you want, and it probably won't matter. I can live without another lifeless Star Wars-license game from Lucasarts, another lame ass sports or racing game from EA, or some street fighter turbo 25 xxl super fast awesome edition from Capcom.

I think gamers understand THIS market reality: people who are immensely wealthy and established in an industry tend to have little or no reason to CHANGE. They have created a namesake for being traditional and repetitive, and can maintain a long life doing so. New companies, underdogs.. they *have* to bring about fresh ideas and take risks, bring us new and great game concepts... because that's the only way anyone is going to notice them. So do not just say "more money, better games".

DDI, I know Allegiance fans. I know they are very nice people, and they like their game very much. I also know they all keep saying, it was because it wasn't advertised enough. Come on. That excuse don't fly in any situation, and it don't work here. Allegiance was borked, and had almost nothing in common with every succesful space sim out there. It just totally abandoned everything that has proven to sell, and just went with whatever they thought was 'revolutionary'.... like having a massive tech tree that is 90% ignored because it takes forever to research it all, and the game is over long before anything gets that high. Or how massive numbers of players are forced to fill mundane roles like ..... turret control. Or the goofy way capital ships and bombers are tailed by Nanite-repair players. Yes, players who do nothing but point a healing gun at a bomber and drop mines. It's all unique.... and most people who played it thought it was pretty crappy too. Sure as hell not worth a monthly fee.

i think those screenshots don't show readouts for well.... screenshot purposes. Looks more movie-like if you disable HUD stuff, you know.

After seeing those screenshots, I'm convinced the X-wing Alliance people are behind this..... and instead of releasing an update to their long standing X-wing series.. they thought "Hey, maybe we can release it in a monthly play system and screw all our stand-alone fans over! bahahahhahahahhaha............................. BAHAHAHAHHA!"
Well, I hope this works out. Personally I feel that most space sim fans are NOT RPG fans. My friend who loves RPGs..... hates space sims. A friend who is a joystick jockey... hates RPGs. The game play styles are radically different (duh). But eh whatever

regarding the XP grind (which i also hate about MMRPGs), maybe the space combat won't be affected by it too much. I mean, even if they force you to fly a Z-95 or TIE Fighter at lower levels.... you should still have fun. And you're not gonna be completely helpless against the more expensive ships.

And the guy who said it should be like Allegiance..... no way man, I think Sony actually wants to make money with their space combat engine (not to mention it has to be like Star Wars movies!!). Allegiance failed and failed hard for many reasons, and one of those reasons is the fact that not a single Newtonian physics space combat game has been a hit. I-War 2 is the closest anything has come, and while I loved that game, games like Freespace 2, Xwing, and Wing Commander probably beat I-War 2's sales by 10 fold.

Someone should do something about the whole XP grind thing. It's cool, but to me the greatest thing about playing a game of any kind is... playing it with your friends. RPGs are especially like this. But with XP grinding, you can play with ur friend, then come back the next day and he's too much stronger than your char cuz he neglected to go to sleep, or something like that. And so you can't quest with him anymore. That was my problem with Diablo 2, and Neverwinter Nights. Maybe there should be some sorta way to donate your XP to friends. I'd have no problem giving away XP if that means i can quest with my buddies again. And in this way, every action you do can be seen as helping everyone along.

Plus if you look at a lot of RPG games, such as NWN, the spells SCALE. THat is, the lower your level, the weaker the spell. So even if you gave away your XP, and lost, say, 2 levels.... I believe the game should still let you keep the new spells you got from the advanced levels. And then simply make sure it scales down correctly, so u'r not overpowered. For me, the best thing about levelling isn't the HP or attributes... it's the spells and abilities. So lemme keep those while i donate Xp to my buddies and lose HP and whatever. Ahem ok, not like any RPG designer is listening......

This comment was edited on Apr 21, 13:33.

if the space combat gets good press, i might have to check this out and ignore my "i hate monthly fee game" policy. I played the hell out of all the X-wing series games. But the X-wing games never quite got out of its arcade flight model... where the ships rapidly decelerate or accelerate with a few push of some buttons, and "dogfights" between players looked very, very silly. Of course, no one complained about this when it came to singleplayer, as the physics made each player an ace pilot within an hour of playing. And the AI can't complain :-P

This resulted in a game that really didn't look anything like the space combat you see in Star Wars 4. Hopefully they threw in the WW2 air combat physics into the game. Yes it's completely unrealistic, but that's what Star Wars space combat has been always based on, and a game based on Star Wars shouldn't forget that. Now if you're a WW2 sim junkie like I was, you're probably sayin "Uh, there's no gravity in space. So how do you gain or lose energy (speed)?!"
Well, I think Lucasarts should just defy reality and pretend "that large planet over there in the distance is your gravity source. Dive towards it and you go faster, climb away from it and you go slower. Look at your instruments to see what is 'up' and what is 'down'." And wala, the game finally plays like Star Wars 4 (which, by the way, is the only movie that is accurately STAR wars... every other movie is about lightsabers and small green dudes..... ugh.)

I agree on how "middle east coalition" is a bad decision for a name. Afterall, most of the middle eastern nations supported the US during the first Gulf War. And much of the war bill of that war was paid for by Saudi Arabia and eventually Kuwait. (85% of the Gulf War was paid for by foreign countries, according to the Dept of Defense) C&C Generals had the GLA: Global Liberation Army. Something like that is more suitable. Finally, why the heck is modern China constantly being shown as the new enemy in movies and games?! I feel like if you really look at what's going on over there right now, and then study China's 20th century history as a whole.. you find no reason to believe China will be attacking the US, or join the "Axis of Evil". That being said, the Chinese government *does* believe the US will eventually attack THEM. And there are decent amounts of history to show the US is quite capable of doing that. (Visit the National Security Archive's website and look for the de-classified documents where the Joint Chief of Staffs seriously consider using nuclear weapons to kill millions of Chinese civilians in the 1950s [collateral damage of course].. sheesh! It's been 50 years since such talk was acceptable, but 50 years is not considered a long time in many political circles.....)

I don't think it's a knee-jerk reaction. Instead, it's been 2-4 years of tons of WW2 games of pressure on that knee, and now the knee has reacted.

Anyway, flight sims will focus on WW2 games for a looooong time coming. Although WW2 and it's aviation technology was only around for about 7 years, all the other years in the 20th century feature either planes that are TOO SLOW.... or planes that are too fast and feature beyond-visual-range missile combat. So there's a good reason for a WW2 flight sim again... cuz that's really the only kind of flight sim that can sell. Jet sims have a billion buttons and MFD readouts to keep track of. I loved being in my F-22 in Total Air War, punching away at different MFD functions and such. But the learning curve was steep. WW2 sim curve? Grab a joystick and pull the trigger. :-p Not to mention that WW2 sims are the only sims that have a reason to put up hundreds of bombers in the air for you to gape at. Every modern sim, you see a pair of planes and that's about it.

Personally, I wanna see someone breathe new life into the modern sim genre by NOT being realistic, but taking what is cool about modern sims, and modifying it into some sorta sci-fi alternate reality world. You know, kinda like Macross Zero's take on modern jets

What's great about this game is that it makes EA's Ultima X MMORPG game seem like a total rip off of your hard earned cash. Both games seem to have identical approaches to gameplay..... you find people to play with in a bigger area, but once you get on the adventure, you're switched over to a place just for your party. But EA is gonna charge $15 for this!! Not to mention the graphics don't look that great.

I also love the idea that player skill will be the focus of the game, through strategy/tactics/etc, and just levelling up with massive hitpoints is not the focus. They even state that a complete newbie does have a chance of taking on a maximum level character. :-O Leveling up is about opening up new strategies to you, through new abilities, so your player becomes more versatile, and not some demi-god with a bajillion hitpoints

that homemade rocket launcher rules. 4 rockets!!! You know.... I *am* getting tired of one-shot launchers. Sure, UT2004's launcher can launch 3... but it only has 1 hole to shoot out of, and that's just not cool enough. :-P

Um as for taxes, well I agree mostly. But I dunno man, California is the world's 5th largest economy, and surely that means it has a MASSIVE % of the total US GDP. If Californians no longer pay federal taxes, other states will suffer greatly. Beneficial to Californians (such as me), but hurts others. And since others are not living in California.. and THEY form the majority in this republic... we Californians gotta keep paying taxes :-P As I always say, anytime you have a democracy, you're gonna get some form of socialism, whether or not you call it that or not. Whether it be in the form of national income taxes that spread wealth throughout the country (Social Security was directly lifted from the Socialist Party platform by FDR), regardless of the source's location, or immigration restrictions to make sure American employers are forced to hire natives.... socialism is a natural, and inevitable, outcome of any democratic nation. (Er, so long as you define socialist acts as "government regulation of the market", which is what alot of conservatives do define it as. Personally I would call it "state capitalism", capitalist but only to the point that the benefits are guaranteed to go to a certain group of people first. Afterall, the ideological socialism tends to mean a world without borders, and global taxation and voting systems and such.)

OK i'm done now.. COOL BAZOOKA!

yeah, Warbirds rules. I don't play it (subscription!!! stay away!), but I think I remember the ability for players to hop into the turret of ANY airborne bomber. Plus the bomber pilot himself was capable of going into any turret, I think. This was a huge improvement over Airwarrior 3's system.... where the bomber pilot just sat there and did nothing for 30 minutes every sortie. -___-

Just finished watchin the finale......

INTERPLAY.... You're fired! *hand motion*

that RPG they talk about in USAtoday is a pretty cool idea, but apparently the game has no 3d graphics or anything, at all. It's entirely window/text based stuff, with lots of statistics. (The game lets kids experience the lives of statistically-based people from around the world.)

So without any cool graphics, I don't think it's gonna be a big hit with the kids :-P If only the Sims people over at Maxis teamed up with these folks, then we'd have a product. Instead of a house, you have a hut. Instead of going to the mall, you go to a small market. Instead of working at an office, you raise some chickens. Instead of going out on a "hot date", your parents recommend dates for you :-P haha

The $15/month fees are massively profitable, none of these modern MMORPGs are "just scraping by". They're raking it in.
I agree with the guy who is asking for the ability to pay less money than a guy who plays all the time. There should be a cheap 10-hour purchase plan, where your first 10 hours of any months are like.. 5 bucks. If you play 11 hours, you immediately go into the standard monthly plan (you add 10 bucks to your billl). For one thing, this invites casual gamers, and most gamers are casual gamers. They play a few hours a week, if even that. So it's fair to them. Second, this invites more people to buy the game in the first place, and get hooked on it. I'm sure lots of people will go to the 11th hour, because the past 10 hours were so great. And since it was their own choice to pass 10 hours, they only blame themselves for the higher charge, instead of the company :-P

I would like to suggest to people who are fed up with high MMORPG fees.... to organise themselves into a massive group of consumers, form a coherent mass organisation, and then lobby the game companies for reduced fees. If the company ignores them, they can threaten to all cancel their subscriptions at the same time. It's kinda like how labor unions work. The workers are united, and threaten to take away their total labor power, when one of their members has a grievance. Hmm that's kinda like the Three Musketeers slogan.. All for One, One for All. Haha.

Cancelling subscriptions en masse would scare the bejeezus out of a company. Even if it was just 10% of the total player base. Of course, it won't be long before game companies ban consumer organisation efforts within the game. I dunno bout you folks, but when I applied for a job, I have to sign off on a paper agreeing that I will never pass literature to other workers. That's designed to prevent you from spreading union info. So I'm sure the game companies will do the same. This market pressure concept works for other policy changes (I've been told international market pressure against South Africa was what defeated apartheid). So it can work for games too.

I like the other guy's idea of "instant MMO", custom made by individuals. If you think about it, it's not too hard to pull off. For one thing, there are THOUSANDS of Half-Life servers out there. I calculated the yearly fees that go into each server per year, and it was extremely high (I think 20 million dollars a year!). These servers operate entirely for free (and some donations). So insant player-run MMO servers are very much possible, but companies don't want to provide that, as it will remove the consumer's interest for their future products. It's just more profitable to milk you forever. Another guy said that the fee goes into constantly adding content. I would remind him that the amazing Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, and Quake Team Fortress were all top quality games that were entirely free. Nevermind the endless supply of custom sounds, maps, and models. Another example that's semi-close to a player-run MMO is the Neverwinter Nights community. The game allows players to create all the quests, custom treasure, models, maps and graphics that they want. Not only that, you can spread your game world across multiple servers. When the player steps into a portal, he's shifted over to another server. EVERY SERVER OF NWN IS COMPLETELY FREE TO PLAY ON. Bioware refuses to allow any server to charge for gameplay. So we're talking about tens of thousands of kind-hearted computer gamers out there who are providing total conversions, and expensive servers, all without expecting any financial reward from it. Hmm now that I think of it, the gaming community is pretty damn generous and selfless :-P
Finally, I think high service charges are the MMO industry's own enemy. For example, I'm guessing that many Everquest players have not tried Star Wars Galaxies because they can't possibly pay $30/month (both are Sony games). They WANT to play more MMOs, alot more, but just can't. MMOs are all unique in their own way, but usually not unique enough to subscribe to multiple games. I think Sony, at least, should consider lowering the monthly to $20/month TOTAL if the player plays both SWG and EQ.
OK i'm done +_+

This comment was edited on Apr 13, 22:50.

Nah, it was a good call to release it on CD too. Installing a game from 6 CDs is not a big deal, seeing how you only do it once. I have a good machine, but have zero reason to buy a dvd player.... so $30 drive woulda been a waste.

Isn't that UT2004 mod.... Troopers.... gonna do that? With such good vehicle code in UT2004 already, I'm assuming the Troopers team can just throw in some new vehicle models and get things going right away. Can't wait to see snowspeeders zooming over my head while I charge an AT-AT with a........ rifle. lol

Too bad it won't have all the shield/weapon management as the X-wing games had 8(

I liked the Reason article, but I think the author overemphasizes gamer's desires to modify their games or create their own stories (and be individualistic). 99.9% of all players of a game probably never come close to creating any custom content for their favorite game.
Console games sell far, far better than PC games, and they cannot be modified at all. So I don't think the desire to make content is really that strong. Final Fantasy games, last time i saw, were pretty straightforward storytelling. And they sell like crazy. Don't forget the extremely scripted and linear Call of Duty and Medal of Honor games, both huge successes.

The only console game I saw the author mention was GTA3, and he describes it as popular because of its freeform. But when I played GTA3, I saw the gameworld as extremely limited. I would not be surprised at all if the vast majority of mod-makers, custom content designers in the PC gaming community are not fans of GTA3 at all. Eh.

The article rings sorta true for me, however. The only reason I've played PC games exclusively is the ability to play mods and/or create content myself. I've spent hundreds of hours creating missions for Fighters Anthology, mods for X-wing Alliance and Battlezone 2, and I always love to tinker with custom sound files, make my own, etc. But I don't see myself as a Libertarian Party type at all (the big fans of Reason). And I read that Warren Spector, who obsesses over freeform gameplay, is a liberal Democrat of some sort (the opponents of the Libertarians). Plus, the Sims creator, I read, geared his SimCity game to be apparently biased towards mass transportation for game success (railways instead of streets), which is pretty un-individualistic.... the article stated that the creator was some sorta Leftist. Oh well, politics is confusing and full of twists and turns. Afterall, Albert Einstein was a full blown Communist and became Person of the Century, all the while people see him as some sorta "free your mind / individual greatness" figure. *shrug*

I liked the mention of Neverwinter Nights, which I've really gotten into recently. The custom content is great. Finally, I dunno if the trend towards custom content is growing. I think it's actually shrinking. More and more companies are focusing on console games. I've always thought that a game with too much replay value can be the game companies own enemy. If people are still hooked to your old game, they might not buy your new game unless it offers significant upgrades (it's expensive and time consuming to constantly develop new and better graphics and more complicated code). And so we have console games, sequels and sequels, rehashing the same game elements over and over. People still eat them up, because the older game had been played till it was bone dry.

This comment was edited on Apr 9, 19:07.