My understanding was that they wanted Modern Warfare 3 delivered in 2 years and that they were holding their MW2 royalties unless they agreed to it, and the heads of IW wanted to do something that wasn't Modern Warfare

We were promised the first ever game of total realism in a current real world conflict, telling the story of real soldiers fighting a very real enemy, and then when the chips were down EA broke that promise.

This article is fucking retarded because it gets one simple fact wrong: The single player still calls them Taliban. The single player isn't being TOUCHED by this change. They just call them Opposing Forces in multiplayer, and the multiplayer isn't about realism because you, you know, respawn.

All this is about is that if they left Taliban as a playable choice in multiplayer, than Fox News will run "GAME HAS YOU KILLING AMERICAN SOLDIERS AS TALIBAN, EA HATES AMERICA" on their broadcasts for a month, and ignorant sobs will get all offended and then our worthless congress will probably do an investigation on whether EA is "aiding and abedding our enemies".

I am just picturing playing the game and every time the name "Taliban" is used in a voice over, some random developers voice is placed over it saying "Opposing Force".

And now my good friend _MR BLACK_

I posted something about this on a mailing list earlier and I think it sums it up pretty well:

"This thing is kinda silly. He’s arguing that the kinect is getting the same complaints about shooters that console shooters had, which is that console shooters don’t give the responsiveness that a mouse/keyboard combo gets. The thing is, that point is still true to this day. The fact of the matter is that you have to create the game with a playstyle that works with console controls (i.e., Halo). The point about controls is irrelevant in the end because Halo doesn’t sell millions because it’s better on consoles than PCs. Halo sells better because having a console is more accessible than buying a $2000+ PC.

As far as his point about Kinect being able to do whatever and that people said the same as they did for console shooters, it’s a sidestep around the real questions people are asking about the Kinect, which, to be honest, is a pretty impressive piece of technology. It’s still worth asking though, how do you control stuff with this thing? They are coming out with a kart racer game and you can’t control the speed of your vehicle in it, you just always go forward. I don’t think that’s a very reassuring argument that you can do “anything” with the Kinect."

You'd think by now they'd throw out a version of Wake Island for BC2.

You'd think with a new 15 dollar map pack that they would at least take a casual interest in somehow blocking hacked clients from running as 'servers' which do thinks like give players that join full xp to level to 70.

You'd think, but you'd be wrong.

MP - Reduced the brightness in Russian vehicles

Thank god

Map Pack 1 was the "vip" map pack that came with the game as a once-usuable code.

If you have the pc version, they include everything in the release and you don't have to worry about any of these schnanigans.

At least it's better than the port of Saint's Row 2. I got it for free for preordering and I can't get it to even run, it just CTDs when you go to start it up.

The real question I think is this:

Can I cancel the lifetime sub during the first month if I decide that the game blows and get my money back, just like how I did it for Champions Online?

"And then after a few moments of having that experience, they would remember that they were in a video game and they would let go."

So basically what they are saying is that after a few moments of the experience of being forced into a level where the player basically had no choice in what their character could do, people's immersion was broken and they just accepted that it was a shooter that was ineffectively trying to present some sort of moral choice to the player?

It seems like people forget that Splinter Cell: Double Agent not only presented a similar experience three years ago, but did so in a way that allowed the player TO take choice and had gameplay implications for their action or inaction. All IW did here is make a level where you gun down civilians. The idea that even an agent under cover would participate in such actions is so implausable that it made it pretty impossible to take anything further in the game seriously. The fact that the plot after that moment gets more absurd by the level doesn't help either.

Wait a minute, the Call of Duty series has always cribbed movie scenes for set pieces (the newest one takes the shower scene from The Rock, wow that sounds bad). Can't they just make this movie by piecing together scenes from all the movies COD ripped off for it's levels?

I'm really digging MW2, but to each their own. If people want dedi servers and such, that's fine and within their rights.

However, what the hell is this about:

"- Support for better Graphics"

Huh?

Does anybody care about this on PC?

They just want something to release alongside the release of Star Trek on bluray. I downloaded the demo on the 360 and I can't recommend wasting the bandwidth on even that.

After buying the last one retail and having to dig out the fucking CD to play it, I'm just going to get this on Steam anyway. Maybe it can just include a tin UI skin for steam

I'm definitely going to get l4d2, although now seeing the quote dug up from Gabe Newell, it is a little bad to read...

"So each time we've released one of those for Team Fortress 2 we've seen about a 20% increase in the number of people who are playing online. And that number is really important because it determines how many community created maps there are, how many servers are running, and so on. So we'll do the same thing with Left 4 Dead where we'll have the initial release and then we'll release more movies, more characters, more weapons, unlockables, achievements, because that's the way you continue to grow a community over time."

Plans change and all that.

Listen to the Rock Paper Shotgun podcast on Left 4 Dead 2.

I just read some of the comments on RPS and I feel like I just gave myself a lobotomy.

It is fun, however, to see people say that they loved valve but will never buy another valve game again. SLAP IN THE FACE!! I bought a 50 dollar game with the idea that a development team of 20-30 being paid $70k a year would continue to support the game over the next ten years! HOW DARE THEY??!

As if running around picking up health packs is more realistic than regenerating health. There's a line between realism and enjoyment, a successful product straddles that line as much as possible without crossing over too much into the former.

And this is what the conundrum of this game was... It was going to be showing you the "horrors of war" but it was still going to be fun? Aren't those two mutually exclusive? War is hell but hell is fun? I'm not sure how you can balance those two aspects which is the major problem games like this have in comparison to other media. You can read a book about something and it's just informative. It's interesting even. However, games have to be fun. So how do you make something like this fun? And if it's fun, doesn't that defeat the entire point of the subject?

"We had intended to convey the reality of the battles to players so that they could feel what it was like to be there."

Our troops have regenerating health? Why the fuck is everyone making such a hoopla about the war then?

This game would have been retarded. I don't get why people thought it was going to be some major new art that propels the videogame industry forward. It was going to the modern version of this: http://ps2.ign.com/articles/549/549790p1.html

Man the voodoo 3 was awesome. I ran a pentium ii with a voodoo 3 pretty much into the ground playing Counter Strike. Good time.s