>The implications of this statement are truly staggering IMO (Think Counter-Strike.) If they pull this off Valve can totally own purely from the longevity and popularity HL2 will achieve in the gaming community. <

You can almost guarantee there won't be a Save As or similar functionality to export HL1 to HL2. Yes, they will make the toolkit capable of converting - but so what? You'll have a bunch of HL1 maps and models running on an HL2 graphics engine. This was bandied about with UT2003 - the ability to convert old maps and virtually nobody bothered, preferring to restart from scratch.

And any significant updates to the codebase will likely have a modster wanting to start most of his work over. Again, a similarity can be made here to the evolution of UT to UT2003. Yeah, I probably could have simply exported some of my old scripts over and called it a day, but they wouldn't have played nice or as well as the rest of the classes in the code.

Sure, some HL mods will port - but let's home some nice new ones come about as well.

I've been playing the live thing for a bit now and I think I can safely say it's probably one best avoided for now. It's buggy as hell (crashed 7 times this weekend alone, and by crash I mean it usually requires a reboot).

Worse, they are still ironing out the gameplay itself. I spend half my walking around. If you can't get to a equipment term, you are left with some pretty useless gear and serve mostly to annoy your enemy and hope to get him to use some ammo before he slaughters you and you get to try again. It's very hard to find a good balanced battle.

Plus you do all this fighting to get points so that you can use cert terms and upgrade you character. Problem is, cert terms are practically impossible to find, so half the time you can't use them anyway.

I'm sticking it out for a little bit, because I've already shelled out some cash - but I can't say I recommend this, or probably any other SOE product.

>> I do like interviews, and, though things you say in interviews may be caused by excitement, and understandibly so, comments you make about your product, a product about to be sold on the open market, during those interviews are legally considered advertising, and false claims made, are false advertising<<

No, it's not false advertising. You don't need money - any lawyer will tell you that for free.

Who couldn't figure out how to do a mailto form correctly on their website? Which would suggest that either they're not too swift or they hire those who aren't too swift. I don't think I'll be trusting the integrity of their network any time soon.

>>I am bitching becuase Unreal 2 is part of a large trend of this kind of shit.<<

Previews are written before a game is done. Developers are often joyous and excitable about what they are trying to create. Expectations and reality often differ, it's what the word "expectation" means. Most of the logical world realized a long time ago that what they read in a preview may very well not be what they get.

>>You say overadvertising is common place and I should just watch TV for some good examples?<<

Actually I'm just saying that you should read reviews before (not) buying games and base your expectations on the game when it's released, not when there is still months left in it's development and lots of things could go right or wrong.

>>as I was lied to about the product from the get-go anyway<<

No, you can't understand the difference between someone saying "this is what we are trying to make" and a review saying "this is what they made".

>>reducing their profits is my responsibility in a free market system.<<

You know, I really don't have much against pirates or warez. I understand it's part of an electronic commodity. But I really find it annoying when pirates either a) bitch about something they stole or b) try to make it sound like they're doing something noble.

Your responsibility in a free market system was to either pay for something you wanted, or not pay for it and not get it. Stealing is never a responsibility in a free market system, it's a crime and a detriment to a free market system. If you don't believe me, look up such simple concepts like "TANSTAAFL" and "Buyer Beware". In the meantime, get off your high horse like you just stood up to the system.

>>Developer: "The last game we made sucked shit and is not being played by anyone, and we are losing money because people are stealing it." RegularX: "QUICK! Make another crappy game, that'll do it!"<<

Profits make games. Pirates lower profits. Enough people steal from the developer's till and they'll have to cut the margins on their next cycle. The result is someone trying to make the next Deer Hunter instead of the next Half-Life. A cheap game for low risk and high profit, not an expensive one that "rebels" like you probably just end up downloading from KaZaa. It's pretty simple economics, actually - but you don't care because you're too busy being pissed off because someone "lied" to you.

>>being a thief does not change my attitude about people lying to me, or the principle of lying to me<<

It's game development. Things change between previews and reviews. Get that in your head and stop being such a victim about something that did you and the community no harm.

Oh please. You're bitching because a game you didn't pay for isn't what a preview said it would be. Boo freaking hoo. It didn't ruin anything for anybody who bother to read a review of it before buying it. If the gaming community is getting screwed by anyone, it's probably people not willing to pay for their games, which in turn causes lower profits for developers and makes shovelware all that more interesting to them.

Why don't you go find some more free stuff to complain about? I think you've kicked this one to death.

Sadly no, but I do have a server that I swap in between that and Invasion. I'll gladly set up the server for anyone who wants to organize a game. Despite some press (RW was PC Gamer's mod of the month a bit ago), the Unreal crowd doesn't seem too hot to support some of the smaller mods that have been released for UT2k3.

Just post to the RW forums if you want the server changed up.

>>Well, I am not foolish enough to purchase Unreal 2. I downloaded it<<

I think you should realize that your point goes kinda moot once it's realized you are complaining so much about a hype machine that somehow did you wrong over a game you warezed.

You pirated it, it didn't cost you anything but time and disk space - so I don't see where you have any room to bitch.

Previews are nothing more than an alternative to reading real game news. If you buy into them, that's your bad. Remember all the glorious previews and screenshots about Halo? There's pages out there describing in great detail a game that never got made. Same with Unreal 2, same with dozens of other games. That's what game reviews are for.

This comment was edited on Jul 9, 14:23.

It's not just big ones. Far Cry, Will Rock, Serious Sam...

>>One of my all-time faves is 3-4 team Domination in the first UT. Talk about over-the-top. Yeow!<<

Try this then:

http://inkless.com/riftwar/

The DNF FAQ always makes me laugh.

Yeah. Using a mailto: as a form action is a last ditch, can't get anything in scripting to work, need some fast data sent method of handling forms on the web. If this is the level of technical prowess they have - they're screwed.

The game uses a propertiery engine designed by the developer.

You missed a two, this is v2225 - 225 would be back in the Unreal I builds I think...

The Bright Skins and Classic UT mute are seperate btw. And there was an earlier mutator which attempted to make the UT2 weapons behave more like the originals.

They got a passable port of Splinter Cell on all three consoles, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of D3 being on them either. The "power of the XBox" isn't nearly as grand as the commercials would have you believe.

>>ive seen the first mod team that has ever sold out completely to its fans by putting their so called "FREE" mod on a subscriber only service.<<

What's interesting is that I can only assume the mod team wasn't compensated OR that BF1942 has the weirdest EULA known to mankind.

Also, http://www.rtzen.com/static/page,1-4.html

Not that it undermines the quality or the feat of the mod, but it's not like most modders have worked on 3D max personally

>>I had to keep reminding myself these guys are modders and not professional game devs.<<

Frank DeLise is vice president of a software company, so these guys aren't exactly typical modders either.

Now put into law something like that for spam.