E3 may have started out as a trade show but it's mutated into something different. E3 provided the gaming industry with a physical location, a prescence, to the rest of the world and it's customers (not just itself).

There's a valid need for an industry trade show, but arguably that should be GDC or what GDC has become.

E3 was/is poised to provide the industry with it's face to the public, to the customer. If they scrap the current E3 then I hope something fills the gap. Make GDC the real trade show and let E3 continue to be the industry's public front.

That was 3 minutes of weak cutscenes and 1 minute of actual quality content. The female Gnome's voice was incredibly irritating.

SOE is leaning about SWG was that they destroyed the community by removing all of the player interdependencies

I think Sony did a fine job destroying their community by shipping the game in a pre-alpha state with gigantic holes in the game content... but I guess that didn't help either.

If you go out and buy an MMO, and expect the game to cater to your solo playstyle, you might need to just go buy a friggin offline RPG.

And the misunderstandings like this is why WoW continues it's godzilla stomp through the MMORPG genre.

For refernece of what most people want, think of Halo. Halo can be played single-player and you have fun. But play it Co-Op with a friend and it's more fun.

That's exactly the kind of content many gamers want. Content that is fun solo and just gets more fun with a group. Not many people really want group content, they want solo content that can also be done Co-Op.

'Online' is merely a tool with which to facilitate the Co-Op or Competitive experience. 'Online' is not an excuse to force socializing or party interaction.

This comment was edited on Jun 7, 14:50.

Letting unions take over is bad.
Exploiting workers is bad.

This will lead to prices increases / decreased quality in games in the short run, but will help in the long run.

Why? Beause just maybe, if the industry stops being this evil, some of the incredibly talented and smart people that left it to make more money with better schedules will come back.

Quality and cost effectiveness come from having smart and skilled developers. And as War suggests below, many of those developers leave the industry, to be replaced by inexeperienced, less effective workers.

Inexperienced developers working 65+ hour work weeks do not reliably churn out quality games.

From what I've seen of Nintendo over the last couple years, they seem to have an idea of what works? If I'm mistaken, someone prove me wrong. Please

Nintendo's handheld division seems to be doing well. Their consoles haven't.

But to be fair, I don't think Nintendo cares about the USA anymore. Nintendo consoles do great in Japan still. They' probably just don't care what USA gamers think anymore, as they've been losing USA console marketshare for years.

Cancelled for the X-Box and PS2 perhaps...

But no mention of the PC, X-Box 360, and PS3 versions.

$800M in profita (not revenue, profits) last quarter? They're hardly dead.

GameBoy and DS profits, meet your new sinkhole, the Nintendo Wii. After a few disastrous months, the Wii will go the way of the Virtual Boy.

People aren't flocking to sofware engineering. In fact the profession is on the decline in the US. Fewer graduates each year are taking software-related degress, and the US has started losing most international college programming competitions.

And harsh working conditions are driving talented people OUT of the gaming industry. Who wants to work 50+ hours a week in the gaming industry when you can get 10% more in another industry for a normal 40 hour week? The average gaming career is only 5 years.

Wonder why so many of the games being released today are fairly medicore? It's because publishers have driven most of the experienced developers out of the industry.

I find watching it akin to watching paint dry. Why on earth would anyone want to watch some kid yelling, 'I pwned joo!' on TV?

Difference being that you can often go online and play with the guys who just won the a gaming league competition the next day.

And most competitions are dominated by 16-25 year old's who practice 4-10 hours a day on their chosen game. Professional gamers are typically beyond the 'I pwned joo!' phase of online gaming.

That, and since it's the media that's handeling the coverage, they wouldn't show it anyway (unless it was cool).

Remember that you're not watching the players, you're watching the game.

Would be neat to watch a game of Battlefield 2 from some kind of omniscient perspective, as in a camera floating around the map, zooming in as things got interesting. I have no idea how they could really implement that though.

They've been doing this for years. Go looks at the Tribes, CS, or CPL communities. Their are video / audio shoutcasting sites that do very professional coverage of a lot of FPS games.

If done correctly, this is a lot of fun. But they're doing 2v2 Halo Deathmatch and Super Smash Brothers... I don't think they'd even bother to do commentary on SSBM, just show the matches and talk afterwards.

Part of the problem is game choice. It's hard to make a spectator sport out of games that suck for spectators to watch, even if they're fun to play. Tribes rocked in this regard, it's a pity it never had the fanbase like Halo or CS does, because it was highly competitive and a great spectator sport.

One can only hope that they'll be working on Master of Magic 2....

Here's hoping. Some of us have been waiting a very long time for a sequel.

Completely different and in no way a double standard.


So if you want to install a washer in your house, the washer manufacturer can require that they get to take some of your electricty to run other people's washers?

Blizzard is in a bad gray area. They should be providing a clear option to use bittorrent or download directly. If they want people to use bittorrent instead, they should just make it faster than direct download. Instead, they use a very nebulous download utility to mask their file sharing.

Game is great, but their patcher makes me feel icky. Bad decision on that one.

1. Your server sucks. Any decent server has a dozen guilds either farming or working on Nef by now.

6 Hardcore Raiding Priests per Guild x 12 guilds = 72 Priets.
% of those that can get +400 spell damage by taking items from Mages/Warlocks? ~25% estimate for ease.

# of Priests per server capable of pulling this off? Less than 20.

So you're shaking in your booties over ~10 possible Priests that might pull this off that you'll face in PvP. On my server, I'd expect to see maybe 3 guys tops pull this off in PvP.

Germany has some of the most vocal anti-nazi policies in the world now. In Germany it is illegal to display the nazi flag anywhere

And that's a horrible form of historical censorship. You can't even make a WWII game with the swastika on it because Germany throws a fit. You don't learn from history by trying to banish a horrible time period from everyone's mind. The US doesn't ban references to Japanese internment camps from US video games.

I would hazard to say that there is more Nazis/White Supremacists/KKK in the states then in Germany right now.

But we haven't had a recent trend of games about US citizens killing white supremicists (Soldier of Fortune maybe?). Comment was directed more about recent trend of games featuring German soldiers rising up against their Nazi masters.

Calm down a little on the 'omg people don't understand the new Germany' rhetoric. Nobody seriously thinks you're still Nazi's and/or blames the current generation for WW2.

This comment was edited on Mar 28, 11:22.

The demo was weaksauce. Incredible weaksauce.

And what's with the recent trend of games featuring Germans killing Nazi's? I guess even Germans like killing Nazi's now?

It's hard to put the blame on one person for a project failing.

But Raph Koster routinely puts out weird design releases. Single-player is dead? Not hardly; it's the most instantly gratifying type of game to play. It will be around for quite some time.

And as much as I enjoyed the open-ended possibilities of SWG, the fact that they focused on getting a solid mo-cap'd dancing system into the game before they had basics like 'fun combat' or 'non-boring professions' astounds me.

This comment was edited on Mar 24, 10:35.

Battlefront is the FPS franchise, not the RTS.

This is like Nintendo posting that they're still the #1 console developer in Japan.

SOE couldstill make good games, but this kind of bragging is ludicrous. You're getting pounded by WoW and you won't even admit it.

BLAH BLAH BLAH

Basically says 'We're cloning Star Wars: Galaxies! That's what people want in Sci-Fi MMO's!'

Sigh.