Bioware has been making horrible games with basically the same story since Neverwinter Nights 2, but I'm still surprised that they finally went full retard.

At least they'll irrevocably burn all the positive reputation they accrued from having other people do Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planscape Torment a decade ago. I'd like to believe it'll hurt their sales and someone will start making RPG's again, but they'll probably just scream "piracy!" and drop the PC if it does.

They had sold over 6 million units as of a couple years ago and have a pseudo cash shop peddling vanity and convenience items at hefty prices.

That said, their business model is predicated on shipping paid expansions every 6-8 months and they haven't had one in over 3 years now.

Please stop remaking everything. I'd like to retain positive memories of at least one movie from my childhood.

Fion wrote on Mar 4, 2011, 00:05:
There are some great vids at Gametrailers.com from GDC. The more I see of this game the more I like. They really are trying to get away from WoW style MMOGs with some fantastic 'other developers should have thought of this a decade ago' innovations.

They did that with the first game - one shard, (almost) no leveling and horizontal expansions so the game world stays populated, no "treasure hunting" so the PVP was about tactics rather than farming, all the races are human, etc.

The info about the second one indicate they are actually moving away from that - level cap of 80 (because WoW has it), guns (because WoW has them), silly fantasy races (admittedly EoTN added them into GW), jumping (which has no part in what was basically a card game for tactical PVP), etc. It's all a little worrying. GW succeeded because it was unique. Making it into another generic fantasy MMO would be a horrible loss.

Yeah, the huge patch came out yesterday. It's nice to see them still fiddling with the game.

The article is purely anecdotal and isn't written very well, but the recent flood of hotfixes is not an encouraging sign for WoW. I've never seen any demand for continual public tinkering and haven't seen another MMO doing this either.

Since I don't play it, my only interest is in whether this will increase or decrease the number of potentially good games that are needlessly turned into awful wowclones. The era of vertically designed (needless leveling creating ghost towns) MMO's on multiple shards should be drawing to a close, but I'm worried a wobbly WoW may provoke even more of them.

I had forgotten about this incident, and never was clear on the details, so the article was a good read.

No pricing information? It might be nice to get some of these for nostalgia, but $3 each for games I already own (and can already play on my pc!) wasn't motivating me to click "add to cart".

So in order to 'help the children' they're attempting to ban a game due to "drug-related violence", that most children will never play anyway, while they live in a region plagued by drug related violence. Hmm. Why not just ban "drug related violence" and leave the game alone? Oh yeah...

Presumably they're looking for bribes. "Give us money or we'll harm you". Which is a pretty similar business model to those cartels!

Zoom wrote on Feb 18, 2011, 11:11:

InBlack wrote on Feb 18, 2011, 11:01:
Dont tell me that no one suspected that this was coming???? I for one had no delusions about it. I dont think any dumbing down of the PC version will happen, since the PC is the lead platform. Unless they decide (for some reason) to limit the screen resolution and implement the console interface...

..and inventory management, and skills complexity (simplified usage for console player brains), and gameplay progression speed (tuned for short attention span), ...

I'm strangely not worried about that either. Blizzard takes their franchises pretty seriously and know that Diablo has amazing staying power if done properly. Turning it into a 3rd person shooter with auto aim just to make a little more money at launch would be incredibly self destructive. It's not like they need the money.

Gamers are insecure, and we’re obsessed with “proving” ourselves to some mystery arbitrator of maturity and value. We talk about games being “taken seriously,” but we never stop and think about who it is that we need to convince.

Convincing other gamers would be a nice start. Stories that are designed for megalomaniacs and feature prostitutes or "romance" are frequently embarrassing to adults, especially female ones. I think it's why so many women play casual games - they're never asked to single-handedly save the universe in between awkward conversations with their barely clothed romantic interest.

The rest of the article is actually fine. The big media outlets hate games because the typical young gamer doesn't read papers or watch much tv. If the gamers don't 'fight back' (negative amazon reviews was a good idea) in ways that affect the outlets and their mouthpieces, then they'll continue to be picked on.

There can only be one! I'm surprisingly sanguine about D3 heading to the Colecovision. The hook to Diablo is in the gameplay, so potentially cutting some graphical corners shouldn't have an impact on my enjoyment.

Everyone has a finite number of good ideas. FNM and Bungle both ended on a high note which is something to be thankful for.

There's two of them!

Mr. Bungle and Faith No More were both excellent.

The Captains Quarters don't seem that interesting but it's nice to know "Walking in Stations" will actually arrive in my lifetime.

It took over 5 years just to add a skill queue. "User friendly" is not what they're known for.

I had forgotten this game existed.

Not much. Everyone's too busy playing Call of Duty to play those.
How would they be doing if Black Ops didn't come out recently?

If they were made solely to cash in on CoD then they probably wouldn't exist if it hadn't come out! The failure of the other generic American military shooters isn't due to CoD. Warhammer, Hellgate, and all the rest didn't fail because of WoW. WoW was the only reason they were ever made. They failed because they were horrible. It wouldn't hurt the publishers to stop making the same derivative games again and again.

Constant tinkering in a leveling & treasure hunting game has to be frustrating.