Speak for yourself. You might not give a shit about games with depth but I certainly do. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 worked so well for me exactly because of the emotional connection to the characters.

I am so glad I'm not the only one here who actually expects and/or desires thought-provoking narrative regardless of the medium.

...dedicated servers?

....ah, phooey.

I think this is the prologue mission in the game, it's the bit in the original teaser where some dudes are talking about shooting up an airport, you play as one of them and then get capped at the end of the mission, like at the end of the first game's level where you "play" as the overthrown Middle-Eastern president.

Considering that they're saving America for Washington DC later on, I wonder if the airport is in a different country. I can't imagine this will cause much of an uproar once the game is out and the full context is there, if that's the case. We Americans do tend to have an unfortunate tendency to wonder what the big deal is when it's not on the homefront...

Dedicated servers?

....fuck.

But it's A-OKAY because they are a business after all, right?

Well, capitalism and free markets function on the philosophy of making as much money as possible. Large businesses with shareholders and investors are obligated by law to take actions they think will result in larger profits.

Problem is, when it gets to a certain point, things tend to plateau out, you've swerved everyone away from the competition so you don't need to make better products, and even if you do, you've already been noticed by anyone with an interest. Nickel-and-diming your customers for all they're worth is the last thing you can do to keep increasing your profits.

(This, incidentally, is why stories about major business "detaching" themselves from the United States are becoming increasingly common; we're "chasing them away" by being one of the last places with some laws that still give some measure of protection to consumers and low-wage employees. Protecting consumers makes it harder to turn a profit when a business gets to this stage.)

I don't think anyone would argue that it's morally okay, but the idea that for-profit business cares about morality as opposed to what's legal is just silly. Unfortunately, the word for making the market act based on what's best for the end-consumer instead of acting to continually funnel as much money up and up and up as possible is "Socialism," and we know how well that goes over. (It's also not at all the right word for anything Obama does, which actually bears some frightening parallels to how fascism works in its extreme infant form. But hey, a little fascism might be good for business.)

Back on topic...some places, like right in the I-Ward protest thread, are praising Penny Arcade for the comic, but am I the only one who doesn't see the tone it takes as anything but condescending and spiteful? It makes valid points, yes, but it's also suggesting that the consumer (in this case, PC gamers) should be held accountable for the amorality of business, which is patently absurd. For years, everyone's preached "don't like, don't give them your money." Are we finally now realizing that this strategy is flawed (don't give them your money, don't expect them to make what you like by default when other factors exist) only to turn around and say it's better to be at the devil's side than in his path?

This comment was edited on Oct 25, 2009, 23:45.

Should anyone have the need to feel sympathy for CliffyB anymore, let's not forget his comments about how terrible it was that twice the amount of people who bought Gears 2 played it and needed bandwidth spent on them for patches thanks to the second-hand market, and that Epic's future releases (which will undoubetly be 360 exclusives) will start popping up a window to prompt the player for their credit-card number and a $20 charge before fighting the final boss if they bought the game second-hand.

What the hell is going wrong with this world where DICE is looking like the most attractive A-list developer these days?

This comment was edited on Oct 24, 2009, 05:45.

The question is whether IW thinks the community is better with or without those 50,000 people. Just because you have money doesn't mean you're wanted. I'm guessing IW doesn't want those people, believing those 50,000 are griefers, cheaters, whiners, complainers, or just people that hang out in one server that they dominate. For the record I disagree. Those people will show up anyway.

That's not the point I'm trying to make, though. They've pretty much said out-loud that they don't care about the dedicated community. The point is that there is, potentially if not realized in the end, a noticeable hole in sales. Matchmaking depends on having as many people as possible to function with any sense of normalcy and desireability; case in point, when I start up Uncharted 2's multiplayer and the game reports 11, 000 players on, it still takes at least three minutes for the matchmaker to go through the process of finding players and putting me in a game. If this hurts sales, it will hurt their backend irrevocably because no amount of effort they put into IWNET can compensate for the poor functionality of a matchmaker with less-than-ideal numbers of players to match with each other.

James Cameron's James Cameron's Avatar by James Cameron, featuring Quintin Tarentino.

Every time I see news on this I end up thinking for about three seconds, "Maybe this'll be a better Avatar: The Last Airbender game than the console crap." Ah well, easy come, easy go...

Just a thought, at this point the petition is getting close to 140k signatures...we can reasonably assume that not everyone signing it will boycott, but as a wild guess, I figure a lot will.

So let's make a guess and say 50k won't be buying the game. Now, there's the lost revenue argument, which is pretty pointless because at the rate PC games sell, it's a drop in the bucket to how much they're going to make with the console versions.

What sticks out more to me is Bowling's statement about how this is being done soas not to divide the community in half. That's fifty-thousand less players for the matchmaking service to actually function with, so even if p2p was suddenly much better with IWNET than it is...well, everywhere else (it's not and will only compound this problem,) the service is already crippled by the bad publicity alone causing a huge division in the player-base, except the division isn't Modders Vs Casuals, it's Bought The Game Vs Didn't.

I think we've mostly been arguing that MS is actively trying to kill gaming on PCs. Their attempts to "help" (GFWL) are worse than doing nothing.

Does anyone else remember awhile back, Blue posted an interview with someone at Microsoft who actually admitted that they do everything possible to sabotage PC gaming (which basically amounts to delaying or denying PC ports of big XBox games) so that more people in other countries where PC gaming is thriving and no one is buying their console will...well, buy their console?

I know I found it again digging through the archives awhile back, but I didn't think to save the URL, doh...

Not sure what you mean but no dedicated server, no joining games in progress, no anti-cheat and apparently no mod support are bad business decisions. The customer is right.

Except there aren't enough customers for the PC versions of games for it to matter. These are good business descisions because whether you like how they're treating PC gaming or not, they make money. On the platforms with a much, much larger number of potential and actual sales (the consoles) this is good strategy; they're not, and from a business standpoint should not be, concerned with how a much dmaller demographic feels about it; PC gamers will either buy into it and add a little to their bottom line, or not and they'll continue to view the platform as, at best, hard to make money on or at worst, untenable because it's not worth the effort of a more consumer-friendly business model.

I never said it's good business for the consumer, just good business. The videogames industry and members thereof are hardly the only for-profit business that view the outside world around them like this.

Not without it's own problems, that game is ArmA 2, not MW2.

When one of ArmA 2's problems isn't being so much of a simulation that I don't have much fun with it, I'll care about it.

Can you turn off the Microsoft Sam squaddie chatter yet? I'd probably enjoy it a lot more if I didn't have to listen to that, at least enough to spend money the next time it's on sale at at least half-price somewhere.

This comment was edited on Oct 22, 2009, 04:12.

It's funny how the Modern Warfare 2 hullabaloo has suddenly spawned new stock conspiracy theories to apply everywhere. No mod support? They're going to push ten sets of overpriced DLC on us, obviously! No dedicated server? It's forced consolization, not just a terrible decision!

Not that I necessarily think it's untrue, It just still surprises me that no-one sees good business decisions coming a mile away regardless of how the end-user will feel.

(PS: Codemasters, I can has dediserver in patch plz? I'll give you a cookie...)

But you're worried about them buying gamersgate? Here's a funnier one. How about if they just buy Steam?

I reject your logical hypothesis and replace it with willfull and optimistic delusions.

The actual website for the movie is http://www.mgs-philanthropy.net/ and it has an English/Italian option on the splash-screen, plus a downloadable version of the movie and subtitle files in various languages.

There is actually no machinima in the movie, all the special-effects were made from scratch. It's really quite impressive. The end-credits music is performed by the singer who did the end-credits music to the first Metal Gear Solid.

Wow, the tone that article takes is incredibly rude. I'll be the first one to admit PC gamers can have an awful superiority complex, but they do things like calling the expectation of a standard feature fanboyism and the people who write this crap wonder why nobody thinks of them as real journalists.

That being said, the comments from I-Ward are pretty telling:

"We're just prioritizing the player experience above the modders and the tuners," says West. He points toward the mounting feedback IW has received from PC fans of Modern Warfare who couldn't find a decent server to play on between all of the cheaters, the insular communities, and huge skill level disparities that the original game's community fractured into. "We thought maybe it would be cool if the fans could play the game," he laughs.

This idea that dedicated servers provide functionality that only modders care about is absurd. I've been playing Modern Warfare since day one and I didn't know there was a modding community.

Again and again during our conversation, West and Zampella hammer the point that hardcore PC players lose very little to this change relative to the returns that casual to moderate fans will see.

Why not have both? West does not want to include dedicated servers alongside the custom-built backend, stating that it would just "bifurcate the community."

Because the brilliant idea has so far done so much for the community?

Anyway, the unspoken point here is obvious; for some bizarre reason, perhaps a planetary alignment beaming bozo-rays into I-Ward's studio, they're absolutely convinced that console-style matchmaking is better than dedicated servers and a browser list despite the downsides (lag and the inability to just jump into a game and go without staring at the matchmaking screen for god knows how long.)

I'd be very surprised to see them backpedal on this after these comments. No matter how large the petition gets, they're convinced it represents a negligible part of the player-base.

Even though everybody seems to blame Halo for starting the regenerating health trend, in my view it had an extremely elegant system that fit perfectly into the mythos. Halo did not in fact have regenerating health; it had regenerating shields (which seem to make perfect sense in a sci-fi setting) and health kits for restoring health. A lot more believable than say, CoD 2 and beyond.

Of course, Halo 2 "refined" it further with regenerating health as well But, really, it hardly matters. Whether or not a gameplay element is implemented because it appeals to the masses has nothing to do with whether or not a gameplay element has legitimate design behind it. As we can see just from this thread, it's perfectly possible for the non-casuals to find regenerating health as compelling as others find medkits, because it's perfectly possible for intelligent developers to structure good gameplay around the mechanics they choose if they actually care about having a legitimate, non-hand-holding experience.

So, uh...Modern Warfare 2, anyone hear this crazy rumor about no dedicated servers or something? Crazy...

As gaming mainstreams, things like private server lists dissapear. This is just a fact of life. It sucks, but the games are still fun, unless you obsess over the past and refuse to adapt and still enjoy games. Fallout fans refusing to even think of Fallout 3 as a possibly decent game epitomize this thinking.

I remember the days when I naively thought, "Man, I wish gaming was a mainstream activity, then I wouldn't be ostracized for enjoying it so much by everyone who looks down it."

Be careful what you wish for, I guess...

COD4 sold 10 million copies. Who do you think is calling the shots there now? Do you think it's some phantom "suit" that everyone keeps fantasizing about, or do you think it's the dev team?

Doesn't I-Ward own the CoD trademark now? In that case, it'd be the dev team.

It hardly matters. They're not going to backpedal on this; they've put time and money into an idea they thought was good. No matter how much backlash it gets, you'll be hard-pressed to even get a reaction from them. It's standard business mentality to not admit mistakes. This is hardly a new scenario. Just listen to the BASH podcast, talking to that guy is like pulling teeth for the hosts (I think they actually made this analogy,) all he does is state the facts of What Is in different ways regardless of what they say.

All of that being said, after putting more thought into this, I'm not entirely sold on the idea that it's going to completely ruin the game. Less than ideal, sure, but I like the idea of not getting kicked for cheating because my 5.1 headphones let me hear dudes coming up behind me, and VAC NOT FAILBUSTER is certainly a selling point all in its own.

its only a game

I really take issue with this line whenever I hear it. "It's only a game" when you're a casual gamer with a job and/or fairly that eats up too much of your time to enjoy a hobby.

Some people, however, prioritize their own happyness higher than other things, and actually take their hobbies seriously. Many of the people here game as a hobby; it's what we do in our free time because we enjoy it. You can say videogames aren't "Serious" and "don't matter" as much as you want, but by this mentality, neither is any other hobby, yet you never hear it said about other hobbies. Especially where work-a-holics are concerned when they condisder their work to double as their hobby.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with taking videogames seriously if it's what you want to spend your free time doing. When our hobbies are messed with because of the mentality of Corporate America and for-profit businesses, it is valid to take issue with it.

This comment was edited on Oct 18, 2009, 17:47.

I feel like someone just kicked my cat out the window and to a pack of hungry hyenas.

I hope they find some way of making wall-crawling a little more intuitive, I could never quite master it in the last two, the camera just whiplashed around too much for me to remember where I was going.

Ah well, I default to the Predator anyway. Yay, overspecialization!