It's $6.99 on steam in the US. Maybe that's the Canadian price?

Peter M. Smith wrote on Jan 4, 2017, 16:48:

DangerDog wrote on Jan 4, 2017, 15:32:
All this effort put forth by Weyland to obtain an Alien for their "bio weapons division" ... who exactly is the enemy they're wanting to take out with this weapon? Is Russia still the generic bad guy in the future?

The Marines bantering in Aliens (before the drop from the Sulaco) indicated that humanity had run into other species in the universe. Frost and Spunkmeyer tales of tail along with Hudson's bug hunt question are what you're looking for.

I've heard this argument before, but the quotes from the movie (paraphrased)

"Apparently, she's seen an alien once." - Ferro
"Well, whoopie fucking doo" - Hudson

"... and a xenomorph might be involved" - Gorman
"Excuse me sir, a what?" - Apone
"It's a bug hunt" - Hicks

To me, that implies that they're claiming that Ripley is like all of the yokels today who claim that they've seen an alien in the sky or been abducted. The marine banter implies that once they hear some unknown word, it's going to be a search and destroy mission.

It also show how dynamic and flexible EG was in their approach to the problem the second time. They didn't just do the same thing over and over again. EG actually gave CDEC the "most powerful" hero (Leshrac) for their draft, and after they floundered with it they knew they had a draft advantage. Using this advantage they were able to push CDEC out of their comfort zone as they had to draft this hero or let it fall into the enemy's hands. An enemy who could run it in a much more dominant role than they could.

It is maneuvers like the drafting mind games that make this game so interesting to watch!

Cutter wrote on Aug 9, 2015, 15:07:
For a video game? That's beyond retarded. Fucking pro athletes are overpaid but at least they have to put real effort in. Our species is doomed.

I hope you're being sarcastic or you're just ignorant about pro-gaming. Your attitude isn't unique, but hopefully one that is slowly changing, so let me give it a shot.

These competitors aren't just casual gamers that play on the weekends with their friends. These are people who live and breathe the game. They spent 8-10 hours of each waking day playing this game and improving their skills. They love doing this, and they are rewarded for doing the thing that they love because people like me enjoy watching people compete at the highest levels of the game. They are fundamentally entertainers just like "real" athletes are. They provides a service that many find entertaining enough to spend their time with and thus are financially rewarded for the time they invest in being the best. They train incredibly hard to be able to play at the level they play at.

If you're angry about why they're getting paid for doing what they love, you should try to understand the viewer. Without the viewers, the players would not be receiving nearly as much money. For most tournaments there are corporate sponsors who subsidize the prize pool. However, in DOTA 2 there is almost always a community factor that increases the prize pool. For example for this tournament $1.6 million was fronted by Valve where the remaining $16.4 million was contributed to by the community for digital items that Valve produces for this tournament. The International is basically an entire season of NFL in 2 weeks of games. This is the one tournament out of the year hosted by Valve (the makers of the game, with interest in promoting the game to more and more people).

To me, watching teams play within the confines of an imaginary battlefield is much more engaging. As a video gamer, who I imagine finds games interesting because of the escapism that it provides, I figured you would understand that. To me are a number of reasons why profession DOTA 2 is more interesting than "real" sports.

• I like playing the game!
• The caster and player personalities are gamers like me, whom I can relate to better than say sports jocks
• The game field/environment is unique and visually interesting. Not a stadium with a bunch of lines on it.
• There are no ties. One person will win, eventually. Also, while you gain leads, the game isn't over until it is over (no arbitrary time limits).
• There is a lot of strategy involved with pick/ban drafting. Heroes each have strengths and weakness and picking a combination of those ahead of time vs another team's is very interesting.
• There is a lot of decisions that must be made by the players instead of being fed instructions (say by an offensive coordinator).
• There are no human referees the games usually run from beginning to end on LANs. There are no human influenced over-reaction fouls or the like. The biggest issues are technical issues like network connections and DDOS attacks.
• There is only simulated carnage and death instead of inflicting that on actual people or animals.

Your viewpoint is the type of stigma that pro-gaming has to fight to be accepted. For some reason it's ok to watch humans physically interact with each other, to determine who is the best but not ok when it's though the confines of a simulation. Luckily, younger people are much more open to this type of entertainment. If you can't accept it, you can just live in your log cabin stroking your shotgun while the world changes around you or you can try to learn to accept new things.

This comment was edited on Aug 9, 2015, 17:27.

The goal of GLNext is to create a cross-platform API that would reduce the number of these platform-specific low overhead APIs such as Mantle (AMD+Windows), Metal (iOS), and DirectX 12 (Windows 10, XB1). If GLNext can achieve performance/feature parity with these APIs, their usefulness is significantly reduced. Thus the hope of these engine developers is that GLNext will reduce the number of viable 3D APIs. This will help the engine developers by letting them focus on a single rendering path instead of the half dozen that there will be if GLNext isn't successful. (As a counter point, having a multitude of different APIs will make the necessity of their engines even more needed. Game developers would need to rely on the engine's ability to target these different rendering paths as it is unlikely that the devs would write them for each unique platform.)

While the pc gamer crowd of BluesNews probably only really cares about DirectX 12. The world as a whole is moving away from Microsoft dominance and PC dominant API design (especially on mobile and console). While the PC video card is really powerful, the design of duplicating RAM on both the CPU/GPU side is becoming a relic. Unified system memory is the future, and Metal (iOS) is designed with the assumption that the GPU and CPU share the same memory space. Thus you can simply pass a memory pointer between the CPU/GPU rather than the asset. If GLNext can't match the performance of these unified system APIs it's going to be a problem to make them cross-platform successful on both unified and dedicated memory spaces.

*fixed*

This comment was edited on Jan 30, 2015, 14:33.

28 nm? Seems huge compared to the 14nm Broadwell. Surprised that both Nvidia and AMD are so far behind Intel in this regard.

This comment was edited on Jan 3, 2015, 08:04.

JeffD wrote on Dec 7, 2014, 14:39:
aaaand hardware has officially out paced any software for it.

As a mobile developer this is 100% true. In about 2 years we can actually target the hardware that is released today. (I'm looking at you ASTC) Add on top the extreme variances of Android hardware, it makes life hard to push hardware with software. Unless you're an Epic Games, Crysis, it is going to be hard to make any money off of only targeting the high end. Apple is a lot easier to push because they often share relatively the same specs each generation of hardware and only have 1 revision every year.

If this game wasn't so much work, it might actually be fun!

Just a note, that gameplay versions in DOTA are notated as 6.79, 6.80, and now 6.81 (not 6.8.1).

Anyways, I'm glad Valve is starting to address the thousands of bugs that are in the game as this is most likely the version that will be used for the annual The International 2014 (TI4) tournament. Which is the $1.6+ million dollar tournament that Valve hosts to promote DOTA2 every year. This year the tournament sold out the Key Arena (10,000 tickets) in < 1 hour so I expect the prize pool to potentially double based on user contributions (it was a $2.8 million prize pool last year).

I know people on this site probably hate this game for detracting resources from Half-Life 3. However, this game is a worldwide phenomenon and easily the #1 played game on Steam. This game is huge!

Ok, great job copying left 4 dead down to a T. You've now got the boomer alien... and the spitter alien... now all you need is the hunter/smoker alien. L4D is awesome, but this mode should have had some more thought put into it.

Not buying another Stardock game after what Demigod did to me... it had such potential, but it was left to die. If it was supported 1/5th as much as Heroes of Newerth, League of Legends, or any other MOBA it would have been a great game. Instead it was a severely flawed disappointment. Hiding behind that "publisher responsibility" is annoying. Someone needed to take responsibility for that, and I blame you.

Also I don't agree with you politically... so I choose with my dollars.

Cats that old that run away usually do so to die. I'd have them bring it into the vet if they haven't already and check the cat out.

Voyager's opening theme music is probably my favorite. Probably conveyed the best theme for exploration and discovery... too bad everything about the show was generally garbage (space dinosaurs and warp speed lizards).

After Stardock's major screwup with Demigod (it had so much potential if it was even supported even 1/4 as much as HoN or LoL). However, they thought instead of making a service like most companies are doing nowadays with entertainment software he'd do a standard old school PC release. One big release and a couple maintenance patches. Which doesn't work for breathing living environments like MOBAs (or A-RTS if you prefer) or MMOs that require constant balancing and tweaking. What a mess.

A little late on the news article. They have been playing preliminary games online since last weekend. I've enjoyed watching the games even though USA/CAN teams aren't nearly as good as the top Chinese teams. Anyways, they're playing for a $1.6 million dollar prize pool so I figured that this would be a bigger deal than people give it. Plus the spectator client is free in Steam allowing you to view the games live with commentary.

avianflu wrote on Apr 2, 2012, 15:18:
One could buy used cartridge games since the very first consoles and same goes for PC's software on disk starting in the early 1980's.

So why is it an industry-destroying issue suddenly *now*? It is a valid question. Sorry but it all sounds like PR spin to me.

And dont even get me going on the consumer rip-off that is DLC. It is only getting worse.

"Want to see the real ending of Fallout 3? Give me 10 more bucks."

It's not a new problem for the industry, as you stated that this has always been present. However, now that there is technology to counter this problem (always-on internet connection, lack of physical product), you can't be surprised to see developers/publishers wanting to get as much money as they can. You can't be surprised by that deverlopers/publishers are leveraging it to their advantage. Which means the end of resell of which they receive no benefit.

DLC is a topic for another day. Just remember the PC industry had a successful model for many years, but it was called the expansion pack.

Beamer: Not a populist opinion but I agree.

Gamers that buy used aren't supporting game developers they are supporting other gamers or GameStop. Gamers are not unique snowflakes. Gamers are consumers. Gamers consume products that game developers produce. A game developer's goal is to make enough money to make another game. If the developer doesn't receive money for their work, the industry fails. If this concept bothers you I think you're out of place in this market.

Oh well guess I missed my chance. If anyone else has a beta key I'd be interested in testing it out.

Community Name: Ferazel
SteamID: bklooster

ASeven wrote on Aug 1, 2011, 17:12:
See, this is how you adapt to change. You change for the better option instead of being lethargic and just accept anything that's thrown at you. If anything, the fact more and more people are playing more and more indie titles, with a growing number of people making indies their main games, will give for an interesting future where the minority might end up being the mainstream gamers and not the opposite.

I don't have a problem with indie games either. I think some of the most innovative experiences are being done by Indie developers. I've probably spent more money on Indie games than AAA games the last couple years. While still in the minority, some Indie games are going to the online service route (see MineCraft). My argument is my viewpoint is more flexible than yours and therefore more likely to adapt to changing system requirements as entertainment media continues to evolve and provide new experiences. While the detractor's opinions don't seem to be as pliable.

I hope they don't blow their load early trying to promote the game before the game is even out to the general public. I hope they can continue to promote the game past the point of release like this. To me watching a MOBA cast is more fun than watching an SC2 cast, so I hope this can be as competitive as SC2 is becoming.