I'm more put off by the fact that they are killing the multiplayer support in Unreal 2.

That is one seriously uninspiring trailer.

Also remember that Renegade has already gone gold. What that means is the master CD is already off to duplication. Any fixes to the demo's netcode probably mean people who buy the game can expect a patch waiting for them after the game is released.

Still, it's good that they are addressing problems, at least.

Heh, I didn't even notice George Broussard had posted, because the account is anonymous. He may want to get that fixed.

The bottom line for me is I'll judge the game on its own merits when it eventually comes out and I'll compare it favorably or negatively to whatever other FPS's have been released in the same timeframe. If the game's great, I'll be happy. If not, oh well. No big deal, really.

I'm just damn curious to know what is taking them so long. Assuming this isn't a mismanaged fiasco like Daikatana, I'd love to read a post-mortem on the game's development.

"Finally, was going with the UT engine a bad decision? Not the technology per se, but that the decision to change engines was costly in terms of getting the product finished?"

They actually switched to the Unreal engine in or around May of 1998 -- yes, almost four years ago -- so I don't know that you could factor the switch into a serious delay. It may have added to the dev cycle back in '98 or '99, but even that gives over two years of dev time since then.

If the DNF dev team does not have internal milestones, the game will never ship, period. They'll go broke first. I'm sure they do have milestones. I'm not so sure how well they've been able to meet them.

It seems like they've been financing the game's development out of their own pockets so far, so Take Two probably isn't all that concerned about when it ships, although it does start to lose its appeal the longer it takes, simply because the evolution of the FPS continues whether DNF ships or not.

Duke Nukem Forever is a joke.

If this game really doesn't come out before October 2002, then 3D Realms has either pulled a Valve and has scrapped most of their current work and is essentially starting over or they are out to prove that there are people who can mismanage a title even worse than John Romero did with Daikatana.

Now, I'm not saying the game itself will be bad, it may turn out to be excellent, and with a full slate of potentially great PC games out there, I'm not exactly twiddling my thumbs for DNF to show up, but after all this time, they're either starting over or screwing up.

JK divided the force powers in both the single and multiplayer into light and dark. Mysteries of the Sith combined the powers in single and multiplayer and now JK2 combines the powers in single but separates them for multiplayer.

Huh?

I played a ton of both games and I think combining the powers made for more interesting and dynamic play, mostly because the light powers were all fairly weak and mainly defense-oriented. Regardless, it seems silly for Raven to go the "easy" route for single player and split the powers for multiplayer. Why not just make it a server-side option and let the admins choose? All of the force powers are available, so they have to be balanced against each other, anyway.

w00t, they're including Capture the Ysalimari, a multiplayer mode from Mysteries of the Sith. I had a blast playing that. The bot support is a nice bonus, too, especially with some of the big titles recently shipping without them (RTCW and MoH, for example). I'm cautiously optimistic about JK2.

1) Pause and order?

I'm not sure what this means. If you mean pause the game to allow you to issue orders, then let the game resume (queuing up commands), I doubt they'll add this, simply because pausing doesn't work well in multiplayer games, which has alway been the Age series' focus.

2) Much less micromanagement?

They did make some improvements with Age of Kings and its expansion, but I doubt they'll do much more beyond that. The series has been extremely popular and that usually doesn't drive a developer to radically alter gameplay -- even for the better. Then there's the whole debate of micromanagement, anyway. How much is too much? How much is too little? I'd prefer less, myself, but a lot of people enjoy the absolute control they have.

Oh, and for those who can't get the demo now, waiting an extra week isn't exactly worth kicking up a fuss over. It's not like the demo is disappearing forever. Relax and play something else...maybe even the RTCW demo.

My two or three cents:

jschuur is Joost Schuur, for those who don't know. He works at Gamespy, home of FilePlanet, so he is not an impartial observer. Just so you know. (And I welcome his views.)

EA is trying to put the genie back in the bottle and it's silly. The deed is done. You can't contain the Internet. And this leads to my next point, which is...

Exclusive demos are dumb. CGW should *not* be trumpeting the demo to move its magazine. It's the content, not some silly CD that should compel people to buy the mag. If it's not, then they may as well just skip the magazine and sell the demo disc. I've also noticed that CGW is now only available with the CD on newsstands, further proof that they don't trust their content alone to sell the magazine. Sad.

Blue's did the right thing by pulling the demo when asked to, but EA, in its typical ham-handed manner, has managed to screw things up again. A demo is supposed to make people buy a game, not foment anger and debate. Sheesh, how stupid that any of this even happened.

So again, demo exclusives are DUMB. They are designed to benefit only those involved and, IMHO, that's wrong because it flies in the face of what a demo is for.

The monster hits in PC gaming can sell over a million copies, but these are pretty rare. The Diablo games, The Sims, Myst, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Half-Life, the Quake and Unreal series have all sold over a million copies, but these are the exceptions. Most PC games actually sell pretty poorly. If you can move over 100,000 copies, you've got a hit. 250,000 would be a very solid number.

So I guess the answer is that while companies like Valve would probably like to sell a lot more, they could tailor their games to that 250k and still turn a decent profit (you also have to extrapolate -- how many people bought HL but didn't answer the survey and have similar specs?)

Over 630,000 people have submitted their hardware specs for the Valve/Speakeasy.net survey after downloading the last Half-Life patch. Of those, 212,179 had a GeForce class video card. The next largest group were TNT2 owners with 143,896. 57.8% had a CPU of at least 700 MHz -- 369,058 people in all. Bear in mind that the survey results can't be fudged as it automatically catalogs your system hardware. Now, you could argue that people downloading a patch for HL do not represent the average gamer, but even if they only represent a portion of the hardcore, that's still getting close to a quarter of a million users with GeForce or better video and processors more than powerful enough to run *any* game out there.

The days of claiming the there is an insufficient hardware base to support T&L or other "advanced" features are over.

You can see the full survery here: http://valve.speakeasy.net/survey/

Also, whoever said games are still being optimized for Voodoo cards has obviously never played Tribes 2.

This is the first time I recall a member of Bungie pointing out how working for the X-Box version was a negative, basically saying that the hard deadline forced them to cut a lot of art, content and even enemy AI (!). It will be interesting to see what, if any, changes are made in the PC version of the game.

I don't recall where the petition to coax Epic into releasing a final patch for Unreal was hosted, but that was a notable case where an online petition *did* work. Epic admitted they were more or less shamed into releasing one more patch for Unreal that improved Direct3D support.

I really don't think the media is going to kick up a fuss about a game in which you kill Nazis, tAE, even in today's PC environment.

I've got this strange urge to go out and buy Ghost Recon now.

#13, it's funny how you can read it either way. I guess if I drop out of cynical gamer mode, maybe Blizzard really is doing this to try to create a better game.

We'll see.

The development of Warcraft III has been a slow, steady progression from an innovative and ambitious title to what now appears to be little more than Warcraft II with a 3D engine tossed in but used to no great effect. This seems to be an attempt by Blizzard to justify the continued paring down of the game. "Well, look at all the people playing Starcraft running 450 mhz systems."

If they don't want "bells and whistles" in the game, they just shouldn't bother. At this late stage of development, I don't see how a survey is going to help. The feature set of the game should have been locked down already.

I played the original demo (when it was still Venom) with either one or two friends alongside and no AI allies and really enjoyed it. It is not only easier to play co-op, it's more realistic and fun, as you can employ some real tactics, instead of just praying that your sidekick doesn't get stuck walking into a tree or something.

My only real beef was the long haul back to join the other players if you got killed. Some of the maps are huge and the spawn points are near the beginning, so it could literally take a minute or more to ctach up to your friends. Then again, it makes you careful.