"Normally, software goes gold 1-2 months before shipping."

Not entertainment software. Most games are in stores within two weeks of going gold. I remember that Quake3 went gold on November 21 of 1999 and was officially released on December 5th, though a number of places had the game even earlier.

/shrug

You'd think that after the success of games like Half-Life, ones with the narrative contained entirely in the game engine, this FMV stuff would have been put out to pasture. It was cool when I saw it in FF7, but that was six years ago - now, this sort of work is pretty uninspiring. It doesn't have the visual quality of high-end 3D and it doesn't have the interactivity of an in-game cinematic - it just lingers somwhere unsatisfyingly in the middle. Warren Spector is undeniably a great game designer; I wish he wouldn't waste his/Deus Ex's resources on this sort of thing...

"After quake 2, id games have been..."

"Games"? They've only released one game since Quake 2.

That's a pretty silly thing to dream about...

La Femme Nikita. The first season of the tv series was released last week! =D

"Vermilion - After working at Sierra for 3 years (and, incidentally, being laid-off because of Vivendi's VERY Enron-like scandal), there's one thing I've learned:

The general public (and even most gamers) will never understand the way the computer-game industry works."

And this has what to do with me? I saw Sierra at their worst before you did, I expect. When I was in undergrad, some of us in my program worked as co-ops at PyroTechnix; you can't imagine how cool it was having a game studio in the same town you went to school in, living in the midwest. Return to Krondor was released to good reviews and turned a profit, but not *enough* profit. On that infamous day, Sierra didn't lay a few people off, they shut down the entire studio here along with Synergistic, Yosemite and others - that was 250 jobs lost at once, entire development houses gone forever. If you've been part of a more depressing story than that, I don't want to hear it.

Anyway, this is all beside the point. Sierra is effectively just a publisher, as they outsource virtually everything. Half-Life has a Sierra label on it, but no one forgets that Valve actually made the game. We're talking about a developer's internal decisions in this case.

The Ritual scenario isn't some horrible scandalous mandate from corporate overlords - it's a development house realizing they don't have enough money to keep their current staff intact. Arguably that's just as much due to their own somewhat lackluster slate of products as it is any outside forces. If SiN or FAKK2 or whatever were better games, wouldn't Ritual be in better shape to keep people on staff? I mean, did anyone even play that Blair Witch Game? Blizzard publishes under the demonic clutches of Vivendi, the people who control Sierra, but you never hear about Blizzard being forced to lay anyone off their huge development staffs. Not coincidentally, every game Blizzard makes sells a gajillion copies. Notice how when Eidos took the knife to Ion Storm, the Dallas/Daikatana office went, but the Austin/Deus Ex studio remains in business and has actually grown. The huge failure of Daikatana and success of Deus Ex explain everything.

It sucks to see anyone lose their jobs, especially guys I know, but there isn't some malicious conspiracy theory here. I hate to say it, but Ritual apparently was reduced to slumming it with Counter-Strike licenses from Valve rather than produce original content - that's a pretty fair indicator that business hasn't been as good there as they'd like.

This comment was edited on Jun 14, 19:30.

Investors? Senior management? At a privately owned company with less than 30 employees? I don't think that's an issue, it doesn't get much less corporate than two dozen guys. I know two of the artists who were laid off - they're not thrilled about it, but they're not acting like this is some Enron scandal either; this sort of thing happens to game studios all the time if they don't have a big hit to rely on.

And that anyone would refer to Tom Mustaine as a corporate PR wank... wtf? He's a game designer, he's not even one of the Ritual biz guys.

I'm glad you don't have a yeast infection - that would be just another thing for you to bitch about...

No, HDTV can't go as high as a PC monitor. The standard for high definition is 10801/720p. Since computer screens are rendered non-interlaced, you have to use the 720 progressive as the point of comparison. That's 720 vertical lines of resolution, and a result of about 1280x720 in total resolution in you have a widescreen TV, and 960x720 on a regular 4:3 television (comparable to a typical CRT). That's not even remotely close to a PC with 1600x1200 resolution.

I have Sony's best plasma HD screen and it's actual pixel resolution is only 1024x1024. I can run video to it from my computer, but it never looks as good as it does on my generic CRT.

Keep in mind that SWG is charging testers for the beta test. Even though the game can be downloaded for free, you still have to order and pay for the discs. Paying to beta test - don't know if it's George, but I think someone is making some money of the SWG beta.

#14: "the white people can write a petition, so can the italians for being protrayed as mobsters and so can any other ethnic race...it's America after all, you can petition anything you want..."

The Sikhs are in India. The game was made in Denmark. America's not even in the same hemisphere. What white male Americans may say or do has nothing to do with what Danish game developers think of the Sikh, no matter how you try to spin it.

F for geography, C+ for effort, and we're kicking you off the debate team.

Alaskan malamutes are very dog-agressive. They're strong pack animals, and while they're very fun/playful within their family, they have a powerful drive to dominate other dogs. Even vocally, the presence of such a powerful canine was probably enough to subdue some of the dogs in the neighborhood; now that Chucky's gone, that dominant spot is vacant and other dogs are more likely to be louder than before.

So far we've seen about a half-dozen screenshots and almost ten minutes of shakycam footage of a beta biuld still a year from going gold. You can NOT tell from that whether the game is scary, if it's just like ResEvil, if it feels like DOOM1, if it will have hordes of enemies - you know nothing of that. The only thing you CAN tell for sure is that it will have excellent graphics; anything else is complete speculation and bitching about it is just silly.

I wanted to play Halo. It bums me a little that it probably won't see a PC release. But calling that whining? Right. I'd pay $50 for one a good game, but not $250.

An 'upgradable engine' isn't as easy as what some of you are talking about. Downloading and installing a new graphics engine and whatnot isn't too terribly difficult. What kills you is content. You have to have improved models, maps and textures to take advantage of that new engine, or all you can hope for is faster framerates. Quake1 running on the Quake3 engine is still going to look like Quake1, with 500-poly characters and 8-bit textures.

The only game I have installed at the moment is JK2, but close enough... That game's .exe's and .dll's, etc, are a bit less than 5 megs in size - not a terrible d/l, if needed. The actual game media is over 600mb. I assume EverQuest is even more content-heavy, seeing as it's 3 expansions deep. That means if you improve the engine to current industry capabilities, you'd have to redo 1gb or so of content - that's an insane amount of work and a distribution nightmare, particularly if you intend it as a free/cheap upgrade. I haven't played Luclin with the graphics at maximum, but the requirements don't surprise me. A dozen races times twenty classes or so, times god only knows how many possible armor/weapon combinations, plus still more NPCs and environments at 32-bit color has to require an *insane* demand for texture memory. By this time next year, I honestly can't fathom a MMORPG not recommending 512mb. It is a shame the Luclin engine didn't scale better with present hardware, but with the need to maintain backward compatibility to existing model/map formats, I suppose some inefficiencies are inevitable - hard to blame them for what they couldn't have foreseen four+ years ago...

Yeah, I know :p I wanted to make my point without it looking like an ad for the game, but I don't suppose mentioning that once would have hurt.

For those who might still be wondering, I make 'The Opera' for Half-life: http://opera.redeemedsoft.com

"You don't seem to have an idea how frantic early mornings are here, when the initial update is being compiled that contains many of the mod stories."

No, I really don't have any idea how frantic your mornings are - Blue didn't say anything about them. What I do know is that, despite having the manner of information Blue mentioned one click off the front page, the media still gets things wrong as often as right. PC Gamer claims the game is "a ton o' slo mo fun", simply because the game is based upon John Woo style films - the fact that we do not have and have never claimed to implement any sort of bullet-time feature doesn't stop others from making it up. We've never had any bad reporting from Blue, etc, but we've had bad reporting. The point of the matter is that I completely agree that information should be precisely encapsulated on the site, but the obligation for accurate reporting falls equally upon the mod authors and the sites who report upon them. Accurate, current information doesn't render us immune to misrepresentation.

Zippy, thanks - I'd lost my scorecard If you like to consider something just shy of 100,000 downloads on Fileplanet alone to be 'little', be my guest. Personally, I'm extremely proud of the game - despite being intended for 1v1 and LAN play, the game's popularity has far exceeded anyone's expectations.

http://www.fileplanet.com/index.asp?file=62355

This comment was edited on Dec 5, 08:02.

In my experience, it really doesn't make a damn bit of difference what's put on the game's website. Those who are interested enough to investigate the game will learn enough to do it justice; those who just want a blurb and a byline don't care one way or the other. My mod was on the cover disc for the Dec issue of PC Gamer - that in itself is quite flattering, but they used a visibly outdated screenshot from somewhere other than our front page and attributed a feature to our gameplay that has not, does not and will not ever exist. Our website never indicated such and even browsing through the manual would make that clear (and it's fun explaing that to the llamas in IRC). I appreciate publicity, any way we can get it, but being poorly represented when one email would settle things...

Yeah, mods aren't making Blue or anyone money, that's not why people come here, so maybe an inquiry email is too much to ask. Nonetheless, I've seen everything done right and still watched the media screw it up. Most mod teams would be thrilled to submit a 30-words-or-less blurb and some pics for the asking, but I've been at this for two and a half years and no one has ever asked - the time it would take Blue or PC Gamer or whomever to email a request for that submission would in every instance take less time than compiling that information themselves and result in more accurate reporting.