Another strike for Blizzard, DiabloIII!

[Taskmage]

Re: Another strike for Blizzard, DiabloIII!

Really my main objection to this is that Activision apparently cares more about their bandwidth cost of maintaining a constant connection to every player - to the point where you can't even idle in town to have dinner for a few minutes - but they don't care that you can't unplug the internet and play on a laptop on a train.

Not offering an excuse for the DRM aspect, but I believe this idle-kick mechanism is in place in Diablo 2 as well. If you're alone in a game and don't touch anything for five minutes, the game closes and you're booted to the lobby. If there are other active players in the game or you pop an ID scroll (thus leaving you "in the middle of doing something") it's circumvented. I think it's less an issue of bandwidth and more one of RAM. If you're not playing then you're tying up resources on the server preserving your game state for basically no good reason.

Even if there is ultimately no such thing as local hosting in the final version, I don't see the idle-d/c thing being more than a minor annoyance. Checkpoints appear to be very frequent in the beta. It's unlikely you'd ever lose more than a couple minutes of progress.

---------- Post added at 02:48 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:38 PM ----------

Because I perceive it as part of a larger trend of a shift in fundamental game design philosophy within the industry.

Which is? I'm getting tired of trying to prise an explanation out of these terse responses, cid. If you don't feel like explaining your opinion to me then you shouldn't have offered it. If you do actually care about making me understand your viewpoint, it's going to take more than single sentence fragments and laconic one-word replies.

[cidbahamut]

Re: Another strike for Blizzard, DiabloIII!

ARGLEBLARG!!!

Fine, now you get the rant about all the touchy feely bullshit opinions that are going to be subsequently picked apart and demonstrated to be completely and totally wrong.

I haven't enjoyed hardly any games that have come out in recent years. You know what the last games I played were that made me sit up and go "god damn, it's good to be a gamer"? Deus Ex and Planescape: Torment. Both released about a decade ago. There's been an overall shift in the industry away from producing quality products towards producing profitable products. No longer do I get games with a sense of humor and self-deprecation. Characters no longer pull their pants down and moon you when you leave the game idle for too long. You don't get well crafted stories most of the time, and when you do it tends to get ruined by a string of voice acting that may or may not actually match the content, removing the immersion that comes with using one's imagination whilst reading the text. No, now it's all big glossy sexy 3D environments designed specifically to appeal to the lowest common denominator and it doesn't matter if your story or gameplay is shit because it looks pretty and will still sell like hotcakes. Now with all mountains of money required to make games you can't afford to have anything that's new and exciting, it all has to be tired old rehashes that guarantee a profit. There's no room in the budget for experimentation or actually taking the time to craft a masterpiece of entertainment. No, that would take too much money, time and effort, and then it wouldn't sell well because there weren't enough tits in it. So we keep plugging along with all our carbon copy games that all play the same with maybe some minor changes between them all. All this technology and it all goes to waste on making everything shiny, but no one can devote the manpower required to actually use that technology to the fullest. Too much of a risk so instead we get games that end up being nothing but linear goddamn corridors that look really pretty, because that's all we can afford because dammit we have a bottom line to meet. Profit has become the sole motivation, everything is driven by profit. It's always been driven by profit, but we've reached the point where the cost of failure is too high and our games are being designed with that unpleasant reality in mind. Nope, can't do anything that might break out and be something absolutely amazing. Oh look, another way to reel in money. You purchased the full game, now buy our DLC two weeks after the release. Fantastic! You know what we used to call those? Expansion packs. They only got made when your game was kick ass enough to warrant additions before corporate could allocate enough money for a full fledged sequel some years later. But no, now it's nickel and dime all the way to the bank and back. Mediocrity at every corner, but it keeps a steady flow of cash into their coffers so it's all ok right? No, not really. We can't have exploration and discovery now. We can't have quality products. The deeper we go down this rabbit hole of increasing production costs, the less we're going to see of breakthroughs and top quality gaming experiences and the more we'll see of mediocrity and features designed to squeeze every last cent out of the player by any means necessary. No more can we expect to see a game produced, sold and expected to bring in money based solely on the quality of the workmanship put into it. No, now we have to continually tack on extra bits and ruin the artistic aesthetic, the story, the continuity, the world-building, the level design, it's all up for grabs if it means it'll help the bottom line because goddamn it there is no room for failure. It's a huge gamble no one can afford to lose anymore and the quality of what's being put on the market is suffering for it. There hasn't been a game released in years that's truly scratched my gamer itch and I blame it on the fact that the games aren't being designed with the same mindset that were in the past. Where's the humor and experimentation? Dead, under a pile of production costs. Where are the cooky cheat codes and easter eggs? Dead, gamers aren't allowed to cheat anymore but they'll do it anyway and fuck our customers for wanting access to god mode and clipping. Where's the quality craftsmanship that brings me games I'll remember until the day I die? Dead, there wasn't room in the budget, but we'll still turn nearly the same profit so it doesn't matter, and fuck our customers for wanting nice things. You want nice things? Here, have some shiny cutscenes and celebrity voice actors, there's your nice things. Dynamic gameplay? Hell no you can't have that, takes too much effort. Secret levels? What are you, mad? That's been relegated to DLC you silly peasant.
Then: Hey, I have a cool idea. Let's have a bunch of people riding around on rockets trying to murder each other.
> Awesome! Let's make it.
Now? Now that wouldn't even make it to the table where ideas for games get considered. I'm tired of everything being about the bottom line. I want games to be masterpieces of art again and it won't ever fucking happen with the way the industry has become. I'm bitter, I'm incredibly jaded, angry, resentful and bitter about it, ok?

[Taskmage]

Re: Another strike for Blizzard, DiabloIII!

ARGLEBLARG!!!

There's a lot of truth in that, if, I think, slightly overstated. There have been innovative and masterful games released in spite of those trends, both by independent "love of the game" type developers and also profit-loving corporate monstrosities. Wacky concept games like what you described still get made, you just might not have heard of them because they don't have big publishers pushing their publicity. Plain Sight might scratch your itch if you were stating a specific desire for whimsical, violent multiplayer.

I just don't follow your logic that if D3 is released with this feature and succeeds, that situation will necessarily get worse as a result. I think you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater if you refuse to play a game you might otherwise enjoy because it has a feature you disagree with philosophically that probably won't affect you.

[DakAttack]

Re: Another strike for Blizzard, DiabloIII!

China is a great example for anything that becomes profitable and proves itself as an industry. Factories appear and begin pumping out the cheapest possible product en masse, regardless of what risks may come with it. EA and Actiblizzard are the two biggest culprits when it comes to game factories, and we've already seen how this can effect popular franchises, such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band. I don't know how any of this contributes to the conversation.

[Taskmage]

Re: Another strike for Blizzard, DiabloIII!

Oh, come on. Blizzard is extremely risk-averse when it comes to straying from their 3 properties, but they turn out quality products and they certainly don't indulge in shovelware. I think Nintendo is a much bigger offender by those criteria. Or were you being ironic and it just went completely over my head?

[Yygdrasil]

Re: Another strike for Blizzard, DiabloIII!

Well you guys wanted to play an MMOG offline didn't you?

Eh? You didn't? Oh, my bad.

Teehee?

With love ~Blizzard~

lmfao

[Malacite]

Re: Another strike for Blizzard, DiabloIII!

Even starcraft 2 has an offline mode, so long as you've already registered the game.

This is nothing more than Kotick's bullshit.

[Icemage]

Re: Another strike for Blizzard, DiabloIII!

ARGLEBLARG!!!
...
I'm bitter, I'm incredibly jaded, angry, resentful and bitter about it, ok?

Games haven't gotten worse or changed. It's because you're getting older.

If you seriously think the last good games to come out were Deus Ex 1 and Planescape: Torment, you are dead inside and have completely lost touch with your inner child.

I'm 37 years old, so I'm old enough to remember pretty much all the way back to the beginning of the video game era, and games aren't any less innovative today than they were three decades ago. The only thing that has changed is my perception of them, my reflexes, and the amount of time I can spend with them.

Every year we see a bunch of really amazing games, and if you can't see that stuff like Rock Band, Super Mario Galaxy, The World Ends With You, Shadow of the Colossus, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and Bioshock aren't just as cool and innovative as any game "back in the day", then we can't really have much of a conversation because you've completely replaced "fun" with "nostalgia" and think you have to have the latter to have the former.


Icemage

---------- Post added at 01:34 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:25 AM ----------

Not offering an excuse for the DRM aspect, but I believe this idle-kick mechanism is in place in Diablo 2 as well. If you're alone in a game and don't touch anything for five minutes, the game closes and you're booted to the lobby. If there are other active players in the game or you pop an ID scroll (thus leaving you "in the middle of doing something") it's circumvented. I think it's less an issue of bandwidth and more one of RAM. If you're not playing then you're tying up resources on the server preserving your game state for basically no good reason.

Eh... I don't think server capacity is really the crux of the issue here. Again, if they REALLY cared about server capacity, they wouldn't be forcing everyone to be connected online in the first place.

The situation we have here is that Activision has mandated that everyone must be online, all the time, to ensure they can enforce DRM. Most of the rest of the terribad features we're seeing revealed now are a consequence of that decision.

Personally, I'm betting that the hacking community will probably get involved somewhere down the line and take down Blizzard's servers. It's too easy an opportunity to make a statement, because it will immediately affect millions of users.


Icemage

[Yygdrasil]

Re: Another strike for Blizzard, DiabloIII!

Games haven't gotten worse or changed. It's because you're getting older.

If you seriously think the last good games to come out were Deus Ex 1 and Planescape: Torment, you are dead inside and have completely lost touch with your inner child.

I'm 37 years old, so I'm old enough to remember pretty much all the way back to the beginning of the video game era, and games aren't any less innovative today than they were three decades ago. The only thing that has changed is my perception of them, my reflexes, and the amount of time I can spend with them.

Every year we see a bunch of really amazing games, and if you can't see that stuff like Rock Band, Super Mario Galaxy, The World Ends With You, Shadow of the Colossus, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and Bioshock aren't just as cool and innovative as any game "back in the day", then we can't really have much of a conversation because you've completely replaced "fun" with "nostalgia" and think you have to have the latter to have the former.

This. If more people could realize this... war wouldn't happen.

[Taskmage]

Re: Another strike for Blizzard, DiabloIII!

Eh... I don't think server capacity is really the crux of the issue here. Again, if they REALLY cared about server capacity, they wouldn't be forcing everyone to be connected online in the first place.

The situation we have here is that Activision has mandated that everyone must be online, all the time, to ensure they can enforce DRM. Most of the rest of the terribad features we're seeing revealed now are a consequence of that decision.

To be honest I don't think this is a DRM issue at all. I think the compulsory online-ness is meant to encourage as many people as possible to participate in the auction house community. That helps ensure the health of the item economy and, if real money transactions on the auction house pan out as a revenue stream, the highest possible return from that system. I wouldn't be surprised to see a loosening of the online requirement in a future patch if AH fees don't produce a significant return for them or if the economy eventually dries up.

Personally, I'm betting that the hacking community will probably get involved somewhere down the line and take down Blizzard's servers. It's too easy an opportunity to make a statement, because it will immediately affect millions of users.

That would be interesting to see and maybe not unlikely. I'll be keeping an eye out for the headline.

[Malacite]

Re: Another strike for Blizzard, DiabloIII!

To be honest I don't think this is a DRM issue at all. I think the compulsory online-ness is meant to encourage as many people as possible to participate in the auction house community.

Bullshit.

Well, it's likely a mix of both - DRM so they don't get screwed by piracy (Like that's ever really worked) and to get people on the AH. I'm telling you this has got to be kotick's doing.

[cidbahamut]

Re: Another strike for Blizzard, DiabloIII!

If you seriously think the last good games to come out were Deus Ex 1 and Planescape: Torment, you are dead inside and have completely lost touch with your inner child.

The last good games to come out? No.

Better than every game on the market today? Absolutely.

And before you herp derp too hard with a nostalgia goggles argument, do keep in mind that I didn't actually encounter either game until 2009.

[Taskmage]

Re: Another strike for Blizzard, DiabloIII!

And before you herp derp too hard with a nostalgia goggles argument, do keep in mind that I didn't actually encounter either game until 2009.

Wouldn't that actually strengthen the argument? You were jaded with contemporary games, then discovered two old classics that felt significantly different partially due to their age and nostalgia for their era?

[Kailea]

Re: Another strike for Blizzard, DiabloIII!

I dont like the "buy it all screw earning it" trend that many games are going to, and this is a reason why I to wont touch Diablo III

Now that is how I feel right now, but I am still watching, and waiting to see how the game goes about things, there might even be a way to make money off this game, and if so, I might look into it more, there are alot of suckers out there.

[Icemage]

Re: Another strike for Blizzard, DiabloIII!

The last good games to come out? No.

Better than every game on the market today? Absolutely.

And before you herp derp too hard with a nostalgia goggles argument, do keep in mind that I didn't actually encounter either game until 2009.

You'll forgive me for saying so, but again, you're either not looking hard enough or you think older games are necessarily better.

I played DX1 and Planescape: Torment when they were first released; yes, they're awesome when taken in the context of the time period they were released in. But to say that they're better games than anything released since is asinine if you're framing that statement as anything other than personal opinion. Objectively speaking, from a game design standpoint, they're most certainly not. Innovative for their time? Yes. Influential for other games? Absolutely. Better than modern games which have learned from their mistakes? No way.

Right now, I'd rather play Deus Ex: Human Revolution than the original Deus Ex. I'd rather play Metal Gear Solid 4 than the original Deus Ex 1. Heck, I think I'd rather play Mass Effect 2 than Deus Ex 1. That doesn't mean I think DX1 is a bad game; far from it. But is has flaws. Many of them. Weird skill balancing. Uneven plot pacing. Some occasionally wonky controls.

PlaneScape: Torment has its issues too. At its core, it suffers greatly from being hamstrung by its D&D roots (inheriting many awful and inappropriate game mechanics from its pen and paper antecedent). It also has some seriously unbalanced combat and execrable enemy AI.


Icemage