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Drakron

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Everything posted by Drakron

  1. Unfortunatly heavy exposure and critical acclaim alone do not sell games. There is a game I loved from that company ... ever heard of "Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri" ? You sould read this: http://ttlg.com/articles/lgsclosing.asp Informative and shows how you are quite wrong (even if it displeases me that Terra Nova was a factor but yes, it looks a Mechwarrior clone and quite franky I did buy it because of that).
  2. I can make numbers up because the publishers also make numbers up as piracy lowering their sales. Piracy is not theft because you dont go to a shop, get the game and run out without paying for it, doing that is theft and the publisher losses money since its a manufactured copy that was not sold because someone taken it. They make a leap with saying piracy does the same because the manufactured copies were not sold to justify losses, its nothing but smoke and mirrors since they cannot honestly say someone would buy their game if they could not downloaded it. The people that profit from piracy are the companies that sell copy protection since piracy helps then when they pull numbers out of their ass to show how sales are lost due to it, I agree that they do lose sales but I highly doubt they are any place near the numbers they pull out of their ass. They blame piracy because "pass the bucket" is popular, its easier to say to the stockholders that they failed their expected sales numbers due to piracy that to say they invested on a ****ty game that lacked the appeal to make their expected sales numbers. Same is happing with the DVD market since its cooling down and guess who they blame? Piracy. Not the fact they make a ****ty game that taken a loss during its theater run and somehow people would buy billions of copies of their ****ty movie in DVD format. Not that is new, the rise on music piracy was due to the music labels got greedy and raised CD prices when the music market was high (due to low CD prices) and people started to be more careful with what they spend their money on.
  3. That was my entire run in Guild Wars, I completed the game once, got another character in south Shiverpeaks and a last one in the Jungle. So there are about 3 months in there, I stop playing even before the "summer expansion" come out because I was bored. Another thing GW is more a co-op game, its easy to do the quests with just the henchman but the missions require players and that is likely why I played for so long.
  4. Sorry but I can not buy it and play it, if I dont intended to buy it in the first place the only thing I am doing is supplying the publisher with a number of someone that played the game without buying it. So how that hurts then? I did not intended to buy the game, I only did because it was free. That is why publishers are full of it when they pull piracy hurting then because if there was no piracy the number of people that would buy their games would not raise to even 1/10 of the people that downloaded and played the game.
  5. You cannot rent PC games, in fact most PC games stop offering demos. You can rent console games but that is like renting movies, its not a demo and there are console game demos. Also you end up backing me up because there are NO PC GAME RENTAL (not a legal one anyway).
  6. People that like a game will likely buy it. People that download a game are likely not going to buy it in thr first place. You want a example? I downloaded The Sims, I liked it so much I brought the game and all the expansions, I also got the Sims 2 when it come out and all its expansions.
  7. Mkreku argument over piracy is rather false. Piracy is the same, the diference was that years ago there was no mass distribution in place (the internet), THAT is what changed. You could always get a pirate copy, the diference is you had to go out and buy it as now you simply download it and then burn a copy. I owned a ZX Spectrum that read magnetic tapes so I could easy get a game and use a normal tape recorder to copy the game. What happens these days is that piracy is more visible but its not hurting anyone besides the people that profited from the paralel market with selling pirated copies since now people can get then from free.
  8. Sorry but MMORPGs are designed as time sinks, WoW is a huge time sink that I played for about 2 months, I dont exactly regret that but it became very clear to me the only way you can play a MMORPG without getting bored out of your wits with XP farming is with a network of friends and I dont have the time and patience to create one.
  9. Recently I read a article about Origin and how what happened when EA brought the company. They were a known respectable company but what happened was "EA given enough rope for then to hang thenselves with", they simply were inresponsible and EA set in to make sure the money was proper used and that lead to the state that Origin Systems is now.
  10. Because now you have a invester that drop 300 millions on you and wants a return of his investment so naturaly they have some control over projects. Original and creative projects are always a bigger risk so they are pushed back as other safer less original creative projects take over ... the problem is the market IS full of those and they only real way you make in the industry is being original and creative BUT that is not how investors look since "safe sequels" always produced more money but they will dry up on the long run, Tomb Raider is a example of that.
  11. Well its unrealistic because of all the cry babies that complained that those sections were too slow in KotOR. That what happen when you "listen" to the "fanbase" and design by committee ... phail.
  12. Yes... I like the idea "a closed network is better that a open network" too, reminds me of several european regimes in 1930's-40's.
  13. The problem is that in previous as we leveled up the world started to run out of creatures to present a challange, there was no such thing as a "level 4 orc" unless we assign then classes and were in 3rd ed by doing so. Yes, there was the alternative of raising its Hit Dice but that required decontruction of the creature into basic stats, not a easy task. 3rd ed "corrected" the issue by making pretty much everything having a basis set of stats and allowed DMs to scale the creatures in power as needed to challange the player, its far better system that the whole "wild guessing" of creatures (since we know what classes and stats is the monsters in MM are using in 3rd ed) or the "we run out of goblins, its orcs turn now".
  14. ID4 is the closest movie we have to a "The War of the Worlds" adaptation to modern days ... if you look close you can spot the similarities. I like ID4 because it did not tried to be anything else that it is, thats the problem with a lot of the "big names" directors that appear to lost the idea of filming a movie and instead are working for their oscar nomination (or their inflated ego in Lucas case).
  15. Well I enjoyed the Commandos line ... well the first 2. They spanish developed. Also I never played but there is "the Longest Adventure", also I also have to refere to "Alone in the Dark" one of the first survival horror games. Also there is Tomb Raider that was done by Core (british) that I enjoyed the firsts as 3d plataform games. Also there is Gothic (german) that even if I hated the combat system had some good ideas (like NPCs going home and being aware of intruders in their home), also I-War a flight combat system developed by a now defunt british developer. Edit: I missed this gem. Rockstar North formerly based in Dundee, Scotland, and now located in the Leith area of Edinburgh.
  16. Dont know ... that states nohing but "hey, we got Sam and Max!" What they will do with it?
  17. Yes, there are a lot of canadian development. But many games were made in europe, the diference is that when the US adapted the Atari europe adapted the ZX Spectrum and we all know that the PC evolved more from the Atari. And I am not going to bother wuth links, there are (and were) many frech and british developement houses and I can even mention that we have a Xbox GotY developed by none other that Starbreeze, a Sweden developer. As for Sierra anc LucasArts ... well both are known from their adventure games, Sierra became part of VU games as LucasArts is what it is ... As I am at it, I can point out Quantic Dream is based on Paris, France and they created "Omikron - The Nomad Soul" and the yet to be released "Fahrenheit" (known as "Indigo Prophecy" in the USA), Syberia I and II are from MC2-Micro
  18. That is why the classification of the game in europe is +18 (we dont have "AO" rating ... you know the age diference of M and AO rating? ONE YEAR) since +18 is considered to be the age people are considered adults.
  19. Best games come out in america? How you guess that? because most PC publishers were american based? Not anymore with VU games, Atari and Ubisoft being european as well Eidos if Eidos was not much in the toilet. What the US have is EA and Activision, LucasArts is a shadow of it former self, Interplay is dead as Sierra is VU Games. Also guess who made Commandos ... a SPANISH DEVELOPER TEAM! Tomb Raider ... Core Design is British. Alone in the Dark ... Inforgrames (Atari today), french. Heck its a big list if I bother to check who exactly made what. As for Japan being second ... give me a break, Japan IS the largest market of video games, perhaps its second on PC but its by FAR larger that the US AND Europe combined in Consoles. We buy "your crap" that is being financed ... in euros.
  20. There are not many sports games, actually Konami does quite well in europe with their soccer games as there is also CM (Campioship Manager) and other soccer games that are rated better that FIFA. EA does not set the standarts because there is hardly competition in most of the sports they publish for, they cannot dominate soccer because the cost would FAR outweight their profits ... if they tried they would sink and that is why they are unable to dominate the soccer sports sims, because other companies can get official leagues, teams and national teams. They dominate US sports because such sports dont have much expression outside the US and Canada, easy to get the leagues and teams that matter and dominate with name recogniton. As for The Sims ... Maxis is unique, they made it big with The Sims (EA was after Sim City BTW) and so EA fears messing too much with Maxis since they again and again stay up in the sales charts. But beyond TS and SC Maxis only started Spore now, they had a line of "Sims" that they no longer develop.
  21. Not only that but the textures are god damn awful, people will be scarred for live if they watch it. It would be AO based ONLY on those painful textures, its like a terrorist attack on your optic nerves.
  22. Well I belive that ESRB was started by publisher thenselves to provide warning labels over content. What ESRB wants to do is the same as issue a rating to a movie over what was left in the cutting room, the problem with publishers is they created a reviewing board to issue labels and lost control over it. That does not happen in europe and you know why? Because each country reviews game content and issue a label that may or may not be the same as Pegi rating (Pegi is the european equivalent of ESRB, except they do THEIR JOB instead of playing politics) so if Pegi decided to act that dumb the countries review boards could simply override whatever they label it (as they often do). Its at times and thing like this I am pround of being european ... that kinda crap does not happen in good old europe.
  23. Origin was brought off in 1992, they were hardly "little guys" and what killed Origin was Ultima Online ... EA seen that as a cash cow and pulled all Origin resources into it. EA is not that bad but they have the habbit of streamline games to a point what was original is gone, Westwood C&C games were interesting but it seens they abandoned the C&C universe and Westwood did other things (Lands of Lore for example) and now Westwood is gone. That is the problem of EA, they want to streamline game design and simply publish the latest trend on the market and so they will never be inovative, just following someone footsteps. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Arts
  24. The older reference is that R.A. Salvatore had access to the 2nd ed ranger class before it was published and so made Drizzt (first featured in "The Crystal Shard") around the unpublished 2nd ed Ranger but there are several 1st edition "oddities" on the novel since the 2nd edition was not completed and Salvatore unlikely had access to all of the incomplete ruleset. Due to Drizzt success some point fingers saying Drizzt created the 2nd ed Ranger as its the way around. From what I recalled he changed little with 3rd edition since there was not many changes, most is simply cosmetic. Nothing like some novel I read about some half elf girl that ends up as a cleric of two goddess ... nothing like completly ignore the character generation chapter of FRCS ...
  25. Because its D&D you idiot. I blame the damn novels for the sheer amount of trash we end up having in the rules, I abandoned FR because it seen the only thing that advanced the setting was the novels as the setting designers appear to taking a break. D&D rules also usuall work, unlike the bastardizations we usually see in cRPGs ... heck there is damn good reason why FR:DS flop despite having R.A. Salvatore writting the story, PATRICK STEWART !!!, thong wearing drow females and its gameplay being based on the LotR "cRPGs" games ...
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