Slowtrain

On what planet is this? If I buy something that doesn't work, I can take it back forr a refund and buy something else. It's hardly an alien concept. And you should, but you seem to have a major issue with "bugs" in general, I'm just saying its impractical. My last 2 game purchases both had game stopping bugs. Not minor bugs like the mouse cursor flickers briefly over part of the GUI, but bugs, like I can't play the game type bugs. One of them involved a cutscene not ending properly and causing a total lock up of the pc. I'll agree that it was most likely some kind of system config conflict, since some people had the problem, but some didn't. I agree that it may not be practical for the coders to be able to account for every possible conflict on a system, but I should be able to take the game back for a refund when that happens. The other bug involved a trigger not activating that basically made it impossible to talk to a person who needed to be talked to advance the game. Lots of people experience this problem as well, and neither the devs nor the publishers ever even admitted to the problem. Last I heard there was no workaround except to load saves from further and further back and see if you can avoid the problem. This is an in-game bug and is completely unacceptable. Again though, simply having the option for a refund would be sufficient. Its the fact that developers and publishers can simply take my money without ever having to worry about giving it back if what I paid for doesn't work right. That is what bugs me so much.

Why move at all? ALl a shooter really needs is a gameplay mechanic for firing a weapon and some sort of object to fire at. Why not just have an FPS where obects move by you and you try to shoot them when they pass a designated point? If you reduce a shooter to all you NEED, then that is all you have to have. But really of course, the MORE OPTIONS one has in a FPS, the more fun the gameplay is, heh? Lean, jump, crawl, prone, swim; they all add to the experience and make it better. You may not make use of lean, but that hardly means it should simply be removed. Or the developers should have. SInce it is their game. Again though, if a game is so easy, I don't see the complaint. Unless you are afraid of crashes. How did Bioshock do that? Just retart the game at your last autosave o something? I can't remember? And yes, personal attacks make me blush. But that's about it.

On what planet is this? If I buy something that doesn't work, I can take it back forr a refund and buy something else. It's hardly an alien concept.

lol. Stabbed through the heart. Yeah, a lot of pc gamers do not wait calmly AT ALL for a patch. WHich I understand. But a lot seem to tolerate this idea that when you buy the game it will be a bug-ridden mess and that the patches will fix it. If gamers could hold onto their panties and not rush out and buy games until they were fixed, developers and publishers would stop releasing them broken. They only do it because they can get away with it. My comparison really is that DRM doesn't cause nearly so much problem as generally buggy games (not that it doesn't cause ANY problems, mind you), yet people really don't seem to have any universal outrage over the blatant offences of publishers and developers releasing buggy games. I purchased 2 pc games at release this last year, both had game stopping bugs. None of them had to do with DRM. You wouldn't actually know a bug ridden mess if it came and sat next to you... Really, games have bugs, on all platforms. The problem with the PC is simple, lots of hardware combinations, and the cost of development for such a dynamic platform. Dev budgets for a PC game are less than for a console games. It's alot easier to develop for a console, my ps3 dev kit is the same as the next one, infact, I can even run my code on another PS3 dev kit and know that it has all the same parts. My PC has a different GFX card. That's a lovely potential rendering problem. Also, PC code tends to be rather sloppy when it comes to memory management, why? because you have so much... It also doesn't have the same sort of care taken over it because it will likely perform very different on a different machine, it's just not worth the extra development time, which may only effect 2% of users. You can't be certain that it will perform the same from machine to machine. Speaking to a few of the guys who ported Half Life 2 to PS3, they were not impressed by the Source Engine as an engine intended for a console, an absolute mess of an engine. To get straight to the point, the whole problem with PC's is the nature of the beast itself. It's generic and often over powered, you can't make something that is awesome and stable for everyone without alot of money behind the project (Blizzard are pretty much the only developers I know that try to actually deliver to such a large ordiance, and even they have to patch the hell out of stuff). whatever, dude. Rationalization is free and easy. If there was an option to get my money back when I buy a game that doesn't work, none of this would bother me so much. There isn't. It must be nice to have a job that takes my ****ing money and doesn't give me a working product or any guaranatee that I'll ever get one.

lol. Stabbed through the heart. Yeah, a lot of pc gamers do not wait calmly AT ALL for a patch. WHich I understand. But a lot seem to tolerate this idea that when you buy the game it will be a bug-ridden mess and that the patches will fix it. But a lot of gamers don't tolerate it. It does cause an outrage among gamers when a game is released buggy. It cannot cause apriori outrage, unlike DDRM, because no developer/publisher will admit that they are about to release a buggy game - see them do that and then see the outcry that would ensue! But we gamers pretty much know that every game is going to be buggy. I mean, we PRAISE games that are mostly bug free. The game industry knowingly releases buggy games. There is no other explanation for what we see in games. SO there is indeed a priori knowledge. Yet gamers keep right on buying these games without forcing game developers and publishers to change their ways. Look at Obsidian: Even in their short history as a developer, they have already a pretty bad history of buggy game releases. But most people on this forum are going to rush right out and buy Alpha Protocol and/or alien crpg without waiting. THEN they will all squawk and complain until Feargus threatens to shut down the board. AGAIN. The bugs are there because we as gamers let them get away with having insufficient resources deveoted to QA and clean game design. Because devs and pubs KNOW that gamers are going to buy them anyway. Dude, once they have your money, there is no recourse for ever getting it back. Unless you are lucky enough to have a store that will return open software. (which used to be totally normal, btw). Gamers ARE getting outraged about DRM, and It IS making a difference. Or appears to be. WHich is good. But I just think it is getting outraged about the wrong thing.

lol. Stabbed through the heart. Yeah, a lot of pc gamers do not wait calmly AT ALL for a patch. WHich I understand. But a lot seem to tolerate this idea that when you buy the game it will be a bug-ridden mess and that the patches will fix it. If gamers could hold onto their panties and not rush out and buy games until they were fixed, developers and publishers would stop releasing them broken. They only do it because they can get away with it. My comparison really is that DRM doesn't cause nearly so much problem as generally buggy games (not that it doesn't cause ANY problems, mind you), yet people really don't seem to have any universal outrage over the blatant offences of publishers and developers releasing buggy games. I purchased 2 pc games at release this last year, both had game stopping bugs. None of them had to do with DRM.

No, running is gay. Why put it in a game at all? Quicksave? Why do you care? You just said it was too easy? Actually you said it was "waaaaaay to easy" to be precise. ALso, out of curiosity, why did you quicksave in Bioshock? You couldn't die.

I can't really remember Fear. Except for office buildings. ANd I had feet. I know I had feet.

Do you have a box with both French and English or do you have another edition? That's the one! A Best Buy French/English combo special. I probably took the express install rather than the custom. Probably I could have unchecked it in the custom.

Really? No leaning? bleah.

What do you think would be a difference between the simplistic way WoW does things and a different way another MMORPG might do something? Can you give an example or two of a simplistic WoW gameplay aspect? Do you think there are other MMORPG's that present an alternative?

You speak too soon. Wait until you've passed Red Forest before forming an opinion. Well, to be fair, I felt Red Forest was where the original STALKER sort of fell apart as well. All the exploration and non-linearity went out of the game at that point and it became almost, but not quite, a generic shooter. I was hoping for better from this one. It appears I hoped wrong.

I spent quite a long time on Far Cry 2, and I think that's a pretty accurate review. I totally loled when Bear Grylls ate the rabbit.

Is that because lots of MMORPG'ers tried it out, then went back to WoW only? Or was the interest in either one just not sustainable due to poor game design? Or something else? I'd say a combination, AoC really lacked sustainability. I think the WoW expansion is probably hurting WAR a bit, plus that game has had technical issues. These games have difficult launches. Blizzard makes it all seem so easy! STALKER: Clear Sky installed a WoW trial offer shortcut on my desktop. It just sits there, smirking at me.

Is that because lots of MMORPG'ers tried it out, then went back to WoW only? Or was the interest in either one just not sustainable due to poor game design? Or something else?

I'd say it is a safer proposition than it was before WoW, to be honest. I'm not saying it isn't risky, but there were an awful lot of MMO's that crashed and burned, or never saw the light of day, before WoW came out. Now it seems like the odds are better that an MMO will get to the store shelves, but of course that doesn't guarantee success. That's a good point. The success of WoW has certainly shown that a MMORPG can be an extremely reliable commercial venture. If nothing else it has legitimized the MMORPG as a viable mainstream product. But dethroning WoW with another product? That seems trickier. I'm sure it will happen eventually. Eithe WoW will self-destruct or people will get bored or something new will make a big splash and set a new bar for success. A better bet would be to design a smaller MMORPG witha smaller budget and a smaller subscriber base. Try to offer a real alternative to WoW. Even then though...

Sinking a lot of money into MMORPG development seems a risky proposition as long as WoW is roaming through the bushes bludgeoning all competitors with a ridiculously huge mace.

Still playing STALKER: Clear Sky at my traditonal glacial pace. I've made it through the swamps, cordon, and am now in the garbage. I love STALKER: SoC, but Clear Sky is much better. Its incredible how many of the gameplay mechanics and systems have been fixed. If I sat down and made a list of all the game design problems in SoC, I think ALL of them have been addressed in Clear Sky. Which is amazing. How often is a developer that on top of their game that they are able to do that? Also, with the 1.7 patch, no major bugs. Not even ctd's. My only tiny complaint at this point would be that, unlike Far Cry 2 where everbody shoots at you all the time and not at anyone else ever, Clear Sky is almost a little too peaceful to be an FPS. Its fun hanging around and watching the factions battle each other though. Having spent a good deal of time playing Far Cry 2, it is refreshing to not have every rifle in the gameworld pointed at my player character. The story as usual is a bunch of underwhelming babble that I've pretty much ignored.

Gives one all sorts of confidence in the finished product, doesn't it? lol. They should just hire Linda and Ian Currie to make the game. Although they would probably want no part of the franchise anymore. Not if they were forced to cheap it out for a quick buck.

Yeah, then let's just make NOLF 3 then. Monolith? Or make FLON 1. All original. No Pressures from cranky fans. Monolith?

lol. Remember XCOM Interceptor? Except worse.

On what are you basing that statement? How long was NOLF 2 made? Are any of the developers who made that game still around? Would they have the same freedom from the publisher? There's no basis for saying because they did it once, they can do it again. Ken Levine made a great game in system shock 2 and then failed horribly witrh Bioshock. Every game is its own entity; the circumstances that created one game will never be duplicated a second time. Who cares about making a NOLF sequel anyway. Screw that. Just make a new IP that has the same basic design goals as the NOLF games. How hard is that?

This is one game that is truly about the journey and not the destination. In the vanilla JA2 I usually restart somewhere in the Queen's palace. I also seem to remember the Urban Chaos mod being really good. Does that work with 1.13? I don't recall if they are compatible together or not. The recommended install of 1.13 is on a fresh install of Jag 2 gold patched to 1.12. Probably you best bet for stability is not to mix them. You could check Bear's Pit. I'm sure they would say one way or the other.

Why? Why not?

Any new version of NOLF would probably have none of the charm of the originals anyway. So why bother? Let it stay dead and just start a new project with the same game concepts in mind. oh right, pre-existing brand names = built in audience who can be deceived into purchasing the "new" version of their favorite game. EVen though it has nothing in common. Except the brand. A big W00t! for Hollywood marketing.