Slowtrain

Why do gamers like playing war so much?

Ultimately, I agree. WHich is why I referred to an ideal state vs a real world state. However, people's expectations are that the government will attempt to protect them and will hold the government accountable for that. And while a lot of governmental accountability is far beyond the reach of the average citizen, there is still more accountablity than large scale business, which essentially operates with impunity outside of governmental regulation. I don't think I said it was "bad". I merely pointed out that businesses have as their singular goal to make money. It is illogical to expect them to be concerned about anything not directly related to making money unless someone (ie the government) is tapping them on the shoulder occasionally and saying, hey, you can't do that, it may be good for you but its bad for everyone else. edit: I just looked back at my original response and I did kind of say, indirectly, that business was bad. SO let me clarify that a bit by saying I don't think that businesses making money is bad (at all). I do think that there is a need for strong government regulation of how businessess operate, with the largest businessess that have potentially the greatest effects on the world needing the most regulation.

otoh, though I have some problems with FO3, overall I think it succeeded to do what Oblivion failed to do, so I give Beth a lot of credit for fixing the major design flaws in Oblivion. And I'm curious to see if those fixes apply to upcoming ES5, or if ES5 is going to simply stick exactly with the Oblivion formula.

I wanted to like Oblivion. I tried to like Oblivion. Oblivion is the type of game I SHOULD like. Big, open, non-linear, stats and quests, flaming swords and monsters. That's my stuff. But in the end, I couldn't do it.

Well, mostly because in an ideal state a business exists exist for no other reason than to make as much money as possible regardless of who or what is damaged in the process while a government exists to protect its people. Granted those are ideal states and in the real world its mostly a matter of degrees rather than extremes. But it wasn't too long ago thast unregulated business had 8 year old children working in coal mines for pennies a day. So. And yes, govenments are models of inefficiency and waste but so are large businesses as well. Ineffiency and waste seems to generally scale mostly with size rather than type. SO I don't think there is much to recommend one over the other in that sense.

If by inspiring you mean stupid, then OK. Hmmm. You may have a point. But then I'm usually doing stupiod things, so being inspired by stupid makes sense. Hey, it's definitely an A for effort. But probably an F for intelligence.

All opinions on internet message boards are useless, both good and bad, whether about games or the latest political crisis. It's all just a bunch of people talking out their ass: me, you, everyone else. But that's the whole point. If you are going to take that away, you might as well shut down the internet. There's nothing good about Oblivion. Except the graphics, I guess. if one os into that. And yes, I'm passing judgement on the whole game. Every last second of it.

If by inspiring you mean stupid, then OK.

That would be like putting poop on a poop sandwich.

Both to some degree. Bethesda's work on Fallout 3 made me a lot more interested in seeing what happens with the next TES game. Not that FO3 was great, but the improvement over Oblivion was huge. Perhaps Oblivion was merely some sort of freakish anomaly or terribleness. I loved Diablo 1, was bored with Diablo 2, so who knows with D3. But I am interested.

In a way though, the pimping that devs and publishers do kinda bites them on the butt. No games can ever be as good as they are hyped to be.

Bethesda has been quiet lately on their 2 main franchises. Nothing on NV and no word yet on ES5. I would guess they'll start pimping one of them out pretty soon. Bethesda seems to work hard for max exposure for their games these days.

Any substantive information about the game will have to wait for Bethesda, but the project is going well and has been a lot of fun so far. Awesome.

I'll just point out here that if F03's cost to content ratio had been the same as the DLC's, FO3 for PC would have cost something like $500 US. Not that they are directly comoarable but as a gamer, DLC appears a frightening money sink. If I am a shareholder, then yeah, I'm screaming the praises of DLC from the rooftops. And watching my dividend checks roll in.

Obsidian: Not much since Sega was paying the bills for it for the most part. Its the publishers dime you are spending not the developers generally. Bioware: Nothing since Bioware is now a arm of EA, it cost EA not Bioware. True. But I wasn't really making a point about where the money was coming from. rather I was making a point that a lot of money was spent on games that were cancelled after years in development or on games that were rebooted after a substantial period of development. In other words, a lot of money, somebody's money, was spent on content that was tossed. If a company of any sort makes a habit of this sort of thing they are going to have financial issues.

in Saw X victims will no doubt be horribly dismembered by hard copies of internet top ten lists.

But...but....but they are so fascinating. Oh wait, no they're not. OK, you win.

Bigotry and intolerance tend to breed bigotry and intolerance. Which is understandable, but not acceptable imo. A person can't legislate out of existence everything idea they disapprove of. I mean, they can try, but it's not going to work. No matter how much legislation or amendments they pass, they will always be something "unacceptable" that still needs to be removed. Easier just to learn to tolerate a varied world.

Its all a personal line where the gamer feels like they aren't getting value for the money. If Bethesda's DLC price to content ratio was standard for all games, I would neither want to nor be able to afford to spend my money on gaming. $10 for 1-2 hours of gaming isn't worth it So for me DLC's are too expensive at their current price point.

Yeah, I didn't have a problem with Fallout 3's DLC, other than the fact most of it was pretty bad. My point was that the more you break content apart into smaller pieces and then sell those pieces individually, the more money the content will generate.

From a developer/publisher/shareholder point-of-view, it's a no-brainer. You can make a lot more money selling the same content piecemeal vs in one big package. Look at what Bethesda accomplished with its DLC: Each DLC cost $10 US, or roughly 1/5 of the cost of the US Fallout 3 PC version. Did any of the DLC's contain anything even remotely close to 1/5 of Fallout 3's content or require 1/5 of Fallout 3's resources to make? Of course not. Not even in the same ballpark. Yet gamer's happily spent the money and Bethesda made a lot of money on them. Will they do it again, but even more so in the next ES game or Fallout 4? I'm pretty sure the answer is yes. Sell a skeleton of a game for a standard price. Get people into the game then start chucking small bits of dlc at them fron every angle. It's the best way to make oodles of cash.

And people wonder why sequelitis is an issue. I don't think people wonder WHY precisely. People know why. It just becomes kind of boring after a while when all you get is sequels and reboots and remakes. Its that balance where I know why something is done and I understand why, but I don't really like it, as a gamer.

If I were gay this would probably bother me. Since I'm not I can only say I find it incredibly amusing that people are so frightened by the idea of gay marriage that they have to amend their consitution. And b0rk it in the process. It's hard to hide stupidity on this scale.