Sigh, this makes me sad. I kind of knew it was going to end poorly.
I guess I’ll wait for another 3-6 months and revisit the game.
On the other hand, WOW! Someone is doing a some-what-sequel to Planescape: Torment?! Woot!
Shut up and take my money!
On that note, Dark Souls is entirely, incredibly fair. I wouldn’t say the game is “balanced” per se: there are a lot of enemies with cheap attacks, and many more who will try to knock you off ledges and such. Yet it’s not nearly as hard as people say provided you accept the nature of the game. Persistance and patience are necessary, but you will be rewarded for them.
And the game positively encourages you to act like a cheap jerkward right back tot he monsters. This game isn’t big on “honorable” combat and anything you can get away with is a valid tactic. get into somebody’s face and stunlock? Do it. Stand back and shred that monster with spells? A-yup. Abuse the piss out of enhancement magic? Yes indeed!
I’m starting to feel a lot better about not getting that job with Origin Support that I interviewed for last summer.
Yeah, right. You died six times before you even got off the Undead Asylum, didn’t you? Snuggly the Crow killed you twice!
I died SEVEN times, thankyouverymuch. And Snuggly only killed me once.
But they were all fair deaths!
Try Jumping!
I wish the Bullfrog guys would have a kickstarter for a new Dungeon Keeper. I know I’d back that one. I’m looking forward to the Torment, Wasteland, Planetary Annihilation, SpaceVenture and whatever the Doublefine thing gets called, all of which I backed.
I really don’t mean to threadshit, but doesn’t this sort of thing happen a lot when you buy a new release? Seems like about 1 in 10 of the games I buy that have been out a while don’t work quite right, don’t work without some goofing around, or don’t work at all, and good luck trying to get your money back if you bought online.
Some server glitches and early bugs that need to be worked out, sure. In this case you have servers that are going down more often than the homecoming queen on prom night, EA turning game functionality off, and retailers refusing to continue to sell the game until the problems are fixed, and that’s on top of a lot of people already being slightly to seriously pissed off about the always-online requirement for this game in the first place.
The good news is, I’ve been obsessively playing Tropico 4 ever since I bought it on sale yesterday, so thanks again to hrhomer for that recommendation.
As they say in screen writing, “Always kill your darlings”.
I wanted to try Crysis 3, but I’m steering clear of EA after what they did with Battlefield 3. It’s as though they intentionally tried to ruin the game. It needs IE, so to run the game you have to start 3 programs. And it doesn’t display ping in game.
But this problem with “authentication” is not really unique to EA. Ever since the Internet age, companies have been making use of this for DRM and as an excuse to release unfinished games, planning to patch them later.
Not quite Bullfrog, and the funding period is over, but how’s this?
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/subterraneangames/war-for-the-overworld
It’s not an official sequel, but it might as well be. It’s so similar that I’m surprise they haven’t been sued over it.
From the HuffyPost article:
WHY do companies continue to do this? It’s a deal-breaker for me, and I’ve passed on a number of apps and games in favor of ones I can use/play without Wi-Fi, or checking in with Big Brother.
Thanks! I’m Going to keep an eye on this one.
I really liked playing games at one point…but the internet killed it…in more ways than one. :rolleyes:
“Thrill Kill”. completed by virgin. EA bought em. decided weeks before the release date that it wasn’t the image they wanted to portray for their company and canned it. They licensed the engine to an abyssmal “wu-tang clan” fighting game and a couple x-men games.
They make online play mandatory because they can squeeze more money from people. Oh sure, they MARKET it as being more convenient for the gamer, somehow, but what it boils down to is that the companies think that they can get more money from us. In reality, though, I think that it’s a dealbreaker for a lot of people. I won’t buy a single-player game that requires me to be connected in order to play. I’ve had my internet connection knocked out too many times.
I was reading my nook in a restaurant, and the owner asked me about it. He was thinking of getting one for his granddaughter, but not if she had to be online to read it. I explained how you had to download the books from a connection, but once the books were downloaded, you read them offline…and I also told him about various wifi locations where she could connect, free of charge, in order to download books and updates. I got the distinct impression that he was going to get his granddaughter the nook, but if the device required her to be online when she used it, then it would have been a dealbreaker.
On the subject of even single-player requiring you to be always online: I officially declare that the PC platform is in DRM-hell.
If I buy a new PC game I consider myself lucky if I manage to start the actual game within an hour (not including install time). Because even if everything works first time, and that’s rare, you probably have to go to some site and create an account and wait for an auto email and be spammed and all that BS.
And as for old games: forget it. After about 3 years the support will disappear so if you’ve changed your OS or hardware in that time, your old DVDs are coasters.
</rant>
The official line is that a lot of the AI processing is being done server-side, to let people with lower-end computers play the game without sacrificing quality.
There is also the resource-sharing aspect of the new Sim City; if I had a surplus of power, I could sell it to a city in the same region. If I had a crime problem, I could get help from a neighbour.
Although these innovations could well have come from a discussion of, “We want to have Sim City use always-online DRM. How can we wrap this up in a way that excuses it?”