I’ve heard rumors that Bethesda is under agreement to kick out another Elder Scrolls title soon, to follow up on Oblivion. Something about how they want it on Xbox 360 and not the next gen platform. So there’s that.
Currently on my most salivate list: Medieval Total War II and Bioshock. Bioshock looks better everyday, you can’t beat run & gun in a Randite dystopia.
Well, it might not be vaporware, but that is about the only positive thing about it.
The screenshots may look amazing, but the thing itself is not as good as it seems.
A gaming program in the Netherlands, GameKings, has played a version of it and were very, very critical.
The problem is that the game has been delayed, moved over to another studio, delayed again, moved to another studio.
Apparently the developer had also borrowed money from local Russian mafia, which causes some more problems.
The build they played looked allright, but there was only the multi-player which means that they are nowhere near completion.
It might be released sometime next year, but it is already outdated.
It looks like a game from 2 years ago, not the way it should look in this day and age. (not my words, but the words of the gamepress)
I’d be a bit surprised if they come out with another completely new Elder Scrolls; I think it would be more likely that they would release an expansion pack for Oblivion (like they released Tribunal and Bloodmoon for Morrowind).
The release I’m waiting for from Bethesda is Fallout 3, but I don’t think they’ve even hinted at a release date yet. (linky)
After playing Morrowind, and then the expansions I’d hope that this is the path that they would take. I love being able to challenge my already super powerful character without having to start over from scratch.
Sid Meier’s Railroads I’m all aquiver over
My opinion: games were better 2 years ago.
I’d rather play a creative and unique game with a 2-year-old engine than the swill released on the FPS front lately.
I’d rather play a good 3DRealms game with a Build engine than a boring game with the best 3D graphics.
Yeah that’s what I said, but apparently it’s Microsoft that’s offering the incentive to kick out another full title asap. It’s just a rumor right now though, but supposedly it may be as soon as 1/1.5 years for the sequel. Who knows.
And ditto on the Fallout 3, I really hope they don’t screw that up.
WHO WANTA SOME WANG!?!?
(greatest lan game ever)
Do your duty to the Imperium of Man:[ul][]Buy Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. Lead the Blood Ravens chapter of the Imperial Space Marines to victory… or else![]Get Winter Assault, the first expansion set - or just get the gold edition of DoW. Give those traitorous scum a proper seein’ too as the Imperial Guard.[*]Wait with baited breath for Dark Crusade, which will introduce the ages-old Necrons and the fledgling Tau.[/ul]Gird your armour, and look to your weapons for strength.
The BF2142 demo is out.
First, I want to say: I played bf1942 (mostly desert combat) for a ridiculous number of hours. I’ve bought every BF game so far. I really want DICE to make a quality game, because I like the games in concept a lot.
But this is just sad. After a billion sales, and years of engine development, it’s still a buggy mess, and filled with bad game design decisions.
First, and most importantly - my A64/6800GT system isn’t very out of date, but I can’t run at even modest 1024x768/medium graphics settings without constant little freezeups. About 30 times a minute, I’ll freeze up for about a tenth of a second to a quarter of a second. That’s really annoying. When I’m in a firefight, it gets much worse. It’s hard to do something like kill a guy standing 10 feet in front of me.
Second, STUPID, STUPID engine bugs/lack of features/whatever persist despite years and years of work and what must be a huge development team. They’ve got to have the dumbest quality assurance people in the business working for them. For example: This is something that bothered me with the original bf1942, and 6 (?) years later, it’s still there - if you type fast, it drops characters. It’s ridiculous. It won’t even let you type a full sentence without mangling it if you type at a fast speed at all.
There are no restrictions on spamming by spaz game retards. The game uses a comm system that allows people to select predefined messages (like “ENEMY SPOTTED”) and has them vocalized to everyone on their team. When you have 20+ people on a team, and EVERY ONE OF THE SPAZZY GAMER RETARDS has to hit “ENEMY SPOTTED” 6 TIMES IN A ROW EVERY TIME THEY SEE AN ENEMY, you have nothing but constant, pointless noise spam in the game.
This is incredibly retarded. First, no one should be able to spam. This would be so easy to fix - make it so you can’t use the same comm in a row, or even just make it so you can only use one every 10 seconds. As they are, they are useless - you have to tune them out because all people do is spam irrelevant information, often on purpose in the 13-year-old-attention-whore-spaz sort of way. And there is, as far as I can see, no mechanism for ignoring someone who constantly abuses this. You just have to put up with noise spam constantly. It drowns out hearing enemies and stuff… you might as well play the game with the sound off… which I may actually start doing. How pathetic is that?
There’s a weird latency on doing some stuff. I only had a ping of 20, and while forward movement was nearly instantaneous, when I moved backwards, there was a half second delay before it kicked in. There were a lot of weird little bugs like that. The BF2 engine should be mature, yet it’s like playing an early beta of something.
I have more stuff, but I can’t really remember it offhand.
No shit.
Do you want to wash Wang, or do you want to watch Wang wash wang?!
Okay, so the glitchy freezes stopped. Is it because I turned the graphic quality down? No… actually, I turned it up. No idea wtf that’s all about sirs.
I’m looking forward to NightFall, the latest addition to Guild Wars. It should be coming in a couple of weeks.
I was anxiously awaiting Hellgate:London, which was supposed to be released in Octocber, but has been delayed to early 2007.
I am excited to see that Jade Empire will be coming to the PC.
OMG!! WTFBBQ!! How did I miss this? Finally finally finally, TA2 is on the way.
Spooooooooooooooooooooooooooge
Now all they need to do is bring out System Shock 3 and a proper Deus Ex 2 and I will be a very happy man. Probably a bachelor again, but happy nonetheless.
Medieval 2 demo now available. Figured you guys would be interested.
You figured right. Medieval Total War was the only one in the series I never played. I will correct that oversight with this sequel.
Looks like it requires SSE2-compliant processors. So pre-64 Athlons are out, as well as PIIIs if anyone uses those anymore.
I know a bunch of people who do QA for EA, although I don’t think any of them worked specifically on BattleField. I can tell you they’re a smart, hard working bunch of people. Buggy, poorly implemented software is seldom the fault of a bad QA team. Usually, it’s the fault of developers who are so incompetent that every time they fix something, they break three other things, or marketers who push the game out the door before any has time to fix it, or some producer dragging his feet because of some office power struggle.
I did QA on a little game called 25 to Life. This title was in QA for almost two years. The bug database ran to (IIRC) almost 12,000 bugs. And when it was released, it was still a semi-functional piece of shit. Why? Because the developers (an independent studio we contracted with to make the game) were quite possibly the stupidest people on Earth. Not only could they not put together a decent video game to save their lives, they actively resented being told what was wrong with their game. They would go out of their way to avoid fixing bugs.
My favorite example: console manufacturers have a list of requirements that each game has to meet in order to release a game for their console. Mostly it’s just functionality stuff, making sure that different games all work more or less the same way, so it doesn’t confuse the customer. But they’ve also got some fidgety legal stuff, like you can only show the Sony logo at the very beginning of the game, you can’t deface it in any way, and you can’t use it anywhere else in the game except the very beginning. They also don’t want you showing the console itself, or any of its periphreals, anywhere in the game itself.
So, 25 to Life has one level set in a shopping mall. In this mall is an electronics store. And in this electronics store, there’s a kiosk holding what is clearly a PS2. They even made a texture file of the distinctive ridged front of the machine. And this is in the X-Box version, too. Now, if Sony doesn’t want a PS2 in their games, you can imagine how Microsoft feels about having a PS2 in their games. So, it gets bugged. “Take it out,” we tell them, “we can’t get it published if you leave it in there.” A few weeks later (they weren’t exactly quick on the draw in getting stuff fixed, which is another issue entirely) the bug gets marked “fixed” in the db, and we get a new build. The guy who found the bug goes and looks. The PS2 is still there, but they’ve made it square. PS2s are rectangular, so this can’t possibly be a PS2, right? Wrong. Bug is fail fixed and goes back to them. “Take it out,” we say. “Just take the whole thing out entirely.” They mark it fixed again. It’s still there, with another minor change in the dimensions. Still not good enough. Back it goes. We get it again, and this time, they’ve written “GamePube” on it in that distinctive blue-purple fading script that’s on the PS2. Nice. It looks even more like a PS2, except now we’re possibly infinging on a Nintendo copyright, and we’re not even releasing a Nintendo version of the game! That’s really going to please the suits at Microsoft, in particular. “Look! The hot new game on your platform is going to include free advertising for your two biggest competitors! Or possibly get you sued by them!” Finally, the guy who wrote the bug suggests that they leave the kiosk, but make it look like someone broke into it and jacked the console. It’ll make the game feel more “street.”* This appeals to their primitive intellects, the offending console is removed, and, some three or four months after it was originally written, the bug is finally closed.
And then we got to move on to explaining to these guys why they can’t have a Coca-Cola vending machine in the middle of one of their levels.**
And that’s all just about basic IP stuff. The joke at the office was we should just title the game, “Grand Theft: Intellectual Property Violation.” All they had to understand was “Don’t put copyrighted images and brand names into your game,” and up until a month before they shipped, they still hadn’t gotten that through their collective skulls. You can imagine the trouble they had figuring out collision detection and AI.
I’m not saying that there’s no such thing as a bad QA team. I’ve worked with a few morons, and although I’ve been lucky so far, it’s entirely possible that a QA office could end up staffed entirely or predominently by idiots. But the fact of the matter is, QA doesn’t really require a lot of smarts. It’s really about endurance. You don’t have to be a genius to realize that if your avatar can walk through solid objects, something’s not quite right. You do have to be willing to sit there for up to twelve hours a day, seven days a week, making sure that every solid object in the game is really solid. Finding the bugs is easy. Getting the developers to actually address the bugs is what’s hard. When you find a bug in a game you’ve just purchased, odds are it’s in a database somewhere in the offices of the company who made it. They just didn’t care enough to fix it.
Sorry for the rant, I just had to defend my peeps in quality assurance. QA represent!
[sub]*The game was programmed in Salt Lake City, which isn’t exactly reknowned for it’s urban black street culture. It had four difficulty levels: easy, medium, hard, and OMFG! Because nothing says “gangsta” like internet chat room leet speak. I think it was Snoop Dog who recorded that infamous rap hit, “U wnt 2 pwn sum suXXors lolz?”
**Their first fix for this one was to cut off the word “Coca-” and expand the texture with the word “Cola” on it to fill up the empty space. But it was still in that distinctive, swoopy red-and-white font. It’s arguably the single most globally recognized corporate brand in the history of advertising, and these dumbfucks thought nobody would notice.[/sub]
You’re right. Perhaps the QA people are giving the developers the right messages, but the developers are making bad design choices anyway.
I’ve just never encountered a big-budget, popular game, with as many fundamental, easilly correctable flaws as the BF series. Not even close.