PC Game Fun Time

After months of inactivity, the official Team Fortress 2 site has finally been updated with some of the new ideas that are in the pipeline.  Veteran players will be happy to learn that Valve has put some of their people back on the task of upgrading the TF2 experience.

Very soon we should be seeing a few interesting changes to the Engineering class, namely the ability to upgrade both dispensers and teleporters.  Higher level teleporters will cool down more quickly, and higher level dispensers will give out more ammo and health.  The teleporter change in particular could substantially change the balance on some maps where getting troops to the front line is important for the attacking team.  The dispenser change sounds like it will be less notable, but then again it may prove critical for Heavies trying to defend a key point without the assistance of a Medic.

Probably most interesting, however, is that Valve has indicated that the next class pack will be for the Scout.  I for one am very excited to see what unlockables the Scout will gain, and whether we will see some new uses for the class.

I have been a little lax and haven’t really put in much time with TF2 lately.  If Valve can get their act together and starting pushing out some more regular updates, maybe that situation will change.

Another week, another heinous DRM debacle. This time the travesty is with the recent release of Grand Theft Auto IV for the PC, a game that I was really looking forward to because I enjoyed all three of its predecessors on the PlayStation 2, but do not own a “current gen” console system on which to play it. Unfortunately, it looks like the PC release has been completely botched by poor quality control and Digital Restrictions Management issues, to the point that I’m not even considering wasting my money on it.

Let’s do a quick comparison between the console experience and the PC experience for Grand Theft Auto IV, shall we?

• Console
  • Put the game disk into your console and it works.
• Computer
  • Put the game disk into your computer.
  • Go through multiple stages of authorization, including DVD validation, entering a serial key, and entering a code from the manual.
  • SecuROM gets installed (naturally).
  • Mandatory sign-up for both Rockstar Social Club and Windows Live, both of which require email validation.
  • Download the decently sized Windows Live update.
  • The game menu takes forever and a half to display, because the menu is downloaded dynamically from a heavily overloaded server on the Internet each time you launch the game.
  • The game is buggy as hell, with lots of crashes to the desktop, and performs poorly even on high-end hardware.

The game cannot be played without Internet access, even if you are just trying to play the single-player mode. So much for gaming on the go. And if you’re running Windows Vista 64-bit, which you should be because the limit of 4 GB RAM with the 32-bit version is turning into a huge liability, you’re hosed, because the game flat-out does not support 64-bit operating systems.

I have a simple message to the craven idiots responsible for the release of Grand Theft Auto IV on the PC: This is why gamers migrate to consoles, you fools! Instead of wasting your development time on DRM and activation features, you should have spent it on 64-bit compatibility, stability fixes, and performance boosts. In an age when most higher-end PC graphics cards have two GPUs on a single card, Grand Theft Auto IV’s developers had the utter shortsightedness to not even bother including dual-graphics card support, thus guaranteeing that no one can get high quality performance in the game.

Grand Theft Auto IV suffers from a lethal combination of obnoxious DRM and terrible quality. How much longer can this situation go on for before PC gamers collectively exclaim “Enough!” and refuse to buy the rubbish that publishers seem so intent on feeding us?

Good news for all the Fallout lovers out there!  Bethesda Softworks has announced their intention to release a Fallout 3 modding kit / editor, appropriately named the Garden of Eden Creation Kit (G.E.C.K) in December.  Also mentioned in the press release are three pieces of downloadable content scheduled for the next few months.

While I am personally not too excited about downloadable content, the news of a proper modding kit on the horizon has me very happy indeed.  Given the game’s very strong sales numbers, it seems almost certain that we will be seeing some excellent work from the modding community.

It occurs to me reading about this that there may be a somewhat hidden agenda behind the delay in the release of the mod tools for Fallout 3.  While it is fairly common for modding kits to lag behind the releases of their respective games, Bethesda has traditionally been pretty on the ball in terms of getting modding support out there early.  Could there be a political motivation behind the delay?

Simply put, having widespread modding support is now a potential liability for game publishers.  There are all sorts of possibilities for offensive material to be added to a game like Fallout 3.  Even if the shipped product did not contain the content, it is not hard to imagine a mainstream media outlet getting hold of a Fallout 3 child killing mod and creating a “Hot Coffee” style incident.  By December (Fallout 3 was released on October 28), Bethesda is probably betting that the attention will have reached a low enough level for a relatively safe release of the modding kit.

If this reasoning did play a factor in Bethesda’s decision to delay the modding kit, one can hardly blame them.  The last thing any game developer or publisher needs is a potentially very expensive lawsuit.  In any event, I look forward to seeing some high quality custom content for Fallout 3.

Word has reached me from my sources that World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King has has become the all time record holder for one day PC game sales, with 2.8 million copies sold.  At $40 per copy, this comes out to about $112 million in sales.

For comparison purposes, the one day sales record for consoles is currently held by Halo 3 with a figure of $170 million.  At the higher price point of $60 per copy, this again comes out to 2.8 million copies sold in one day.

While one day sales figures are hardly a measure of the health of the industry as a whole, it is interesting to note that even with the “decline” of PC gaming, sales records are still being made.   In fact, the records are even quite competitive with console sales records!

The truth is that PC gaming sales figures are still strong, they have just been shifted online and away from the traditional genres like first person shooters.  While the death of traditional genres may be disturbing to the more traditional crowd, the platform itself lives on.

While we seem to be doing a little to much gushing over Stardock around here of late, I feel like this news is noteworthy.

Stardock has continued their tradition of releasing major free updates for already released games.  Their latest free “patch” for the Galactic Civilizations II trilogy (the original game and 2 expansion packs) would almost put some expansion packs to shame (I’m looking at you, Sims!)

This update adds a bunch of new features, including new more varied game setup options, improved graphics, a substantially revised espionage system and new diplomacy options.  It also adds some of the usual game balance improvements and bugfixes.

It would be nice if more developers would show this kind of continuing commitment to an already released game.  Stardock has publicly stated that there will be no more official expansion packs for Gal Civ II and there is no monthly fee for playing.  However, the decision to add these “content updates” still makes good business sense, as I’m certain each substantial update generates some additional sales for Stardock.

Maybe there is still hope that someday most developers will actually care about and even take pride in their games.

Supreme Commander 2, the sequel to … well … Supreme Commander, has been announced, though no release date is yet set. And it’s going to be published by Square Enix, which makes it the company’s first foray outside of the Japanese game development market, and also a large departure from the usual big-haired angsty hero RPG fare.

For those of you who may not be aware, Supreme Commander was the spiritual successor (designed by the same guy, Chris Taylor) to the late-90s real-time strategy masterpiece Total Annihilation. Supreme Commander ultimately wasn’t quite as legendary as its predecessor, but it was quite good, and Grokmoo and I spent many months playing it. We even ran a dedicated community blog. Here’s hoping that the sequel surpasses it. My main problem with Supreme Commander was that the endgame wasn’t particularly good, with potentially hours worth of build-up to a resolution that typically lasted a minute at most. The exponential ramp-up of economic structures, which allowed one to construct huge armies entirely independently of any strategic need to control resources on the map, led to massive, massive turtling, which felt more like SimCity with a disaster thrown in at the end than the strategic give-and-take, feint-and-assault one typically expects from an RTS.

I think Chris Taylor is aware of the criticisms of Supreme Commander and should be able to use the lessons learned from it to great effect with the sequel. Supreme Commander was revolutionary, but uneven around the edges. All Supreme Commander 2 has to do to be a masterpiece is to be evolutionary. And Chris: Please don’t make the same mistake of having such ridiculously high system requirements as Supreme Commander. As a college student at the time, I was definitely in your target market, but the only way I was able to play the game was to build a computer good enough to run it — and the only reason I could afford that was because of my scholarship. Look at the success of World of Warcraft, which succeeds partially because it prioritizes running on moderate hardware over absolute cutting-edge visuals, and ask yourself if that really was such a bad idea.

The demo for Left 4 Dead, Valve’s imminent coop zombie survival horror first-person shooter, is now available to the general public through Steam. So log on and download it! It was previously available only to people who had already pre-purchased the game, which frankly seems like a bit of a dirty trick to generate pre-sales to me.

I’ve personally been looking forward to Left 4 Dead because, I’ll admit it, I’m a huge zombie nut. I make it a point to try out every zombie-related PC game that gets released, including Zombie Panic! Source, a pretty good free Source mod that definitely captures the spirit of the zombie, and Stubbs the Zombie, which frankly isn’t that good. It’s just not that fun to play exclusively as the zombie.

I’ll get back to you with my impressions on Left 4 Dead as soon as I’ve had a bit of time playing the demo. I’ll also render my verdict on whether it’s worth purchasing the whole game, which isn’t a given; sometimes the demo pretty much sates any appetite you had for the game.

The latest news is — if you can believe it — that Fallout 3 has already made $300 million in sales across all platforms. That’s way better than most movies can even pretend to aspire to. And according to our resident Fallout expert, the returns are deserved, as it’s a really good game.

I also find it kind of hard to fault Bethesda Software in deciding to dumb down Fallout somewhat in order to bring it to consoles. They wouldn’t have come close to $300 million in sales without selling those millions of copies for the console. We’re definitely seeing a trend here that has gone from emerging to mainstream: expect pretty much all AAA PC game titles to be released on gaming consoles as well from here on out. After publishers made such a killing on Bioshock, Far Cry 2, and now Fallout 3, there’s no way to financially justify to their shareholders the release of a PC-exclusive game these days. There may be a few remaining exceptions (such as Blizzard), but even they will “see the light” eventually. Heck, even Id Software is developing for consoles now.

We’re all probably at least <em>familiar</em> with MapleStory, the Korean 2D side-scrolling massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG), even if we’ve never played it. I’ve played World of Warcraft though, and I figure that’s close enough to be qualified to comment on this bizarrely inaccurate news article from Yahoo: Online divorcee jailed after killing virtual hubby. If anyone reading this has played MapleStory, maybe you can fill in the details in the comments below.

Upon first glance, I thought the article was talking about, you know, something that actually mattered: murder. People get “married” in online games all the time, and I could see fallout from the virtual world spilling over into the real world and resulting in a deadly altercation between the players behind the characters. But that’s not what this article is about. After reading through the article a bit, I realized that the “killing” they refer to is about a woman who “killed” her recently divorced husband’s character. So what, I thought? MapleStory probably has PVP. That should be a fairly common occurrence then, and the husband probably deserved it for dumping her abruptly anyway.

But no, when the article says “killing”, what it actually means is that the man hadn’t yet gotten around to changing his account password, and the woman logged in and deleted his character. So by attempting to sensationalize the news story, Yahoo actually made the story sound less serious to those in the know. Not that I think this rises to the level of meriting criminal hacking charges, mind you, which the woman is somehow facing.

So once you’ve managed to slog your way through the massively misleading inflammatory article (brilliant computer game journalism skills on display there, Yahoo), the real question you’re left with is: Does a jilted wife deserve anything close to a $1,000 fine and five years in prison for deleting a character in an MMORPG? I’m going to have to go with no — he should just get over it and learn a lesson from the school of hard knocks on not sharing his password with anyone — but depending on the extent of real-money trading (RMT) he was engaged in, he could possibly have suffered a severe financial loss from the deletion.

Which would bring up another question about whether a couple bits in an MMORPG’s database are actually worth the money people are willing to pay for them, but that’s another gargantuan topic in itself.

Odds are we all hate Digital Restrictions Management. Everyone has either been bitten by it either on games they’ve legitimately purchased (I know I have), or knows someone who was. Even pirates hate DRM because it requires 30 seconds of inconvenience to copy a cracked executable over the installed one (if any sarcasm over the “hassle” DRM creates for pirates versus the hassle it creates for paying customers is showing, please disregard it). But 2K Sports, bless them, has managed to invent out of whole cloth a folly even worse than DRM: serial code activation in a game that doesn’t ship with serial codes.

Presumably they meant to include serial codes in the boxed copies of NBA 2K9 for PC; it’s just that somewhere along the line of communication between headquarters and the packaging factory, that (possibly important) instruction was lost. Yes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and 2K Sports is now partially to blame. So if you bought NBA 2K9 for PC and tried to install it, you’d be the software installation equivalent of all dressed up with nowhere to go. Along with everyone else. It’s the same feeling as when you’re left wondering “Where’s the NFO file?”, except you’re out fifty bucks for the privilege.

2K Sports did manage to get on the ball really quickly and released a patch that is automatically downloaded during installation that removes the serial number activation. So anyone attempting to install the game now will never realize anything is amiss. Unless they aren’t connected to the Internet during the attempted installation. And unless they try it at some point in the future.

Just like with DRM, there’s another hidden folly inherent in this “solution”: what happens when the patch server goes offline? The server 2K Sports is using to support this game won’t be around indefinitely. Heck, the company won’t survive forever. Yet there are still people who get a retro gaming kick from playing PC games that are two decades old right at this very moment. Had those games used such an incompetent verification scheme during installation, you wouldn’t be able to play them today. 2K Sports owes it to posterity to release at least one good serial number for people twenty years down the line to be able to use to play the game, if that’s what they want to do.

But let’s be honest: Who in the hell plays sports games on PC?! I didn’t even realize anyone bothered publishing them. Is there any greater disparity between console gamers and PC gamers than the relative affections for sports games? Sports games on the PC seem so antithetical to the hardcore PC gaming crowd I know it’d be like rick-rolling a Black Panther rally — though that is something I’d actually like to see.