The Midagedgamer Report for 8-10-2012
A new Origin Client that doesn't say Beta, Id boss
apologizes for Rage, a new "are you stupid?" segment and more!
So Wednesday evening EA finally pushed its latest Origin
Client (ver. 9.0.2) out as an update.
Aside from some refinements to the look of the games library and minor
reconfiguration of the UI it's pretty much the same.
At least EA isn't hiding behind the "Beta" tag
anymore
EA also took down the Battlefield 3 Battlelog site Early
Tuesday morning replacing it with the "Update in Progress, Check back
later soldier" placeholder. Early
Thursday morning the Battlelog page showed a notice that the service would be
offline for one hour starting at 8AM UTC.
Since the Armored Kill DLC is due out in a month with 2 week early
access for Premium members it's the likely culprit. A month prior to Close Quarters' release saw
similar outages.
Ea's chosen to pacify the salivating scores of devotees by
releasing more screenshots and gameplay footage of the upcoming Armored Kill
DLC.
Interesting to note that some of the new DLC footage is
reminiscent of Bad Company 2 Multiplayer maps.
Wouldn't be the first time EA reused content. Think Need For Speed Hot Pursuit and Most
Wanted. In related news it seems
Motorcycles are in, Dino's are out for the final BF3 DLC pack called
Endgame. Reportedly seen at E3 this year
along with new maps come a new two wheeled option to dispatch your enemies.
Crytek is reported expanding its operations into Shanghai,
China saying; " "The
formation of Crytek Shanghai builds on the base we first established in Asia
with Crytek Seoul, and offers invaluable strategic opportunities as we continue
to expand our reach into the world's largest market."
The
new Crytek Shanghai Software will be responsible for support and development of
Crytek's products in Asis as well as supporting their Free to Play
"Warface" FPS.
With
a focus on what Crytek calls the world largest market, expect upcoming releases
from the German company to have the same disappointing gameplay and visuals on
release as Crysis 2. Leveraging a market
is fine but with it comes the danger of focusing on quantity over quality. Crysis was groundbreaking, Crysis 2 was just
broken. Let's hope Crytek has learned
their lesson.
And now, our "Are you stupid??" segment.
Seems young Tyler Rigby, a 15 year old boy from Columbus,
Ohio has taken up residence in the hospital after playing Call of Duty Modern
Warfare 3 for 4 days straight. His aunt,
Jennifer Thompson, said, ""We were talking and I heard a thump and I looked
over and he just fell."
Tyler's Xbox has been confiscated.
Apart from the obvious video game addiction, how could a parent not
notice their child playing a game in a nonstop marathon session for 4
days? Electronic babysitter indeed.
In a completely unrelated but equally ridiculous story Wednesday found a guy winning 50K in a
texting competition with the news touting his "mad skills." Strange how loosely we throw around the word "skill"
these days. I bet Tyler has "mad
skills" too.
Diablo 3 Character Profiles went live Tuesday which is
little more than a stats page that can be shared with other D3 players. This
goes along with the July 19th announcement of max-level content for Diablo 3 to
keep high level players paying. Oh, I
mean playing....sure I do
Now if they could just fix that always online thing...
Counter Strike: Global Offensive PC pre-orders have opened
up. It's said to be the first CS title
to be released simultaneously on PC and consoles. Price is set at $15. At least the price is reasonable. Of course CounterStrike is an acquired taste
focused more on gameplay than visuals which in GO's case are roughly equivalent
to a five year old COD title.
In
our "Let's give Valve and Blizzard more ammunition" segment it
seems a leak of the Win 8 RTM has removed the ability to boot straight to the
desktop available in the earlier builds.
In other words Microsoft is telling the world, It's tiles or nothing,
get used to it. We'll see how the world
responds.
http://pcper.com/news/Editorial/Windows-8-Users-Can-No-Longer-Boot-Straight-Desktop-Must-Start-Metro
In other news..
Steam is expanding its offerings beyond games. Likely a move to counter Microsoft's store,
the online game portal will supposedly add productivity and creative software
to its lineup . Valve's Mark Richardson
says this about the expansion, " The 40 million gamers frequenting Steam
are interested in more than playing games"
Sure they are Mark, sure they are.
At last weekend's quakecon Id software co-founder John
Carmack took one for the team and apologized for the recently released RAGE
debacle. Among the admissions were
issues with a lackluster game world and problems with driver support likely
responsible for reported tearing and rendering flaws throughout the game on the
PC. Carmack said driver support was,
"really, really poorly handled."
He went on to say ID's learned from their mistakes with
Rage. No word on when to expect those
apologetic $60 refund checks though. Currently the game is selling new for
around $15 on Amazon.com with some vendors offering it for as little as $9. If you're really sorry, give the money back
John and save your crocodile tears. Of
course with Bethesda as Id's taskmaster now, they're probably ok with turning
out C list titles for A list prices.
Finally I'll close with a suggestion to the EA, ID and
Activision's of the world.
With so-called AAA game titles now demanding $60 it's
inexcusable to have such debilitating flaws. Diablo 3's launch day issues, player
hacks and Rages poor showing on the PC never needed to happen.
Closed betas are
obviously not enough to ferret out these issues and there's a growing backlash
against premium prices for flawed products.
That's as it should be.
Perhaps developers should take a look back at the old
shareware model. For those of you
unfamiliar shareware was a try before you buy affair that was responsible for
putting I'd software (Doom, Quake,RageAn) on the map. With it you got a functional piece of software
that either disabled premium features or stopped working after a period of time.
For games it was a playable demo that allowed access to the
rest of the game after purchasing a key to unlock it.
A game trailer or leaked press release is no longer
sufficient to make a buy decision. It
also does little to ferret out potential issues for the publisher. After somebody has paid full price is not the
time to make sure everything's right.
Even Microsoft releases demos of their operating systems
before they ask for any money these days.
So bring back the shareware demo, it's a much more realistic
measure of your market and allows adequate resource planning should you want to
emulate Blizzard's draconian "always connected" model.
Really makes you wonder about the MBA's who run these
companies doesn't it.
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