Gaming is better than ever, so why does it suck? ( PART 2)

So when I left you we were pretty much around 2003.  Games were becoming huge multi-gigabyte affairs whose installation meant juggling half a dozen discs and staring at progress bars for what seemed like hours.  Yeah, it's still a bit faster than the average Steam download (by 2x) but it always seems to take longer when you have all those discs.

It was also the start of the upgrade mill.  Better games demanded better performance and it wasn't long before I was bringing my own rig over which could be anything from a laptop to a full on gaming monster.  For awhile there it was a continuing arms race as we continually tried to one up each other. 

It became painfully obvious that games like Test Drive and Need For Speed suffered the same affliction as Racer, however.  Meaning that in driving games we couldn't be sure if a win resulted from own performance or an advantage of the rig we were playing on.  That necessitated a foray into game genres less dependent on the hardware and more focused on a cooperative play style.

So we moved on to Role playing games like Dungeon Siege 2 and Dragon Age.  We also embraced real time strategy games like Star Trek Armada 2, Star Wars: Empire at War and even shooters like Battlefield 1942, Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, Call of Duty and a host of others whose game boxes still clutter our bookshelves.

It let us at least continue gaming while one of us tried to achieve some parity with the other's gaming rig. 

But this isn't a story about hardware.  Aside from what drove us to purchase it, that is...

By the way, we played A LOT of games most of which we've long forgotten about.  My friend was a Diablo fanatic and I was nuts over Need For Speed 3.  The list from the last article, however, comprised games that we literally spent 100's and in some cases thousands of hours playing. 

But around the time Battlefield 2142 launched something began to change.  The Internet was maturing and multiplayer gaming was moving from your living room to the wider world.  With it we began seeing the advent of DLC and games being pumped out on a timetable.

The first echoes of DRM started too with the hated Securom anti-piracy solution.  Everyone hated it and online forums were filled with angry gamers bemoaning its interference.  "No-CD" cracks were popular downloads for gamers not because they wanted to pirate the game but because DRM they contained often denied them access to their legitimate copy. 

Something had to change.

It's pretty rare to get a triple-A title on physical media these days.  Even consoles are more likely to  download a game instead of making you fumble with some kind of disc.  Unfortunately, games are largely unplayable without an Internet connection these days as most are focused on at least some measure of an online experience.  

That's meant that cooperative gameplay has seen a sharp decline in the past few years.  Even if your chosen game includes a so-called "Lan mode" it's likely you'll still have to log into an online server to play. 

It's largely the compromise that arose from the uproar over DRM on physical media.  If a publisher can guarantee that every copy of their game has to  phone home there's no real need for draconian measures on the physical media anymore.  In other words, they just move the draconian measures to the Internet.

The problem is that publishers aren't going to maintain servers forever.  Try to start a local LAN game of Need For Speed: Carbon, for example, and you're going to be disappointed.  This was one of the earliest examples of the "phone home" method of copy protection.  When EA shut down the servers they not only shut down online play, they shut down LAN play as well making the game largely useless.

Nice.

But that was just the start.

Part 3