Spore, Mass Effect to use retardedly strict DRM.

[Jaevric]

This is good news. I'd wanted to grab a copy of Mass Effect for the PC since I love CRPGs and don't have a console in the house, but I wasn't thrilled with the potential issues of the DRM scheme.

What they've changed it to now seems much more reasonable, and not having to have the disc in the changer is a bonus--I don't mind switching disks myself but it's all good.

As for Crysis selling poorly, I too suspect it was less due to "pirating" and more due to the fact that most computers would curl up in a ball and make whimpering noises if you tried to run Crysis on them.

[Lord of the Abyss]

And why should I believe that ? Given the success of games without copy protection, why should I believe that piracy is this industry crippling problem ? And not, say, an excuse for anti-piracy companies to sell bad copy protection schemes, and bad game developers using piracy as an excuse to handwave away their own failures ? And is there any actual evidence that most PC owners are using mostly pirated games ? Or is it just a convenient claim by gamemakers or copy protection companies ?

How about when Crytek specifically mentioned it as a significant factor in their decision to produce console games from now on? Like it or not, it's costing more money than developers are now willing to spend. Sorry, PC gamers, you've screwed the pooch.

As said, why should I believe what some marketing guy says ? Do you think that they'd admit they screwed up, when they can blame piracy instead ? Let me point it out again; games without copy protection, like Sins of a Solar Empire, sell fine, and make a profit. If piracy was the scourge you make it out to be, they wouldn't.

[Stark]

As for Crysis selling poorly, I too suspect it was less due to "pirating" and more due to the fact that most computers would curl up in a ball and make whimpering noises if you tried to run Crysis on them.

Have you played Crysis? I have. It runs fine on 'moderate with knobs on' with a 6600GT. You need a good system for high settings, just like any game, but the huge amount of 'zomg need teh sli'd 8800s for crysis' thing is just garbage. It's not as scalable as UT3, but what is?

[CaptHawkeye]

As for Crysis selling poorly, I too suspect it was less due to "pirating" and more due to the fact that most computers would curl up in a ball and make whimpering noises if you tried to run Crysis on them.

Have you played Crysis? I have. It runs fine on 'moderate with knobs on' with a 6600GT. You need a good system for high settings, just like any game, but the huge amount of 'zomg need teh sli'd 8800s for crysis' thing is just garbage. It's not as scalable as UT3, but what is?

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Crysis is just derivative bullshit with extreme pretension to originality thanks to its massive back catalog of empty promises?

I know people who actually hated it by looking at the box. "Yet another corridor shooter? Fuck off."

[Stark]

Yeah, the game has real problems, but since you CAN run it on middling systems, the near-universal 'needs huge computer lol' is just bullshit and I hate liars.

It even had a demo that showcased just how linear the game was going to be - walk through this suspiciously corridor-like valley... now walk along a suspiciously corridor-like shoreline until you come to the corridor-like ravine into the cliff...

[Jaevric]

Ah, nope I admit it. I was going by secondhand information. Thought about getting it but I heard very little about it having great gameplay, just pretty as hell.

[Stark]

Don't feel too bad; like I said, every motherfucker who mentions Crysis says 'J00 N33D COMPUTAR MADE OF GOLD'. It's not UT3, but it is playabel on systems a bit older.

Amusingly, the people who say 'need good computer' are the ones that say 'looks pretty', but it really doesn't. Even turning everything to max on my 8800, it looks a bit flash but not making anyone pee their pants. It has good draw distance and plenty of shaders, but much of the terrain texturing is awful and the level design is pretty uninspired.

[weemadando]

The issue Stark, is that there was the perception that Crysis was a disproportionate system hog. And lets face it, for most people, if you are going to download a 1.5gb demo, you may as well just download the whole fucking game.

And whoever said that console piracy is harder than PC piracy - have you ever witnessed the amount of hoops that some people will jump through to make a pirated game work on a PC?

[Elessar]

The issue Stark, is that there was the perception that Crysis was a disproportionate system hog. And lets face it, for most people, if you are going to download a 1.5gb demo, you may as well just download the whole fucking game.

And whoever said that console piracy is harder than PC piracy - have you ever witnessed the amount of hoops that some people will jump through to make a pirated game work on a PC?

The fact that a physical modification to the hardware is required suggests difficulty that is leaps and bounds beyond mere software.

Of course, some people are more comfortable soldering tiny little chips together, as well as taking apart and putting back together a machine that was never meant to be treated in that manner. But hey, hardware modifications generally scare people. Perhaps it's because a misstep is so much more disastrous.

[Resinence]

Um no.
With the current generation all having net access, it's trivial to softmod them by installing custom firmware updates.

[Vympel]

The perception that Crysis is resource heavy is definitely there. My friend - who has the exact same PC as me, down to the case (i.e. a high end beast back in Oct 2006 when I bought it, and still pretty awesome now, haven't run into any games it can't do bloody well) - said he didn't want to try Crysis (which he had gotten for his birthday from his g/f) because he didn't think his PC would run it.

I told him he was a retard, my system ran it on 1280x1024 (I have a 19'' LCD and that's good enough for me, thanks muchly) with all settings except for anti-aliasing maxed, without so much as a hiccup.

[CaptHawkeye]

Yeah, the game has real problems, but since you CAN run it on middling systems, the near-universal 'needs huge computer lol' is just bullshit and I hate liars.

I told him he was a retard, my system ran it on 1280x1024 (I have a 19'' LCD and that's good enough for me, thanks muchly) with all settings except for anti-aliasing maxed, without so much as a hiccup.

What's funny is that it's not even really "middling settings". You just need to know what shit to turn off or leave a little low. My game ran GREAT with all textures and physics maxed, but as soon as you turn up anti aliasing or shaders, the frames went to hell and the game became unplayable.

It even had a demo that showcased just how linear the game was going to be - walk through this suspiciously corridor-like valley... now walk along a suspiciously corridor-like shoreline until you come to the corridor-like ravine into the cliff...

I had the naive dream for a while that the first level was just "training nonsense". I had never played Far Cry, so I didn't know Crytek's propensity for bullshit.

Amusingly, the people who say 'need good computer' are the ones that say 'looks pretty', but it really doesn't. Even turning everything to max on my 8800, it looks a bit flash but not making anyone pee their pants. It has good draw distance and plenty of shaders, but much of the terrain texturing is awful and the level design is pretty uninspired.

The trees were hilarious to me. They looked so awesome in the alpha gameplay demos, but walk up to them now with settings maxed and voila, they're still the same old "flat leaf texture box" copy-pasted 100 times. The ground textures looked only a little better than Half Life's. A game that came out before Crysis was even in development. Oh but now they've got individual shaders for some pebbles on the ground! Too bad I don't give a shit about that!

[Shogoki]

As for Crysis selling poorly, I too suspect it was less due to "pirating" and more due to the fact that most computers would curl up in a ball and make whimpering noises if you tried to run Crysis on them.

It's still funny that people still think Crysis tanked, given it's already sold over a million units as of January, they didn't open with "OMG BEST OPENING EVAR!" but it's been selling steadily since it's release, and the fact that it's fairly system intensive only makes it all the more impressive.

It probably could have used less inane "NEED A $7000 PC!", "PC IS DEAD!!" (actual quotes) from the likes of people like the 1up yours cast, though.

On a side note, there are a few graphical mods now available on incrysis.com that are pretty fucking amazing, they'll make the game look better than on Very High settings, while still maintaining a performance similar to the High setting, and you truly haven't experienced parallax mapping until you try this stuff.

[Vendetta]

As said, why should I believe what some marketing guy says ? Do you think that they'd admit they screwed up, when they can blame piracy instead ? Let me point it out again; games without copy protection, like Sins of a Solar Empire, sell fine, and make a profit. If piracy was the scourge you make it out to be, they wouldn't.

If you want to stick to a niche audience, that's fine. But for the big companies, they're looking for titles that shift millions straight away. They don't think "we made a profit and that's enough", they look at GTA4 selling six million in a week and cream their pants and want to do that themselves. That's how they make money, big titles with monster budgets that they want a big return for.

It's like the difference between indie film and big studios. Games are that big a business now, and to sustain that they need big sales.

[2000AD]

I know people who actually hated it by looking at the box. "Yet another corridor shooter? Fuck off."

That's funny considering the box has a distinct lack of corridors on it. In fact every picture and screenshot is out in the open.

[Lord of the Abyss]

As said, why should I believe what some marketing guy says ? Do you think that they'd admit they screwed up, when they can blame piracy instead ? Let me point it out again; games without copy protection, like Sins of a Solar Empire, sell fine, and make a profit. If piracy was the scourge you make it out to be, they wouldn't.

If you want to stick to a niche audience, that's fine. But for the big companies, they're looking for titles that shift millions straight away. They don't think "we made a profit and that's enough", they look at GTA4 selling six million in a week and cream their pants and want to do that themselves. That's how they make money, big titles with monster budgets that they want a big return for.

It's like the difference between indie film and big studios. Games are that big a business now, and to sustain that they need big sales.

Then the problem is unrealistic expectations, not piracy; and I'll note that nothing you said supports the idea that piracy is the problem. Nor does it answer the question of how Sins of a Solar Empire or other games without protection can be profitable at all, if the problem is piracy.

Most games ( or movies for that matter ) aren't massively popular, and it's rather obvious that outside of ( usually ) a few famous series, no one can predict which will be really successful, which do OK, and which flop. Spending huge amounts of resources on games that are rolls of the dice is stupid. Planning your companies fortunes using extreme outliers like GTA IV is stupid. And none of that has a thing to do with piracy. I find it much more plausible to believe that piracy is more the excuse than the problem.

[Stark]

On a side note, there are a few graphical mods now available on incrysis.com that are pretty fucking amazing, they'll make the game look better than on Very High settings, while still maintaining a performance similar to the High setting, and you truly haven't experienced parallax mapping until you try this stuff.

If mods fixing games made me want to play them, I'd be playing Oblivion.

But hey, some people could look at the Crysis box and not see the 'corridors'. We're not dealing with rocket scientists here.

[Commander 598]

People knew Crysis was going to be another linear FPS trying to sell with it's graphics and some other title specific gimmick because basically the only (As far as I know) non-linear [singleplayer] FPS ever created was Operation Flashpoint and it's younger, slightly slower brother Armed Assault, not counting those of us who already knew how deceptive things could look in Far Cry screenshots.

[Stark]

At Hawkeye's suggestion I tracked down some of the very early (quite post-Far Cry) 'trailers' for Crysis. Just like Far Cry, they were talking a load of shit about open levels and interactive stories. It's like they hired Peter Molyneux or something!

They're actually MORE amusing than the Bioshock trailers (where the devs go on about 'revolutionising FPS' when the video shows a guy walking down a corridor and shooting some people).

[Commander 598]

Sure, Crysis (And Far Cry) had bigger than average maps that you could [mostly] traverse at will, but it's still a corridor. I think Crysis could probably support (Possibly much, but I could be wrong about it) larger and less linear maps than what I saw in the demo, but for some reason it feels like they don't even try.

[CaptHawkeye]

Sure, Crysis (And Far Cry) had bigger than average maps that you could [mostly] traverse at will, but it's still a corridor.
I think Crysis could probably support (Possibly much, but I could be wrong about it) larger and less linear maps than what I saw in the demo, but for some reason it feels like they don't even try.

They didn't try because they exhausted themselves and the game engine on making sure Crysis had "teh uber polys". If they had decided not to go with the "super graphics" approach they actually might had been able to accomplish even a little of the stuff they promised.

If I had to chose between Crysis as it is now, and Crysis with signifigantly toned down graphics but keeping even half of the promises it made back in development, i'd chose the later. As Crysis is, it's just a graphical tech demo for an engine that isn't even all that special.

[Commander 598]

The most impressive thing about Crysis's engine is that you can shoot trees apart. That's it.

[loomer]

Trees, AND rocks.

[Covenant]

I've long thought about what would be an effective and nonconfrontational form of piracy, and I always think back to how stuff used to be. Frankly, even though it would be possible to cheese a ye olde game by copying down the "word written on the bottom of page 3" copy protection that a lot of games used way back when, I think that games really need to look at what they're selling the way stardock does.

The way that games used to be, you got feelies with the product. Cloth maps, a poster, a little booklet to read through, stuff like that. I imagine that nowadays they could do other stuff, like give you a free use of that 3D Game Printer service to print out your spaceship or character or endgame completion trophy or whatnot, and people would be thrilled. Buying the game would get you stuff, as well as entertainment. And these things are harder to pirate, since it's an experience. You can scan and print the map, but having the actual map is cooler and I know people would enjoy getting it the way they like getting robust manuals and other cool doodads with a game. If it became industry standard to package some sort of feelie or a toy (like the 3D Printouts) or something interesting and similar (when I beat Robot City, I was mailed a piece of signed art by a sci-fi painter) then pirates will surely be able to play the game but they won't be able to get the cool stuff.

And really, who cares about people stealing the product if there are plenty of people buying it for the full experience? Online games like WoW are a good example of a type of game that's pirate resistant even if they allow people to make their own servers and such. The desire to show off publically is big enough as to drive people to pay for it, even if they gave it away for free.

[Jade Falcon]

The way that games used to be, you got feelies with the product. Cloth maps, a poster, a little booklet to read through, stuff like that. I imagine that nowadays they could do other stuff, like give you a free use of that 3D Game Printer service to print out your spaceship or character or endgame completion trophy or whatnot, and people would be thrilled. Buying the game would get you stuff, as well as entertainment. And these things are harder to pirate, since it's an experience. You can scan and print the map, but having the actual map is cooler and I know people would enjoy getting it the way they like getting robust manuals and other cool doodads with a game. If it became industry standard to package some sort of feelie or a toy (like the 3D Printouts) or something interesting and similar (when I beat Robot City, I was mailed a piece of signed art by a sci-fi painter) then pirates will surely be able to play the game but they won't be able to get the cool stuff.

Look at old Microprose games. A box the size and sturdiness of an aircraft hanger. A mini novel of a manual, two, sometimes four fold out maps. Granted this is the extreme and I'm glad I don't have to find storage space for all that now, but still...