Sunday, March 17, 2013

Is Ignorance Bliss?

Sometimes I think it's not worthwhile to keep up with the ins and outs of the gaming industry. There's almost too much information, and not all of it good. And it's starting to effect how much I enjoy some titles.

A couple of recent examples: Aliens: Colonial Marines (ACM) and SimCity (SC). We'll start with ACM.

Some of you may have heard about the issues surrounding this title. Most of it has to do with a lot of drama in the development of the game. The developer went on and on about how much they loved the franchise, and how they were finally going to give the fans the "true" Aliens game that they've wanted all these years. What really happened is that they couldn't give two shits about the game, and instead farmed it out to various lower-tier third-party developers to actually make the game, and put out a game that was very different than what they promised us. So much so that people have openly accused them of lying, outright false advertisement, largely based on a "live" demo shown at E3 last year, nearly all of which did not appear in the final game.

That said, the game actually isn't bad. It's just not as good as it could have been, as it should have been. The graphics are a little "meh" most of the time (but other times downright stunning, like the exteriors of LV-426). The AI is a little bit on the stupid side. Okay, maybe more than a "little". But, really, it plays fairly well (on PC, at any rate, although it could be that my system is merely muscling it's way through), and it's not downright buggy or crashing or anything.

But I wonder how I would feel about the game if I hadn't seen those early reviews? If I didn't already know going into it that it wasn't going to be as great as I thought it was?

Which brings me to SimCity. Oh, dear.

What started out as a promising game turned into a nightmare for many, as the game was plagued with server issues at launch. Plenty of paying customers were unable to play the game that they purchased for a week or more. Thankfully, those issues have been largely resolved, but now new issues are coming to light.

That always-online requirement? EA/Maxis said it was due to heavy server-side calculations that were occurring, that most of the detailed simulations you were seeing were actually being done on their end, to offload the extreme stress from your lowly little PCs. This was, apparently, the cause of some of the server issues they were having at launch.

Turns out that was a load of bollocks. The game is, in fact, run entirely offline, and if not for their artificial 20-minute timeout, the game will run just fine indefinitely without a network connection at all. It's actually coded into the game to force itself to quit if it can't talk to the Maxis servers for twenty minutes. If you change that one line of code, the game will run forever, and perfectly fine, for any length of time.

So it turns out that the only reason the servers were there was to facilitate inter-city regional interactions between players (which makes sense for multiplayer) and to save your game, since the only copy of your city is in the cloud. Isn't it? No, actually, that's stored on your PC, too, and just uploaded to their servers at regular intervals and when you quit. And while the servers are necessary for multiplayer, if you choose to run an entire region all on your onesies, the inter-city processing is so minimal (as shown by users tracking exactly what information was sent back and forth between the servers whenever they ran multiple cities), that it could easily be run on your PC as well.

The city size limit? Artificial. It's bound only by their invisible walls, not by any limitation in processing or graphical power. Users have already broken out of those walls and affected the region around them.

One reason for all this, one that I happen to agree with, is the idea that the game was originally intended to be a browser-based game, likely integrated into Facebook or some such. Those limitations make a lot more sense when you look at it that way. But then they decided to make it a full standalone game released at $60, without removing any of those browser-based limitations. And now they're catching a ton of flak for it.

The problem is that I know all these things. I've been keeping up with the news, reading the forums and the news sites. And, frankly, it's starting to ruin the game for me. Now, when I play it, I can't help but see those invisible walls, and the ludicrously stupid traffic AI routines, and forced limitations (like game speed) because their servers can't handle the load. If I hadn't read any of that, I would probably be enjoying the game a lot more than I am.

With something like this, that you look forward to, and you initially enjoy before hearing other people complain... is it better to remain ignorant of the flaws, if you yourself don't notice them? Sometimes... maybe it is.

Microsoft's Problem: Microsoft

This one's been coming for a while, I just haven't gotten around to writing it yet, but it came up again on the NeoGAF forums today, so I figured I'd go ahead and put it into words.

This revelation occurred to me shortly after the launch of Windows 8. Like most tech-heads, I passed on Win8 because it had absolutely nothing to offer me. Worse, it would have made my system more difficult to work with and to do the things I do.

When it comes to computers, it's true that many people don't know that much about the technical side of things. But chances are, they know someone who does. So there's usually someone they can ask, besides the salesman at Best Buy, about what they should and should not purchase. This is what happened to Windows 8. Everyone knew about it thanks to Microsoft's aggressive marketing, but even the people that didn't know any better were warned off by the people that did.

Here's Microsoft's problem: They can't see beyond their own marketing. Every salesman loves to talk about how great their product is, it's part of being a salesman. But a good salesman also knows the truth about the product, even if it's something they never talk about. They know the areas to avoid discussion, they know how to downplay faults and lean the conversation over to the positives. But the important thing is that they're aware of the issues, and why their product isn't for everyone.

Except Microsoft. They appear to actually believe the shit that comes out of their mouth at trade shows like E3 or on their television commercials. In the case of Windows 8, the result is that they're genuinely baffled by the low sales figures. It's true that people aren't buying Windows 8. Microsoft blames the OEM manufacturers for "not making enticing hardware" that can easily be sold with Win8 on it (but wait, MS.. I thought that Win8 itself was reason enough?). The manufacturers have it right.. they're blaming Microsoft for forcing them to install an operating system that no one wants to buy. Microsoft can't see this side of the argument because they refuse to believe that people actually don't want to buy their amazing product.

Seriously, this is their problem... they honestly cannot understand the concept of someone not wanting to buy Windows 8. It's so incredible, it's so amazing, it's so revolutionary, everyone must want it, but why are they not buying it? They're placing the blame on everyone but themselves, refusing to acknowledge that they didn't actually make something that real people want.

This is something I've seen crop up now and again with different companies, but Microsoft is far and away the worst at it right now. They believe in their own marketing so much that they expect everyone else to do so as well, for no other reason than because they said so. Windows 8 is the second coming of the PC operating system because Microsoft said it was. Kinect is the true future of gaming because Microsoft said it was. Surface is the true tablet experience because Microsoft said it was. And they can't see beyond that "because we said so" mentality. And they're going to continue pushing crap onto the market, and they're going to continue being surprised at the lack of sales, and eventually they're going to run themselves into the mud doing it.

On the subject of Kinect, I think MS is about to create a schism in the gaming industry by packing the thing in with every Xbox Infinity (or whatever they're going to call it). They're going to push Kinect so hard (most likely demanding that all games feature some kind of Kinect functionality) that developers will stop making games for them in favor of PS4/PC games that use traditional control schemes. It's too early to tell, really, but that's my prediction, we'll see what happens.

Unfortunately, marketing can be a powerful tool. Look at the recent announcement of the Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone. Underwhelming and second-best in nearly every way to the HTC One, but destined to sell ten times more because of marketing. When it comes to computers, people ask the tech-heads around them. For some reason, they don't do this with smartphones, even though they are just computers themselves. My recommendation: Buy the HTC One. That's what I'm buying.

Saturday, March 9, 2013

SimCity Followup

Given the events of the last week, I felt a followup to my last post was required, regarding the now-released SimCity game.

If you're not up to speed, the gist of the argument is that EA/Maxis was apparently unprepared for the initial rush of gamers on the first few days of launch, resulting in a large number of people being unable to play the game due to the EA servers being inaccessible. This was mostly limited to login issues, and once logged in, gameplay was usually okay. But a few people, myself included, experienced certain issues in-game as well, such as lag, being unable to share resources between cities, or being unable to start a new city or region (even though I was playing in "Private" mode).

Now, the first response to my last post, wherein I essentially said that always-online was okay, is the old "I told you so". But is that really the case? At no point in my previous post did I mention launch problems, and I even mentioned Diablo III (D3) as an example of an always-online game that I was okay with, noting that D3 itself had a huge number of issues at launch.

But I just mentioned general-purpose gameplay. "I just want to play single player", or "I want to be able to play on the train without internet". That's what everyone was complaining about before launch, not a fear that the game would be unplayable.

Unfortunately, EA's reaction to this has been less than stellar. They knew how many pre-orders were done, they knew how much load was going to be on the servers, but they didn't prepare for it. After the fact, they just said pointless things like "We're working on it", without providing any clear information on what the problem was or what they were doing. At one point even going so far as to say that it was the gamers' fault, that the game was so awesome that people just kept playing, taking up valuable server space and preventing new players from joining. And then, worst of all, actually disabling in-game features to reduce the hammering that their servers were getting. I haven't talked to a single person  yet who's okay with that part of it.

They've since announced that they'll be offering a free game from their library as an apology to anyone who owns SimCity. That's all well and good, but I have the sneaking suspicion the selection will be pretty poor, that I'll end up picking something from the list that I don't really have all that much interest in (the fact that it will play exclusively through Origin is not a selling point, either, as I like that service far less than Steam or Uplay).

Anyway, I just wanted to clarify my stance from earlier, and that I do still stick to those ideas, in spite of the launch issues that SimCity suffered.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Is Always-Online Really the Devil?

So I've been chatting on several boards lately regarding the upcoming release of SimCity, and I'm surprised by the number of people put off by the whole "Always-on" DRM that the game employs. Well, there's a few things to consider. First off, it's not exclusively just DRM. The game does feature a strong multiplayer component. While I don't necessarily feel I'll be joining in much myself, I understand that it really does need to be there.

Now, this hearkens back to another discussion a year or so ago about Diablo III, and its always-on requirement. The same kind of outrage hit the 'net that time, too. And at first, I joined in. I mean, it was a single-player game, after all, much like SimCity. I didn't think that it was necessary to always be connected.

Then it hit me: I'm always online anyway. What f'in difference did it make? I use Steam, for cryin' out loud.. that's an always-on solution, too. Yes, yes, I know it has an "offline mode", but to be honest, I've never once felt the need to use it. I'm not one of those "mobile" gamers who likes to carry around a high-end gaming laptop so I can play Crysis 3 on the go. I have one gaming system, and it's my PC. I don't even game on my tablet. And really, if you're that much into gaming that you have a ridiculously expensive laptop that can run all that stuff, then it's probably worth your while to be able to get that thing online just about anywhere. It's more than possible today. Get a wi-fi hotspot, tether your phone, or just buy a laptop that has LTE built right into it. I'm sure they make that kind of thing by now, don't they? If not, they should. That's a freebie, Alienware, off you go.

Online is not only about multiplayer. Even for single-player games, it's about sharing. I can, if I want, link my games with Facebook or Twitter or any of those, and then everyone will know when I get the latest achievement or whatever. And that requires a constant internet connection.

And yes, I'm one of those non-social gamers who tends to play single-player titles. But I'm okay with "always online". You know why? Because I'm always online. And so are you.