Dragon Age Forum News (Dec. 06, 04)

Remove all ads!

Here are today's Dragon Age forum highlights, collected by NWVault. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

This HL2 thing SUX !!! Will Bioware do the same ?

---

---

Quote: Perhaps, but in doing so you incur tremendous costs that considerably outweigh the benefits from lack of piracy. The servers and lines required to run an MMORPG are not cheap... unless you plan to charge a monthly fee for bandwidth considerations alone, the idea of a singleplayer EQ is quite suicidal.

---

Just have what is (in effect) a server which validates and does a tiny amount of infrequent (yet frequent enough ) checking and processing doesn't require that much of either bandwidth or CPU - I wasn't implying that you have ALL the serverside effort that a MMORPG has. And as Georg said, removing even a tiny segment of code from being visible to a pirate makes it a heck of a lot more tricky to break...

Another way to look at it is that when we all have 1GB broadband, you'll never buy a game again - just order it online and it will download it as it plays. I think that's what the Infinium/Phantom/whateveryouwannacallit is suggesting that it will do...

---

That's the way NCSort/ArenaNet are heading with GuildWars.
No monthly fee, you can play it singleplayer if you want, but you always play on their servers...

More:

---

100MB and verify online everytime I want to play?!? I think I'll give a piece of crap like that a miss. No game, no matter how good it is, is worth that kind of aggro.

---

You are looking at it from the wrong perspective. Assume for a moment that all publishers industry adopts the "server" model on a wide scope ... you probably would end up with the question "no game at all" or "game as a service".

You might decide "I'll stop gaming all together", but a lot of people wouldn't mind ... after all, how many (compared to the total market) do you think still play those 10 year old titles? How many still play 15 year old titles? My guess is maybe 1-2% of the market.... and
the next generation of gamers would not even know "the good old days" and wouldn't care....

Of course this would just be really bad dream... but, the number of publishers and independent developers is already small, and more will die due to the cost of adapting to the next generation of consoles. So you end up with like 3 publishers controlling 90% of the market in a few years and 90% is enough power to install something like this on the whole industry... even if they lost 10% customers in the process, it would still be a commercially viable venture as it gets rid of all the game rentals and casual piracy.

And don't count on digital product delivery to remove the publisher out of the equation - publishers these days do a lot more than just sending the games to the shelves ... they fund the multi million dollar projects games have become.