[quote who="Alstein" reply="150" id="2811036"]There's also a possibility the US will get caps also, due to non-existant regulation and a very pro-business political climate not seen since the Gilded Age.

 

 
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Which is pretty awful. It's unfortunate I get reamed by my cable company as it is, high prices, higher prices if I don't have TV with them, very slow uploads, marginal downloads and now the idea of a cap. How exactly is this going to help digital distribution?

I don't think anyone really wants gaming 'in the cloud.'   OnLive so far hasn't impressed anyone all that much.  Cloud assisted gaming, certainly...it's already shown itself in several places.

A lot of people don't exactly have options, and 3G/4G do fine for gaming as long as your signal and ISP are good.

I definately appreciate savegames+config changes being held online (when it works, of course...heh New Vegas.)  Then when I reinstall or load a game up on a different system, I don't have anything to worry about.

Mind you that is rarely an issue since I don't use my laptop for much anymore but it's nice to have anyway.

Note that Steam, Impulse, and MMOs are all 'cloud' services.  Not all using it for the same things, of course, but anyway.

To those talking about hardware: BULLSHIT!!! You know as well as I do, that most of the problems with Elemental had nothing to do with hardware. The problems, was lack of balance, lack of content and great ambitions that wasn't yet fullfilled.

I have one of the absolutely worst PC platforms imaginable, but still I've been able to play (on release date) the last two year: Overlord 2, Spore, Fallout 3 and Dragon Age: Origins. All games that tax the hardware worse than any other game I play. Oddly enough though they are the most hardware demanding they have been the smoothest playing experience.

I am however a strategy fan, and have also tried: Hearts of Iron 3: Semper Fi, Victoria 2, Distant Worlds, Star Ruler, and Elemental. Every single of these hardware light games have been unplayable at launch. The reason is that the scope and ambitions of these games excede that of any console game, and the companies behind these games does now have the resource that the makers of Fallout or Dragon Age does.

So less resources, bigger ambitions: It has to come back and bite you somewhere. I still buy the games and support them, but I don't expect any of them to be playable until 6-12 months after release (I actually had my hopes up for Elemental, but it seems to be universal across the board).

Hell, take this as a reminder. I am using the same computer today to play Dragon Age, that I used to play Civ IV (the first release) with, and it took 5 months before NVidia (not Firaxis) released a new driver that stoped making Civ IV blue screen my computer. Gal Civ II took 1 or 2 months before Stardock released a patch that similarly stopped bluescreening my computer, but I've not had hardware problems with Elemental, all the Elemental problems have been gamedesign problems.

Lack of balance amd content are not bugs, so your point is moot. We are discussing why they do not work, and not why they are not as good as the classics.

I guess that is a question of point-of-view. If a game is fun and addictive enough, I will actually keep playing it dispite having to reload the game every few hours due to memory leaks (Victoria 2), or that the game overheats the GPU and blue-screens the computer (Gal Civ 2). The "bug" with elemental was that it wasn't fun enough. It might have had technical issues, but they never bothered me as much as the gameplay issues. Fortunately Stardock seems to fix both, 1.0x series all the technical stuff, while the 1.1 patch will largely focus on patching gameplay issues

I agree that star ruler was less buggy, but star ruler also had a ton LESS content than Elemental. So it's not a great example because one of the key points above is that games are much more advanced nowadays, which frankly, Star ruler wasn't.

my thoughts exactly.  15 years ago they didnt have these standards.   Hell you had to deal with ISA cards PCI and AGP plus many other factors  that werent standardized yet.  Should be much easier now.

DirectX does not solve the compatiblity issues, as not all drivers/hardware comply. And some times you have to check individual features to make sure they will work, or at least if the driver claims they will.

Though I hear DX 10 and above are better about it.

I've been seeing games lately that REQUIRE DX10 or 11. Why can't we start having games that require a 64bit OS? That would alleviate the memory problems for games that are poorly coded.

It's true that many games take big shortcuts these days, but they did in the past as well. However, I blame high speed internet. Games release buggy knowing they can patch them. As we are well aware they often underestimate the difficulty fixing the bugs.

I think the last game I played that didn't require any patching was X-Com Apocalypse. The old gold box TSR games didn't have any serious troubles either. Heh, that's going back a ways.

Speaking of Elemental specifically, crashing wasn't the worst problem, it was "fun". We'll see how that turns out.

I agree with the OP though, there are a lot of corners cut in today's gaming market. Don't blame it on PC specs, look what has happened to the console releases since they can patch over the internet as well now. Consoles have way less variety in their specs, yet games put out on them still require patching a great deal of the time these days.

Is it greed? Is it that we underestimate the budgets? Most property developers can sell units during completion, I guess the equivalent of pre-orders, in order to complete their projects. However, they can do the finishing touches in units nobody lives in. Well, the game developers just can't take those shortcuts.