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Golan

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Posts posted by Golan

  1. Posted

    Gone or not, I hope pretty soon someone will mod the game and the alpha game can still work through third-party servers.

    Why would anybody do that? Setting aside the fact that it's effectively pirating the game which EA won't like and has probably taken measures against, it's a huge investment of time and resources to save what is, in its current state, simply a ****ty game.

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  2. Posted

    Earlier Dev posts suggested that the details of the CC13 severs were simply unknown to EA, leaving them in a running state simply for lack of awareness of their existence. Due to them being hosted in the amazon cloud, discovering them was non-trivial. It's very likely that either EA did trace the bills or the closure of VG simply meant that running costs were no longer paid, as would fit the beginning of the month.

  4. Posted

    Not really surprised, definitely not sad. The game had potential on paper, yes; the slow development workflow coupled with the huge backlog meant they would never realistically get that done. That is, provided they wanted to in the first place, which is something I highly doubt in light of some design decisions.

    The game as it was would not have lived. Pulling the plug is the only acceptable course of action with this stumbling corpse.

     

    What surprises me is the harshness with which they seem to have pulled the plug on *the team*. It's sad to see so many people taking the fall for design decisions only a few persons made.

    But then it's EA and has always been.

  5. Posted

    Some nice artwork there! I'm sure I've seen the Harbinger, APC/Tank and Firehawk before, are they rereleases?

    Loving that GDI style! A shame CC4 doesn't look as cool. Though it's probably good the Nod designs weren't used... ;)

     

    @Solo

    Asuka was working on getting his SDK to support CC4 as well - I am sure to have seen a proof of principle screen from a small mod (very small) but perhaps he's advanced that the capabilities further yet.

  6. Posted · Edited by Golan

    It's a free online game, it wouldn't make sense to put that in a box.

    It sure would make sense to have some definitive milestones for when the game is considered ready for revealing it to the public. First impression and all that stuff. Doesn't have to be a physical box.

  7. Posted · Edited by Golan

    Generals 1 had less than 1 percent of all buyers interested in competitive multiplayer. This is based on estimated sales of at minimum 3 million games (taking into account Gen1 being the "most sold C&C game" and RA1 being the highest listed with 3 million) and the most influential competitive Gen1 league, Clanwars, with the extrapolation to estimating the entire competitive playerbase via a factor of ten (10) applied be on the really, really safe side of making an educated guess.

  8. Posted · Edited by Golan

    The problem with the "they will add SP later if you want it" is that there is no reason for SP fans to stick around until EA eventually possibly perhaps with some luck decides to add an SP of whatever kind they feel makes an SP. It requires incredible naivety to expect it to both a) happen and B) be of quality. Good SP is something that takes an incredible amount of time for planning and revision (not necessarily resources), you can't just slap it in a regular DLC development cycle of about 6 months.

    Yes, no SP at "launch" is not a bad thing - but no reliable guarantee of SP later on is. If there is one thing EA cannot expect to get through with, it's asking people to have faith that they will deliver something later.

  9. Posted · Edited by Golan

    But what about the leaked campaign videos with Danko, Jarmen Kell and all? Will that be tossed in the nearest Recycle Bin if the game doesn't get the intended fan support and becomes discontinued?

     

    They could just as well be. That material was made for a several year long parallel production cycle, you can't just take it and cram it into a 6 month DLC cycle. Well, you can, but only if you want an even ****tier, more linear, flat campaign than the TW->RA3->TT line has led to.

  12. Posted

    Bah, I'd take it as a sign of an honest relaunch when they un-ban the people who spoke up to the previous administration. So far, the new paint is still wet and yet they already made a coup worthy of the old administration.

     

    Best of luck, they are really going to need it.

  15. Posted

    Errr.... Generals 1 was banned in China not because China was a playable faction, but because you had to destroy the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre in Hong Kong and the Three Gorges Dam, as well as use nukes liberally and suffer a nuke yourself in Beijing as China.
    That's kinda what Banshee said, no? Gen1 had those problems because of the name(s) attached to the faction/actions, not the actions or names alone. If they had used generic naming, there wouldn't have been the problem.

  17. Posted · Edited by Golan

    Truth be told, that would probably be the worst case scenario for me. "Guys, people are crying out for SP, can we give them some? - Well, don't we have those half-finished, year old concept things in the fridge? Just reheat them and add some paint, done." - that's precisely the fallback plan the last few interviews sounded like.

    Thanks, but I've had enough half-assed "you can see where they hit the shortened deadline" SPs. Especially in C&C.

  19. Posted

    Do you really believe that Bioware label would have that kind of effect in Generals 2? I mean, if they brought some of the Bioware producers to actually work at the conception of the game, ok... but that's clearly has never been the case at all.

     

    As I just clearly said: Yes. Not necessarily in the way of some actual Bioware people going there (though it really did sounded as Cypher said when BVG was announced) especially seeing how I was talking about the label (which doesn't have any specific people) but definitely in the way the game is plannend and designed.

    It's like they wouldn't put their EA Sports label on Battlefield3 or for that same matter remove it from Madden NFL. With a company as big as EA, labels are used to identify certain types of games (in terms of style, gameplay, quality) just like smaller companies would have their name identified with a specific style - think of Sierra games, LucasArts, Bullfrog, Maxis, Blizzard.

    Of course they can put any label they please on any game they get their fingers on. But applying a label to a game that doesn't fit to it means destroying the reputation and thus the raison d'être of the label.

     

    So assuming they aren't completely incompetent, applying and removing a label means that the game respectively does or does not adhere to the label's standards.

     

    No, it did not guaranteed high quality graphics. In fact, the SAGE engine has never been a sinonym of quality. It just guaranteed rushed games. I did enjoy some of these rushed games, but they could have been much better if EA actually gave the dev team enough time to polish them.

     

    Guaranteeing high quality isn't the same as guaranteeing quality per se. There are such things as average and bad quality and many labels (non-gaming included) live by making it clear that they do not deliver highest quality possible but for example good quality per price (i.e. cheap ****). Likewise, EA's guarantee was a fun spectacle with not much depth and polish.

    The problems of SAGE are in how it handles gameplay, not graphics. Most graphic criticism is a matter of style, not technology. Especially C&C stands out with its visuals (FMV videos anyone? Those don't come cheap) being a redeeming factor for underdeveloped/glitchy gameplay - something you could rely on to be enjoyable.

    This is actually also where much of the current public negativity aims at, most of the vocal people are SP folks which wouldn't even know half the bugs/glichtes/shortcommings (or wouldn't care) but are damn angry that EA no longer deliveres the fun the C&C label guaranteed in the past.

  20. Posted

    I don't think that the Bioware label would make any difference at all for the end user, honestly. It doesn't guarantee any kind of quality, specially when the original Bioware would not be directly involved in the conception of the game. Maybe they'd use their policies, in the same way EA policies are used and no quality is guaranteed with that.

    While not a guarantee, a label is certainly a declaration of intent. For a super-company such as EA, labels are meta-franchises that are meant to signify specific styles; if they are just randomly applied without intent to deliver a specific content and/or quality, there's no identification with the label and it becomes worthless. So applying a label to games that meet that standard and also removing it from games that don't is imperative - the later of which has just happened.

    And actually, EA policies did guarantee a certain kind of quality in the past, which is the entire reason why many people are currently rather suspicious - namely a guarantee for good visual quality masking mediocre gameplay quality.

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