PCGP Episode #172: Launch Day
Vi Sitter i Ventrilo Och Spelar Demigod. We also talk Fallout MMO, TimeWarner coming to their senses, and red shirt deployment strats.
56 Responses to “PCGP Episode #172: Launch Day”
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April 16th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Nice!
April 16th, 2009 at 10:39 pm
thanks
April 16th, 2009 at 11:20 pm
Okay, now I have run out of things to say.
April 16th, 2009 at 11:28 pm
King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella is the one you’re speaking of, Josh.
(King’s Quest VI is 1000000000000x better).
April 17th, 2009 at 2:59 am
Regarding reviews and patches:
The press should stop adding numbers to reviews. Review scores have never been anything but misleading for consumers, but when the game is a service, the earliest moment you can fully review it is when the service ends. And most PC Games are sold as subscriptions to services these days. Even single player games.
Written reviews for Demigod can be updated later when the multiplayer issues are fixed. It’s just the score that will be invalid in a few days. That score is what most people base they decision on.
What I as a consumer would really like to see from Game Magazines: Publisher/Developer Profiles, where critics list the last games released by that company and judge how the Consumer was treated. How many updates, what content, additional costs etc can the user usually expect from this company?
That’s as important to the consumer as what is in the game at release.
I know of course why we have scores in reviews: It would be so cool if we consumers could evaluate the quality of a product by looking at a number. It would be a great help in choosing games, and we could make all kinds of “best of” lists like metacritic has them.
But the reality is that games cannot be expressed as numbers, just as movies cannot be expressed as numbers. Review scores are meaningless. There are so many factors that play in here: When was the game reviewed, Who chose the score, what did that guy play last etc. Maybe all these factors would be minimized by statistics, if metacritic had an average over 10000 reviews for each game. But because that is not the case, there is no _real_ difference between a 80 and a 90.
April 17th, 2009 at 3:03 am
Thanks Vagabond!
I knew it was a Kings Quest game, but I’ll be damned if they don’t all blur together after awhile.
Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow was definitely my favorite too. I still vividly remember trading with the lamp peddler and dealing with the nightingale in the tree , not to mention the epic Minotaur battle! I spent so many hours trying to solve those puzzles with my dad and bro, good times…
April 17th, 2009 at 4:11 am
I’ll suggest three X-Com tips for you guys. Try to avoid playing at night! Your scouters/tank will increase their chances vastly. Daylight always better than the flares; just wait around until the location breaks daylight. Once you start encountering psyhic attacks, just sack those that are vulnerable. Early on you want to make lazer rifles and just auto shoot with them.
X-com could definately needed a tutorial.
April 17th, 2009 at 4:59 am
Weird, I played the same games first. Load Runner and Airborne. I also played Civ at a friend’s house haha
The Lord of the Rings MMO thing was different because the MMO used the book license and not the move license (which EA has)
April 17th, 2009 at 5:36 am
___________________________________________________
Demigod developer Stardock claims that over 120,000 users have tried to play the title online since it was launched early last weekend, and only 18,000 of them have actually paid for it.
___________________________________________________
What a sad world we live in. Pirates should be put to death, they’re nothing but jobless bums who fail to understand that because they do what they do, they’re destroying industries. This idea of “getting everything free” is really pathetic, if you want something entertaining, you should work for it.
The funny side to piracy is watching pirates trying to justify piracy. Go on, get a pirate to try and give you a reason on why piracy is a good thing and watch them fail like the failures they are.
April 17th, 2009 at 6:07 am
“Pirates should be put to death, they’re nothing but jobless bums ”
No that’s not true. Believe me, I am not a pirate and I spent a lot (too much if you ask me) money on games.
The reason I disagree with you is that about 90% of all people I know pirate software. My mother, father, sister, most of my friends. These are all good people, and I must say I’m very offended if you suggest to “put them to death”.
Almost all the music on ipods is pirated. Almost every private copy of Microsoft Office is pirated. If you really think all these people should die, then I suggest you get yourself a gun and shoot random people on the street. Pirates are not just “jobless bums”. Some of them are nurses and firefighters and teachers and doctors.
The problem with piracy is not that there are so many bad people, but that it is widely accepted as a trivial offense.
I tried to explain to my mother that openoffice.org is free, and that she hurt competition if she pirates Microsoft Office instead. She just said “but everyone is doing it”. And that is true.
April 17th, 2009 at 6:46 am
Was a little wierd to see the first sentence there in swedish….
Was shorted out for like 10 seconds just staring at the screen “wtf, am i at the right site??”
April 17th, 2009 at 8:47 am
295GTX is a dual-GPU video card, so it uses internal SLI to work. That means: if the game doesn’t support SLI that well — your 295GTX won’t be any faster than 275GTX.
P.S. I would disagree a bit with “in a year or two no one will need a dual-gpu vga”, because now games aren’t that demanding because most of them are console ports, and as you know — the consoles aren’t that powerful. Wait for “xbox720″ and you’ll see that game requirements will skyrocket. And another argument to that fact is: ATI is going for the new strategy (as you can see with 4850×2), it bundles up two mid-range GPU’s for mainstream buyers, and it’s going to do that for the future. What that means is, more and more people will get dual-GPU video cards, so SLI and CF support will be a much bigger deal in a year or two, than it is today.
April 17th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
@bookwormat
On the review scores front, I agree with you. They are just plain stupid, and can go die in a fire.
As for my first played games, I think Super Mario Bros. 3 might have been the first game I ever played. As for PC games, maybe Solitaire or something, but Space Quest 6 is the one I remember playing the most from a long time ago.
*Arnie voice*
“LEAVE NOW OR I REARRANGE YOUR ORGANZ.”
And then he proceeds to literally turn you inside out. I couldn’t get much farther than that, adventure games are hard when you’re young.
April 17th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Crap, missed the edit timer.
—
This was great episode. GRIZATE. Lots of great discussion, and cracked up many times, many because of Andy.
April 17th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
On launch problems:
Every game needs to be taken as its own situation. In the case of Demigod, Stardock and GPG were screwed over by Gamestop, and piracy numbers they never expected to see. Those problems have been solved for the vast majority of people, and they should be commended for responding to the community and fixing these issues so quickly.
On Demigod piracy:
Blogs like Kotaku piss me off. The story here was that piracy messed up the launch, but GPG and Stardock successfully responded quickly to cut them off. The story was never “OMFG PIRACY 100,000 PIRATES 18,000 SALES”.
First of all, Kotaku mistook 18,000 *CONNECTIONS* as 18,000 *SALES*, which it isn’t. I’m willing to put money on the bet that most of the thousands of people in the beta didn’t care about playing the game on launch day, and even many people who bought it wouldn’t have a chance to play that first day.
Second of all, read Brad Wardell’s actual quote - they expected ~50,000 peak connections AFTER A FEW WEEKS. That means that ~18,000 on launch day is right around where they expected to be, sales-wise.
April 17th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
@bookwormat If you don’t like number scores, just ignore them and read the actual review. Doing both is just our way of trying to please everybody, because there *are* a lot of people out there that would go nuts if we stopped giving out scores. And of course, scores should never be taken by themselves as a definition of a game - we see them as shorthand, so that people can know at a glance whether we liked a game or not. Oh, and a helpful tip: Metacritic scores are entirely useless, since they don’t take into account that our 80% score means something different from someone else’s 80% score.
The idea of a “live review” that is updated as you go would be great, except you have to consider the logistics of it. That means that every so often you have to go back and extensively play *every game,* then write about the changes. That’s a lot of work, and the workload expands every day that a new game is released, so it’s not practical for any publication. If you need up-to-the-minute impressions of how a game is running after it has been out for six months or a year, the best place to go is the forums, not reviews.
I do like the idea of a publisher scorecard - we had something like that in the works a while ago, but it fell through the cracks. Generally, you’d want to limit it to a publisher thing if you’re talking about post-release support, since developers almost always *want* to keep updating and supporting their games, but if the publisher won’t pay for it, they can’t do it.
I’m not sure what you mean by “Most PC Games are sold as subscriptions to services these days. Even single player games.” What single-player games are you paying a subscription fee for? Or are you talking about paid DLC? That’s kind of a strange way of looking at it, considering you have no obligation to buy the DLC (and in the case of Fallout 3: Operation Anchorage you *shouldn’t* buy it).
@kyrieee Yes, EA had the LOTR movie license, but they did not have the rights to make an MMO based on the movie license.
@dLMN8R The differences between Demigod’s rocky launch and a hypothetical game launch in which the publisher/developer screwed the pooch themselves is irrelevant to the average user. In both cases, someone comes home with their shiny new game and it doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.
April 17th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Right, but the person who comes home with the shiny new game and it doesn’t work has already foregone reading reviews
It’s the people who wait for reviews to buy the game that won’t encounter those launch problems, as long as the launch problems are fixed quickly - which in this case, they have.
April 17th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
@Dan
I think bookwormat means digital distribution, where you’re basically paying a subscription fee to rent a game, since you never actually own it.
April 17th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
@Aeshir Ah. Then “subscription” is the wrong word for it. A subscription generally has a reoccurring fee for regular content delivery. And, strictly speaking, you’ve never actually “owned” any game you’ve purchased, you’ve only held a license to play it. The difference that online activation makes is that it’s now been made more difficult to transfer that license to another user.
April 17th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
Edit: Omg, what a wall of text!
@Dan, thanks for answering.
“If you don’t like number scores, just ignore them and read the actual review.”
It’s not that easy, because so many other people focus on the score. The value a multiplayer game like Demigod has for me is directly dependent on the number of people playing it:
- I need as many people online as possible, so the matchmaking algorithm can find equal players for me.
- The success of the game decides how much effort Stardock is putting into the game. How much free content, what kind of expansions etc.
“Doing both is just our way of trying to please everybody, because there *are* a lot of people out there that would go nuts if we stopped giving out scores. ”
I believe that. The problem is that people like scores because they think scores give them something which I think they do not really get.
The score depends on the reviewer, on the time the review was done, on the games that where released before that game etc. It even depends on the price of the game.
“And of course, scores should never be taken by themselves as a definition of a game - we see them as shorthand, so that people can know at a glance whether we liked a game or not.”
If I read both the review and the score: What information will I find in the score that is not already in the review?
The problem with the “shorthand” approach is this: Most people use scores to filter out as many games as they can, so they have it easier to decide where to put their money. For example, they look at all the games with a score >90, or >80, and they ignore the rest. Or they have 2 games which they both like, and they buy the one that scored 97 instead the one that scored 96.
Games with low scores are _invisible_ to most people. It doesn’t matter what you write about a game you gave a 65. If it had no single player, or lacked gameplay, or was simply too short (Maybe the “good but to short” game is now $5 on some steam weekend sale). Most people will never look at that review because of the score.
Btw: a interesting sidenote about Demigod’s price: In the US, it’s $40 for Demigod and $50 for most full priced games. In Europe, it is $40 for Demigod and $65 for most full priced games. So for Europeans the value for money is a much better, and maybe the lack of a campaing much less of a annoyance.
“Generally, you’d want to limit it to a publisher thing if you’re talking about post-release support, since developers almost always *want* to keep updating and supporting their games, but if the publisher won’t pay for it, they can’t do it.”
I see. That makes sense of course.
“What single-player games are you paying a subscription fee for? ”
You are right that subscription is misleading. So is ‘registration’ the correct word?
You buy the right to play the game as long as the distributor offers their service to you. You do not buy a software license like it used to be in the past - That would allow you to borrow or resell the game, as well as play it in 50 years on some emulator (I think I borrowed my copy of Grim Fandango to at least 10 people in the last decade.).
I’m not really troubled by the registration model - It makes no sense for a company to sell games in times of high speed internet. A registration based service is much easier to maintain than it used to be, and has many advantages to the company (even some for customers). I see little reason why a company should sell their games, so I accept the service model.
Single player games are also services simply because they require maintainance. You always need postgame support if you buy software because it is impossible to avoid bugs. So even a single player game is bound to a service.
Games are also often shipped in pieces. For example, Dawn of War 2 was marketed/”promised” to have “lots of free content as well as some premium content”. So the game is expected to change over time, and details on how it changes is not unknown. Which makes it less of a product and more of a service. A service based on trust.
A bit offtopic since we where talking about single player games: In multiplayer games, not buying the expansion/dlc often means you cannot play the original anymore. For example, if you did not buy all the expansions for the first Dawn of War, you was not able to find any people online anymore, since multiplayer was not compatible between players with or without the expansion.
Would be interesting how this works with Starcraft 2. I guess many Koreans will have to buy all three parts of the game, even if they are only interested in the multiplayer part of the game.
Again, thank for answering.
PS:Love the podcast.
PPS:Sorry for all the typos.
April 17th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
I haven’t listened to the podcast yet, but on the Left 4 Dead website (www.l4d.com) they have the complete details on the DLC that will come out next week. Keep up the fantastic job with the podcast.
April 17th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
@Bookwormat
No problem, that’s what we’re here for!
“It’s not that easy, because so many other people focus on the score.”
We leave the decision of how best to absorb the information up to the reader. Some people like scores, and some people, like you, like the text. As long as the two are in sync - and we make certain that they are - then both types of readers are getting the same recommendation or denouncement, but in the long or short form that they prefer.
“The score depends on the reviewer, on the time the review was done, on the games that where released before that game etc. It even depends on the price of the game.”
So does the review text. All entertainment reviewing, whether text or numerical, is subjective.
“The problem with the “shorthand” approach is this: Most people use scores to filter out as many games as they can, so they have it easier to decide where to put their money.”
And that’s exactly why people like them. Some people don’t want to put quite as much time and energy into the decision process. They want the field narrowed down to cut out all of the crap, and scores allow them to do that. For everybody else, we proudly print the full review that justifies why we gave each game the score that we did.
As for the online activation thing, I’m not personally convinced that there will be a problem X number of years down the line with being able to play your games, barring some sort of apocalyptic event. There has never been an instance of a major non-MMO game becoming unplayable due to a company going under, and I don’t think it’s likely to happen - if a company does go under, they can simply release a patch to remove the online authentication. Developers will do this because they want people to be able to enjoy their games, and no developer I’ve ever spoken with has wanted to screw over their fans. I could be wrong, but I personally doubt it will be a problem.
You have a very broad definition of the term service…I would not define patches the promise of future DLC as a “service” that ties you to anything myself, but I suppose I can see how you might interpret it that way.
For StarCraft II, the current Blizzard line is that you’ll get the full multiplayer experience from the first of the three parts (Wings of Liberty) and the next two parts will be single-player campaigns for the Protoss and Zerg. Whether or not they stick to that when the game finally hits remains to be seen.
April 18th, 2009 at 1:45 am
Wow, nostalgia overload! But I wouldn’t really know much about that, because I’m 14. Great episode, BTW!
April 18th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Bioshock 2 wont launch with a PC version……..
http://uk.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/bioshock2/news.html?sid=6208179&tag=topslot;img;1
Hate how this has gone cause they’re scared of piracy but don’t realise that this doesn’t help the platform and the people who were going to pirate will just wait and pirate it when it releases a year later. Where as the people who were gonna buy it probably wont be interested in purchasing it a year later.
If it doesn’t get launched along side the consoles then I know I wont be buying it a year later cause I’m not supporting being treated like shit by developers anymore.
April 19th, 2009 at 12:39 am
@Just Be I completely agree with you. Such a sucker-punch every time this happens.
April 19th, 2009 at 12:49 am
8D
http://playhimoffkeyboardcat.com/
I await the asplodation of Logan’s head on thursday.
April 19th, 2009 at 8:41 am
The funniest thing ever:
http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1907543
Captures the stupidity of the internet very well.
April 19th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
I don’t wanna overload this page with links, but this is just awesome.
“Pip-Berry 3000″: Blackberry home screen modded to look like VATS in Fallout 3.
http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/kotaku/full/~3/gIwXiOXhAzk/pip+berry-3000
April 19th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
@Just Be That’s completely in contradiction to everything 2K has been telling us. I suspect this is an instance of GameSpot UK mislabeling an article.
April 19th, 2009 at 11:25 pm
Well aint this just dandy! Trying to install the 1.4 patch for CoD5 and I get “Error 1628″
So I see I have to modify the local security policy.. Oh wait I use Home Premium and I can’t do that!
Instead of whining about piracy how about getting the root of the biggest problem with PC Gaming… Windows!!
Now if you will all excuse me I’m going to go burn an entire fucking night getting a patch to work!
I’m at my wit’s end here. ANY help appreciated
April 19th, 2009 at 11:55 pm
But not to leave things on a bad note…
First game I played was Oregon Trail. I also remember getting magazines and loading the games in myself and saving them on cassettes
First game I really played and got really into was F-19 Stealth Fighter. Still have the box and the disks. I miss that game, things were so much simpler then
April 21st, 2009 at 7:08 am
I honestly don’t remember which was precisely the first PC game I played. We were high sophisticates — we had both an Apple II (owned by my brothers) and an Apple Macintosh (my father’s). We had a multitude of games, from sports like Hardball, one that involved saving a farm with a rifle, Sid Meier’s Pirates (awesome), and then a huge box of games for the Apple II, most of which have probably never been heard of. Some of them were original game floppies, so they were probably purchased. Others were on blank homemade ones, so looking back, I’m guessing my brothers probably got them somewhat less… consumer based. Games ranging from some type of Pinball game, to graphical text adventures like Swiss Family Robinson, to shooters like Law of the West, to Hard Hat Mack, Seawolf, and Choplifter. And Conan. And then there was a set of edutainment games called Microzine. And games my siblings had written the code themselves.
First game on a PC that I owned was Alpha Centauri. Still have it, still play it.
Zero-day problems — mention them lightly. I’m guessing you can’t write the review in March or whatever, then edit in what happened right before it gets published in April. Don’t affect the score. I use the score as a general guideline — more telling to me is your impressions of the game. The only problem I recall seeing when I was in the US and able to get the magazine was that the bad games, i.e.
April 21st, 2009 at 9:34 am
I don’t have time to read all the comments, but has anyone corrected that guy on the Odyssey 2 yet? He has the Odyssey 1, Atari VCS (2600), Odyssey 2, and Fairchild Channel F turned into one machine in his mind.
The Channel F was the first removable cart system (he implies it is the Odyssey 2). The Odyssey 1 was arguably the first system with removable games, but these were only connectors changing the “wiring” of the hardware, not containing programs. The Odyssey 2 was the third removable cart system, after the Channel F and 2600.
The Odyssey 1 came with overlays, as did the Vectrex. Not so much the Odyssey 2. It didn’t need overlays, as it produced colour graphics. As for putting English on the Pong ball, he either played the Channel F or the Odyssey 1 there, as that was not in any O2 game. Finally, the Haunted House game he describes is on the 2600, and is called appropriately “Haunted House.”
April 21st, 2009 at 11:56 am
Logan mentioned the Apple ][ game “The Prisoner” and this was one of my first computer games I played too (you can tell I’m an old timer because I still use the phrase “computer games”). Prisoner and it’s graphically enhanced sequel were really great games that pushed the limits of what a game could be.
There were sequences in the game where you were essentially playing a version of Simon. However, the computer, when prompting you if you wanted to continue, would keep raising the stakes until eventually it would threaten to format the floppy if you lost that round.
The main gist of the game was to never reveal your resignation code (a four digit number) to the computer. The computer would try to trick you by sticking your code in the middle of the string of numbers you had to memorize in the aforementioned Simon game. Also, there were points when you thought it crashed and it would send you to the DOS prompt with an error message like “Syntax Error Line 1234″. Being a good nerd, you would type the BASIC command “LIST 1234″ forgetting that 1234 was actually your resignation number and then you would really lose the game and have to start over. Great stuff.
April 21st, 2009 at 12:32 pm
@Atarifever You’re right, it was the original Odyssey that we had. But it did have a game called Haunted House, like the 2600. I remember because the light would light up beneath the overlay, and it would be like, “boo.”
@Tantalus OMG THAT’S IT
April 21st, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Zero-Day problems: I’m one of those people that rarely; if ever, play online. I got over my WoW phase about a year ago and online multiplayer in other games really doesn’t appeal to me.
If the problems affect gameplay itself then yes it should absolutely affect the score. If it’s multiplayer problems then I don’t think so. It’s hard to tell how popular your game is going to be, so sometimes it’s better to start small and scale up.
April 21st, 2009 at 9:26 pm
Left 4 Dead DLC is out… Survival mode completes my life…
April 21st, 2009 at 11:48 pm
Interestingly enough the Angry Videogame Nerd just did a bit on the Odyssey I, go here to watch:
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/48329.html
April 22nd, 2009 at 8:59 am
@ Logan Sorry, I didn’t know the Odyssey had a Haunted House game, and it sounded like you were describing Atari’s Haunted House (fantastic game by the way; arguably the first “survival horror”).
April 23rd, 2009 at 1:19 pm
OK I like Far Cry 2 again
April 23rd, 2009 at 2:31 pm
I try to get the survival L4D update and steam says the game is unavailable.
Is steam having a bandwidth issue or is it my bad luck. It was unavailable for a few days already.
April 23rd, 2009 at 2:55 pm
hey wich X-com are they talken about cuase there are 5 if im right so wich one is it.
April 23rd, 2009 at 2:57 pm
@Wildcat - the only one you want to play is the first one, UFO Defense. The second one, Terror From the Deep, maybe. Pretend the rest don’t exist.
@thegamepro8171 - No idea what’s up with that - we all got it easily and have had no problems so far. Are you able to play anything else on Steam?
April 23rd, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Hey guys, today’s podcast may not be posted this evening, but for good reason–Andytron is whipping up something special that we’re hoping you’re like. (No, we aren’t going to sing Queen covers at you like MaxPC). Your patience will redeem you.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:35 pm
I won’t reveal what it is.
April 23rd, 2009 at 10:03 pm
It’s looking as if we got owned and wont be able to fully realize the fruits of our labor.
April 23rd, 2009 at 10:52 pm
Meh, these things happen all I ask is a podcast this week and I’ll be happy
April 24th, 2009 at 10:51 am
Why’s the Pcgamer/Maximumpc server for TF2 always empty? What servers do you play on?
April 24th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
The Orange Box is 66& off on Steam this weekend! Holy crap, that’s only ten bucks!!! For anyone who hasn’t gotten it yet, you have NO excuses!
April 24th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Should I get my hopes up for a podcast this week after all?
April 24th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
SWEET!
i got my first closed beta testing key!!!!! Got it last week for battlefield heroes
April 24th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
Another Thursday, another missing podcast. Meh.
Stop being the best podcast around so we don’t get so disappointed when this happens.
April 24th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Or you could just teach yourself not to be disappointed when you don’t get a podcast on Thursday and maybe have to wait until Friday or the next week, that would be a lot easier.
April 24th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
@thegamepro8171 - same thing is happening with me. i went to launch L4D from Steam and it said try later or something to that effect. so i unistalled it and went to reinstall, now it just sits at download starting screen?
second issue of the day- i bought Braid off steam and installed it. when i went to launch it from the steam games tab an error box popped up and said cant find steam or file path. what is up with that? does anyone know how to resolve this. i removed and reinstalled 3 times to no effect.
oh p.s i ruled out problems with other games by launching TF2 succefully through steam. so we know that steam does work
April 24th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Another Thursday, another missing podcast. Meh.
Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Meh.
April 25th, 2009 at 12:51 am
solved it
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=9725442