Eris

 

DRM = Digital Restrictions Management, not Rights. It has never had anything whatsoever to do with anyone's rights, and everything to do with restricting the use of technology. Labeling it rights management is just a slick form of framing the debate and you shouldn't be buying it - let alone reinforcing it.

If everyone would start simply calling it digital restrictions management, we would have much more honest discussions about this problem. Remember, this has never been about copyright infringement, it has always been about control.

Blacklightning

Feb 18 2012, 03:27 AM

On the subject of multiplayer and game longetivity, I had a different interpretation of the problem.

See, because I'm an ozzie and most of the people I ever get to play online are yanks or brits, I generally have a pretty hard time of finding an online game that works with a tolerable amount of lag to go by. So the obvious solution is "well BL, why don't you just play people closer to you, ya ranty bastard?"... and see, that's just the thing. Nobody fucking allows it anymore. Back in the N64/Cube era it was perfectly reasonable to expect all four controllers to be used for most multiplayer games, splitscreen or otherwise. Nowadays, the only games off the top of my head that still do that is the Halo series, which means for the most part that I've got three spare X360 controllers just sitting around collecting dust. Now, toning down the game's graphics to allow it to be rendered four seperate times per screen really isn't that difficult, and most splitscreen gamers can tolerate a bit of multiplayer frame lag if it means a chance to fuck around with mates in the same room.

But granted, not all multiplayer games can really be optimized very well for it, so if it's a game like Saints, fair enough. That would mean having to buy multiple fucking consoles and games for the opportunity to play with people in the same building as you - that's not always a bad thing though, if you're not the one buying duplicates of everything. Have everyone buy a 360 and a copy of that game you like, and you can just throw a LAN party whenever you want... right? Umm, no. Despite it being trivially easy to implement, a LAN option for multiplayer gaming remains mysteriously absent from every multiplayer title I could ever want to play, again, sans Halo (it's worth noting that I grew out of said series not long after Halo 3). Now the motive for this is pretty obvious - they want more people to sign up to their paid online service for the opportunity to play with friends so that they get more money off it - but this short-sightedness costs greatly on the game's lasting value because the servers won't be up forever (depending on the game, of course - for example, what I remember of Shadowrun's longetivity lasted mere months before the servers were shut down). A game like Doom or Quake is still playable today because with the right tools, you can simply pop it into multiple computers, link them together via router and fuck each other's shit up, whereas nowadays once the servers shut down, you can kiss any chance of getting a good run out of a game goodbye, sometimes destroying the game in its entirety if it's solely dependent on multiplayer interactions. And even while the game is still running, it's to say nothing of how ridiculously inefficient it is to have to connect to a distant server for the privalege of playing someone in the very next room.

Then as if self-sabotaging the game's longetivity by removing LAN functions wasn't enough, recently we've hit the absolute cieling of absurdity - online passes. What's an online pass? It's DLC that lets you play the game online. DLC that enables you to play online. So in addition to the game lasting about as long as the servers are still running, you have to buy the game completely new close to the launch date (assuming the retailer isn't an absolute sleaze like Gamestop and stealing even the DLC codes that new buyers are obliged to), otherwise you're fucked right from square one. You can't just tell a friend a few years after release "hey, this game was pretty cool and you haven't played it yet, maybe you should buy it so we can digitally stab each other sometime", because by that point all the new DLC codes will already have been used, and gamers won't see any incentive to fork out another 5-10 bucks for something they were already entitled to just by virtue of owning a hard copy of the game. Even more ridiculous still was the case with Saints 3, which did have a LAN function but required an online pass for it. How the fuck does that even work?

tl;dr, a game that can work over LAN can potentially last as long as the industry does - otherwise it'll last a bit longer than five years. And that's being extremely generous. Sure, devs could squeeze more longetivity out of a multiplayer title if they wanted to, but most of the big ones honestly do not give a fuck what their games do as long as it pays. It's selfish, short-sighted bullshit of the highest calibre.


On another minor footnote, I'd just like to add that UE4 really looks like nothing that Deus Ex wasn't already capable of, and I was honestly more disappointed that it wasn't an announcement of a new Unreal game that wasn't the UT series. I'm really more excited for progress on the Infinite Detail engine than whatever Epic Games can pump out anymore.