Recent content by grigjd3

The ROI on making games is too small for Valve's current business model. Creating new economies, now that is what gets Valve's attention.

I count (1) Dungeons and Dragons (the old colored box sets that were later turned into a rules compendium), (2) Advanced DnD, (3) Advanced DnD 2nd ed. (4) ADnD 2.5 (advanced rules sets), (5) 3.0, (6) 3.5, (7) 4, and (8) 5, Is that the same way you count 8?

This really depends a lot on the contract and details. Now, I know nothing of what happened in this case and certainly nothing about Carmack's contract with Zenimax, but there are a lot of hooks as to how this kind of thing *could* belong to Zenimax. For instance, if I build my company's code on...

Depends. On these kinds of things, often if investigation shows that the threats were hollow and the person makes a real effort to express regret in court, they can get off with relatively light sentences, like public service and probation. It always depends on the judge, but there is certainly...

Civilization has my vote.

Yep, it's funny to me that only non-artists ever see art as somehow sacred or unassailable. With my own amateur work and with the professional artists I know, there is always an interest in hearing the impact their work has on people and seeing if they failed or succeeded (and to what extent) in...

I think that over the last three decades, there has been a noticeable movement from making programmers see things like a computer to making a computer see things like a person. Notation like curly braces are really there because a computer finds special characters easy to parse. There is a...

I think you mean escapades?

So, again, I can't possibly say what EA's motivations are, but it was clear that Deadspace was never in doubt about receiving a sequel and that Mirror's Edge was. That is, several years passed where EA consistently said there would be no sequel for Mirror's Edge. However, if you're looking for...

The biggest complaint that the original game got, and largely why it didn't sell well, is that the learning curve on the gameplay was too high. Now, I can't possibly speak for EA, but it seems like a closed beta with metrics being sent back to the development team would really help them hammer...

Why? It's on PC and the artistic style leaves little reason to update the graphics.

For strategy games like chess, go, Othello, Civilization, etc, there are two aspects to the traditional AI: 1. the depth of the move tree that can be explored. 2. the analysis of the resulting board. Effectively, the game checks every move it can make and tries out different options and...

You're vastly underestimating the cost of five developers for three months. Try $150K. Remember, employees cost companies a lot more than their paycheck. Companies pay benefits like subsidizing health insurance and they pay a payroll tax. A typical game developer at a AAA studio likely costs at...

The problem that VR has as a new technology that isn't present in TVs or audio systems, etc, is that it is for a single person. I can't put an oculus rift in my living room because only one person can use it at a time. Thus, it must go with my gaming PC, which may or may not be capable of...

The best argument against DRM would be unbreakable DRM. If you can't find a difference in sales when you have unbreakable DRM, then you're wasting money on it.