Azuaron said:
Yeah... no.
If they're making a co-op game, it's going to be always online. It's going to be. It's going to be always online. It's the easiest way to do it, and smaller developers have to keep to their costs down.
"But if it HAS single-player..." but nothing. It won't "have single-player"; it will allow you to play a multiplayer game by yourself. Which just makes YOU sad, like if you played Starcraft as the zerg with no opponents and your "goal" was to cover the entire map with skin (I've totally never done that. Really. Stop looking at me like that.)
For instance, Arkham Horror. Great board game. Technically, it says one person can play it. It's got all the rules and everything. But I'll never play it alone because 1. The game will kick my ass 2. It would make me a sad, sorry man who couldn't find any friends and, most importantly, 3. It wouldn't be any fun.
So quit your moaning about DRM and piracy because it's not about that, it's about technical and development limitations and the type of experience they want their players to have. So if you're going to get a co-op game, get a co-op game. Get this game, whatever. But you're going to have to be online.
And if you don't want a co-op game, then go buy a single-player game.
Why do we expect the absolute minimum from these companies whose products we are paying $60s a pop for? Releasing annual games with reused assets, rushing their games for arbitrary deadlines and releasing half-finished, bug ridden pieces of crap, filling games with DRM that does very little to stop pirates playing the game and actively stops legitimate customers from playing the game and harms their experience. We shouldn't defend them, we should be always asking for more, asking for better, so they have to deliver a better experience for us, otherwise we'll just be thrown the dregs and leftovers and told they're the best thing in the restaurant, now pay up, full price y'all!
Last millenium, in the far off, ancient time of 1995, there was a company called Westwood. They released a new game called Command and Conquer, which was revolutionary in including RTS multiplayer. Back then the only way to do multiplayer was by LANing, and the company knew that not many people would know someone else who had a copy of the game. So what did they do?
They put two copies of the game in every disk That way all you had to do was find another computer to connect to. Today that idea would be ridiculed in the boardrooms. Everyone would talk of the piracy it would cause, and the damage to the bottom line, it would be seen as absolute madness, and would never be done, but they did it, and they didn't bother restricting the second disk to be a multiplayer only thing, or look about putting some DRM so it could only be used on one computer, or so many times. They gave an extra free copy of the full game to anyone who bought it, because they wanted to give their customers the best gaming experience possible.
That is what I want my gaming companies to be like. That is the standard I hold them to, and it may be unrealistic, or downright impossible today, but if we as gamers all kept the pressure on companies to do what is best by us, not by them, then the gaming scene would be a much better place.
For us, not them. Obviously.
