Tweet
It's telling that last week Adam Orth found himself on the wrong side of public opinion after voicing his support for always online features, an opinion so badly received that he wound up ending the week no longer Microsoft Studio's creative director. It wasn't so much that he merely considered always online a good thing for gaming and consoles, but that he thought it was an acceptable step for both games and consoles to take, that the infrastructure was in place to support it, and we should just accept that as the way things are nowadays. What's telling about it isn't that Orth was wrong. The proof in that pudding has been served in multiple flavours, from Diablo 3's infamous error 37 to SimCity's shameful faceplant of a launch that's only now starting to get into a state where EA can properly start rebooting the game and turning on features that should have been there at release. No, the telling part is that Orth was partly right, even if it was an uncomfortable truth.
These requirements are for the good of the game, we're so often told. Diablo is a fundamentally multiplayer game, after all - unless you're one of the many people who never played it that way. The cynical way to look at it was as a way of ensuring there were enough people around to make the real money auction house viable, but conspiracy theory aside, the requirement was the detriment of almost anyone who played the game, patchy connection or not.
Read more…
More...