xbox one: dead on arrival
ChildofBhaal599
Member Posts: 1,781
in Off-Topic
well, seeing what happened at e3 i don't see why they try anymore. for those who don't want pc drm and the new xbox one drm we now have ps4 which is entirely free of drm. am still going to move to pc completely myself, but it is good to see that sony isn't following microsoft's example.
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I'm going to buy it when the price drops in half, otherwise I'm sticking with PC
That it's 20% cheaper is icing on the cake.
The biggest market for the Xbox One would've been gamers... But then they decided to make games be more or less a secondary feature on the thing and make it cost more than a gaming PC (that would have equal or better performance) making it obsolete upon reaching the market. The PS4 doesn't exactly do much better in terms of pricing and performance... But alteast it's still a gaming console.
Then again the console price never really was the problem - it's the games' price that is. 10 AAA games and you basically spent twice the amount of money into games than into the console.
As far as online multiplayer goes, it's not a concern for me since I rarely bother with it. The sensible thing when a new console comes out is usually to wait a little bit until the price starts coming down, but this time around I'm in a position where I might have a bit of money to spare, so I might consider the PS4.
I haven't really kept up on PS4 news since the initial announcement, but I thought Sony had said that they were leaving the issue of used games up to the publisher. So while you could freely share/sell games that were published by Sony, there was the possibility that third party publishers could choose to restrict this. Has this changed, or am I just remembering wrong?Spent a minute searching and found the answer.
Edit: I'm not saying that I think that this is for sure what would happen in the case of the servers responsible for checking your XB One games went down. I'm just saying that it's not like being cut off from all your games is the only possible outcome if the servers were to shut down.
And if the publisher could remove the DRM requirement with noting but a patch, the game would be laughably easy to crack. Any publisher that's worried about piracy isn't going to make it that easy to circumvent their anti-piracy measures.
The slightly less mindbogglingly stupid alternative is to run a cryptographically signed OS on special hardware (I.e. a games console) which only runs cryptographically signed applications (solving the problem by using essentially tamper proof hardware). But in that case, you could still remove the DRM checks with a simple patch (which the console will refuse to run unless you release the cryptographic signature)
Really, I think it's not so much about piracy as trying to restrict people trading their older, used games, because they think they hurt sales of new games. I'm not really convinced by that, since new games have short shelf lives anyway, and people who buy used games can still use the extra money they've saved to buy DLC.
Of course, if in the future distribution all goes digital then it all becomes a moot point.
Baldur's Gate was a value. You could sink 70+ hours into it easy....that's less then a dollar per hour you're spending (was about 50 bucks at release, if memory serves....god that was a long time ago). The above example is like 4 bucks per hour at the end range....plus all the unhealthy DLC and pre-order practices involved.
And here's the thing.....digital couldn't do used games because of how easily you could pirate and share games. But that's changed. With distribution models like Steam, there is no reason at all anymore to not allow people to sell and trade games between each other since you have an official means of transferring ownership of the digital media through those platforms.
While Steam's trade feature is currently useless, if it was re-tooled so people could trade game/DLC licenses for either other games or an agreed upon amount of Steam cash, you could have literally a finely regulated used game system for digital media. The same number of copies are still in circulation and people can recoup their money to spend on other games, and people that bought a game that looked promising but just didn't meet their expectations, could find someone else to buy or trade for it instead of having it languish in their account collecting dust. (I wish VERY much I could get rid of Skyrim and Dawn of War 2: Gold.....those games were MASSIVE disappointments to me, but I'm sure there's people out there who'd be more then willing to pay a little less then the normal steam price for the games and all their DLC).
@TJ_hooker
Technically you can. It's why private servers exist. They've data-mined enough information to create emulated servers. Sure they're generally buggy as all hell..but there ya go....it's do-able. Though Consoles don't have that option (usually), once their server goes down, that's the end. Did they patch WK Chronicles so you could host local multiplayer games or using the host's machine as a server for people to connect to instead of their own? Even though all the resources to do so are on disc? Hell no...and no other games will either.
Also some games, like the PS2 Monster Hunter have all their content on disk, but after the servers were shut-down, over half the games content was locked out....but through use of gamesharks/codebreakers you could force them to unlock ANYWAY.
I'm actually conflicted....as much as I absolutely hate Oblivion, I have a hard time saying which one I hate more......Skyrim gutted the game and gave you no choices to make, while oblivion was a shoddily done and the scaling was god awful, but managed to have more overall freedom, which is what Bethesda games (until Skyrim) have always focused on.
Morrowind had the most freedom of the modern games. You could literally be anything you wanted, and could literally tell the plot to go F it's self, screw destiny, and do things your way. And you could fly...can't over state that...the lack of flight has always just ruined it.....you cannot take a feature like that out and then tell people to suck it up, you're walking NOW!? F progress, we're taking 15 steps back for every forward step we take. And enchanting and spellmaking was awesome. Hated Skyrim and Oblivion's enchanting system.
Oblivion, you were still a nobody, free to make your own destiny. And despite removing flight and screwing the leveling system up BADLY....it still had a fair amount of freedom. Though the gutting of the disposition system was a prelude of things to come. And you still had spell-making at least, and the auto-unlocking of perks at set skills was a neat Idea (hated Skyrim's version of it).
Skyrim you have no freedom. Your destiny is set and you can't do a damn thing without it rail-roading you into being a Dragonborn. And the DLCs were much better.....Hearthfire was the best of the DLCs IMO, since it actually gave you a little bit of choice in how to build your house. Dragonborn the DLC was garbage, especially it's big and widely toted new ability....that was a clunky POS and useless outside of one very awkward forced story battle and represented a major lost opportunity. Enchanting was heavily restricted, crafting was an interesting idea, but seemed tacked on and I didn't like the removal of the repair skill (wouldn't have minded folding them together). I also disliked the removal of the old attribute system. While I agree it had it's share of problems, I disliked how Skyrim handled it. (A Hybrid method that allowed you to gain levels like Skyrim, but gave a flat 15 stat points to distribute instead of making you level up just so, would worked much better.)
And Dawnguard.....ugh....you have no choice. It ends the same way. You actually only get to choose between Side A, who has no disadvantages and gets everything Side B does + some awesome stuff, or Side B who doesn't get any of Side A's stuff, a bunch of penalties, and has even more potentially gamebreaking bugs. The Lord Form was clunky and useless (though I will admit Grip was fun (what a Master Level Telekinesis should've been).....when you could actually manage to hit an enemy with it, since it forced 3rd person and 3rd person sucks for aiming)
And completely beheading the speech and disposition system. They really should've just called speech, Mercantile. And they missed so many options during the Civil war quests.
And the overuse of lines....I swear to god, it seems like the full Skyrim script was maybe 5 pages long. And overuse of voice actors. While they had good talent, they didn't have enough of them, which is why full VA in a game of that scale is a GRAVE mistake. VA can add to immersion...but not when everyone sounds the %^#&%^#& same and says the exact same %^#&.
The most fun I had in Skyrim was a level 1, whole game challenge (minus the handful of Daedric quests with higher min levels), where my character attacked only using a shield, unless specifically required to do something else to fulfill the quest. And only due to the shear absurdity of a lvl 1 effortlessly killing lvl 50 Liches and Draugr Death Overlords (there's a surprizing number of areas who aren't level scaled, mostly Dragon Priest lairs or the final area before the final battle), with impunity, where as they normally present a challenge to even higher level characters, especially the ranged ones. But as I said, I do agree the combat was an improvement.....that was it.
Starting with Oblivion, they've definitely aimed more towards a controlled, set of experiences. In a way, similar to the transition from open BG to streamlined and more linear BG2.
Different strokes for different folks (that is a saying, right?)