The Gaming News Thread

[Monk]

Rogue System heads toward Kickstarter

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013...ce-combat-sim/

This has got to be one of the coolest projects to come along in a while. The number of subsystems available is really amazing:



Can never have enough of this genre imo

[Monk]

A first look at Vicky 2's upcoming newspaper system is provided in the first Heart of Darkness dev diary.

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/...%96-Newspapers!

[Crazed Rabbit]

Rogue System heads toward Kickstarter

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013...ce-combat-sim/

This has got to be one of the coolest projects to come along in a while. The number of subsystems available is really amazing:

Can never have enough of this genre imo

That's really neat, and I hope it succeeds, but I'm interested in what he means by 'Well Beyond Visual Range';

"Weapon Targeting System (WTS): The WTS provides target tracking at various ranges--VR (visual),BVR (beyond visual), FBVR (far beyond) and WBVR (well beyond)."

I would love me some gameplay on the truly realistic side of space combat, but then he goes and writes stuff like this:

Weapons systems such as plasmarepeaters and slug throwers are best saved for VR combat. Missiles and Kinetic weapons are generally used at BVR and FBVR ranges. Typically, only beam weapons are accurate enough for WBVR engage-ment. There are various types of WTS’s that track by one or more means, such as EMF (electro-magneticfield), Radiation (heat) and Optical. By reducing your EMF and RAD signatures you can effectively “hide”within a star system’s “background clutter”.

There's no stealth in space.

I'm unsure about all the subsystems. Some of those details could be really cool, but some of them seem annoying. Shouldn't a space flight computer be able to minimize damage and manage systems better and faster than any human? I'd think the pilot should just be managing the sort of over-all power allocation.

- Life Support System (LSS): This not only provides clean air for the pilot/crew to breathe, it also keepscrew compartment temperatures at a nominal rate. If this system is damaged the pilot could suffocatedue to bad air, or even “bake” or “freeze” to death.

No one's going to freeze to death when there's hardly any heat dissipation.

Still, the world needs more of these types of games. And if it's as modifiable as they claim, someone could fix all my gripes.

CR

[Husar]

Well, I think realistic space combat would be rather boring as the lack of any air resistance would make ranges almost infinite and whoever can find the enemy first can fire first and that's about it. A proper computer system would make sure the shot hits, they can already hit ballistic missiles from ships on waves with all the randomness involved. What would make them miss in space?

[Fragony]

A lot of it

[Fisherking]

For anyone interested in the American Civil War, AGEod is coming out with ACW 2 sometime this year.

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

Well, I think realistic space combat would be rather boring as the lack of any air resistance would make ranges almost infinite and whoever can find the enemy first can fire first and that's about it. A proper computer system would make sure the shot hits, they can already hit ballistic missiles from ships on waves with all the randomness involved. What would make them miss in space?

Doesn't that depend on how far away you are, the speed of the projectile you are firing, and how fast the target can change course? My guess is ballistic missiles aren't fast enough to move out of the way of ballistic projectiles within the distances we deal with on earth.

If you have one straight-moving projectile that is not fast enough to beat the maneuvering of a target very far away, space combat is probably boring because you won't be *able* to hit the target. That's part of why sci-fi games uses missiles and lasers and/or distances that aren't very far.

[Husar]

Well, a laser is pretty fast, so unless we're talking about lightminutes of distance, which is already far enough so you won't see much of the enemy I guess, it's not very likely that they will miss. A distance of 100km isn't a whole lot for a laser in space. A missile would take rather long to travel that distance anyway and a laser on the target could easily destroy the missile before it even gets close. If the game models battles over distances of several lightminutes then it's still boring of course since just waiting for them to show up on your radar screen would take minutes.and as you say there's not really a weapons system that could work against a target flying random patterns at this distance. Unless you fire some kind of field weapon where the field covers a large area or cone. But at within visual range engagements or even anything close to it a laser makes zap and it's a hit. The kind of slow-flying "laser projectiles" of games and movies aren't really realistic after all and realism was the assumption here, right?

[Fragony]

Pretty excited about the ps4. Looks like Sony learned from it's mistakes and made hidiously powerfull console that's easy to work with, at a very reasonable price

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/df...-playstation-4

[Crazed Rabbit]

Well, a laser is pretty fast, so unless we're talking about lightminutes of distance, which is already far enough so you won't see much of the enemy I guess, it's not very likely that they will miss. A distance of 100km isn't a whole lot for a laser in space. A missile would take rather long to travel that distance anyway and a laser on the target could easily destroy the missile before it even gets close. If the game models battles over distances of several lightminutes then it's still boring of course since just waiting for them to show up on your radar screen would take minutes.and as you say there's not really a weapons system that could work against a target flying random patterns at this distance. Unless you fire some kind of field weapon where the field covers a large area or cone. But at within visual range engagements or even anything close to it a laser makes zap and it's a hit. The kind of slow-flying "laser projectiles" of games and movies aren't really realistic after all and realism was the assumption here, right?

Ah, but laser isn't just zapping someone and taking them out. You have to keep the laser on target - a specific point - and burning a hole into the enemy ship. Even if this takes just a few seconds, at ranges of 1000km the slightest error in targeting or stability could screw that up. And then you burn a hole and take out one compartment.

I would heavily recommend this site:
http://www.projectrho.com/public_htm...--Laser_Cannon

If your opponent has a laser, they can shoot you, and possibly destroy your own laser. Unless you get their laser first. Or they might shoot some self-guiding projectiles at you, and you'll have to use your laser to blow them up before they hit you. And while you do that they hit you with their laser.

And projectile weapons don't lose energy over space, so they could be fired from outside of laser range - hopefully with enough projectiles to saturate any laser defense. But lasers will always have a lot of range with which they can destroy incoming projectiles.

As to what could make lasers miss:

And don't think that lasers will automatically hit their targets either. There are many factors that can cause a miss. Off the top of his head, Dr. John Schilling mentions:

Uncertain target location due to finite sensor resolution
Uncertain target motion due to sensor glint or shape effects
Sensor boresight error due to finite manufacturing tolerances
Target motion during sensor integration time
Analog-to-digital conversion errors of sensor data
Software errors in fire control system
Hardware errors in fire control system
Digital-to-analog conversion errors of gunlaying servo commands
Target motion during weapon aiming time
Weapon boresight error due to finite manufacturing tolerances
Weapon structural distortion due to inertial effects of rapid slew
Weapon structural distortion due to external or internal vibration
Weapon structural distortion due to thermal expansion during firing
And we haven't even begun to include target countermeasures...

CR

[Husar]

What mister cube says. In space you also have to deal with less random movement than you do on say, an ocean, yet the navy can already aim lasers at one spot of a moving target from a moving platform.



The only thing that would limit laser range are bad optics that lead to the beam dissipating and becoming less focused at long distances. Or an enemy coated in mirrors. And projectiles fired at 100.000km range would have to be guided or suffer from really, really bad accuracy. However, even if you fire 100 missiles, at 100.000km there's plenty of time to destroy them with a laser before they arrive. And if you're coated in mirrors you also don't have to worry about the other guy's laser. Or you can fire 200 missiles back to keep him busy for a few minutes. In gaming terms that would all still mean you're sending stuff towards a blip on your radar, in the case of lasers you can even spare yourself any graphical effects.

If you like that sort of thing, there's already a game for you: https://sites.google.com/site/samsimulator1972/home

[Husar]

Lasers play a huge, huge part in modern warfare already. An Abrams tank uses a laser range-finder for just about everything, from calibrating a firing solution for a main gun round to telling your loader how high he should aim his machine gun.

I know, I tried the Steel Beasts demo.
But these lasers aren't even used in space. I'd think in space you even deal with less vibration, there are no different layers of air temperature etc. etc., making things easier. My point was if they're already used effectively in this rough terrain here on earth, why should they be less reliable in space, where everything floats around gently? There are no waves or bumps in space that could suddenly distort your aim. There is also no air that makes them less intense at long ranges. The one thing that could defeat them are mirrors. If you fired a missile with a mirror in front of the warhead then the laser might destroy the ship that fires it.so maybe scratch lasers, how do photon torpedos and plasma blasters work again?

[Crazed Rabbit]

I know, I tried the Steel Beasts demo.
But these lasers aren't even used in space. I'd think in space you even deal with less vibration, there are no different layers of air temperature etc. etc., making things easier. My point was if they're already used effectively in this rough terrain here on earth, why should they be less reliable in space, where everything floats around gently? There are no waves or bumps in space that could suddenly distort your aim. There is also no air that makes them less intense at long ranges. The one thing that could defeat them are mirrors. If you fired a missile with a mirror in front of the warhead then the laser might destroy the ship that fires it.so maybe scratch lasers, how do photon torpedos and plasma blasters work again?

It's like you're not reading my previous post. And lasers have to deal with diffraction in any environment: http://panoptesv.com/SciFi/LaserDeat...ffraction.html

Mirrors don't work. No mirror is 100% efficient in reflecting light and any amount of energy that isn't reflected will nigh-on instantly destroy the reflective capabilities of the mirror. And then destroy the mirror and whatever is behind it.

Imagine salvo after salvo of ship-peircing kinetic bursts being fired at the ship's current location and every location that the computer thinks they might possibly be. The tactic most successful would probably be finding the enemy unawares, getting a range bearing (difficult if the other guy has laser-detecting technology, which already exists, so... element of surprise would be difficult to get beyond that brief first moment) and then having your cannons saturate a spherical area exactly large enough to encompass any place the enemy ship could be by the time your rounds got there.

Ah, now this begins to get interesting. Another possibility is firing kinetic weapons with some small boosters to allow for mid flight adjustments. Otherwise, trying to saturate the possible routes of a ship 1,000 km away could - would - take more ammo than is available.

Here's a short discussion of space combat tactics:
http://www.projectrho.com/public_htm...vanced_Tactics

And there's links here to a variety of interesting discussions on lasers, missiles, and kinetic weapons;
http://www.projectrho.com/public_htm...--Introduction

CR

[Husar]

It's like you're not reading my previous post.

I did, but only remembered talk about internal vibrations etc. making aiming hard. That's why I said it's probably less hard in space if it can be used on tanks today already. and we're talking about more advanced than today.

And lasers have to deal with diffraction in any environment: http://panoptesv.com/SciFi/LaserDeat...ffraction.html

Mirrors don't work. No mirror is 100% efficient in reflecting light and any amount of energy that isn't reflected will nigh-on instantly destroy the reflective capabilities of the mirror. And then destroy the mirror and whatever is behind it.

Yes, but the only energy that hurts the mirror is the remaining energy that is not reflected and we don't even know what kind of mirrors we will have once we have lasers capable to tearing through an armored space ship. Maybe mirrors made of unobtainium.

Ah, now this begins to get interesting. Another possibility is firing kinetic weapons with some small boosters to allow for mid flight adjustments. Otherwise, trying to saturate the possible routes of a ship 1,000 km away could - would - take more ammo than is available.

Yes, I also thought the amount of ammunition could easily become a problem in GC's scenario. But I'd still think that at these long ranges, kinetic projectiles are relatively easy to avoid or destroy before impact. Or they'd have to be very, very fast, but in any case it's enough to destroy the ones coming at you, whether it's a few guided ones or just a few from a huge mass of projectiles. In the games and movie scenarios, the space fighters are pretty small, like modern airplanes, saturating space thousands of kilometers away with enough matter to kill one no matter where it moves would probably take more projectile mass than 10 such space ships could carry, no?

[gaelic cowboy]

@GC I cant help feeling some alien world government ended up destroying it's economy by building such ginormomungus spacecruiser deathmachines.

Sure the little ewok planet would only need to attach a few booster rockets to a couple of asteroids and boom the empire is gone.

[Husar]

It could be built by mining asteroids. Otherwise we might risk lowering the weight of the earth too much, thus changing its course around the sun.

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

Apparently we shouldn't militarize space because it's a real downer.

[Monk]

I hope you guys like Planescape: Torment because we're getting a new game in its style:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...es-of-numenera

Not even a day after it went live the project has been fully funded. And it still has the full 30 days to go.

[TinCow]

I hope you guys like Planescape: Torment because we're getting a new game in its style:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...es-of-numenera

Not even a day after it went live the project has been fully funded. And it still has the full 30 days to go.

I got in around the 600k mark.

[Lemur]

Looks like the new Sim City is exactly as crippled as we expected.

So many news items about this mess, hard to choose one, so instead I'll link to the Google News feed.

[Fragony]

Most issues have been fixed, they are working on it and give buyers a free game as a mea culpa. Have been treated worse.

[Monk]

Looks like the new Sim City is exactly as crippled as we expected.

So many news items about this mess, hard to choose one, so instead I'll link to the Google News feed.

I didn't post anything about this because it's been everywhere, I don't think there's anyone satisfied with how the launch has turned out. It's gotten so bad EA is now limiting game features to lighten the load on their servers. It's a goddamn disaster.

I was involved with a number of the beta versions of Sim City. It really didn't take a fortune teller to predict some of the problems the game was going to have but EA (or Maxis, it was hard to tell) didn't seem too interested in taking feedback in regards to the always on DRM or the city size limits, which have turned out to be the two biggest negatives for the game.

Though, if you would have told me Sim City would have a worse launch than Diablo III, I would have said you're exaggerating. The deed and the damage are done, unfortunately.

[Fragony]

http://uk.ign.com/articles/2013/03/0...coming-in-2014

A reboot huh. I can't shake of the feeling that Thief 4 is going to piss me off even more than Thief 3 did. Ah well, I am going to buy a ps4 for it, as I bought an xbox to play Thief 3. I demand HUGE levels with these 8gb of RAM provided with no loading times at all and flawless AI and physics. Deliver.

[Husar]

Looks like the new Sim City is exactly as crippled as we expected.

So many news items about this mess, hard to choose one, so instead I'll link to the Google News feed.

On that note I'd like to share these if you haven't seen them yet:

https://i.imgur.com/rUvSn7L.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/ZEFfs4q.jpg

http://www.krawall.de/web/Sim_City_/ktopsy/id,64545/

Last one is a german joke (short) review where they rate the graphics and controls of the error messages because they couldn't play the game.

[Lemur]

The cool thing is that due to always-on DRM, SC is difficult to play now, but guaranteed to be impossible to play in the future. EA is under ZERO obligation to maintain servers going forward, and thry have deliberately created a crippled app that cannot function as a standalone exe.

And Frags, you do realize that giving you an unlock code to an unspecified older game costs EA nothing, right?

-edit-

Public (but anonymous) letter from an EA employee. Couldn't say it better meself.

To the executives at EA, from one of your employees

I am deeply embarrassed by the troubled launch of Sim City and I hope you are too. When I walk around our campus and look at the kind of talent we’ve collected, the amenities we have access to and the opportunities working at such a big company affords us, I can’t imagine how for release after release, EA continues to make the same embarrassing, anti-consumer mistakes. We should be better than this. You should not be failing us so badly.

Another thing I see when I walk around our campus are massive banners that display what are said to be our company values. They are on posters on every floor, included in company-wide emails and hanging above the cafeteria in bright colors. You even print them on our coffee mugs so we see them every day. But somehow when planning the launch of Sim City, you threw them all out the window.

Most important of the values you are ignoring is Think Consumers First. What part of the Sim City DRM scheme, which has rendered the game unplayable for hundreds of thousands of fans across the globe, demonstrates that you are thinking about consumers before you are thinking about yourselves? Does “first” mean something different in boardrooms than it does to the rest of us? Does the meaning of that word change when you get the word “executive” in front of your title?

You can’t even pretend that you didn’t know consumers would be angry about this. Common sense aside, consumers complained about this during your public betas. In fact, when one of them posted his criticisms on the forums, he was banned! You tried to silence your critics. The same thing is happening now as users write in to demand refunds. What part of this behavior aligns with our company value to Be Accountable?

What you’ve demonstrated with this launch is that our corporate management does not believe in our core values. They are for the unwashed masses, not for the important people who forced this anti-consumer DRM onto the Sim City team. This DRM scheme is not about the consumers or even about piracy. It’s about covering your own asses. It allows you to hand-wave weak sales or bad reviews and blame outside factors like pirates or server failures in the event the game struggles. You are protecting your own jobs at the expense of consumers. I think this violates the Act With Integrity value I’m looking at on my own coffee mug right now.

On behalf of your other employees, I’d like to ask you to fix this. Allow the Sim City team to patch the game to run offline. If Create Quality and Innovation is still a core value that you believe in, then this shouldn’t be a hard decision. Games that gamers can’t play because of server overload or ISP issues are NOT quality. Be Bold by giving the consumers what they want and take accountability for the mistake.

Finally I’d like to ask you to follow the last company value on the list in the future: Learn and Grow. When you made this mistake with Spore, the company and all your employees suffered for it. You didn’t learn from that mistake and you are making it again with Sim City.

So please, learn from this debacle. Don’t do this again. Grow into better leaders and actually apply our company values when you make decisions. Don’t just use them as tools to motivate your staff. With the money, talent and intellectual property available to EA, we should be leading the industry into a golden age of consumer-focused game publishing. Instead we’re the most reviled game publisher in the world. That’s your fault. Things can only change if you actually start following the company values and apply them to every title we launch.

Sincerely,

A Disappointed But Hopeful Artist at EARS

[TinCow]

If you missed the news coverage, Richard Garriott has started a kickstarter for a new Ultima game. Personally, the Ultima universe is no longer exciting for me, and that's coming from someone who played a lot of the SP games and put a good two years into UO. That said, his ideas about a hybrid SP/MMO system are crazy enough to be interesting. I'd say it's likely to be a train wreck and I'm not going to join the kickstarter, but I'll follow its progress with interest.

[Lemur]

Just to beat up on EA a little more, a network/database geek has some informed hypotheses as to how/why the server architecture for SimCity is breaking down.

Okay, I'm looking for input on this working theory of what's going on. I may well be wrong on specifics or in general. Some of this is conjecture, some of it is assumption.

What we know:

• The SimCity servers are hosted on Amazon EC2.
• The ops team have, in the time since the US launch, added 4 servers: EU West 3 and 4, EU East 3 and Oceanic 2 (sidenote: I would be mildly amused if they got to the point of having an Oceanic 6).
• Very little data is shared between servers, if any. You must be on the same server as other players in your region; the global market is server-specific; leaderboards are server-specific.
• A major issue in the day(s) following launch was database replication lag.

This means that each 'server' is almost certainly in reality a cluster of EC2 nodes, each cluster having its own shared database. The database itself consists of more than one node, apparently in a master-slave configuration. Writes (changes to data) go in to one central master, which performs the change and transmits it to its slaves. Reads (getting data) are distributed across the slaves.

• The client appears to be able to simulate a city while disconnected from the servers. I've experienced this myself, having the disconnection notice active for several minutes while the city and simulation still function as normal.
• Trades and other region sharing functionality often appears to be delayed and/or broken.
• While connected, a client seems to send and receive a relatively small amount of data, less that 50MB an hour.
• The servers implement some form of client action validation, whereby the client synchronises its recent actions with the server, and the server checks that those actions are valid, choosing to accept them or force a rollback if it rejects them.

So the servers are responsible for:

• Simulating the region
• Handling inter-city trading
• Validating individual client actions
• Managing the leaderboards
• Maintaining the global market
• Handling other sundry social elements, like the region wall chat

The admins have disabled leaderboards. More tellingly, they have slowed down the maximum game speed, suggesting that—if at a city level the server is only used for validation—that the number of actions performed that require validation is overwhelming the servers.

What interests me is that the admins have been adding capacity, but seemingly by adding new clusters rather than adding additional nodes within existing clusters. The latter would generally be the better option, as it is less dependent on users having to switch to different servers (and relying on using user choice for load balancing is extremely inefficient in the long term).

That in itself suggests that each cluster has a single, central point of performance limitation. And I wonder if it's the master database. I wonder if the fundamental approach of server-side validation, which requires both a record of the client's actions and continual updates, is causing too many writes for a single master to handle. I worry that this could be a core limitation of the architecture, one which may take weeks to overcome with a complete and satisfactory fix.

Such a fix could be:

• Alter the database setup to a multi-master one, or reduce replication overhead. May entail switching database software, or refactoring the schema. Could be a huge undertaking.
• Disable server validation, which consequent knock-on effect of a) greater risk of cheating in leaderboards; b) greater risk of cheating / trolling in public regions; c) greater risk of modding / patching out DRM.
• Greatly reduce the processing and/or data overhead for server validation (and possibly region simulation). May not be possible; may be possible but a big undertaking; may be a relatively small undertaking if a small area of functionality is causing the majority of the overhead.
• Edit: I just want to add something I said in a comment: Of course it is still entirely possible that the solution to the bottleneck is relatively minor. Perhaps slaves are just running out of RAM, or something is errantly writing excessive changes, causing the replication log to balloon in size, or there're too many indexes.

It could just be a hard to diagnose issue, that once found, is a relatively easy fix. One can only hope.

Thoughts?

[Veho Nex]

Thoughts?

EA sucks and needs to be removed as a power house in the gaming world.

[Monk]

Just to beat up on EA a little more, a network/database geek has some informed hypotheses as to how/why the server architecture for SimCity is breaking down.

Okay, I'm looking for input on this working theory of what's going on. I may well be wrong on specifics or in general. Some of this is conjecture, some of it is assumption.

What we know:

• The SimCity servers are hosted on Amazon EC2.
• The ops team have, in the time since the US launch, added 4 servers: EU West 3 and 4, EU East 3 and Oceanic 2 (sidenote: I would be mildly amused if they got to the point of having an Oceanic 6).
• Very little data is shared between servers, if any. You must be on the same server as other players in your region; the global market is server-specific; leaderboards are server-specific.
• A major issue in the day(s) following launch was database replication lag.

This means that each 'server' is almost certainly in reality a cluster of EC2 nodes, each cluster having its own shared database. The database itself consists of more than one node, apparently in a master-slave configuration. Writes (changes to data) go in to one central master, which performs the change and transmits it to its slaves. Reads (getting data) are distributed across the slaves.

• The client appears to be able to simulate a city while disconnected from the servers. I've experienced this myself, having the disconnection notice active for several minutes while the city and simulation still function as normal.
• Trades and other region sharing functionality often appears to be delayed and/or broken.
• While connected, a client seems to send and receive a relatively small amount of data, less that 50MB an hour.
• The servers implement some form of client action validation, whereby the client synchronises its recent actions with the server, and the server checks that those actions are valid, choosing to accept them or force a rollback if it rejects them.

So the servers are responsible for:

• Simulating the region
• Handling inter-city trading
• Validating individual client actions
• Managing the leaderboards
• Maintaining the global market
• Handling other sundry social elements, like the region wall chat

The admins have disabled leaderboards. More tellingly, they have slowed down the maximum game speed, suggesting that—if at a city level the server is only used for validation—that the number of actions performed that require validation is overwhelming the servers.

What interests me is that the admins have been adding capacity, but seemingly by adding new clusters rather than adding additional nodes within existing clusters. The latter would generally be the better option, as it is less dependent on users having to switch to different servers (and relying on using user choice for load balancing is extremely inefficient in the long term).

That in itself suggests that each cluster has a single, central point of performance limitation. And I wonder if it's the master database. I wonder if the fundamental approach of server-side validation, which requires both a record of the client's actions and continual updates, is causing too many writes for a single master to handle. I worry that this could be a core limitation of the architecture, one which may take weeks to overcome with a complete and satisfactory fix.

Such a fix could be:

• Alter the database setup to a multi-master one, or reduce replication overhead. May entail switching database software, or refactoring the schema. Could be a huge undertaking.
• Disable server validation, which consequent knock-on effect of a) greater risk of cheating in leaderboards; b) greater risk of cheating / trolling in public regions; c) greater risk of modding / patching out DRM.
• Greatly reduce the processing and/or data overhead for server validation (and possibly region simulation). May not be possible; may be possible but a big undertaking; may be a relatively small undertaking if a small area of functionality is causing the majority of the overhead.
• Edit: I just want to add something I said in a comment: Of course it is still entirely possible that the solution to the bottleneck is relatively minor. Perhaps slaves are just running out of RAM, or something is errantly writing excessive changes, causing the replication log to balloon in size, or there're too many indexes.

It could just be a hard to diagnose issue, that once found, is a relatively easy fix. One can only hope.

Thoughts?

Well, EA's made their bed and now they have to lie in it. A recent tweet from the SimCity devs sheds a small amount of light about the future of their game: https://twitter.com/simcity/status/310497022157406209 (this was in response to someone asking them when they might provide an offline mode)

It's literally history repeating itself, first Diablo III is made for Multiplayer because "no one plays singleplayer," and now Sim City (a traditionally singleplayer game) is admitted by the devs to be solely played as a multiplayer experience. Let's just forget the fact that the actual multiplayer functions are incredibly shallow. I don't know where this idea that forced co-op should be a feature entered into the major publisher minds, but I'd really like to see it gone.

Don't be surprised if in 8 months EA releases a statement declaring "More people like singleplayer than we thought." It has happened before. It shall happen again.

[Crazed Rabbit]

A 'HD' version of Age of Empires 2 is coming to Steam soon.


ARMA 3 might actually be somewhat optimized!

CR