@ Luke Maciak:
Well I intend to play Guild Wars 2, it looks kinda interesting. As for old republic, I was never that much into star wars.

Mass effect universe is too interesting to end with ME3, so we should get something else and I would love to explore the galaxy killing space rats. :D

@ Karthik:

That’s what I’m afraid off – that single player campaign will be shorter, and even more linear than usual. Then again I had similar qualms about Portal 2 multiplayer and it worked out just fine. But, Portal 2 was made by Valve which does it’s own thing. BioWare on the other hand has to dance to the tune EA dictates to them. That’s the difference.

Also, I wonder if this decision will allow them to make ME3 a Diablo3 style, online-only game.

@ Liudvikas:

I wouldn’t because it would be an MMO. In fact, I am completely uninterested in both The Old Republic and the new Guild Wars even though both are supposed to be these big paradigm breaking revolutions that aim to take the MMO formula away from the “Golden WoW Standard” template which everyone has been using for the past decade. I just don’t think they will be that much different. And if they are, I’m ready to be pleasantly surprised.

@ Luke Maciak:
Not the Mass Effect 3!!!

Seriously though, I will be very angry if co-op will be needed to forward story in any way or form.

They are making a mistake, I’d play the shit out of MMO in ME universe, but shepards story shouldn’t be contaminated by my non-existent friends.

@ Luke Maciak: The Mass Effect 3 co-op is an odd, odd decision. They say:

“Success in multi-player will have a direct impact on the outcome of the single player campaign”

Which is the worst possible thing Bioware could do; then they go on to say:

“It is important to note that the system is entirely optional and just another way players can have control over your game experience – it is still possible to achieve the optimal, complete ending of the game in Mass Effect 3 through single-player alone.”

Methinks
i) The singleplayer will be somewhat shorter as a result.
ii) Shepard’s decisions in the previous games will be trivialized, if you can make up for any losses with grinding through co-op.
iii) This paves the way to enforce always-online DRM or some such idiocy.

The best case scenario is that none of this happens. What a shame.

@ Karthik:

Well said. I’m the same way – I don’t really care that much for multiplayer. I have clocked way more hours in Morrowind, Oblivion or Fallout games that in TF2 and L4D. :)

Re: cracking MMO’s though – there are actually scores of private WoW servers out there, so it is not like these games don’t get pirated. It is harder, and more time consuming though.

Speaking of Mass Effect though, have you heard that Mass Effect 3 will be have a multiplayer co-op mode? I died a little inside when I found out.

@ Liudvikas:

Yep. Unless you have bought it on Steam and you are on PC. Like that time when I preordered L4D2, and Valve said it will get unlocked at midnight. At 2am my friend who owns an Xbox texts me to tell me he just went to the store and bought the game and is playing it. I was still waiting for Valve to unlock it. :)

But yeah, legal customers usually get to play before pirates. They also get to see all the fun bugs before they get patched out. :)

@ k00pa:

I don’t think he has any machines linked to the account anymore. But yeah, there are probably some hoops he could jump through to get his account back, but I think he just gave up on it and came to terms with losing those games. I guess it is just too much hassle for him and he claims “he got his money’s worth” from those games anyway. Personally, I’d fight for it, but I guess virtual property is weird like that. His Steam games were more or less just an extended rental for him I guess.

I half jokingly keep telling him to email Gaben and see what happens. :)

Even if you lost your password and lost your yahoo account linked to it, you can still recover the account if you have any proof that its you.

One good piece of proof is retail box with the cdkey. Another proof that works is example paypal transaction id for a game…

So basically if you have at least one physical box linked to your steam account, you should be pretty safe from losing your account by forgetting the password.

Another reason to add DRM, even if it’s cracked the same day, the people who pre-ordered the game will play first and sometimes getting it a little bit sooner is all it takes to consider buying it.

I don’t think publishers intend DRM to be piracy deterrents these days. It’s about control now. If you can control the terms on which your users play your games, you can sell them cosmetic junk and DLC forever. Diablo 3’s always online DRM, for example, isn’t about piracy at all. It’s about Blizzard’s cut in real money item transactions that they have no way of regulating with traditional disc-check DRM.

I always believed that publishers will lose to pirates in the short term, but the industry will win in the end, to the chagrin of most legitimate buyers. This appears to be happening now, with

a) The proliferation of free-to-play titles, which suffer in quality for obvious reasons. (Good luck pirating these!) Path of Exile and Firefall, for instance, might be great F2P games, but they’re basically MMOs, which means they’re more chores than stories and cannot have compelling narratives.

b) Movement of game assets to publisher servers: Diablo 3 will not be cracked at launch! This pretty much kills piracy. There is no way to play skirmish modes on pirated versions of Starcraft 2, for instance, since Battle.net does much of the heavy lifting here.

c) A steep decline in singleplayer narrative focused games, like Mass Effect or Fallout 3. This is the only kind of game I really enjoy playing.

Piracy is losing in more ways than one. I don’t blame the games industry for trying to engage us on their terms, but I do feel increasingly distanced from my once favorite hobby.
I will never pay more than $15 for crippled games that can be turned off at the will of short-sighted publishers again.

@ Andrew Zimmerman:

I steered clear of Bioshock 2 because it seemed like a nasty money grab. The first Bioshock told a compelling and interesting story, and I felt that there was absolutely no reason to revisit that setting.

But yeah, this is an excellent example of how not to do it. GFWL is trying to be like Steam but fails at it so hard.

I think I blogged abut it when I was talking about Fallout 3 but I initially started the game without creating GFWL account because it would let me do that. Then I wanted to add a DLC and had to create one. Without telling me, it moved all my saved games to a different folder and the game could no longer find them. I had to manually copy them back where they were supposed to be.

GFWL is possibly the worst thing in existence.

@ Victoria:

Yeah, the regional restrictions are ridiculous. It may have something to do with the the publisher’s distribution rights. Whoever published that book for Kindle may only have rights to distribute it in UK, whereas distribution in your country may be handled by another company, which currently does not give a fuck about Kindle versions.

It’s silly and annoying though.

I get similarly mad when I discover that a lot of books/stories have slipped into public domain in every nation of the world except US. And of course you can’t buy them in US because they have been out of print for half a century already. Thanks to our endless copyright extension bonanza we now have abandonware literature. :P

I’m OK with the whole iTunes App Store thing – despite my being a pirate in nature :) I found myself buying more and more apps and games there. I like that apps are available for both my iPhone and iPad.

I liked the App thing for OS X as well, but there lies a problem. At some point during summer the developers of Pixelmator removed it from the store because of some problem. I couldn’t update to the latest version from the store and I didn’t have my key for the app despite having bought it to update from developer site. That situation resolved quickly but I’m not so optimistic for the future – it can happen at any time.

What really makes me (and it’s not pure DRM, but I think, kinda related) is the regional restrictions. I really wanted a certain new book from Amazon but it was only available for UK citizens in Kindle format. I don’t see the point of a downloadable product if it’s regionally restricted. I understand that this is how the system works at the moment but it doesn’t make me any less mad. I decided to give it a try and changed my Kindle location to UK. Hello, new book! :) no problem in buying it at all. So, what was their kittens point anyway?