I lost interest in Obsidian when they switched to first-person only games. Shame, they used to be one of my favorite studios. Before MS bought them.

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Quoting: redneckdrowAs long as you only receive a license, things won't improve one bit! DRM-free or not, you still lack the ability to preserve it as an individual!

The biggest threat to preservation isn't the license issue, but more and more large studios putting intrusive DRM/anti-cheat systems on their games that are basically guaranteed not to run on any system 20 years from now on, combined with many popular games being online games or having online modes that won't run without the devs releasing the server software.

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When I read that I couldn't believe it was not available there for all that time. oO

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Quoting: jensWhy don’t you just apply for the role to fix this?

I don't like corporations enough to want to work for one.

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If these devs wouldn't suck at coding, they would design their games to be cheat-resilient from the ground up, instead of writing vulnerable client-side systems and then try to detect if someone/something is tampering with them at runtime. But hey, it's not that a lot of people having actual talent would want to work for EA, so there is that.

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Quoting: wintermute

Quoting: KimyrielleI never really understood why people shell out massive amounts of money for a laptop that's heavy enough not really to be a mobile device anymore, when they could get a desktop PC with similar specs for half the price.

Because the "desks" I want to game at are in multiple cities and it's a lot better than lugging a desktop PC and monitor around (some of the desks are kitchen tables, others are beds).

Fair enough, but that's hardly a mainstream lifestyle. But still it seems that desktop PC are not really considered even by people who hardly know how the world looks like outside of their own town.

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I never really understood why people shell out massive amounts of money for a laptop that's heavy enough not really to be a mobile device anymore, when they could get a desktop PC with similar specs for half the price.

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Quoting: Lib-Instlinux needs actual real native games and more people will come. emulation isnt ideal.

That ship has sailed years ago.

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Quoting: Mountain Man"Remove DRM and give us your server code" is to essentially demand that companies release their games for free after they are no longer commercially viable.

It's absolutely not, and I am pretty sure you know that.

Removing the DRM is just yet another patch against the already released executable. Companies are actually doing it every now and then. It doesn't make the game "free", since nobody is forcing them to put up the assets for free download. People who already bought it can still continue to play it, that's all this demand is about.

Same for the server code. I am not aware that releasing stand-alone servers has made any game "free". Same reason as above. The server code alone doesn't do anything. Again, check the Steam Tools page. There are plenty examples of released server software to counter your point.

Also the question remains why they would even care about releasing the game for "free", if they are no longer planning to sell it anyway (which is the assumed scenario here). The economic damage done is exactly zero, since you can't earn money with a game you're not selling. But hey, nobody is demanding greedy corporations to be not greedy. All that's requested here is people being able to continue to use a product they PAID FOR, and tell their makers that it's not ok to disable people's games on a whim, or when they had a bad day.

As a personal note: I get the idea where our positions on this matter are irreconcilable. You're a free-market advocate. I am pro-regulation when it's warranted, and it's remarkably often, IMHO. We won't agree on this, and that's ok. But maybe we can refrain from making misleading statements like "releasing server software makes a game free", when that's clearly not true?

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I really hope that they will get of that silly unit upkeep cost system they introduced in VI. With resource distribution as random as it is, it tends to cripple unit production so bad that the game IMHO stops being fun. I patched it out of my game with a little mod back then, and that solved it for me, but still.

Also, please no more cartoon art style.

I would love if we could build in/under water and have tech advances a bit farther into the future, like in Call to Power II, which I still feel was the overall best "Civ" title.

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