NCCS is largely in neutral for awhile, until we see how the greeting is going to mesh with the fourteen thousand badly made NPC mods on the Nexus; and I'm still largely disgusted with the "community" and its rampant stupidity and obliviousness... so I've lately been writing again. Hopefully I can get some of this mess out of my head, and actually start sleeping again.
In the course of the playing required for the next installment of Nos' Adventures, I've had three game crashes, and three deaths directly caused by game lag and semi-automatic weapons refusing to fire more than once every ten seconds.
Will someone remind me why in the holy fuck we're all looking forward to TESV? Bethesda has proven three times over now that they don't care about making a game work; only about selling DLC. And now they've got it into their heads to inexorably link their games to Steam - the shittiest and most invasive media management system since Realplayer.
Anyway, the screenshots are all taken; and the story lined out - I just have to write it, and transfer the text from Word to Blogger, adding in the relevant images and italics tags. Would really be nice if formatting would copy from .doc files to a text box in Firefox. I could probably set it to display in html, or use Frontpage to do my writing or something like that... but such things screw up my writing chi, so I'll just have to deal with it, I guess.
May be a few days yet, though. I think I burst a seal someplace coughing earlier, and I need to make sure I'm not bleeding internally and/or going to collapse.
Yeah, I've been posting about this sort of thing on the Nexus in the Skyrim threads recently, but I already know I'm wasting my time and it would be delusional of me to think that Bethesda is going to change their MO now. I'm sure the new game will be full of useless FPS killing stuff like HDR lighting and high-res shadows, swaying blades of grass and rustling leaves, window and water reflections and ripples and butterflies and raindrops and snowflakes and just about anything else you can name that has absolutely nothing at all to do with the quality of the actual gameplay and yet will force us all to either buy new rigs or upgrade the ones we have if we want to play it.
ReplyDeleteAnd if they go DRM with this one I also suspect that many gamers will refuse to pay for it. Hell, I'm struggling to keep up with my bills now, and you can bet that the internet will be one of the first things to go if I have to start livin' lean. Sure, if things get that bad I wouldn't be able to afford a new game anyway, but that's not the point. If we pay for a game that should be the end of it; don't make us jump through hoops to play something we already purchased fair and square. I just don't get it.
I like the model Stardock uses.
ReplyDeleteThey figure that if you're going to pirate, you're going to pirate. So, their games contain no DRM whatsoever. If you buy it, you get to play it without any asinine hoops to be negotiated.
Their setup is that you have to be registered via CD key to get updates; so while the game itself is DRM free, it's at least inconvenient to keep up to date if you didn't buy it.
Not impossible, but then again there is no DRM that can't be cracked, given time and motivation.
As for getting why they do it... that's control, plain and simple.
In physical media, the lawyers and such were never able to force you to use something in one way. Buy a CD, you can rip it, play it, copy it, give it to ten friends; use the fucking thing as a skeet target if you're so inclined.
But digital media and the internet? That you can only use when and how they allow you. You pay for it, but don't own it. Look at new media. Music and movies that will only play if you log into a web site to validate it; games that won't run unless they can report everything your PC does to a central server; E-books that can be disabled or deleted from your reader at any time they see fit.
I try not to wear a tinfoil hat, but big brother is alive and well - and it ain't the traffic cameras that people need to be worrying over.