I know I'm massively out of step with everyone else but I'd swap an online authentication for the disc check any day.
Really? I recall you were of the opposite opinion even during the whole Bioshock controversy.
Have you changed your opinion Dhruiny, or maybe you could clarify.
(PS- yes, for those interested, I did bring up the Bioshock DRM with the speaker from 2K but even then I knew he couldn't elaborate because he had nothing to do with it, having worked on the PS3 version of it. He did seem he didn't like it - or didn't like to have to deal with massive blow up at least.)
Alrik
Well, I once wrote somewhere that developers are rather technically oriented, not creativity oriented. So, in my thesis, the higher developer-oriented the grade of a tool set is, the fewer creativity it might evoke. So to say.
Because in theory, creativity is rather seen with non-techie people, not vice versa.
Therefore I personally doubt we'll see very creative new mods there, only rather mods that are interesting from a technological perspective ("techie playground").
As somebody who spent four years of his life playing with the NWN Toolset I can assure you technology is a definitely a great tool for creativity. The Toolset itself succeeded because it was annoyingly simple to make a mod you can DM a a game in in 5 minutes.
But the richness of the scripting tools allowed me to do some stuff that was so crazy that I decided to finally finish my CS degree. (check out the Fire Elemental building in my mod below. I'll remind you that none of what I did in the mod was with haks).
And since it was a game, if your players didn't see it or it didn't add to the fun there is no real point except to what you know is under the hood. The fun of the player should always be the focus.
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So relevance to the DA Toolset it appears from watching the videos I saw those of us familiar with te NWN Toolset see it as a step in the right direction.
However, we all know there is no multiplayer, no DM client, and it looks like you are limited to the areas they give you.
I was far more interested in what kind of toolset they could put out and what I could do with it than what they've announced over the years about the game. I'm likely going to pass.
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Notice how phrase "supporting the game" seems to have changed its meaning from "patching the game" to "letting you buy some goodies".
nice catch
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I think the public screamfest that Bioware had with Atari over allowing SecuROM to add one half baked version to the game over another lead to this new DRM policy.
You may recall that the initial SecuROM on NWN cracked a lot of discs (including mine) and Bio even recommended the customer use a copied version and safely tuck the original away.
In one patch the SecuROM was so bad that Bio yelled at Atari and a patch was quickly released they removed it entirely until it was fixed in the next patch.
Makes me wonder how they convinced EA to let them do this however. Maybe it was already in the contract.
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Did anyone read my point on marketing in the 2k Game Lecture?
All this info about the game is coming out now months and months before the game is released. This is the reason the speaker says is for such specific deadlines - contracts for this kind of information are signed years in advance.
The delay IMO really throws what Bio signed already out of whack.