MS could still sell cards. Sony do it with PSN. You just pay for a cash value card, rather than a Points value card.
My preference is to do away with them. It makes the process more straight forward and open.
That's slightly concerning...
Why make the the THIRD entry in the series easier to get in to? Why would they expect newcomers to jump in to the series at this point?
Does that mean the story is also less important to accommodate those people who are coming in to the series for the first time?
I already thought ME2 moved a little too far away from RPG, and it seems ME3 will continue this trend.
The question is... What benefit do they provide? How do they make the purchasing process better or easier?
From the day they were introduced I couldn't understand the point of them other than to obfuscate what they represented as a cash value.
And what's funny is people actually defending MS on this. Imagine if Amazon or a bricks and mortar store decided to implement it's own currency, with an odd exchange rate.
EDIT: And to put ...
Pointless question considering the current strong rumour that MS will ditch Points by the end of the year...
Which btw, seems to me the strongest indication of a 2013 launch for the Next Xbox.
@CrimsonEngage. MS could easily give a code or other method (like Amazon and PSN do) to reimburse you for surveys etc. Points are a ridiculous idea intended purely to ensure MS have as much of your cash as possible. i.e. For an 900 point game I would have to buy 1200 ...
All predictions sound good and plausible. The Next Xbox should be a beast. But my concern is not hardware, it's software.
When a DRM negatively impacts the experience for legitimate customers, then yes.
Having to be always connected to the internet in Single Player modes is a big negative for me (No more playing games on my laptop while travelling. Losing progress in the game because my connection bugs out for a moment. Login servers sometimes being down which happened a lot for Anno 1404)
I can just about live with the activation limit, and even losing an activation if I chang...
I certainly didn't dislike the demo, but it didn't grip me as much as I was hoping.
Something about the game made me think I'd seen it all before. I don't mind a game borrowing from other RPG's, after all it's rampant in the industry. But after the excellent opening (which kinda reminded me of Planescape: Torment) I just feel it's unlikely the story will be strong enough to make me want to put up with the 'been there, done that before' ...
1. Because they can...
2. I'm sure they will license the tech to other companies (as they did with MemorySticks). So we will see cheaper stuff from SanDisk, Kingston etc at some point
To call this 'hacking' gives far too much credit, and diminishes the skills and talent real hackers have (not condoning hacking, but there are some seriously talented people out there).
MS had / have a minor flaw in their security set up - part of which is to cause less inconvenience to the end user (i.e. it doesn't lock the account after X number of failed attempts). Security will always be a balance between restricting the end user and potentially leaving a hol...
It's that sort of devout faith people put in company's who are primarily geared up to extract money from your wallet and maximising profit, that leads to complacency and ultimately getting ripped off.
I get the feeling the devs hate having this DRM crap packed in by Ubisoft.
I don't understand why Ubisoft would alienate their paying customers in such a way. As broadband speeds increase the temptation to rip their games is only going to increase. The only people getting a nice experience are those who bypass the restrictive DRM.
Problem is, it's not Ubisoft who would suffer from the piracy - they've got plenty of studios making them money. It...
No to Feb launch
Maybe to GTA V
Terrible idea.
What niche of the market would Sega fill? The thing I've seen this gen is that each manufacturer has clearly defined a strategy different from the others.
Nintendo have gone for lower power hardware, and casual appeal through motion and other non standard controls
Microsoft are banking on Kinect and complimentary 'living room 'services.
Sony are catering to mainly hardcore plus casual and pushing t...
I believe that NPD stopped reporting the figures on the individual manufacturers externally, so it was up to the MS etc if they wanted to release them publicly.
Ninty and MS decided they would comment, but Sony decided not to bother. What do they care about commenting globally on US only figures that are not 100% accurate (for example a lot of smaller or independent stores are not captured by NPD figures).
For anyone who can do math, there's no conspirac...
Yes, because Apple, MacDonalds, Nike etc etc can't sell any of their goods in Japan; nope, just doesn't happen. Those pesky xenophobic Japanese!!! /s
And unless a company is 'stuffing the channel', (which there has never been an indication of Sony doing) the difference between shipped and sold really isn't that great because it costs the manufacturer to have units sat in warehouses. Try working in logistics for a while before talking about something you ...
Can't believe there wasn't a #4 for insanely boring mini games... Scanning in ME1 and Mining in ME2.
Grrr, still makes me mad how boring that was and in #2 how important Mining was to get a certain ending!
The one thing putting me off this game is the lack of ambiguity in the moral choices.
It's obvious (as the review states) that you either go Good or Dark Side, or are left floundering in the middle ground.
To put it in context of Star Wars... If you took a character such as Han Solo, it's obvious his background is very grey. He's a smuggler, he's done bad stuff and probably screwed over people, but he's also a good guy. Why can't the...
I used to be a Nvidia guy, then they utterly screwed up, with the 8series subsctrate problems, so I've been AMD ever since.
But surely no matter what, even if 3rd party devs step up, the 1st party devs, who have access directly to the engineers who created the hardware, are always going to be one step ahead.
That was the whole point of Sony setting up the ICE team, so that they could pass some of that low level knowledge on to other devs outside the Sony fold.
Also, I would imagine we'll see an even bigger push towards multiplatform games using 'off the shelf' engines ...
It's getting nasty out there in App land!!
In this case I agree that SpryFox are well justified to take on 6Wave. It's obvious they saw what they were creating and decided it was probably cheaper to just code their own instead of pay SpryFox.