I used to organise LANs both (PC and Xbox/360) back in college. My issue is when everything started to get tied to the cloud (e.g. Starcraft 2 or Halo 5 both needing internet connections), which to me is not true LAN.
@pezen: That 'gated' access is happening within the match. Starting at round 1, everyone has the same amount of money and the same starting weapons. Any progress/performance is contained within that one match, and everyone is reset to the same level when they play the next. (Same basic principle with DOTA, Halo, UT, Quake). Every match starts with everyone on an equal playing field which makes it far better as a competitive game.
Compare that to something like CoD or BF where it's heavily biased toward those that spent time grinding away through the tech tree to get the best guns/attachments/streaks and perks vs someone who might be level/rank 1 and has to be at a disadvantage only having the starting weapon. I have some personal experience with this when I recently bought Battlefield 4 on the PC after having played many hours on the PS4, and man it's such a chore having to re-grind my way through to re-earn my favorite perks/weapons/attachements in order to be as competitive as I was on the PS4. All of which handicaps any team I'm playing with.
Because it wrapped it in a better package that was much easier to show off to the mass audience. I like both games, but the presentation of CoD4 was really well done.
Last game I pre-ordered was Halo Reach Legendary edition, which was kind of around the time the gross DLC pre-order bonuses started taking off and I don't want to support that kind of shady system so I stopped (up until then I was a pretty frequent pre-orderer). The more recent high profile set of games launching broken/buggy combined with poor returns policy/consumer protection on game purchases has only re-enforced my notion that it makes no logical sense to throw money at something before it's been evaluated. Now I wait till I can get a good assessment of the game post-release and often I'm paying well under the RRP not long after launch so I'm getting a far better value now than I ever did in the past as a pre-order fiend.
I really don't understand why they didn't just show this on actual BBC3. Instead they've been showing old reruns of shows that no one cares about. This is a half step in the right direction for legitimizing esports, but they could have taken a giant leap in the right direction.
It's probably because the BBC Three channel is going to be shut down sometime next year and go web only, so they're moving a lot of the new stuff to iPlayer.
I'm liking what I'm seeing so far, I just hope the story can stand on it's own without having to rely on external lore knowledge which I felt was Halo 4's biggest issue story-wise.
If people want a digital revolution, the infrastructure has to support it - both in terms of large/affordable bandwidth and rock-solid stability. The former obviously involves ISPs willing to upgrade infrastructures and allow users access to affordable high bandwidth tiers. (Much like the physical transportation issues that had to be solved when shipping physical products).
On the latter, one only has to look back at the end of 2014 when XBL and PSN both were taken down for a good chunk of December, often breaking many people's access to their purchased digital content (I can only imagine how much worse it would have been under XBone's original premise). Not to mention how servers cripple on day 0/1 for many of the big launches. I'm aware these problems aren't easy to solve but that's the big issue right now is this central point of failure model has big risks that need to be addressed.
Log in to comment