But Messiaah, Blackops looked much better on PC than on the consoles as well. lolConsoles could never beat the PC is in the "looks" department.As for the next issue, I could imagine what Judge Judy would say to someone brought before her on a charge like that....Judge Judy: Sir...are you telling me you bought the game?WarOne: Yes maam.Judge Judy: But let me get this straight....you also pirated the game? A game that you also bought?WarOne: I downloaded the game...Judge Judy: You pirated it, you stole it, swiped, 5 finger discount, whatever....That's what you did! A game that you also bought. Is that correct?WarOne: Yes maamJudge Judy: Are you on any medication?WarOne: But notnice said....Judge Judy: I don't care what notnice said....Do you come from a long line of idiots? Get out of my court room. Guilty.
How many people completed each game? This is tracked by viewing available achievements given for seeing the end. Source: Raptr
Money, it's a gasGrand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption reportedly cost Rockstar Games $100 million to make. Each. Among all of the developers we spoke to, they agreed that game length is directly tied to their budget. Rockstar declined to comment for this article.Larger-scale games require more people to make them, and time and money are limited resources. The average development cycle for a game is somewhere around two years, and the average development budget is between $10 and $20 million—but that's not including a Killzone or StarCraft."There are few developers out there who can work on a game forever until they feel it's ready," said Tsui. He added that no matter what the game is, you want to come out on time and on budget. "That really dictates how long a game is."
More killer, less fillerDevelopers are now more interested in creating a finely tuned experience that's awesome from start to finish, compared to a mediocre one that lingers on for too long like in years past."The 'shift toward shorter games' is a lot of people waking up to the idea of quality over quantity," said Tsui. "There was always this legendary question of, 'Hey, is your game 40-hours long?' That was always the big deal. I think that bullet-point has gone away…It's a cliché at this point.""An action-adventure game like the Uncharted series, they're pretty big games," he said, "but no one's playing those games and thinking, 'Oh, this isn't 40-60 hours.'" He said that if a game is designed well, it ends at a precisely specific time and leaves players slightly hungry for more.
It's the neglect, stupidIt's not really upsetting me that much that I can't play DA:O on a weekday—that's probably for the better. And I'm not by any means opposed to DRM for games; indeed, there's an argument to be made that it's a legitimate response to ongoing piracy problems. No, my beef is with buggy, poorly-thought-out DRM schemes that have legit users sniffing around torrent sites to see if they can get their hands on a working copy of the game they paid for. The fact that DA:O has to reauthorize my DLC every time I log into the Bioware server is just nuts, and it sets users up for all sorts of problems. (On the client side, the authorization service that runs under Windows doesn't always start, so even if Bioware's servers are up, users can still face this problem.)Then there's the fact that, again, EA/Bioware didn't address this issue for three whole days. For three days, users were locked out of a game that they paid for due to these server problems, and there was no notice posted. Not only that, but they either don't monitor the Bioware forums, or they don't care enough to participate in them, because no one from Bioware showed up during this period to even acknowledge the issue informally. This mix of incompetence and malicious neglect is startling to me, but it's apparently par for the course for these two companies.
