Yesterday I bought Sim City and I can´t play it cause the servers are down. Which brings me to the following: I am 99% sure that I will be able to play CE offline, and I want to thank you for that now. Please, please keep at that. I hope I am not wrong.
And if you want more recent confirmations: https://twitter.com/nvining/status/309180672017317888 https://twitter.com/micahjbest/status/309472158764122112
Short answers: - You will not need to be connected to the Internet, or our servers, for single-player, offline play. - Some interesting things may happen if you *are* connected to our servers, and choose to sign in, but it is not a requirement. You can, of course, disable it from your end. No program should be able to upload data to a server without a user's permission and consent. We are not ready to talk about what 'interesting things' means. - You will need to be connected to the Internet for multiplayer (obviously) or round-robin. I sort of think it would be fun to do play-by-email round robin, but I don't know what the logistics of this are yet. - You will need to be connected to our servers in order to do other interesting things. We are not ready to talk about what 'other interesting things' means. - Our servers run on AWS, including what we're doing for multiplayer. If CE becomes so popular it manages to take out Amazon, we... well, we'll be pretty happy? - I believe CE will be available directly from us, similar to the arrangement we now have for Dungeons of Dredmor. Shorter answer: I believe it was David who said that our philosophy was "basically, don't suck." I still like that philosophy. The programming staff at Gaslamp also believes that making an always-online game is a huge pain in the ass, and if EA can't do it without causing a massive explosion we probably can't either. So, uh, let's not do that!
Gaming has turned into a two tier system with pretty bland AAA stuff and interesting non-AAA stuff. I can't remember the last AAA title that tried something new that wasn't clearly aggressively weighted to the publisher. It doesn't help that simcity uses the dullest scenario in a city builder I've ever encountered or that it's mechanics are just plain awful (in any of the games) compared to any other builder I've played.
THe last AAA title I remember doing something different was Heavy Rain. The one I am looking forward to is The last of us and The last Guardian.
Looking forward to CoH 2 Bioshock Infinite. Metro 2034 and Rome Total war 2. Sure there are crap publishers, but there are also decent ones and good game developers. But one does certainly see the strategy side of things being heavily neglected as of late and handed over to mid-tier publishers. Though they then proceed to reap the rewards. And of course we have smaller developers like gaslamp games doing excellent work as well. The Wonders of capitalism If there is a demand, then someone will supply.
Not sure Heavy Rain counts as it's kinda like Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy (same studio, too). I want The Last of Us but console-goddamn-exclusive.
If you exclude every inovative game then of course you have no inovative games lol. Forgot another one: Age of wonders 3. Only found out last weak that they produce it. Absolutely loved Age of wonders 1, 2 and shadow magic. Just perfect turn based strategy. I think I´ll dig out the old games again.
are Civilization and HoMM games considered AAA? if no then i havent bought a AAA in +10 years since i last owned an N64 and bought my Starcraft Broodwar battlechest.