Microsoft Creative Director Comments on Always-Online

[Bladexdsl]

It wasn't really "info" at all so this confirms nothing.

 

[Gahars]

*snip*

Suuuuuuure...

 

[Guild McCommunist]

When your statement gets doubted, just say it's a joke and you're a "master trole" and everything magically disappears in a cloud of obscurity.

SMOKE BOMB.

 

[porkiewpyne]

And he's fired he handed in his resignation.

Source: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/...00_-microsoft-designer-adam-orth-resigns.aspx

 

[p1ngpong]

Calm down ladies!

 

[FAST6191]

I have a simple question: why is anyone on this thread defending something that, allegedly, makes it more difficult to do the thing the machine was designed to do? How is that, in any way, defensible or desirable, from the consumer's pov? I can see where it might be wonderful for MS and, perhaps, third parties, but certainly, from a gamer's perspective, making these things mandatory is, in no way, a positive, right?

Obviously it depends upon the implementation but assuming they go for the full on "sim city" style nonsense (and not the WGA stuff which is also an online DRM) then it also means every game can afford to be demon's/dark souls (or perhaps a good version of MindJack or left 4 dead could get a whole new lease of life or that recent "Defiance" game's model could be tweaked), soft/silent updates could become the norm extending to AI updates of a sort (think some of the fighting games when they take tournament data and more generally the idea of heuristics), you might have something resembling a soft MMO (your game is your game but every other fool changes monster distributions or something), returning to the updates thing we have already seen mobile phone games sell a base game and do free updates all the time which is an interesting model (though many of the annual FPS titles are doing something similar).

For my money none of those is an overwhelming positive but I note myself as a one that truly dislikes online games so I might not have the best perspective. Still the ability to afford a whole load of new gameplay styles, some of which have already been proven in limited amounts or with a lot of effort on the part of the developer, is surely a positive.


As for the PR damage vs small fraction of the userbase I am inclined to utter a phrase along the lines of "and they will tell their friends".

 

[The Real Jdbye]

This actually makes even LESS sense on consoles than it does on PCs, Android devices and other platforms where you have access to the file system.
Pirating on them is much harder in the first place, and since consoles are so locked down, if security is done properly it will take a very long time for any hacks to be released, and it will be cracked so wide open that patching the games to work offline will be trivial.