DISQUS

Okay, according to recent interviews (IncGamers, Gossipgamers) the StarCraft 2 story is somewhat different:

StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty is the main game, the Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos if you will. Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void are expansion packs that will require Wings of Liberty in order to be played, just like The Frozen Throne. I'd say this drastically increases the likelihood of them being published with expansion pack price tags.

As for Battle.Net subscriptions. In a recent interview with IncGamers (last week), they've said that playing StarCraft 2 and future games on Battle.Net will remain free. But apparently they are thinking about adding in micro payments for additional features (such as hosting a custom tournament or league through Battle.Net.). I hope they don't go overboard with this.

I signed the LAN in StarCraft 2 petition, along with roughly 35000 other people. I doubt Blizzard will listen, but they should. Even if they make it so you can play over LAN as long as you're logged into Battle.Net, you'd still need an internet connection and that is not always easy to come by.

I mean, come on... StarCraft 2 without LAN support is like a WarCraft game without Orcs!

They did recently claim that the expansion packs (the SC2 games released after Wings of Liberty) will probably be priced at an expansion pack price point. I'm not entirely convinced, because they'd have to convince Activision too... and if there is a horrible publisher out there, then it's Activision. They're the new EA now that EA has gone all 'innovative' and 'high quality' and 'activation-DRM-free', whereas Activision has gone 'sequel', 'sequel', 'expansion pack'.

I don't think Activision will stand for stand-alone expansion packs that big (equally large singleplayer campaign to Wings of Liberty and revamped multiplayer for each installment) being published at expansion pack price points.

As for Left 4 Dead 2: I was thoroughly disappointed with the announcement. Then the gameplay videos and previews came... and Left 4 Dead 2 is starting to sound cool. But, what about my full-price original L4D? Sure, we've got mods now, but we didn't exactly get value for our money from Valve this time now did we? Five campaigns, one extra map, one additional game mode and six guns?

I'll still buy L4D2 damn it, but I hope they do something to appease us 'oldschool' (like way back last year) L4D players as well. Give us a discount on purchasing L4D2 or something. Updating L4D will be of no use, because everyone will be over at L4D2 come this November anyway.

Nice review, but you kind of missed the mark on the interface/server browser. It's completely different from any previous UT game, completely inferior and does not include a favorite servers option. Also, when using the Quick Match feature all I ever got was servers I couldn't join because of the 'Connecting...' bug.

I really hope they add some alternative announcers for the full game, because this announcer sucks even more than the one in UT2003. They should amp up the taunts too, because now they just sound silly and - extremely - annoying.

Aside from those points it's looking to be by far the best game released this year (or in the past several years for that matter). Awesome gameplay that might even surpass the original game. Heck, the fact that both casual and competitive players are loving it speaks volumes in and of itself. This game looks set to do exactly that which UT2003/UT2004/Quake 4 failed to do.

Interesting story, but those figures are completely off. PC gaming has never been for avid gamers willing to spend $5000 on a system, or at least it hasn't been for the past decade or so. I only know one gamer willing to spend that kind of money on his system, and he's a multimillionaire.

These kinds of pre-assembled gaming rigs are totally overpriced, they always have been and they probably always will be. The Blackbird 002 for example is less capable than my new custom gaming PC, which cost $1300 less (or $1700 less if you count the $400 I made on my old PC).

So sure, the price of pre-assembled PCs is dropping, but this is merely because the price of custom PCs is dropping as well. Furthermore, it's easy to find inexpensive pre-assembled PCs in webshops nowadays, which are a much better alternative if you don't know everything there is to know about the latest computer hardware.

Home assembly, or selecting your own components and having the shop assemble it, can easily save you 50% of the cost for a high end gaming PC. Don't know the latest about computer hardware yourself? Look up your local whizkid and have him give you some advice, or google for some recent recommendations by major hardware sites. It's not hard to find these things nowadays - and it can save you a lot of money.

Actually Mark Rein had already mentioned this the moment the "November release date" was revealed. They've always been about getting it right, rather than getting it done on time. The November release date wasn't set in stone from the beginning, just an educated guess on Epic's part.

Too bad everyone refers to these statistics in as PS3-promoting a manner as possible, rather than bothering to list the cold hard facts as well. You see, the PS3 might be pretty damn fast at the two to three different kinds of work units it can handle - but it cannot compute the vast majority (and generally most important) of Folding@Home work units.

So sure it's fast, but it can't even do 1/4th the work a PC can. And as such, the Folding@Home team would be infinitely happier with 20000 new PC users than 20000 new PS3 users, even if those PCs might take longer over computing the handful of work units the PS3 can handle. So front runner? I think not.