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Battlefield Bad Company mixed in with EA slagging

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Storm Rider:
Considering that Need for Speed is EA's second largest franchise (you have to remember, it's fucking huge in Europe), I seriously doubt it gets budgetary constraints.

Nodaisho:
The lack of support is why I like PC games for online (partially that I haven't bothered to figure out what I need to do to get the network adaptor working on my PS2), they stop having servers up and as long as there are still people that want to play, someone else will put one up. EQlive could shut down tomorrow and thousands of people would just shift to private servers (though other thousands would go catatonic after 8 years of their life went down the drain).

Ending support of something is also why I prefer to buy games and music on a hard copy, though with the right copy protection (was it spore that was going to make you check every few days?) that could get screwed up unless you did the sensible thing and looked for a crack for the protection. Maybe it is just false reassurance, but I like having a hard copy as well as having it on the hard drive.

Dimmukane:
I also like having physical copies.  At least for now.  This helps whenever I have to reinstall anything.  I built a new computer just over a year ago, and was installing my games on it, and found that my copies of Half Life 2, Far Cry, and Neverwinter Nights 2 had gotten discolored over time(meaning they couldn't be read, which ironically supports the reason I like having physical copies).  So I downloaded everything for Half Life 2 off of Steam, which took a good 5 hours, and I didn't re-install HL:DM or HL:Source, which would've been another 2 gigs or so.  Neverwinter Nights 2 I had to pirate to get my game back, which took an overnight torrent dl.  Having the disk (at least when it's in good condition) keeps me from having to deal with those long waits to start playing again.  However, seeing as bandwidth is only expected to increase, I don't think this'll be much of an issue in the next ten years or so.

Nodaisho:
Bandwidth will increase, but so will what they put in, there is a race to add more realism, which in a shooter game could take one hell of a lot of work (you could map out all the veins and muscle and organs and bones of a target, have an algorithm to see what the bullet would do on impact, using an actual object with weight, shape, and travel time rather than hitscan, and that is without getting into penetration and deflection), I think that eventually we will reach the desired level of realism in games, but then something else will come in fashion. It will be nice to have instant loading of normal sites in a basic internet package though.

Dimmukane:
The two big things that add disk space are art and pre-rendered video.  Which hasn't gone up as much as bandwidth has in the past few years (Well, bandwidth only has a slight edge, currently).  But in all honesty I expect to see programmers writing algorithms that tesselate and variate on textures at runtime to cut down on overall art assets.  For instance, Borderlands (and possibly Too Human) used algorithms to generate over half a million weapons.  The programmers and artists did not hand design the textures for each one, they made maybe several thousand, and then the algorithm did the mix and match, swapping out color palettes from time to time.

As for pre-rendered cutscenes, the games that use them are generally on consoles.  They're not going to suddenly get longer, and many games are switching to in-engine cutscenes to save space (and because they look pretty good now, anyway).

I may be wrong, but that's just where I see things going.

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