Ah, you’re making me nostalgic for my college days. :)
“Why? How many entertainment items can you actually buy from a store, take it home, try it out, then decide if you like it or not? C’mon.”
Yea your right C’mon. C’mon why shouldn’t they be able to do it. Why do the vast majority do it all the time. I’m saying their excuse sounds lame because it does. Forgive me if I don’t believe every single word that comes out of publishers PR spokemans mouth. :roll:
" Even the Max Payne demo wasn’t the reason people wanted it or bought the game."
It was a reason for me and several other people I know. Getting to actually try the game out and see the “bullet time” in action made me feel it would be more than just a gimmick. That along with some reviews made me decide to get it. Demos can make a diffrence.
There’s another reason they can be benefitial. Seeing how your system may run the game(Assuming its not based on a un-optimized beta from months ago). Allot of gamers don’t have top of the line hardware and they may want to see how it runs beyond just what the sys reqs may say on the box.
maybe the game is so great with such a great story and magnetic gameplay that the devs feel any attempt to portray the actual game in a stripped-down-size-kind-to-dl-demo would be a crime against all the effort they have put into the whole of the game.
or maybe it is just a piece of shit and they wanna at least rape all the spoiled i-gotta-have-it-now shits and hope for the best from there.
either way this is why there is 10000 game review sites. so who the fuck cares.
Games certainly are in a playable state before their retail release, but they’re not necessarily in a polished state, the kind that might get players to buy the games.
Making a good demo involves more than “ripping out” a single level and slapping on an installer, because the demo is indicative of the final product, and companies want to make sure that the demo, which will be publicly free for anyone to try, is at its absolute best because it can and often will influence a purchasing decision. Sounds like Epic wanted to spend all their time and resources finishing the game, and considering all the drama surrounding the UT2003 demo, I can’t say I blame them.
I don’t see how a demo is “profitable” unless it’s somehow sold. Demos are still understood to be free software, though many internet distribution sites have started charging money for downloads because of bandwidth costs…but Epic doesn’t see a penny of the money you pay to Fileplanet for a subscription. If anything, a demo is a loss, because you have to devote extra time and resources and pull members of your team off the core game to work on the demo, which, in and of itself, won’t bring in any immediate “profit.” During the home stretch of a game’s development and polish, usually everyone is cranking, trying to fix up every last little thing, and if the issue of a demo comes up, it becomes a decision of working on the demo, or working on the actual game.
I think Epic & Infogrames could have been smarter about releasing more information on Unreal 2 to generate more public interest in the game, but I understand their decision to not go with the demo. The game is out next Tuesday anyway, so that isn’t too long a wait.
God forbid that he’s telling the truth and they are busy. C’mon, benefit of the doubt please? Thank You. :D
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Er. “telling the truth” fits my #2 explanation. IE: They don’t have “spare time” to do a demo. If the publisher was paying them to do a demo, I doubt Legend’s response would be “we don’t have time.” Rather, they’d fit it in.
I reckon my system’s big enough to run the game, I trust the Unreal engine to deliver great graphics, and I trust Legend to deliver great gameplay. So I don’t really need a demo. Bring on the game!
uh, you can try out almost every other form of entertainment.
Music = radio/jukebox/video
Console Games = Demos / rentals
Movies = Preview Nights / rentals / Trailers (while trailers are sorta just a commercial they can easily warn you off a movie or send you right out to see it)
Magazines = Newstand full version free browsing! “Oh the review I was interested in is only 1 paragraph, no thanks”
Books = Most bookstores will let you sit and read the whole thing if you choose, also libraries and online sample chapters, or even publishers like baen who will give you like the 1st 2 books of a 5 book series for free.
Pc games, where a demo can help you know if the game will even RUN for you AT ALL, kinda should have a demo so you know if it will work. No obligation for them to make one, but imho they serve to put peoples minds at rest as far as bugs / performance for the game.
Books you know work, movies work, console games in general will work, music cds will play, and you can still try those out… yet PC games can (on occasion) just be a 50$ plastic disc and having a sample showing that it will run for you and maybe be fun and worth the $50 sounds like a nice idea to me as a consumer.
All very good points. but does it really matter to most of us? (Someone start a poll. :) )
Based on Legend’s and the Unreal line’s track record, I would probably pick this up even if I didn’t know anything else about it.
Peter
Actually that is what is keeping me away from it. What are, uh, some highlights to their track record?
I have yet to have a publisher accept a game level as-is for a demo, even when the demo is “the first three levels of the game.” Publishers choose the level that is most visually interesting, even if that’s the sixth game level. Then designers have to go back in and rebalance it so that it’s playable as a first level, and add in weapons and enemies the publisher wants to showcase.
There’s also a lot of architecture work in getting the level to run as a stand-alone process in terms of separating it from the main UI or disabling options, deciding which sound files to resize or whether to eliminate music, creating new .ini files, etc. It’s a time consuming process.
I have yet to have a publisher accept a game level as-is for a demo, even when the demo is “the first three levels of the game.” Publishers choose the level that is most visually interesting, even if that’s the sixth game level. Then designers have to go back in and rebalance it so that it’s playable as a first level, and add in weapons and enemies the publisher wants to showcase.
There’s also a lot of architecture work in getting the level to run as a stand-alone process in terms of separating it from the main UI or disabling options, deciding which sound files to resize or whether to eliminate music, creating new .ini files, etc. It’s a time consuming process.[/quote]
Indeed.
That’s all. Coming from someone who is totally ignorant of programming even at its most basic levels, that sounds as easy a changing a couple of lines of code to me. 
[size=2]BTW, what’re you wearing?[/size]
sort of off-topic but…
Here’s to hoping they take the assets that were going to be used for multiplay when they were still going to go with that option and use them to make a nice squad-based gametype for the next iteration of UT2003.
Legend started out in the early '90s as a spiritual ancestor to Infocom–Legend president Bob Bates wrote some of the later Infocom adventures (Sherlock and Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur, I think–with text-and-graphic adventures, including Steve Meretzky’s Spellcasting trilogy, two games based on Frederick Pohl’s Gateway novels, Eric the Unready and TimeQuest.
They moved into graphic adventures in the early and mid '90s with Companions of Xanth, Shannara and Death Gate, Meretzky’s RPG Superhero League of Hoboken and, most notably, Mike Verdu’s sci-fi adventure Mission Critical (an amazing game even now).
In the mid and late '90s, they stopped self-publishing and became a developer–doing Callahan’s Crosstime Salon, Star Control 3, and the Blackstone Chronicles (based on John Saul’s books) for other companies (and even an adventure-in-ethics, called Quandaries, for the US government, if memory serves :) ).
After GT Interactive picked them up, Legend went into 3D games–developing the Return to Na Pali add-on for Unreal and The Wheel of Time (a wonderful and sadly under-rated FPS with an inventive multi-player mode).
Peter
Right, I knew most of that.
Star Control 3 was ok.
Anyways, u2 does look like a game I’d like (the general idea of it) but it still has that ridiculous THIS IS FOR YOU GEEKS design ethic to it, althoguh to a lesser extent than UT or UT2k3.
I mean wtf is with the hooters waitress as your intel officer? Ok fine make her ‘hot’ but can she wear some sort of authentic looking uniform of some type instead of some exotic gymnist getup? How the hell is that immersive or making it seem even remotely plausible?
It worked for Troi on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Hey, it worked for your wife, too! She was only on like 10 times and still had more sex then Geordi.
Anyway, I’m a little disappointed in what I’ve seen from the recent Gamespot videos:
http://gamespot.com/gamespot/filters/products/media/0,11100,472314,00.html
On the good side, there are lots of explosions and a guy seems to be talking to me through the missions which is cool. On the other hand, he seems sort of annoying, the outdoor settings seem a lot like the crappy Predator missions in AvP2, and the indoor game could just as well be UT2k3 with some texture changes for all I could tell. If there’s some amazing interaction/RPG elements/stunning gameplay, it must not translate into 30-60 second footage movies.
I think it IS supposed to have an immersive story. I didn’t actually play the orginal Unreal (long story, but boring). However, I heard a lot of people liked the atmosphere, so that is what I want from this game. Yes, mission design and such add to atmosphere, but so far the Unreal series (I have played the other games) have had nice designs, stellar to above average graphics, and nice sound effects (excepting the roxors quotes and such in the newer titles…hate those).
I just hope the writers can stay on the right side of the fine line between dramatic, serious storylines, and cheezy overdone crap.
A company stating that they will do no demo would make me want to wait for other brave souls to plunk their money down and post reports on Usenet and message boards. It just raises too many questions for me to be comfortable buying it as soon as it’s released.
Jeans and a sweatshirt–sorry to disappoint. :-)