STALKER 2, news!

Oh oh

I actually don’t understand people.

Not sure if I can physically resist buying a STALKER game, but that’s just terrible. I hope they reconsider.

I don’t want to over-react or anything, but Diablo III is setting a bad god damned precedent.

Streaming code? Really?

I bet this will get swiftly taken care of by crackers, and the “feature” will only end up inconveniencing the legal users.

I hope Stalker 2 isn’t a classic game I want to revisit in a few decades like the first one then.

Oh man… :(

motherfucker

why?

Bloody hell - it’s UbiSoft all over again. :(

Ubisoft, underappreciated revolutionaries of the PC gaming industry!

sigh…

blergh

but i’ll most likely end up buying it

love the stalker series

Meh, will have to grab the console version then since that probably won’t require constant internet access.

Ugh.

I’ve bought all three of their previous STALKER games and have spent a ridiculous amount of time playing them – I’m talking Elder Scrolls time here – and this is how I’m gonna be treated going forward? Why are some companies dead set on destroying the PC platform.

You know ppl, I’ve been playing Guild Wars as basically a massively singleplayer always-connected game for the last 4 years. The world hasn’t ended.

Love me some Stalker, but, it does sucketh that they’re going this route. Not that it will stop me since I finally got all three installments played recently.

I’m sure Eastern Bloc piracy is bad. But they’re right next to Poland where CD Projekt released The Witcher 2 with a minimum of DRM (and then quickly got rid of it). They’ve made it work, though they had to lay a lot of groundwork for goodwill first.

Anyway, I’m more concerned about the direction they take the game. No one really knows what it’s going to be like.

I don’t trust the vast majority of publishers to not have the following happen when depending on their servers with single player games:

  1. The game doesn’t work for the first week/month. Their servers were only designed to handle a small fraction of the people who bought the game playing at once but during the first week/month, tons of people are putting tons of hours in to the game since it is new, thus they can’t handle the strain and give up. Better luck next week/month?

  2. One year later when stalker 2 Gold is released, support (ie the streaming code) for stalker 2 is stopped and you can no longer play it. Don’t hold your breath for some sort of magical copy protection removing patch.

It isn’t that the publisher screwing their customers when the game requires a connection to their servers is certain, but it is very possible and has happened before. You basically put your full trust in the publisher that they won’t save $25/month by cutting off support for the game a year down the road.

You also trust that the publisher won’t use the copy protection as a weapon to force you to buy the new version of the game, something EA is infamous for doing all of the time.

Fuck this shit. Stalker, of all games?

Don’t belittle legitimate complaints.