Gaming News / MMORPG

Mark Jacobs addresses DRM and WAR

Mark Jacobs graced the VN boards with an awesome post last night.  He addressed the issue of whether or not WAR will have a SecurROM type system and then proceeded to give great insight on both sides of the DRM argument.

It’s a long post so I won’t display the whole thing on the front page.  You’ll have to click the little ‘more’ button for the entire post.   Needless to say I agree with him completely.

Folks,

Just so you know, WAR will not be using any sort of copy protection technology like SecureROM on the disk because, as it has been pointed out, you need to play our game while connected to our servers and that you need an key and an active account to play our game just like DAoC, WoW, etc.

However, I’m sure this was not an easy decision for either the Spore or the Bioware guys. I know that Will/Lucy and Ray/Greg really care about making great games and I’m sure that they wish that the world was a different place and that putting any sort of DRM system on their games wasn’t necessary. However, some facts are clearly true:

(more…)

16 Comments
May 9, 2008
MMORPG

Mark Jacobs – WAR Beta Q/A

Mark Jacobs, aka the horse, posted a Q/A on the WAR Herald yesterday (or today?) and “clarified” a lot of beta related questions for the community.

Folks,

It’s been, ahem, a rather interesting couple of months here in Mythic-land hasn’t it? Fortunately, I’m not here to announce anything nearly as interesting as our recent news. I’m here to talk about good things, some changes and as always to give the community the facts straight from the horse’s (wait for it, wait for it) head.

First, we are finishing up the initial stage of our first major RvR testing and it has gone really well. Our server is almost full nightly and the beta testers are having a great time. The kudos are flying fast and furious and while nothing is perfect, it is safe to say that this stage is exceeding our expectations.

Second, over the last few months there have been a few questions and concerns about our beta program in regards to system requirements, eligibility requirements, admittance dates, general policies and procedures for our Beta Test in North America. While we have tried to be really clear I want to take this opportunity to be even clearer.

Click ‘more’ to see the entire Q/A and my thoughts. (more…)

1 Comment
April 16, 2008
Gaming News / MMORPG

Mark Jacobs on the recent Stealth debacle

Uh oh, he looks pissed. Picture from Gamasutra.The Paris event from last week has caused a lot of controversy and stirred up a hornets nest of PR problems for Mythic. Right now there are fingers pointing every-which-way but rumors are that GOA is to blame for the leaks about stealth, CTF, and whatever else is causing the uproar. Personally I don’t care who is to blame. I’m somewhat irritated that the “no stealth” stance Mythic adopted early on in development has been scrapped, but I’ll talk more on that this week in a blog post I’m working on. For now here’s what Mark Jacobs had to say this evening regarding stealth:

“Folks,

I’ll comment more when appropriate on this issue but for now what I’m willing to say is simply this. The stealth that we had in DAoC or that can be found in WoW and/or other games is not in WAR now and I still have no intention of allowing it into the game. As some people have commented here and in other places, what they have seen is a system that allows for two of the lightly armored classes to close quickly with a target. There will be no combination of stealth + long-range damage dealing in the game. Two quick FYIs for ya. Some of the leaks regarding stealth have been, quite frankly, BS. During our last phase of testing there were some bugs in the implementation (“Gee, really Mr. Wizard, you had bugs in a Beta Test? I’m surprised!”) of the classes closing/survival ability. Second, as our beta testers know, I have said that I will take out any system or sub-system that I believe is a net negative in terms of RvR enjoyment. And this is one of those sub-systems that would certainly be looked at amazingly carefully before we committed to it. One of the best parts of beta is the ability to iterate on existing systems as well to try other systems to see what works and what doesn’t work.

The FYIs are the big reason I don’t want to go into any more depth regarding what we are doing with this system. It is subject to change based on what I see over the next few weeks. Considering that we are about to begin a couple of major RvR test cycles, nobody should get worked up about what we have, don’t have, might have regarding this issue, it’s truly pointless.

Mark”

Whether or not stealth is here to stay appears to be up in the air. The feedback has been extremely negative so far regarding how the information was delivered to the public and the fact that stealth is in the game at all. It doesn’t look pretty any way you look at it. For what it’s worth, at least he’s saying it’s not going to be like DAOC or WoW stealth.

I’ll keep you guys updated on any interesting tidbits I find.

PS Mark: I approve your choice of cold beverages. mmm Diet Coke.

Update #1: Another quote tonight from Mark. Click that “More” button to see the updates. (more…)

7 Comments
April 7, 2008