Call of Duty 7 to be Revealed Friday Night on GTTV
Despite the legal drama surrounding Activision and Infinity Ward, Treyarch soldiers on and will be releasing a new Call of Duty game this fall.
The prevailing theory is that the game will take place during the Vietnam War. In any case, we'll know more after the debut.
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Pneum0
replyDedicated servers please.
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Oh, i really think that we'll get some.
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I'm not that confident. The whole reason why Activision and IW built IWNet was because dedicated servers and mods made it harder and less appealing for the average PC consumer to play online, so they decided "let's make it just like XBox Live; the bonus is that by forcing a Steam tie-in, it's confined to a system that can deliver paid DLC!"
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"The whole reason why Activision and IW built IWNet was because dedicated servers and mods made it harder and less appealing for the average PC consumer to play online"
Is there any truth to this statement?
I'm not being sarcastic, either; but I don't even know if "average PC consumer (we can just call that gamer, instead)" had ever had an issue playing the past CODs?
You're right about the other half, tho. It is all about control and distribution for their own DLC.
If they would have came out and said that instead of this PR spin, then maybe I wouldn't have been so upset, but all they have done is sold us less for more, and I for one am not a happy consumer.-
I posted Mike Griffith's quote on this earlier today: http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?id=22808964
November 5, 2009 Activision earnings call: http://pc.ign.com/articles/104/1042836p1.html
Activision Publishing CEO Mike Griffith, on the MW2 backlash about the lack of dedicated servers:
"We're of course watching this very carefully and paying attention to it. But we're not overly concerned about it. We think one of the problems with our PC SKUs on this title in the past is that it has not been as friendly a consumer experience in terms of matchmaking and online play as the consoles have allowed it to be. Our solution here improves that consumer experience overall by a significant margin. So we think the benefits that we'll see are going to far outweigh any negatives that seem to be surfacing."
This was the company line. It was repeated and marched out by Jason West, Vince Zampella, and Mackey McCandlish in a Best Buy online community chat that was held prior to the November 10, 2009 launch of MW2 (and I'm guessing that those guys probably wished that there were less hardcore PC gamers present in the chat).-
Here's the link to the Best Buy chat log, dated November 3, 2009: http://www.forums.bestbuy.com/t5/Gaming-Gadgets-and-eReaders/Call-of-Duty-Modern-Warfare-2-Live-Chat-Session-Transcript/td-p/67692;jsessionid=45476B8F6E7A95EF20BC295B033647CF
frzg: Was the decision to create IWNet for PC a profit based decision or a 'genuine improvement of the game'?
Vince-IW: To improve the game, it actually cost us money to develop it so the there isn't a profit motive.
Ah yes, CEO-speak. Arguably, they spent the money to build IWNet and create a platform to launch lots of DLC, enforce stat tracking, forbid mods, and matchmake... badly. It won't cost nearly as much to tie CoD7 into IWNet, now that the costs of launching have already been paid.
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And regarding the "average PC consumer" having difficulty playing past CoD titles online, it was probably spurred by complaints from people complaining that it was too hard to get onto a good server. As many of us here know, walking into a typical public server is a crapshoot; you usually want to hunt down an open clan server with good admins watching over, and a good community.
But no, that wouldn't fly, because:
1. The average PC gamer also has a 360, and finds XBox Live to be easy and intuitive.
2. They wanted to protect their intellectual property from modders.
3. They wanted to provide a future revenue stream by selling DLC.
Therefore, Steamworks and IWNet.
From a business standpoint, it makes no sense to do any different for Call of Duty 7. It would take a large amount of political power within Activision or Treyarch to resist this and stand up for the hardcore PC gamers, but Treyarch isn't known for being brave in the face of an abusive publisher, and Activision isn't known for passing up an opportunity to make yet more money, even if it's at the expense of a very small group of very devoted fans.
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