Great job with the port!! My PC cant run it properly but because of that I know its a great port (it´s playble on lowest settings on a geforce 6150 onboard gpu). I have a question Sven, why there are no Capcom games for PC in Argentina? I cant find anywhere RE4, Lost Planet or Dmc4; so theres a reason for that? Thank you very much in advance!!!!
So does the PC version have any intrusive DRM like Starforce-(ProActive,Frontline)/Securom/Sony rootkit and or have activation, call home to activate every so days(besides serial key)? Sorry for my long rant, and I can't believe I registered just to give my input.
DMC4 uses disc-based SecuROM in a very basic implimentation.
Future titles from CEI will be using network Auth SecuROM, but our implimentation will be different than what you've seen elsewhere.
I think what people don't take into consideration is how many times something phones home (or whether it does at all after initial install) is entirely up to the publisher. The number of allowed installs is entirely up to the publisher. How tripwires are implimented and how gameplay degrades is entirely up to the publisher (and developer to integrate). The fact that you can release installs, and get them back to install again elsewhere is a communications and education issue (there isn't a finite number of installs, there's a finite number of concurrent installs, just for example). There's offline mode support.
There's a wide number of variables and communications issues with DRM and it's not an easy thing by any stretch.
Well I think I'll sell my PS3 version and get the PC but any future titles that requries online activation especially if it's (mostly) single player game I'm going to pass on. As much as I liked Lost Plannet on PC, I didn't like the fact you must be online to play single player.
About 2-3 years ago when my life was unstable (unemployeed and mostly temp jobs) and couldn't afford the internet and local phone service so all my games on STEAM that I had was basically useless. Granted now my situation is better then it has been but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen again since the economy isn't all that healthy right now.
That's why I haven't bought Bio Shock (yea the limit cap for install has been removed but the online activation still remains) and Mass Effect. Lost Planet I didn't know it required Steam since I traded my XB360 version (since I had 3RRoL back then) for my friends PC version (that was still unopened) since he had a crappy computer at the time.
As long there's a over the phone activation like how Windows (XP/Vista)/Adobe products then yea it's hassle but I'd still end up buying it but more then anything still feel shaky of console to PC ports.
The only good thing about the PC is that I know in the future if I want to play that game again (as long the next Windows can still play from XP-Vista codes) I can. The console versions if it's DLC like XBLA/PSN/Wii ware has a unknown future since how do we know if the next generation of that respect console would be able to import those games in your new console? I know for a fact the original XBLA games on the Xbox couldn't be transfered to the XB360.
As much as I like DLC for the console every time I purchase anything for it I have that question back in my mind nagging at me especially when I got burnt by MS when I had to send my 360 for repair and gor a refurb so all of my DLC purchase had to be online just to use it,.
I've always brought by 360 over to a friends house (he has internet but the cables in the other side of the house and no wi-fi) but because of that DRM problem we couldn't play half of the games I purchased and MS couldn't un associate the rights from my original to my refurb (they can now but it's too late I don't buy stuff as in DLC and retail for my XB360 because of shotty customer service but I'll rent the games).
At home it wouldn't be that much of a problem but I have 3 different accounts (every console I have at least 3). One for purchases, the other for DL demos and video promos and the last one is for my gaming. I learned early on that since MS and Sony keeps track of all of your download histories so in time you'll have to scroll and scroll to get to the one you want to re download.
So I guess if the future games on the PC are half-assed ports I don't have to worry about wasting my money on the potability that the next gen console can't play them because of licensing problems or coding so I guess it's not all doom and gloom.
P.S I asked both Sony and MS about the future of current DLC and if the next gen system would support it.
All I got was (not word for word), "We don't know at this time, since the technology is growing vastly in a fast pace and to see if it's profitable depending on licencing issue that we may have to renegotiate." so I'm not taking any chances if I can help it so PC FTW!
In FPS, I stopped shooting while jumping, for my crotch can't take the abuse anymore. Darn noobs with their auto aims... my precious it hurts us.
I know of Brad and actually we both participate on another board out there. CEI has a contract in place with Stardock for Impulse so you'll see our content popping up there as we start rolling it out. It's one of about a dozen DD partners we have (and climbing).
Before I forget; that makes me *quite* happy to know. Thank you. I bought my Penny Arcade game from them, and while there's room for improvement on Impulse, I have to say I'm pretty happy with them thus far. I figure by the time you release games with them, Impulse will be *quite* nice.
That being said, I've also got Steam, and the moment MIcrosoft gets their Live for Windows Marketplace up and running I'm grabbing that, too. I like to have options ;)
Having to assign my logitech gamepad to an XBOX360-controller really doesn't make much sense to me.
However I really think that some time could have been spent changing the controller menus to represent PC controllers, I'm guessing that the PS3 version doesn't ask you to map your PS3 controller to an XBOX controller.
So as I said before, I'm really curious about if these changes are harder to make than you might think since from the outside it seems like "simple" changes that for some reason aren't being made.
Oh and btw, rumble does not work with the logitech cordless rumblepad 2 , I know that's a technical issue but those kind of things really should work out of the box.
A fair question... but one I'm ultimately going to answer with another question:
Actually we did support a controller out of the box: the Games for Windows controller as mandated by the Games for Windows TCRs. Any gamepad that uses the same DirectInput calls/button maps should have also worked out of the box.
The question is how many controllers and which ones are the right ones to support? We made it so any and all keys could be assigned as needed (as it seems you've managed albeit with a bit of work). We supported what should be deemed "the standard PC controller" and there's probably more of these in the wild due to 360 penetration than pretty much anything else you could think of. Anything else, we figured would be handled by the configurability offered via menus/config files.
In short, it's impossible to support and test (and testing has significant costs associated with it on PC) every possible controller combination there is out there.
The beauty of Games for Windows as a program is you know what's going to be supported and anything else is likely to be a question mark.
P.S.- Ever play Crysis with a 360 pad? It's sort of cool in a Haloish sort of way. :)
Hey everyone! I actually registered just to post my concerns and opinions here.
Anyway, regarding the controller. Why couldn't you have just implemented the old system like I see on many older games (pre-Games for Windows games) to map the buttons in-game like you would a generic controller and if there's any special feature on the controller, enabling it from the 'Game Controllers' menu from the Control Panel. It's kinda hard to explain but it has something to do with those two. I have a Logitech Rumblepad 2 and it doesn't map properly. I could have used my Xbox 360 controller instead but I don't have the PC receiver for it. And I still prefer my Rumblepad 2 for my PC games that need a controller. Despite the high Xbox 360 penetration rate, I'm still sure that people wouldn't be buying Xbox 360 controllers for the PC. I bet even half of those potential games didn't even know you could use it on the PC. At least that's what's evident as none of the people I know actually use or even know that the Xbox 360 controller could be used on the PC. Some even use a PS2-to-PC adapter to use their DualShock 2 controllers. And yeah, I'm using a corded Rumblepad 2 and force feedback doesn't work. D=
Regarding the piracy issue, I won't lie. I've had my share (sorry developers...). But what will make me buy an original? As mentioned in the previous posts, I download a game to try it out and see if it's good. 'If you like it, I buy it', just as the people who crack the game state at every end of their 'read me' files. Second is the multiplayer factor. This is why I love demos that have a multiplayer feature. Two months ago, I torrented Universe at War for the PC and I ended up not liking the single player after 3 or 4 hours. I tried playing LAN then with a friend and we both didn't like it. I expected it to be good as the reviews say, but we're not all the same, right? Third is the playability factor relative to the hardware I have. For the past two years, my main system has been my laptop with a humble Pentium M 760, Geforce 6600, 2 GB of DDR2-533 RAM, 5400 rpm 160 GB hard drive and a 15" 1680x1050 screen. It was only April this year that I got my Athlon X2 + Geforce 8800 GT desktop rig. So back then I'd be trying out the newer games to see if they ran at at least a good resolution, mostly1280x800, because my native resolution makes the lower resolutions look even crappier. Lost Planet only ran at 30 FPS at 800x600, no AA, mediumish settings. So I did away with that and stuck to the Xbox 360 version but I would have preferred to play it with a mouse. Luckily, games like Race Driver: Grid, which looks awesome even at low settings, ran steadily at 30 FPS at 1024x640 with 2x and it looked good. DMC4 wasn't so bad either. =P 1024x640, 2x AA, super high textures, high shadows, low quality and hovers at 40 FPS. Good enough for me when playing away from home. BTW, I only bought Crysis when I got my desktop rig.
Another thing I couldn't get my head around is why some companies like Nintendo equate piracy to loss of sales. People like me download a lot of the new releases via torrent just to narrow down my purchase options. I mean, I can only afford a single game a month at most. Only about a tenth of what I torrent actually stay on my PC until I've bought the actual product since the rest are just a waste of hard drive space and I don't really have the time to savor all those games. I'm still a student you know. I would prefer buying a single good game over getting five games I don't like for free and I'd probably just give them away. I wouldn't purchase a game until I try it myself no matter what the reviews say, especially on the PC.
Another thing I couldn't get my head around is why some companies like Nintendo equate piracy to loss of sales.
You need to look at piracy globally for one, and ignore folks who use it as an extended demo.
There are lots of people who pirate with no intentions of ever buying around the world. You also have bootleggers who make their money from piracy. Gamasutra had a good article concerning piracy in Korea not too long ago, where people buy bootlegged games from street vendors. I went to the Philippines last year and the mall by the hotel I was in had some shops with bootleg games for sale. I've read posts from people in South America who say in their area bootlegging is so rampant console makers sell the systems at very high prices because they'll never make any money on game sales. The Dreamcast lost favor with publishers after it was discovered how easy it was to pirate DC games, and SNK (not SNK Playmore that you see today) was severely hurt financially by bootleggers in Asia pirating arcade boards!
You have to understand that niche titles and small companies are hurt the most by piracy. And AAA, big-budget PC gaming is definitely a niche market.
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/37203/98/
Zagreb (Croatia) - My former colleague Igor “Iggy” Gajic got the chance to interview Cevat Yerly, co-founder and CEO of Crytek. During the interview, Yerly was keen on keeping the lid of future projects, but he did not refrain himself from stating his views about the current state of PC gaming industry.
Said Yerli, “We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable. I believe that’s the core problem of PC Gaming, piracy, to the degree [that PC gamers who] pirate games inherently destroy the platform. Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we won't have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future. We are going to support PC, but not exclusive anymore."
This statement confirms the attitude a lot of game developers discussed earlier this year at the 2008 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, CA. We spoke with Mark Rein, VP of Epic Games, and learned that the Unreal Tournament 3 servers received over 40 million attempts at illegitimate access using pirate keys. That number is huge, and the real magnitude comes when you calculate the retail price of $49.99 (59.99 for Collector's Edition).
If those 40 million players actually paid the full price, it would have been nearly $2 billion more in Epic’s pocket book. That is more than the quarterly sales results from Nvidia or AMD. To add another perspective, the government lost out as well, because no sales tax is earned on pirated copies.
When you take into account that Crytek saw similar levels of pirated copies, it is easy to see how big of a deal gaming piracy is. Between two games there were billions of dollars of lost sales. The natural instinct is of course to hit the platform(s) where they can actually earn money, which is looking less and less favorable for PC gaming.
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/46079
Across two separate lectures at this week's Game Developers Conference, id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead and Epic Games president Michael Capps both admitted that piracy of PC games caused their companies to pursue developing beyond the PC platform. "Piracy has pushed id as being multiplatform," stated Hollenshead, whose company contracted Z-Axis to handle the PlayStation 3 version and Nerve Software the Xbox 360 edition of Splash Damage's forthcoming Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (PC).
Comments made by Epic's Capps carried a similar tone. "PC gaming is really falling apart," he revealed. "It killed us to make Unreal Tournament 3 cross-platform, but Epic had to do it," adding "the market that would buy a $600 video card knows how Bittorrent works." Epic is currently developing Unreal Tournament 3 for the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in-house.
Meanwhile, Firaxis designer and programmer Soren Johnson remained confident in PC development. He suggested that "game design on the PC is going to bend toward persistence," noting Blizzard's World of Warcraft is "successful because you can't pirate WoW. You cannot pirate an MMO. Period."
I can understand your reasoning, but understand that piracy, as a whole, is a lot worse for the industry than a lot of gamers realize. And Soren Johnson's comments concerning the inability to pirate a MMO aren't true, either. Just ask NCSoft which had to shut down pirate servers of Lineage II or EA concerning "private" servers for Ultima Online (they didn't consider it a possibility, so weren't prepared from it technically or legally).
To stop piracy is not by putting heavy DRM it is by supporting the products if the game has patches and downloaded content. People will buy the game. Look at ME for instance Bring down the sky needs a legal cd-key for it too work.
Great job with the port!! My PC cant run it properly but because of that I know its a great port (it´s playble on lowest settings on a geforce 6150 onboard gpu). I have a question Sven, why there are no Capcom games for PC in Argentina? I cant find anywhere RE4, Lost Planet or Dmc4; so theres a reason for that? Thank you very much in advance!!!!
Do you really except DMC 4 to run on medium with that system. Get a Graphics card then you will able to run it properly.
The Problem is that the PC version came out half a year later... PS3 and Xbox360 already sold millions , Most of the Hardcore DMC fans couldn't wait that long ^ ^
Also the game should have included More special or bonus contents exclusive to the PC , and like the others stated more marketing and etc....
The Problem is that the PC version came out half a year later... PS3 and Xbox360 already sold millions , Most of the Hardcore DMC fans couldn't wait that long
Or don't have PC's that can run it, so they're waiting to get a new console instead?
I think the stigma of PC gaming doesn't help; the reputation of PC gaming being a pain in the butt is, sadly, well earned. Update drivers for the video card, update your Direct X, troubleshoot your sound, figure out what the real requirements are vs the lie on the box, patch the game, hope its not a crap port of a console game, etc.
I think if more people were aware of just how trouble free DMC4 is/can be compared to the typical PC games of the past, combined with the cheaper price? That would help.
"I've never seen DMC4 for the pc in stores (Target, Best Buys, Circtuit City), it isn't on any of the major digital distribution hub, and while gamestop and gogamer carry the game, it was never featured and only can be found if you search of it. Pirates are probably the only people outside of capcom that even knew the game was out."
This is what someone answered on a forum and I totally agree this.
I think since this game has not online support, Capcom could have put games for windows live support to boost sells.
But the main problem is clearly the big delay between console version and pc version.
). I have a question Sven, why there are no Capcom games for PC in Argentina? I cant find anywhere RE4, Lost Planet or Dmc4; so theres a reason for that? Thank you very much in advance!!!!
, I know that's a technical issue but those kind of things really should work out of the box.
