Why are people making a fuss about it being an online game now ? At the end of the tech demo, they clearly showed that it was an online game! It was part of the excitement that we could take down those dragons in co op !
I think the fuss is over it being an online game.
Does that mean online required in order to play, thus according to many on this forum, a ton of people won't be able to play it because a lot of people don't have reliable internet?
Or does it just mean the same thing as COD, Killzone, Halo, etc. Where it's really just an offline game with an online arena/co-op mode? Wouldn't make sense to call something like that an "online game."
I take it that since it's being created by Capcom Online Games, and being called an online game, that online will be required whether you play alone or with friends.
And the more games embrace that philosophy the sooner I feel we'll start to have a paradigm shift in how games are presented and how that changes existing game genres and potentially introduces new genres.
Somewhat similar to how game changing textured polygons were over gourard shaded polygons. 3D graphics versus 2D graphics. Hardware accelerated 3D versus non-accelerated 3D. Game distribution via CD versus floppy disk or cartridges. The introduction of more than 2 buttons on a game controller. The introduction of analog sticks on a game controller. Since the turn of the century it's mostly just been more of the same thing, just a little bit better. Graphics and computing power has progressed at a rather steady and predictable rate with a lull for a few years when CPU's hit the power wall and everyone had to learn how to code games for multiple CPUs.
The potential for online games that offload some part of the game to the cloud means that you break out of that rather predictable march of CPU and GPU power. Now you potentially have a pool of resources that you can dedicated to non-latency critical tasks that you would not want to dedicated resources to on a local machine or when you do, you do so very sparingly.
For me it's optimism in game developers coming up with something potentially new and compelling in either presentation or gameplay above and beyond what is expected by the predictable increase in hardware specs.
Regards,
SB
!
