There are online petitions and online boycotts against Infinity Ward’s latest title Call of Duty: Modern Warefare 2.   The big issue at hand? :  You won’t be able to run your own private game servers.

Not that bad, right?  Not if you take into account the masses who thrive for custom mods, like maps or custom game additions like the ones which took off with Call of Duty 4.  What’s so wrong without having to deal with the monthly cost for your own server?  Centralized gaming offered from Infinity Ward.  Why so bad?  We’ll have to see how reliable the online playability is.  How long will these servers be online for?  How many server upgrades / maintenance’s will gamers have to face?  Stop and think about it, it could get horrible pretty quickly.  Nothing like trying to plan a private clan scrim and Infinity Ward’s doing maintenance.

Infinity Ward head Jason West has been recently quoted laughing “We thought maybe it would be cool if the fans could play the game”.  “We’re just prioritizing the player experience above the modders and the tuners”, he added.  Prioritizing the player experience above the modders and tuners, really?  It seems quite obvious that Infinity Ward is centralizing the opportunity for taking the online multiplayer gaming in house.  For what?  Why?  Because running private servers makes playing a selected Call of Duty release longer?  There are plenty of Call of Duty 2 servers still out there, is this the problem?  Is this what’s killing Infinity Ward’s profits?  It’s possible to generate a slue of conclusions.

What happened to the good days of a vast online gaming community which regularly boasted custom modifications to suit their own personal gaming needs?  The times where, setting up your own custom server to heighten difficulty levels or make it more entertaining.  We now live in a current system of centralized gaming.  Perfect example is the XBOX Live subscriptions, which currently goes for $49 a year, and has rumors of raising to $100 a year.

It’s hard to believe that Infinity Ward would truly mean making the outcome of the online gaming ‘better’ doing this.  More like a throttled regime.  One would think of the possible final outcomes of doing this, such as will they cancel the modern warefare 2 servers, so that you the consumer will buy their next release later on?  What would stop them?  Private servers would.

Carmack: Blu-ray is advantageous for RAGE and Doom 4

From gamesindustry.biz

John Carmack has been discussing the advantages and disadvantages of PlayStation 3 versus Xbox 360 development, stating that while games don’t require as much compression on Blu-ray, less “sweat equity” has been expended into his studio’s Xbox 360 projects.

Upcoming id title Doom 4 will “almost certainly” come on three discs, Carmack told GameInformer in an interview, as reported by VG247, although the studio is working on compression methods that will enable RAGE to ship on just two, since the nature of the game doesn’t suit more than that.

“We would love to set the thing up where it filled one Blu-ray disc versus three DVDs, which is about the right mix, but the game just…we can’t cut it into a third like that,” said Carmack.

“We can cut it into two pieces. We’ve got two large wastelands on there. We just couldn’t make an arbitrary cut.”

He doesn’t foresee the same being a problem for Doom 4, however.

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