Five years of PR releases, touting the unique and atmospheric character of the game, and now it's going to be a banal XBox shooter? Way to go, Remedy!

So if, say, Street Fighter 4 required you to own the game if you wanted to go over to a friend's house and duke it out in versus, would you be okay with that?
I really don't see the problem with local play, even if not everyone involved owns the game, and the fact that SC1 has an explicit option for this suggest Blizzard didn't, either.

That's kind of why it was interesting though, because it hadn't been done before. Doesn't mean it can be (and apparently remedy can't after all) but it doesn't mean they can't try.
I had my fingers crossed that they had a good idea of how to do it.... but maybe not.
As a linear controlled horror game it'll probably be more successful... but i have exponentially less interest in it.
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One way i could maybe see a horror sandbox game working would be something like the beginning of Dark Corners of the Earth. It wasn't really sandbox, but at the beginning you could wander around the town, meet and interact with scary/strange/manacing characters and try to solve clues. In a lot of ways it was linear, but it didn't really feel that way. And entering specific areas triggered scary or foreboding cutscenes or events. It was really spooky.
On the other hand, once all hell broke loose, it turned into a totally linear controlled ride.. exciting, but not with half the atmosphere.
(so i guess that's how i imagine it might work... maybe...)

It's an interesting idea, but Remedy was talking about an actual city, a bit harder to produce any sort of quality atmosphere than the 2-3 block town of Innsmouth in DCoTE. Not to mention that the larger an area gets, the harder smaller details are to see. While the relatively small area of DCoTE made it easy to notice, for instance, the body being dragged though the door in that house's basement; the average player won't have the patience to look though every basement window in his path to his next objective when he has an actual city to traverse.
It might still be a good game, but after watching a few more gameplay vids from E3, it just ends up looking more generic and uninspired (seriously, using light to disperse darkness shields from targets, sounds a bit to close to Obscure to me).

If you were playing Street Fighter 4 by linking multiple machines together, yes I would be perfectly OK with it.
Remember, fighting games it's 2 controllers on one machine, both players playing from that one machine. Whereas the LAN set up for RTSs only differs from multiplayer over Battle.net, or by IP connection in that all the machines are within the same general location.
Also, I do not see any PROBLEM with single-disc LAN play, not at all. In fact, I think it's a rather good thing, even though it's something I have never taken advantage of. However, I also don't see requiring every player to own a disk as a problem, either.

The whole no LAN argument is kind of petty, really. There's no reason you and your friends can't set up a private game in your house. And don't even mention lag. These days with broadband so readily available, lag is really a non-issue. I also don't believe in it as an argument for the sake of being old-school.

I'm sorry but you're retarded. I work for an ISP and I know all about these things, there are millions of people in America who still don't have broadband access.

No Lan support IS A killer for large lans and get togethers.
Do you not understand that most lan parties do not have net access for everyone?
Do you not understand just how much bandwidth it'd take to support a lot of people (some in the hundred's/over a thousand depending on the event).
It's simply not feasable for these events to use b.net when you could simply network people on LAN and go from there with no bandwidth or ISP backbone needed.
Not to mention trying to get everyone connected to the ne can you imagine the headache that'd be? Some people use DSL, some cable, they wouldn't all have the right modems/equpiment, then you'd have to configure it all, HEADACHE.
Having no lan support and telling people "use b.net" is simply not feasable for the huge lan events and get togethers that people do, especially for SC (they even have some on tv in South Korea).

And even WITH broadband lag is a fair issue, a single overloaded/dodgy router anywhere along the path can fuck up a game.
The lack of LAN (even though I personally detest starcraft and have absolutely no intention of trying SC2) is simply a stupid device that will cost them potential customers who might end up playing a lan game, realise they enjoy it and then go & buy the game.
The amount of piracy its going to stop is a big fat fucking zero
Maybe they really DO hate south korea, they're trying to kill its most popular "sport"

if all those machines are connected at once, it's seriously going to kill lan clubs and etc because before they didn't have to provide an internet connection - and if they want to play sc2 they will have to, which is going to require a lot of traffic (imagine you've got 20 guys wanting to play sc2) easier to do with a professional rtr than it is over broadband because you have to have like a dedicated t1 at that point.

It's not because I disagree, it's because you're wrong.

You don't know for a fact that I'm wrong in this particular instance, unless you had data with the ratio between the number of Blizzard game owners and the number of said owners with broadband. Do you have that number? Of course if you do, you can call me wrong right now, if you'd like, but I highly doubt that. Also, your answer doesn't explain why you're acting like such a jerk over a simple disagreement.

"It's things like this that make me think there may be some credibility to the whole "PC gaming is dying" theory. *sigh* "
I think Blizzard, Valve, GSC Gameworld, etc, would all have something to say about that.

Don't be so eager to hate them...they've said they'd love to do a PC version and it seemed like common sense to them, but it's up to Microsoft. I'd bet like with most multiplatform PC titles, this one will be released 3-6 months after the console version, hopefully with extras.
I concur. Personally, I'd rather wait and get extras than get it at the same time without. Not sure if I'm in the minority there or not.
But yeah..I never have a shortage of games to play, so I have no problems waiting.

Yes, conviction is a dangerous thing.