No Dedicated Servers or LAN Play in Command & Conquer 4

[DarkSaber]

This is utter bollocks aimed at casual "don't know shit about PC" gamers. You log onto THEIR (EAs, or whoevers) Master Server, get access to what you unlocked and THEN join a server running a game.

And I ain't bised because I had no intention of getting this game to begin with. The C&C series peaked with Red Alert (1) and has been downhill since. And EA getting hold of it made me even LESS inclined to give it another go. And this just gave that inclination a set of concrete over-shoes and shoved it off the pier.

 

[Voop_Bakon]

if you go to another machine - friend's house, Internet café - whatever, you can login with your profile and all the stuff you've unlocked is accessible to you there. It all lives on a server so you can't really do dedicated servers with that."

Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuullllllllllshiiiiiiiiiiit.

Games like TF2, pretty much the whole Battlefield series, America's Army series, CoD 4(Modern Warfare) and 5 (World at War), amongst many others, all have unlockable items AND dedicated servers so this is a pretty poor excuse.

QFT

This is a piss poor excuse, almost as bad as what IW did to us. No dedicated servers is not a bad thing for an RTS, but no LAN support?

You can take the radio out of my car, but why also take the bloody gearbox and leave me with 1 gear?

While I still don't think PC gaming is dying, developers are certainly not caring about it anymore.

 

[teh_gunslinger]

DRM, no LAN/dedicated servers, half the game left out so more DLC can be sold...
Isn't the games industry great?
OT: If they have a reason for it, then great. Truthfully I'm not a huge fan of ded. servers and LAN, being brought up on console multiplayer, Blizzard, and MMOs. And seeing how TF2 and CSS work, where you can't easily find a game, I think I prefer the developers running servers that make finding a game easy. However, I don't see why you can't have both.

Am I understanding you correctly? You say it's hard to find games of TF2 and CSS? Really?
As I'm writing this there are 45000 people playing CSS, 41000 playing CS 1.6 and about 17000 playing TF2. I really think finding a server poses no problem.

As for unlockables, well fuck that. Keep that out of my RTS. I won't be playing this train wreck but what purpose does unlockables serve? There really is no excuse for cutting LAN play.

Oh wow... Talk about developers keep slapping us in the face with their tiny cocks. What's with this new trend? This notion that matchmaking etc is a good feature? It sucks ffs! :S Dedicated and lan support works absolutely perfect. Why try to fix something that isn't broken :S I just don't get it...

Matchmaking works for an RTS to a degree. Blizzard's age old battle.net doesn't even use dedicated servers. You may still have a game list to choose off of, but they won't be dedicated servers, they`ll be P2P games I believe.

Anyways, don't jump the gun.

I wasn't only refering to RTS's but sure...

It depends on the game itself man. Left 4 Dead's matchmaking makes perfect sense. L4D DID have dedicated servers, but you could only connect to those servers through matchmaking.

An online racing sim would also work well on a matchmaking system (hell, they've used such systems on PC games since the 90s).

In the case of Modern Warfare 2, I was totally against their choice. Matchmaking doesn't make sense for a game where you have 8 or more players in any given game. Heck they had to reduce the maximum number of players to 16 (12?) to accomodate a reasonable matchmaking. It doesn't appeal to me. In the case of L4D, though you have four, or eight people playing a single game, thus matchmaking makes sense. L4D's case is further re-enforced by the fact that it's very much a co-op game.

Except that the matchmaking in L4D is absolutely terrible. I love the game but I detest the limitations of matchmaking. It's like being tied on both hands. It really feels claustrophobic to be limited to a bad system.
Though there of course are way around it, it seems crappy that I need to force it through console.

 

[Baron Khaine]

I don't know of any RTS multiplayers that get played over Dediboxes, though it was all P2P, or atleast it has been on the ones i've played. Which include a fair amount of recent RTS's.

So all this is saying is, yeah, were not gonna have dedicated servers, but we never had them in the first place, so, this announcement means nothing, but look at us, were following MW2, fuck you gamers.

Sounds to me like a big hoohah about nothing and some free publicity for C&C 4.

The LAN thing sucks though.

 

[DarkSaber]

What makes this such bollcoks is games like Killing Floor have unlockable perks AND dedicated servers. Why? Becase you connect to a Master Server that stores your unlocked stuff, and then presents a list of dedicated (fan-run but still dedicated) servers where you can play WITH your unlocked stuff.

 

[Acidwell]

Dedicated servers have been gone from a lot of rts games and it tends to work unlike in fps games but NO LAN? What the fuck? is there really any point in leaving it out, surely the netcode for lan would be similar to p2p.

 

[shadow skill]

Oh come on. What is with the constant ***** slapping of PC gamers lately.

Its like they've chained the platform to a wall, stuck electric cables on its nipples and are spitting on it whilst making small cuts into its chest and pouring hot candlewax into those cuts calling me a ***** and pulling my hair while choking me.

..I'm sorry what?

Admit it, you like it.

I normally like changes in gaming... but this is one change I can't get behind. I really hate the lack of dedicated servers and there is no legitimate reason why they should take them out.

Expensive. Very expensive.

And PC gamers are not the market they used to be. You're just not worth that much anymore - not enough to invest in the cost of servers, anyways.

As others have said most dedicated servers are actually paid for by the community rather than the content manufacturer. I've already explained this in other threads where dedicated servers have come up.

 

[51gunner]

No dedicated servers is one thing, but no LAN play is ridiculous. Starcraft is a LAN classic and really helped popularize them (at least for my friends), somehow it feels like a betrayal for Starcraft II to not support it at all.

Hell, my friends and I were planning a LAN to celebrate.

 

[MagicMouse]

Wait, no LAN?

On an RTS?

SCREW THAT. And to think I was actually looking forward to this game.

 

[Stormz]

These companies have been making really bad decisions lately haven't they? This is why I'm just going to stick with older games. I have no reason to give money to a company that can't listen to their fans.

 

[oppp7]

DRM, no LAN/dedicated servers, half the game left out so more DLC can be sold...
Isn't the games industry great?
OT: If they have a reason for it, then great. Truthfully I'm not a huge fan of ded. servers and LAN, being brought up on console multiplayer, Blizzard, and MMOs. And seeing how TF2 and CSS work, where you can't easily find a game, I think I prefer the developers running servers that make finding a game easy. However, I don't see why you can't have both.

Am I understanding you correctly? You say it's hard to find games of TF2 and CSS? Really?
As I'm writing this there are 45000 people playing CSS, 41000 playing CS 1.6 and about 17000 playing TF2. I really think finding a server poses no problem.

I'm talking about finding them without mods, or it being the same damn map over and over.
Truthfully though, I haven't done a huge amount of searching on CSS, but whenever I do it's like hundreds of servers with 1 person in each.

 

[tcurt]

On a plus note, I gave up interest in Command & Conquer once the story went Britney Spears.

Notice that #4 is Tiberian Twilight. Now they have gone all glittery emo vampire too.

 

[TimeCruiserMike]

god damnit. . . WTF! why no LAN. LAN is how i most enjoy playing an RTS . .. I can't stand playing with random fuckers. Whatever . . . the community will put that back in through mods just like they did for modern warfare 2

 

[Dys]

Uh, when did RTS multiplayer ever use dedicated servers? Maybe I just didn't play them enough, but it was always player hosted.

This is rather a good point, though no lan option is more or less a death sentence for a lot of these games.

 

[FightThePower]

Oh dear.

Still it's not like they have done so in the past, Red Alert 3 insisted on using GameSpy, which was a pile of crap. I wasn't really going to buy C&C 4 anyway, I think the whole class system and unit unlocks isn't a good idea; it may work in online FPSs to a degree, but I am not convinced it will work in an RTS setting.

 

[kinky257]

The lack of dedicated servers isn't a problem for rts's, with only 4v4 usually being the largest sized game and 1v1 usualy being the most played game type most normal computers can cope with it. Both Company of heroes and Dawn of War 2 lack dedicated servers and it doesn't really negativly impact play.

Ugh, this sucks. One of the best things about older RTS games (like starcraft, and the other C&Cs) was that you could boot up the game, and create any game with whatever game mode and with whatever settings you wanted.

Both of the games I mentioned above allow you to chose the map/ game type/ options in them and I see little reason for C&C4 to not allow this, though ranked games are auto-match only. The lack of lan support will be a loss for some though.

 

[Pingieking]

Well, that's one less game to go on the list of "Games Ping Wants to Play in 2010".

 

[Dobrev]

The key problem for me is that I don't want unlockable stuff. Multiplayer games should always start equal and fair both players. Persistant scores and statistics might be a nice feature to have, but denaying you ability to play just because your progress wil not be track seems stupid.

I am getting fed up with PR people telling us how we don't need al this stuff and giving silly explanations. You want to control our playtime and always be connected to you - ain't that hard to say.

 

[Xan Krieger]

To be honest I'll get the game if it's good because no dedicated servers and LAN doesn't affect me. I never play games multiplayer so I'm fine.