Fortnite closed beta coming early 2013, says Epic

Its going to take a lot of effort on Epics part to restore their poor reputation with the PC crowd. Yes Epic you made UT2004 in 2004 well done.

Since then the PC crowd got UT3 which did not measure up at all to the previous title. Then we got 2 sloppy rushed ports with Bulletstorm and Gears of War. Put GFWL on Fortnite Epic and you can kiss your reputation with PC Gamers goodbye for good.

Wow, 2103? That’s probably the earliest announcement in history.

Problem?

I think Epic are too smart to launch a PC exclusive with GFWL.

I can’t wait for this. I enjoyed Bulletstorm on the PC only other game that has ran as smooth on the PC for me was Max Payne 3.

Yeah I agree, there was nothing wrong with the port itself.

But then I never tried to play coop, which is usually when GFWL starts breaking games.

I never played CoOp, as I have 0 friends (Not a South Park reference), but Bulletstorm was good fun. It suffered from having sub-par graphics compared to high end PC games, but that was expected from a console port.

I am excited for this though. Looks like proper fun.

I honestly don’t believe this game will have GFWL. There is no reason to since the game is not going on the 360 where most of their games are referenced off of and from what I hear GFWL makes it easier to port from 360 to PC because of it.

Except if you want to patch your game at some point, or include multiplayer

It does seem to be favored by those who make the quickest and dirtiest ports though.

The guys who are serious about the PC are either dropping it or going with Steamworks, and I think most of those publishers know they’re cutting a heel to save a foot by doing it.

Except maybe WB. They seem pretty clueless.

@7 You just managed to talk bad about Bethesda, THQ, Sega, Capcom, LucasArts, Codemasters, Square Enix, Namco Bandai, Double Fine, Rockstar, 2K games, and EA in one comment. Damn DSB you’re on a roll

@8 That’s not entirely fair

THQ have dropped GFWL. 2K, EA and Square Enix seem to have done the same. And I assume that by Bethesda you mean Bulletstorm? I’m not sure that wasn’t Epic’s choice.

Namco Bandai, Codemasters, LucasArts, Capcom, Warner Brothers and Sega can go fuck themselves though.

I guess there’s a possibility that Double Fine can’t afford a proper port, considering what Phoenixblight says, but then it doesn’t make a lot of sense that Signal Studios are able to switch to Steamworks.

They can go fuck themselves, tentatively.

By Bethesda i was actually referring to Fallout 3, if you remember that game used GFWL. Both the retail and steam version (i loved the first 2 fallouts so much i bought the 3rd on both steam and retail, what a grave mistake that was xD )

@10 Oh right. Again, I think fair should be fair.

They’ve obviously dropped it in the meantime, and I’ll happily send them a basket for that.

Consider publishers like Ubisoft who are actually willing to run their business into the ground, to avoid admitting that they made a mistake

Well Ubisoft is in a category for themselves entirely. No matter what you or i think of GFWL (i know we disagree on it ) Ubisoft manages to piss off the PC crowd with pretty much everything they do. They are like the Uwe Boll of game publishers IMO xD

I dunno, I find Microsoft more insulting with the PC than Ubisoft. Microsoft owns the operating system and are supposed to understand all things PC including games, which they used to be good at on the PC. At least Ubisoft have made good games for the PC in the last 6+ years all be it with crap DRM, but at least they keep their crap DRM on their own games and don’t contaminate others *cough* Microsoft.

I think they’re two peas in a pod, really.

Given Microsofts position as owner of two of the biggest gaming platforms on the planet, it’s certainly weird that they don’t make half an effort with their gaming software.

Assembly line AAA games, ruined studios, and some of the poorest DRM on the market.

At the end of the day though, it’s down to the developers and publishers whether they want to use it, and they’re ultimately to blame for not checking the quality of the bloatware they bundle their games with.

^I think it is a bit of a stretch to call GFWL bloatware, it doesn’t use so much more ressources than any other DRM on the market. If i remember correctly then securom actually uses more RAM than GFWL so actually securom would be the bloatware of those two, but really none of the DRM solutions that i’ve seen utilized lately qualify as being bloatware.

On another note, i do agree with you that it would be great if Microsoft supported gaming more on the PC than they already do, and from the looks of it they are (very) slowly starting to do that with Windows 8.

Haha. I always thought bloatware meant something else

What do you call an unneccessary piece of software tacked onto another, that adds nothing to that software, except extra login screens and pointless updates, followed by pointless restarts, while achieving none of the things that it was created for?

I mean I know we call it GFWL, but what’s the general term for a program like that?

@16
I usually call it Steam, but i think most call it either crapware or shovelware

How do you figure?

I go through exactly zero login screens to play a game on Steam, and I use the same number of clicks as I would on my desktop to start one.

I’ve never once had to restart a game so Steam could update it, and certainly never repeatedly.

I save time by having all my games updated automatically, without having to keep up with a developer blog, and consult Gamers Hell to find the right patch, or sequence of patches.

It doesn’t do anything to stop piracy directly, so it fails there, but it has played a pretty significant role as one in a number of businesses, promoting the only business and delivery model, ever to cause a decrease in piracy.

Aside from the fact that it saves you a trip to the store, and ownership of a lot of useless plastic.

Ergo, I’m looking at one program that conveniences me, and achieves a comfortable (but certainly not perfect) standard of functionality, and one that takes between 5-10 attempts to connect me to my friends, that requires a manual login for every new game, followed by manual input of a license key, forcibly restarting my games purely to update the DRM, sometimes repeatedly, while offering me no benefit what so ever.

If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit!

I must say i’ve had pretty much the opposite experience with Steam compared to what you just described

Several times when launching a game, no matter if it is something that has just launched, or if it has been years since the game was released. It happens that i receive the dreaded “The servers are too busy, please try again later”. Which just annoys me when i have the game on my computer, and i just want to play the damn game…

Now i must agree with you that in most cases the auto update thingy is nice, but then again. However it does have a downside, that i was reminded off as late as yesterday when modding KOTOR 2 a bit. The mod i was trying out edited some existing files, and Steam saw some files weren’t matching those in its database so it replaced them.

But the absolute worst thing i must say is actually not the client itself, but the customer service. Everything that has to do with customer service on Steam is either email or web based, which isn’t all that great. As you already know i’m a bit paranoid when it comes to my games And since there isn’t a steam phone number i can contact what do i do if my account is banned without reason? I can write an email, sure, but that is very easily ignored, a phone call is much harder to ignore because, well there is actually someone waiting for an answer

Yup, it’s not perfect.

There’s always a risk that an online service is going to fail, but personally I haven’t been inconvenienced by that.

I wasn’t aware that they didn’t have phone supporters, but I haven’t had any problems with the e-mail thing.

Every reply I’ve gotten has been within 24 hours of making the ticket, sometimes an hour or two, depending on the time difference, and that’s even been the case during sales. They’ve always been pretty helpful when I’ve needed something.

I can kind of agree that phone support would make a nice addition, but if you’re already paranoid, then how good do you feel letting a random indian or chinese guy, who makes less than we spend on sodapop every day, handle your personal information?

That leads to situations like these: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking/

Personally I’d rather take a well trained supporter over a random “poor person”, who’s not even allowed to use his or her own name.

I recently called KLM because I had a problem paying for a flight, and the chick on the phone actually asked me to read aloud my credit card info… That’s not the kind of support I need

I think Steam has far more serious problems when it comes to something like the offline mode, which is just ass backwards (you have to get online, before you can go offline) and their return policy which seems to be far less extensive than you might like, at least by European standards.