[Bullethead]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

The way it reads to me is "i was a strictly multiplayer flier, but now that i lack the required connectivity i'm upset about the trimmed down single-player". It's all fine and dandy if you are, but (and i say this with no intention whatsoever to insult you) this is just a repeat of what we see so often on these boards: "i want the features that are important to me personally, overall balancing of the product be damned".
Ok, i'm exaggerating a bit here to illustrate the point (in fact you seem like a much more civil and level headed fellow than many old-timers of the forum ), i think you get my drift.

When I started in forums in the late 80s, EVERYTHING said was what today would be called a bannable "personal attack". But that was back in the day before some idjit thought kids should have computers. So now, allegedly, a mere Facebook page can cause a bloody revolution these days. Give your kid a gun before a car and a car before a computer, based on the amount of harm he can do with each of them. So I do get your drift

Anyway, yup, until say 3 years ago, I'd only done online flightsims since the early 90s. Dial-up sucked for everything else but at least it could do a server-client MMO game as well as broadband.

Don't get me wrong, i am not one to take whatever is served to me under the excuse of "buy it or the genre will die". However, i don't base my decisions on a single feature alone.

Sure, but some features are more important than others. Gameplay is a feature, and IMHO it's the most important feature. Without it, everything else, no matter how well-executed, is pretty useless. For instance, let's say you always wanted to own a Harley-Davidson, totally customized to your personal taste. You constantly dream of riding it all over the country, "looking for adventure and whatever comes our way". But when you go to the dealership, you find out that while you can get a bike exactly to your specifications, you're told all you can do with it is ride around the same block in the same town, over and over. But you still have to pay the full price for it. Maybe, someday, you'll be able to fullfill your dreams, but there's no guarantee, and all the while depreciation is setting in.

So what would you do? Buy the thing now and just admire the paint and chrome, without getting to ride it as you want, or wait a few years and buy it used for less than 1/2 the price and be able to hit the highway immediately?

I think it's not a case of putting no effort in it. They said themselves that with the amount of people they have (the whole team is about 25 people, with many of them having more than one field of responsibility), a dynamic campaign like the one you ask will take another year to complete.

My own game company has way fewer employees and we do dynamic campaigns. I write the campaigns all by myself, AAMOF, on top of my many other responsibilities. It's not that hard to do, just tedious. Want to see my work?
www.stormeaglestudios.com

So I'm really not impressed by this argument. Reading between the lines, as a member of the industry myself, I see the lack of a dynamic campaign in COD as just the latest chapter in the long, tragic saga of Evil Publishers chasing short-term profits and to Hell with the interests of the Good Developers, the genre, and the customers. Ubi told Maddox that the game WILL ship by such-and-such a date, so Maddox had better have the FM, DM and artwork done by then, leaving no manhours left to do a campaign, and all gameplay worthy of the name limited to "small batch" online.

This is why my company is an "indy", as in it self-publishes.

It looks like the three of us (me you and the developer) all want the same thing, but real life constraints are forcing a simple choice: release a simplified campaign generator now, or release a proper dynamic campaign similar to the one we want next year.

And folks wonder why there are hardly any PC games on store shelves these days. The Evil Publishers and the Evil Retailers are to blame.