and had to choose Comcast, has it stabilized and been reasonable.
what.
My thoughts exactly.
I know right? I'm still waiting for this to suck at some point. I'm not crazy for expecting that, surely I'm not....and no, I can't tell you why its been good. I'm going with: extremely lucky.
That's your right, however the game was specifically designed in such a way that the servers handle the massive load of most of the game including the planets, their orbits, the shadows, and much of the load of thousands or tens of thousands of units duking it out across an entire solar system.
Yeah, I've heard the performance argument before...hmm...oh right, EA with SimCity (5). Except that was proven to be a bunch of bull. So, you'll excuse me if I'm skeptical.
To my knowledge, it's the first RTS to ever use this mechanic, allowing such massive-scale battles while still keeping fantastic performance on even the most modest of PCs. It also avoids the individual slowdown, "weakest link in the chain" problem basically every RTS since the beginning of time has had when the architecture is structured around the players, not the server. One person shouldn't ruin the fun for everyone else, and the way Uber designed the game handles it fantastically.
Which is impressive, if true. At this point, I have no reason to disbelieve it but this song has been sung to me many times lately when companies attempt to justify always-online DRM so to hear someone else say it makes me extremely suspicious. However, this has a big drawback to it: you're dependent on their servers. Which as we all know, last a finite amount of time. AKA: for however long they continue to remain profitable.
Considering that they've (in my opinion) completely revolutionized the RTS genre by literally bringing to the planetary scale, doing in all within two years, and on an Indie Developer budget, I honestly think there's no room to complain.
I don't care if they're EA, Valve, Arcen Games or an old company resurrected from the dead. Always-online DRM for single player games is a deal breaker. And yes, there is always plenty of room to complain. The indie dev and small budget cards aren't immunity from criticism. The game still has to be up to snuff. Otherwise, how will games ever improve? There is never a perfect game, there never will be. Which is a good thing but holding back just because they're indie and they "completely revolutionized" the genre isn't valid.
To be frank, I thought the two year development cycle of a complicated RTS game was too quick. I've got games from Kickstarter of less complex genres still in BETA and active development polishing things out before release. I don't really understand why they rushed the release on this game.
There's a good explanation for why it was designed this way, and while offline single player may be added in the future, I can't fault them for not putting in the extra few months of work before release just for people using 56k modems in the year 2014.
I'm sorry, but did you not read what I just said? A lot of people in the US alone have very few, if any, choices when it comes to their Internet. And what they do get, is usually a terrible high-speed internet service. And even if we ignore the awful ISP situation in the USA, there's also the other end, the servers themselves. Even if we had a perfect ISP situation, servers FAIL. They go down, they lag up, they cause problems. The companies with the most experience with servers still have issues to this very day. (Everyone from Blizzard to Hi-Rez). Playing an MMO, online FPS/MOBA or any other online multiplayer game should give you more than enough experience with that. It's one more thing to fail, to go wrong. As such, I think its not too crazy to not want to deal with that while in the middle of a single player game.
