silentcorner

I’ve been really hooked on Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising, a military shooter/sim by Novalogic recommended to me by my friend Dan over at extrasonic. This game is very cool. In my opinion, this is Battlefield 1942/Vietnam done even better. I even joined a squad which really makes a huge difference while playing when you’re with an organized group of people. However, that’s where the fun starts to end.

Somewhere along the line it seems like Novalogic didn’t pay any attention to the games that are out there now, nor the players who were beta testing their product, and instead look to their own financial greed. Most shooter games these days (including the aforementioned Battlefields, Raven Shield, etc…) contain a pretty good dedicated server, some even a Linux based dedicated server. But not Novalogic…. they want you to spend money with their partner if you want a dedicated server, but they will advertise you can run your own… except you can only run 64 users on your own, instead of 150 on theirs, and here’s one of the kickers… You *must* have a 3D accelerator video card in your server and enabled to even start up the dedicated server portion of the game. What a crock! I have a nice dual Xeon, 2 GB server on 100 Mbps bandwidth I was just itching to run this game on, but I can’t because, like most servers I might add, it doesn’t have a 3D enabled video card (ATI Rage XL - it’s 3D capable, but since Windows 2003 is a server only based operating system, the drivers for it do not support 3D acceleration). Unfortunately, so far Novalogic’s response seems to be (based on responses they have given), “Oh sorry, it’s not a problem for us since we have 3D cards in our servers, so we have no plans to change that”. Just adding another video card in a rack mounted server (or worse, multiple servers) located in another state is not always a viable solution.

I must say I’m highly disappointed in Novalogic at this point. I believe this lack of support for non-Novalogic servers (because the Novalogic ones are too expensive for the majority of the players and clans) is a big mistake for their game. I think there would be more quality servers to play on if they spent some time making more usable dedicated server functionality with less restrictive graphic requirements (why do I need 3D accelerator just to run the menus). I would hope that they make some of these changes for their upcoming expansion Joint Operations: Escalation (which I’m beta testing and really like so far), but based on their responses, and their past history, I doubt that is going to happen.