Quote:
DominionsFAN said:
Wait, hold right there! Example in Kohan 2, you can save the multi game anytime, and just load it up later on!!! Yes all this with a gamespy lobby system!
So if someone has to go....the host just saving the game, and loading it up when everyone available again! 
|
Pardon me, but this is a ludicrous comparison! Kohan plus GameSpy are provided by two separate companies, that are very comercially oriented, with huge resources.
Illwinter Design is a very talented, non-commercial development house, with two developers. IMNSHO, the fact that Dominions II (and no doubt III), has such an elegant design base, combined with an excellent implementation (especially when consider w/r to the limited dev resources available), that it far outshines any of the more commercial titles available. I am not an anti-commercial snob - I have greatly enjoyed many commercial titles, but if you like epic scoped, turn based strategy games, Dom II is the hands down winner, as far as I am concerned.
Now, when considering Dom III, the Last thing I would put on my wishlist is a game lobby. This is not to say that a game lobby would be a bad thing, but the task of creating a game lobby does overlaps little with game development, and I would far, far prefer to have our most excellent IW game designers/developers doing, well, game design and development.
If a game lobby were to be done, it should be as others have said, done by a third party. If this could be arranged, that might be nice, but I suspect (as was also suggested), that this would have to be set up by Shrapnel, rather than IW (the steps to initiate this would have to be on the business side, rather than development). I suppose it might be nice if GameSpy itself were to take an interest in Dom II (I don't know enough about GameSpy to even know if this were a good thing), but from a business perspective, this sound more than a little unlikely.
But even if a likely third party is identified, there are so many steps that precede game lobbies, that game lobbies still fall down on the list. Before you can talk about game lobbies, you will need servers run by some company, that can afford to maintain them and keep them running. To that end, if Shrapnel stepped up to the plate and provided servers to run Esben Mosehansen's *very* nice (and by my guess, low maintenance) PBW Dom II server, that would be a wonderful thing. I'm not sure that it would pay for Shrapnel to do this, but it would certainly be far cheaper to do this than to provide a game lobby.
- Thufir
PS My apologies if the tone of this sounds hostile, but there is just *so* much to this question that I couldn't help myself from spewing out a lengthy response