I've done exactly that, and the original is far more atmospheric and immersive. They used what they had better back then, created a world you felt you were in contact with, rather than eye candy you merely passed by.

And incremental updates are the antithesis of innovation. Why does that word get misused so often these days?

You're right, patching only takes care of the problems you know about.

If you need to feel like you are achieving something or progressing in some Progress Quest by playing video games, good for you.

I wish Sony would let me turn off trophy announcements on the PS3 though. I play games for their own sake, not for e-peen points, and this idiocy interferes with my gaming.

Since they made them mandatory, I have terrible images of playing Ico 3 when it comes out and having the PS3's OS dinging away at me during the game.

What they mean is single shard. Colloquially people refer to shards as servers.

You are confusing MMORPGs with single-player games (with a side of RTS).

Single player games are meant to make you the stand out character, the hero who profoundly affects the world, because you are the only real person in there.

MMORPGs are supposed to put you in a world with other people, and thus will of course provide an experience like real life, where only the best will rise to the top and the rest will have to work together to achieve anything.

The whole point of a MMORPG is that the challenge is other players, and only by being better than them can you succeed - the opposite of a world where you are guaranteed to succeed, and the opposite of what you described.

Real MMORPGs don't have bosses - they have other players.

In any game where you are merely put in the role of the world-changing hero, your actions are meaningless. You aren't really doing anything, the game is letting you do things. Only in games where you must earn that power, where failure is as likely as success, do your actions really mean anything - that is why MMORPGs exist.

So, spend lots of money to get everyone on the same cluster, then send them to different instances so that it is exactly as if they are on different clusters?

Either your strategy or my reading of your post or nonsense.

Oh, equating physical theft and copyright infringement, do I really have to explain the difference to you?

Many people here are forgetting that it is immaterial whether Microsoft actually did something wrong - all that matters is that they might have, and that they are Microsoft. Thus they are wrong.

Posting on Norton's forums is a fundamental human right?

Steam is great for the masses, but I mostly play games which are good enough that I will be playing them on and off for some time to come. As long as the general crap is all that's tied to it, I don't care that much. However, I am afraid that DD (Steam or otherwise) and its equivalents on consoles may take over completely, which would threaten the longevity of those games I do wish to play. So, in the interest of games which are more than transient time wasters, I hope physical distribution stays strong, and preferably (though hopelessly unlikely) that DD just goes away.

There may be hope though. When music first started becoming legally available online, it was horribly DRM encumbered, but they have backed off a lot over time. So, while DD may never go away, games in the future might at least not be programmed to fail.

Although, even in that case I would still hope that physical distribution would remain the standard. A real life example, the first two Team Ico games came in nice cardboard cases with art cards. I'm currently wondering if their PS3 game will follow suit, or only have a normal case. The idea of one being released without so much as boxart or a manual is not appealing.