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Infinity Ward Uses Steamworks For Modern Warfare 2
by Chris Remo [PC, Console/PC]
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October 23, 2009
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In arguably the highest-profile third-party use of Steamworks to date, the PC version of Infinity Ward's upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 will make use of Valve's suite of publishing, updating, and social tools.
Infinity Ward and publisher Activision will be using Steamworks for game authentication, auto-patching and updating, achievements, anti-cheating measures, and persistent player settings across multiple PCs by way of the Steam Cloud. Steamworks also has built-in support for free or paid downloadable content, although that feature was not mentioned in the announcement.
Valve's Steamworks, which is offered free to all developers, competes in some areas with Microsoft's Games for Windows Live service, but outside of Valve's own games and several indie developers, it has seen less pickup than Microsoft's solution.
With the recent announcement of Infinity Ward's in-house multiplayer server backend, "IWNet," following the studio's confirmation that the game would not support player-run dedicated servers, it is unclear what role Steamworks will have in the multiplayer side of the game. While Steamworks offers a matchmaking and lobby infrastructure, today's statement made no mention of integrating those features, suggesting the IWNet solution has its own system.
Valve today put Modern Warfare 2 up for preorder on its online Steam store, but all PC copies of Modern Warfare 2 will ship with Steamworks support -- not just those sold on Steam itself. Beyond the Steamworks features themselves, one possible secondary benefit of that move means all copies of the game will be automatically updated the same way with the same patches. In the past, some gamers have noticed delays between standalone game patches and Steam auto-patches, due to the different systems being used.
"Steamworks will make it possible for us to have a closer connection to our fans, and enable us to support our community much more than ever before," said Infinity Ward's Robert Bowling in a statement. "Steam is the hands down leader in offering a community focused experience on PC and the inclusion of Steamworks has allowed us to deliver the most feature-rich PC version to ever come from Infinity Ward, which at the end of the day will mean the most to our fans."
Past Steamworks-equipped games have included Dylan Fitterer's indie hit Audiosurf, Tripwire Interative's shooters Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 and Killing Floor, and The Creative Assembly's historical strategy game Empire: Total War.
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Has anyone tried to play Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising online? The game itself is great, but the front-end problems are game-breakers and any purely match-making based system is so unreliable and problematic, it makes things pointless.
I've heard a lot of 'don't knock it til you've tried it' but unless this is a miracle, a genuine Pope-endorsed miracle, of a matchmaking system, then it will cause problems.
There are always pros and cons with this stuff. I think matchmaking could be interesting but lobbying (like when you create your own "server" instance in L4D) can be a chore if you don't have enough people. So, if you and your friends or clan want to play on the same team, good luck getting matched quickly.
And, I'm not so sure about how they're going to judge skill...and will they really prevent me from playing with my friends if their skill isn't up to par with mine?
I am not buying this game. I hope you are not making a mistake and decide to buy this game.
Leave it alone. Walk away from it now and let Activision and IW enjoy the fruits of their labour.
MW2 - RIP before it was even launched.
hahahaha this made me LMAO
Right!
Look guys it is the hackers, cheaters and pirates that brought this own on us. I for one like the matchmaking style experience that they had for the xbox side so if it is more like that then awesome!
I would rather spend more time playing and less time refreshing server list that has 10K servers with 9K of them being empty. it is freaking BS. Another reason for this is to dump PunkBuster which has been giving everyone fits for the last year or so. I will be super glad to see it go.
...it's a matter of principles. (you might have heard about it)
@James Barnette
Why not giving the players both?
The protest is still going strong, I even heard people have been calling Bobby Kotick's direct line at Activision voicing their protest - that's not passion you see every day in this industry.
However, as has been brought up in another article, dedicated server and MOD support has been decreasing slowly over the last several years. The additional costs of maintaining and supporting a PC SKU that supports mods can expensive with little or no increase in additional unit sales.
Finally dedicated servers:
In the past most projects started out this way with dedicated servers in the developer being the primary model that you would ship. This was easiest as you could just determine bandwidth and latency requires on the local network and extrapolate that to the network at large. (This assumes an ideal moderate topology with NAT at moderate levels.)
As time went on in development, you had to focus more on optimization with a multitude of concerns that increased development costs and reduced performance. It wasn't impossible but you had to make a call on what to improve, what to let go, and finally what to redesign / fix.
By standardizing the network structure you can focus more on what to improve in a given time.
Ha Mickey too right!
NO DEDI = NO MP -- Check out Dragon Rising and their wonderful idea of using Lobby.... Useless.