Warcraft III: Refunded General - How one company managed to mess up a remaster of a 17 year old game.

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Oldfag CNC fanboy here. I don't really agree.

Generals was honestly a perfectly fine RTS. It had absolutely jack squat to do with CNC, that was just a title plastered on to move more units. But there was nothing particularly wrong with Generals as a game.

While the aesthetic of CNC did change somewhat with Tiberium Wars, it still felt much, much, MUCH more like a real CNC game than any other since Tiberian Sun. While not AS good as earlier games in the series, I would argue all day erry day that it was a modern, streamlined rendition of the Tiberium series rather than being a clone of Generals. I can't really comment on the multiplayer aspects, as I don't think I've ever played a CNC game online despite hundreds of hours in single player.

RA3 was... RA3. 'nuff said. But that was never really the problem. The wild divergence in tone between the Red Alert and Tiberium series started with 2, not 3. It wasn't exactly unprecedented. And while I thought RA2 was fun, I didn't really care for the shift in tone as far as CNC as a series goes. A lot of people forget that RA1 was an absolutely dead serious game about a fictional world war.

No, I think the traditional diagnosis of CNC4 killing the series is correct. Simply because it was seriously THAT bad.
Generals itself is fine. The debilitating effect it had on the series as a whole isn't, as I described in detail, and neither is the pretense of it being 'C&C', when that isn't reflected in anything but the name and the genre. It's basically been irl retconned as the best game in the series, when it pretty much isn't even one, which tilts me so hard I shit out my hemorrhoids.

What do you mean about TW being more CNC than anything? RA2 is a TS reskin with better assets (also, proportionally a lot better sized buildings, lol). Same as RA1 being a C&C reskin, only that one is just the exact same, D2K falls in this camp too. Those games all play the same underneath all their drapes. They couldn't be closer if they tried.

TW on the other hand, with the way the units move and behave, feels exactly like Generals. That's the point. You have 4 games, 6 if you count the 2 Dune games, that are very noticably the same, from design of the UI, to unit behaviour. Then you play Generals, and it's blatantly different, but then you play 3, and it sure as shit doesn't resemble C&C1 through RA2, where the only real difference is going from top down to isometric perspective. If you want a 3D game that plays like C&C, try Emperor, and compare it to TW.

I don't get the streamlined argument. Old C&C, as much as I love them, are not complicated at all, it's the other way around. Generals and games post became more complex, both on a design level and a unit management level, directly because they aimed for the SC esports audience that was used to more complex shit. Multiple build queues, SC/WC style upgrades and multiple unit abilities, heavy counter unit ability micro gameplay. Those all got put into the series starting with Generals, before that, in the old games you had a handful of units that can unpack and have abilites, universal sidebar and that's it. You can diehard anything in MP, but those old games were streamlined so much to begin with a child could play them. It's why it was known as the comfy meme RTS where you build a base, build 30 tanks, left click, steamroll. Same can't be said of the SC injected later entries. (this is a reply @Jaimas too, also they did sth different by aping SC kek)

RA3 was bad in that it tried to be everything and ended up being nothing. It tried to ape RA2, but ended up being a flanderised obnoxious version of it, as seemingly made by people who watched a meme compilation. Simultaneously it's also a coop game, which pigeonholed mission and level design. Also a console game, so map sizes have to be limited. Also double down on fast esports micro gameplay shit by giving every unit hard counter abilities against each other. All while being playing like a RA2 mod for Generals, even the general ability shit returned.

RA1 being serious is overstated and RA2 being wacky is also overstated. The later has scenes like a guy begging for his life in a cupboard before being executed, a person getting blown up in a terrorist attack in front of your eyes, the intro starts with a guy getting brainwashed and murdering his friend. Conversely, RA1 has Stalin in bed cackling with his mistress like a cartoon villain. RA1 was always more camp than Tiberian Dawn, even as people were killing eachother in the cutscenes. It wasn't nearly as serious about its subject matter as it is made out to be.

Now, not saying there isn't an overall increase in camp going from 1 to 2, but outside of isolated comedic beats, it's a moderate increase. Not the drastic insanity that people retroactively attributed to it post 3 being shite. People treat 1's darkest moments and 2's most comedic moments as the baseline tone for the two games, which isn't the case

By C&C4 they've already given up. As described in my original post, the double whammy of TW burning all the nostalgia kindle in one go and failing as an esport, followed by RA3 flopping was the death sentence of the series. RA3 did so fucking bad, they cancelled the console version of the expansion, removed coop, cut it down to mini campaigns and didn't allow new units in MP. Ironically, missions were a lot better because of the larger maps and no forced coop. They didn't even print discs, they sold codes in a box for like 5 bucks.

C&C4 and F2P Generals 2 were just fishing for anything that might work. TW/RA3 style followups were proven to be a failure by then, described why in my original post, which meant a death sentence for the series.

@Jaimas, I wouldn't say Dota coming out of WC3 is a feather in the games' cap, considering people would rather play Dota than WC3 even when it was just a custom game. Dota (and the standalone games that followed it) at its's core is just WC3 without everything but 1 hero unit. People had fun with aspects of WC3, but they were overwhelmed by it, so a game mode that removes 80% of the gameplay loop was preferable to playing normal WC3. Eclipsing it both casually and competitively, which later was even true with SC2 vs moba. It's like an admission that the game was bloated as hell. Insert George Lucas saying he went too far in a few places.
 
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MOBAs are absolute cancer and anyone that likes them should be shot.

Let me oldfag even harder by saying C&C3 is neither great as an RTS, and is downright terrible as C&C game. It was the second step in murdering the series dead by being a 100% esports/MPfag game first and foremost. See, the '00s was not a kind period for RTS, chief among them cnc. Primary goal for everyone under the sun was becoming the next SC, and in the first half of the decade, this effort resulted in some manner of success. SC2 was not even close to being on the horizon, and the Dota ball hasn't started rolling yet, so games like C&C Generals got free real estate to shine on the scene, which almost solely comprised of people bored with Brood War looking for a new game. Read, it wasn't the old C&C audience growing or settling into MP, it was a migrating SC audience jumping game from game for MP. This audience brought with them their MPfaggotry to every game they touched, and as an incredibly vocal and active audience, drowned out the native audiences opinions almost completely, thus leading to SP being an afterthought, as "nobody plays RTS for the SP", that old mpfag chestnut, and developers pandering solely to them because of that alluring SC esports money, which noone got to. This mentality defined, and ruined RTS in the '00s for good.

Now, one of the games they settled on back then was Generals, the first step in murdering C&C, expanding on that in a bit. Generals, right? One of the classics, it's in the The First Decade! Absolutely not. The people that played TibSun, RA2 and older C&C games, fucking hated that piece of shit. Frankly, it didn't play like C&C, a lot of hallmarks of the C&C design were missing, the universal sidebar and unpack button, replaced with single construction units and a SC esque upgrade and unit ability system, lacklustre campaign that was missing the series hallmark FMVs, and unit behaviour that felt completely different from the grid based movement in all the prior games. Emperor is sometimes brought up against Generals as to how a 3D C&C game would play and feel.

But then where did the love for this game come from? Well, to quote SC esports fag and ass cancer victim TotalBiscuit, "I didn't play much RA2 and I didn't like it, but I played so much Generals and it was great!" The afformentioned migrating SCfag latched onto their 'first' C&C game and proclaimed it the greatest. In reality, it was a SCified bastard child in the franchise aimed directly at capturing them, but they wouldn't know or care about that since they never really played and thus knew what real C&C played like. And since discourse was defined by SC/MPtards for RTS in the '00s, Generals became regarded as one the 'core classics', despite being a complete no show with the old C&C audience. From Tiberian Dawn to Emperor fricking Battle of Dune, top down to isometric, 2d to 3d you'll find C&C played in one very recognisable and consistent way. Generals was completely at odds with that, but since it got propped up at the time on the scene, it became the baseline for future C&C games, and thus the series was coopted by the new MPfag crowd near entirely.

Moving onto 2007, the MP success of Generals convinced the developers that they were doing good work, and thus C&C3 was made as a full esports game, ready take everything over. Patches solely existed for the sake of MP balance, no matter how much the campaign missions got fucked over by balance changes. For the gameplay, they used Generals as a base and built on top of it. Some of the superficial mechanical quirks of old C&C were replicated, but at its core, 3 moved and felt like Generals 2.0. Narratively and art wise it was a soft reboot, gone was the C&C2 grungy 90s scifi feel, replaced with late 2000s clean SciFi channel shit and comic book-y art and a return to C&C95 tanks and shit. Despite the initial hype and success, the game failed to gain foothold as an esports mainstay, it had a flavor of the month window with the MPfag crowd, but EA and the devs miscalculated the staying power of their new game over this sensation called Dota. See, a lot has changed since 2003 on the MP scene, in the interim period Dota gobbled up almost the entire post Brood War MP crowd and was snowballing and simultaneously bulldozing the esports RTS. The audience gained with Generals evaporated. The old RA2/C&C2 crowd? They were drawn back with the nostalgia jerking off of Kane and the brand, but were soon alienated by the game being a Generals-like, a game that audience never like to begin with, and the jarring regression in story and setting compared to Tiberian Sun left people confused. This was the first great blow that killed the series in the end. This was followed by the jack of no trades, failure of all RA3 flopping.

C&C4 is wrongly credited as the game that killed the series, as well as being a game that came into existence for no reason. Reality is, it was last ditch effort shit being thrown at the wall to see if it sticks after Tiberium Wars and RA3 shit the bed.

There's a bit of karmic schadenfruede over the SC audience killing every other RTS in the 2000s by SCificying them, to then later go play Dota instead, and as a result kill SC2 and the what was left of the genre as well.

tl;dr: it fucking sucked bro

As an aside Dune 2 aged like tard cum. If anyone wants to 'play' it, I'd recommend source ports/remakes with quality of life improvements of later C&C games backported instead. Y'know, like selecting multiple units at the same time.
Blizzard killed SC2 with retarded decisions and there was not much esports money to chase in the early 2000s.

Play Age of Mythology instead of that stuff if you want a good RTS from that era that's still active but don't like Starcraft.
 
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Surprised to see so many old C&C boomers. I played Tiberian Dawn when I was eight and it was, a matter of fact, one of my first video games ever. What a return to my childhood that would be if the upcoming remaster turns out to be good with C&C being back and on top, because everyone else is either dead or has completely lost the fucking plot.
No fuckin' wai, d00d. C&C Red Alert was my first RTS. Played it before I was in school, even. Heck, I still play it on occasion since the game's gone freeware and is readily available on the internet.

I've recently tried to get into C&C The Original, but even after finding some patches, I'm still having some technical issues with the FMVs, what with them freezing mid-play. The game itself seems to run fine, however.
 
Generals itself is fine. The debilitating effect it had on the series as a whole isn't, as I described in detail, and neither is the pretense of it being 'C&C', when that isn't reflected in anything but the name and the genre. It's basically been irl retconned as the best game in the series, when it pretty much isn't even one, which tilts me so hard I shit out my hemorrhoids.

What do you mean about TW being more CNC than anything? RA2 is a TS reskin with better assets (also, proportionally a lot better sized buildings, lol). Same as RA1 being a C&C reskin, only that one is just the exact same, D2K falls in this camp too. Those games all play the same underneath all their drapes. They couldn't be closer if they tried.

TW on the other hand, with the way the units move and behave, feels exactly like Generals. That's the point. You have 4 games, 6 if you count the 2 Dune games, that are very noticably the same, from design of the UI, to unit behaviour. Then you play Generals, and it's blatantly different, but then you play 3, and it sure as shit doesn't resemble C&C1 through RA2, where the only real difference is going from top down to isometric perspective. If you want a 3D game that plays like C&C, try Emperor, and compare it to TW.

I don't get the streamlined argument. Old C&C, as much as I love them, are not complicated at all, it's the other way around. Generals and games post became more complex, both on a design level and a unit management level, directly because they aimed for the SC esports audience that was used to more complex shit. Multiple build queues, SC/WC style upgrades and multiple unit abilities, heavy counter unit ability micro gameplay. Those all got put into the series starting with Generals, before that, in the old games you had a handful of units that can unpack and have abilites, universal sidebar and that's it. You can diehard anything in MP, but those old games were streamlined so much to begin with a child could play them. It's why it was known as the comfy meme RTS where you build a base, build 30 tanks, left click, steamroll. Same can't be said of the SC injected later entries. (this is a reply @Jaimas too, also they did sth different by aping SC kek)

RA3 was bad in that it tried to be everything and ended up being nothing. It tried to ape RA2, but ended up being a flanderised obnoxious version of it, as seemingly made by people who watched a meme compilation. Simultaneously it's also a coop game, which pigeonholed mission and level design. Also a console game, so map sizes have to be limited. Also double down on fast esports micro gameplay shit by giving every unit hard counter abilities against each other. All while being playing like a RA2 mod for Generals, even the general ability shit returned.

RA1 being serious is overstated and RA2 being wacky is also overstated. The later has scenes like a guy begging for his life in a cupboard before being executed, a person getting blown up in a terrorist attack in front of your eyes, the intro starts with a guy getting brainwashed and murdering his friend. Conversely, RA1 has Stalin in bed cackling with his mistress like a cartoon villain. RA1 was always more camp than Tiberian Dawn, even as people were killing eachother in the cutscenes. It wasn't nearly as serious about its subject matter as it is made out to be.

Now, not saying there isn't an overall increase in camp going from 1 to 2, but outside of isolated comedic beats, it's a moderate increase. Not the drastic insanity that people retroactively attributed to it post 3 being shite. People treat 1's darkest moments and 2's most comedic moments as the baseline tone for the two games, which isn't the case

By C&C4 they've already given up. As described in my original post, the double whammy of TW burning all the nostalgia kindle in one go and failing as an esport, followed by RA3 flopping was the death sentence of the series. RA3 did so fucking bad, they cancelled the console version of the expansion, removed coop, cut it down to mini campaigns and didn't allow new units in MP. Ironically, missions were a lot better because of the larger maps and no forced coop. They didn't even print discs, they sold codes in a box for like 5 bucks.

C&C4 and F2P Generals 2 were just fishing for anything that might work. TW/RA3 style followups were proven to be a failure by then, described why in my original post, which meant a death sentence for the series.

@Jaimas, I wouldn't say Dota coming out of WC3 is a feather in the games' cap, considering people would rather play Dota than WC3 even when it was just a custom game. Dota (and the standalone games that followed it) at its's core is just WC3 without everything but 1 hero unit. People had fun with aspects of WC3, but they were overwhelmed by it, so a game mode that removes 80% of the gameplay loop was preferable to playing normal WC3. Eclipsing it both casually and competitively, which later was even true with SC2 vs moba. It's like an admission that the game was bloated as hell. Insert George Lucas saying he went too far in a few places.

I can agree with your sentiments, but I never really heard anyone say, even in my most oldfag of times, say that Generals was the best game in the series. At best I heard it was enjoyable as a fun diversion from the regular series and people giving hopes that it dev branched into its own thing like Red Alert did. The people I heard who declared it their favorite one almost invariably point to some mod like Shockwave, Nations at War, or Conflict. On its own merits, Generals adopted so much from basically every game put out by Westwood before it.

It's probably just as well because even as a fan of Generals I can tell you that any argument that it is the best is objectively incorrect. Generals has tons of issues, including a resource leak that gradually drags down multiplayer games, a meta wherein high-level games of Generals end in about two to three minutes after selling your own Command Center, and in both it and Zero Hour, game balance that holds for exactly fifteen seconds before you find twenty places to break it entirely.

When people refer to TibWars as streamlined, it's not because the game is less complex than the original games. Fuck that. No, it's the game speed and design. The game is intended to be much faster and more dynamic, more interesting to watch, with more variables. It's very clear from a design perspective that the game is intended to foster a quick back-and-forth gameplay style that's interesting to watch, and is relatively simple in gameplay loop. The reason TibWars feels to you like Generals is that it inherited some of Generals' gameplay design flaws. In fact in some maps of the original, it's even possible to do the same "sell your base and early rush" tactic that hallmarked high-level Generals gameplay, which further highlights that flaw.

Interesting insight on the DOTA thing by the way. I do know one of the reasons I didn't like WC3 all that much was that it was ridiuclously micromanagement heavy even by Craft game standards. Every fucking unit required excessive micromanagement, to the point where the game was basically unplayable for many players unless they slowed the game down intentionally. It reminded me of Dune 2, and I'm willing to give the game coded in 1992 when no existing conventions existed in RTS games yet some slack.

ADDENDUM: You left out two of my favorite cheesy RA cutscenes. The one where Tanya kills some dude with a chair and the one where you cut to the Russian command room and they're talking casually how quick a village died to nerve gas with the same verve one would give to learning one's dog shit on the carpet.
 
In light of all the C&C spergery I see before me, I have to ask: how many of you frequented the Petroglyph forums when they were still around?

I have to disagree with the notion that Generals was a bad game. It was in fact excellent, and I say that having played Tiberium Dawn to death when it came out. I was not keen on the technological jump of Tiberium Sun storywise, but I still played it. Perhaps it's the fact that I didn't like their cheesy future setting may be why I enjoyed the cheesy modernistic setting of Generals a lot more.

My favourites were TD, RA2 and Generals overall. C&C 3 was okay, but had a convoluted plot that tried to explain how everything became closer to post-modern TD again before jumping back into TS in short order, which was disruptive and overall pointless. I also thought that some of the mechanics lifted from Generals were used incorrectly, and the gameplay felt very limiting overall.

RA2 was just flat-out fun and had all sorts of interesting features at the time, from Tesla Troopers charging up Tesla Coils, the Prism Towers powering up via proximity, Mirage Tanks, GIs all being deployable...there was a certain "oompf" about the game that made it thoroughly enjoyable to experience.
 
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Under the new EULA, Blizzard now owns whatever content that's created using the map making tools, right? This is terrible for content creators in Warcraft 3, but in theory, if a map somehow slips under Blizzard's radar, and happens to contain offensive content, Blizzard now owns that content.....

So, in theory, if a particularly enterprising shithead happened to say, create and upload a map in the shape of say, Winnie the Pooh's head, or say, an Auschwitz Tower Defense Game, and they managed to slip past the censors somehow (easier than it seems considering how easy it is to hide shit in events).

Seems like something oddly exploitable to me.
 
This is a really weird splintering of the C&C oldfag fanbase. I always assumed there was consensus on how the franchise played out.

At the time C&C3 was coming out, I remember Generals being held up as the "proper RTS" in the series, that C&C1 through RA2 were fun but could never be properly balanced or have a deep learning curve. I heard a lot of what @capitalBBustard relates, that Generals was supposedly superior to the mainline games because it was taking the genre more seriously.

I hated Generals too, it simply wasn't fun. The alleged depth felt like a series of gimmicks to me, and I couldn't articulate why until I played more RTS up through Starcraft 2. Long story short, Generals and SC require hyper efficiency in macro at the start of the game, and extreme micro near the end of the game. SC in particular is extremely unforgiving if you fall behind. Your game plan feels like it was on a set path, and you were just racing to see who could run down a set path the fastest.

But classic C&C was about the mid game skirmishes, with superweapons to end stalemates if it goes too long. You could go for raids on the enemy economy, or map control, or scout out your opponent's forces to counter them, build defenses to turtle or artillery to siege, or just spam a strong unit and rush. (That last one that was often too powerful and gave C&C balance a bad name.) Mid game C&C was almost always an interesting mash-up of different tactics being thrown at each other, while mid game Generals/SC was always the same, varying only by the timings you hit for tech milestones.

That didn't make Generals a bad game, but it really didn't feel like C&C. In fact all of the above tactics were available in SC/Generals, but they couldn't win you games; they were just diversions from the main macro and efficiency grind. They served as replay/esports highlights while you waited for the inevitable macro-fueled battle at the end.

Having said that, I really liked C&C3, even with the changed mechanics. The story was messy, and the factions were a bit sketchy, but the gameplay was still fun. It was the constant patching that really got to me, it was the first time it felt like the developers were actively trying to create and manage "The Meta" balance instead of just enabling gameplay. From one patch to the next, entire factions would disappear from being viable or have their identity watered down.

I'd mark RA3 as the downfall of the franchise. Forcing 1 refinery to 1 resource node killed an entire core aspect of C&C game progression; it formalized the macro rigidity you found in Starcraft. The ability trees and unit skills were a badly implemented way to shoehorn APM micro into prominence. And the damn balance patching continued to be bad.

C&C4 was like an experimental fanfic. You could glimpse some decent ideas for expanding RTS conventions, but nothing was well executed in that game, and its very existence served to discredit any faith you might have in the ideas or the team behind it.

And then C&C Tiberium Alliances never happened. I don't care what you remember or what evidence you produce to the contrary.

Back on topic: one of the few things I wished C&C had borrowed from WC3 was the Battle.net matchmaking experience. I remember the bad old days of GameSpy, and the days of direct modem dialing before that. So for me, the deep irony of WC3:Reforged is that it killed off the good version of Battle.net, as @Jaimas pointed out with that graphic.

It's times like this that the moral case for game piracy and physical medium rises into relevance again. It'll never go away so long as game companies keep screwing over their customers in such basic ways.
 
i played a bit of red alret and CNC in my younger years. still have the red alert 2 CD but i doubt it will run on a windows 10.
RA3.jpg


i want too go back how things used to be.
 
There isn't an overall consensus because C&C always had a ton of smaller communities and each player in those communities has different ideas of what they liked and didn't like about the games, and no one's really wrong there. While there's differences of opinion on what the best choices were and weren't, most can agree as a whole the series was good, whatever their favorites were. We can also collectively acknowledge that all of them have flaws, big and small.

Back on the main topic, one thing I found very surreal is that just this time last year, I tried getting WC3 to run on my rig. It didn't work, since the game apparently was never designed to run on anything that came out after Windows XP. Which is fucking ridiculous because it's fully 3D and has no reason to not just be forced to the right resolution with some user settings and elbow grease, but here we fucking are. Eventually I got the game to work, almost, but it kept crashing and I just said fuck it after the 20th attempt or so.

.....Meanwhile, Warcraft 2:BNE runs perfectly fine with zero fucking problems. Because that makes fucking sense.
 
All the series that political correctness retards have ruined is now starting to resemble the Vietnam War Memorial.

Blizzard now has Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo all in the shitter. It won't be long, the executives and middle managers will come for them soon.
 
Under the new EULA, Blizzard now owns whatever content that's created using the map making tools, right? This is terrible for content creators in Warcraft 3, but in theory, if a map somehow slips under Blizzard's radar, and happens to contain offensive content, Blizzard now owns that content.....

So, in theory, if a particularly enterprising shithead happened to say, create and upload a map in the shape of say, Winnie the Pooh's head, or say, an Auschwitz Tower Defense Game, and they managed to slip past the censors somehow (easier than it seems considering how easy it is to hide shit in events).

Seems like something oddly exploitable to me.
The ownership bit is in that questionable/grey area where it might not actually be legally binding, for one, but Blizzard is also, supposedly, actively moderating custom games hosted on the service likely to prevent that specific occurrence.
I'd wager it has more to do with preventing people from selling maps, scripts, other files but with them being butthurt that HotS is in the grave while LoL and DotA2 are flourishing it may also serve as a deterrent to innovators, however purposely it might be.
 
I think this is the first instance of a company literally coming for your old game and fucking with it. This is worse than what EA pulled with Darkspore and if it's not it certainly ranks up there.

You're going to need to unplug the internet to play games. What's to stop Bethesda for fucking with morrowind and removing all the problematic content? You're going to need to invest in an OG Xbox Copy of the GOTY edition. Even GOG isn't safe after what Gearbox did with the Duke Nukem collection.

I hope Ross puts up a video about this since he's pretty well versed in software rights.
 
i played a bit of red alret and CNC in my younger years. still have the red alert 2 CD but i doubt it will run on a windows 10.View attachment 1125013

i want too go back how things used to be.

I have the CDs and I have that image as a physical poster, packed in with one of the RA3 premium versions.

Can you imagine Blizzard or EA putting out cheesecake like that now? Women are required to be badass, no exceptions; standing around posing encourages the dreaded male gaze. The closest you'll get is something like the Battlefield 5 uberfrau doing a grimdark stare at something off-camera.

The women in that picture are either badass or experts at their job, but the series was still trying to be fun, so they were allowed to do sexy poses in their goofy live-action outfits. There's a heart and a character to it (and the old Warcraft series) that modern big studios seem increasingly unable to reproduce.

WC3:Reforged feels like no one involved cared about the character of the game they were touching up. They have a list of corporate requirements, they have a list of "forward looking upgrades", the had a "future proofing" EULA, and they were just doing their job to meet the manager's approval, not their fellow gamers' approval.
 
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