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Australian Saint's Row IV players can't co-op with rest of the world

No, its a clear statement of what consumers are actually getting when they buy the product. Volition should be commended for their openess.

Meanwhile Ubisoft will still double the price of the slightly cut down season pass and just smile.
 

Skyzard

Banned
Hey guys, have some alien drugs, they get you high and are great but they're from out of this world.

Huge difference to a classification board I'm sure.
 

Tazo

Member
So do I buy the Australian copy and play online with lower latency, or buy the uncensored version and have a worse online experience due to lag?

Of course I'll import it.
 

Storm360

Member
AU 360 users, since your console is PAL, you can grab a 360 copy from the UK and play it fine


PS3, any version is fine
 
So what was our R18+ rating for then?

It undermines everything we did to acheive that rating!

So now they approve it and it's only MA15+? This makes no sense to me!
 

Pinbot

Banned
I'm still importing.

Don't trust the Aussie copy to be only missing one mission. The last of us and Spartacus legends have been de-gored without it ever being brought to the AU public's attention.
 

Denzar

Member
The Australian ratings board refuses that SR IV get's an 18+ rating. Volition cuts a side missions and a Seaon Pass weapon and is necessitated to limit co-op to Australia only. SR IV receives a 15+ rating (WTF btw).

In the meantime GTA V waltzes past the ratings board with an 18+ rating.
 

Dead Man

Member
So what was our R18+ rating for then?

It undermines everything we did to acheive that rating!

So now they approve it and it's only MA15+? This makes no sense to me!

We weren't paying attention when they just moved everything to R18 and didn't actually change the things that would result in an RC. They were fuckers, basically.
 

Card Boy

Banned
The Australian ratings board refuses that SR IV get's an 18+ rating. Volition cuts a side missions and a Seaon Pass weapon and is necessitated to limit co-op to Australia only. SR IV receives a 15+ rating (WTF btw).

In the meantime GTA V waltzes past the ratings board with an18+ rating.

Ratings are just for show, half of it involves how much pubs are willing to bribe the board.
 

Adnor

Banned
And the mods will most likely not work in the australian version, as the mods of SR2 and 3 didn't work in the censored versions because the modders didn't have how to test them.
So if you are from Australia and want to get the PC version, import it or ask someone else to buy it for you.
 
People know taking drugs is bad, just as they know shooting people is bad.
I dont know why the classification board has to "protect" us from drug related themes, when only a complete moron could be encouraged to take them, based on what they saw in a video game.
As an Australian adult, the whole thing is patronizing and embarrassing.
I feel bad for Volition too, as this will likely cost them some sales.

Edit: So NZ will have the proper version, right?
 

Chev

Member
They already cut it...a single marker to say this dood is australian for co-op purposes is going to break the game and take weeks of programming?

Yup. The way multiplayer works, on a technical level, is by synchronizing the games of all the players. Said synchronization works by having a common start state on all player machines and then sharing all the changes that happen over time. most of the general implementation problems for multiplayer come from how to best transmit and enforce the changes for different players but the base principle is always that.

That "common start state" is actually a dreadfully tricky thing to enforce as it covers code and content, and even the way computations will be done (thus why cross-platform multiplayer is uncommon, different platforms will have slight differences in calculations unless special and usually esoteric measures are taken). For the games to be synchronized the best way is to have all those be the same for each player.

But in the case of our aussie friends that initial state is different. The content has been changed, possibly the code. it's not a single marker, as that wouldn't fly with the boards, all the content had to be removed from the disk and the game made to work without it. So they can't be synchronized unless you completely overhaul the core principle of said synchronization, and even then that'll raise gameplay questions (should the non-australian players be forbidden access to the cut weapons so australians can play? In all games or only the ones with players from down under? Won't that make them avoid those players because their mere presence locks out features?).

All those things can be solved, to be sure, but indeed it'd take weeks or months and there's most certainly no budget planned for it.
 

Skyzard

Banned
I appreciate the clarification but about this:

all the content had to be removed from the disk and the game made to work without it. So they can't be synchronized unless you completely overhaul the core principle of said synchronization,

It's just a side-mission? It's not like a road is missing. It's either there or it isn't. Unless they've named their levels in a way that refers to previous levels...which seems insane, what would be missing in the synch for all other plays during routine play?

One person is going to try to start the mission, the game knows one of the players can't plays it since they spot they're using the aussie version and it says no and it prevents de-synching. Prompts for the sidemission can also be disabled.
 
As an Australian, I don't actually care, this is fantastic.

Websites such as OzGamerParty started because we hated playing on foreign servers, the website is now known as progames.com.au for anyone who cares. It basically started as a way to get people together from Australia, we would all delete the current COD4 patch because Infinity Ward did the shittest job possible getting Australians into a lag free matches.

The situation always seems to be, 31 AU players not lagging, 1 US player joins, and the server switches host to the US. Everyone lags, the US player tops the score board because of a 150-300 ping advantage.

You probably won't here many AU players complaining about this that actually care about match performance. If you want to play with a shitty connection, just buy it from playasia for less. Not really a big deal if you ask me, it's win win.
 

Card Boy

Banned
As an Australian, I don't actually care, this is fantastic.

Websites such as OzGamerParty started because we hated playing on foreign servers, the website is now known as progames.com.au for anyone who cares. It basically started as a way to get people together from Australia, we would all delete the current COD4 patch because Infinity Ward did the shittest job possible getting Australians into a lag free matches.

The situation always seems to be, 31 AU players not lagging, 1 US player joins, and the server switches host to the US. Everyone lags, the US player tops the score board because of a 150-300 ping advantage.

You probably won't here many AU players complaining about this that actually care about match performance. If you want to play with a shitty connection, just buy it from playasia for less. Not really a big deal if you ask me, it's win win.

This post about SR4?
 

Card Boy

Banned
Guess i missed the other posts...

Are Aussies under a Dictatorship? It's almost like North-Koreas Jucke ideology, "no help from outside".

1561989-884279_time_to_stop_posting_super.jpg
 
I know I can just import a UK copy, to play with my international friends, but then that leaves me unable to play with other Australian friends that just pick up a copy locally.

This just straight up sucks.

I really don't understand our classification board either. It is the same people that classify both movies and video games, right?
So, how is a movie like Limitless, where illegal drugs are shown to have very positive effects, allowed but this (something that is probably only used once) isn't?
 

Turfster

Member
I really don't understand our classification board either. It is the same people that classify both movies and video games, right?
So, how is a movie like Limitless, where illegal drugs are shown to have very positive effects, allowed but this (something that is probably only used once) isn't?

I'll bet it's because in a movie, you're not the character! or something lame like that.

It's just a side-mission? It's not like a road is missing. It's either there or it isn't. Unless they've named their levels in a way that refers to previous levels...which seems insane, what would be missing in the synch for all other plays during routine play?

One person is going to try to start the mission, the game knows one of the players can't plays it since they spot they're using the aussie version and it says no and it prevents de-synching. Prompts for the sidemission can also be disabled.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Saint's Row doesn't have levels. (apart from one or two exceptions, but I'm going to bet this wasn't one) It's all one big open world state, so... Syncing networked stuff is hard enough when everyone is actually using the same dataset, and "just adding a flag" is a lot harder than you seem to think it is.
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
really don't understand our classification board either. It is the same people that classify both movies and video games, right?
So, how is a movie like Limitless, where illegal drugs are shown to have very positive effects, allowed but this (something that is probably only used once) isn't?

Because of the dated assumption that interactive media is a greater influence than passive media. Never mind the fact that if you're purchasing an R18+ game, you're more than likely to be capable of independent and rational thought...
 
Hopefully Aussies realize that importing/getting a friend to gift them an international version on Steam is the better choice.
 

Zukuu

Banned
Isn't that due to delay next to impossible anyway?

Sucks for local aussies that get a different version tho.
 

Chev

Member
I appreciate the clarification but about this:



It's just a side-mission? It's not like a road is missing. It's either there or it isn't. Unless they've named their levels in a way that refers to previous levels...which seems insane, what would be missing in the synch for all other plays during routine play?

One person is going to try to start the mission, the game knows one of the players can't plays it since they spot they're using the aussie version and it says no and it prevents de-synching. Prompts for the sidemission can also be disabled.
You're instinctively assuming several things that shouldn't be assumed. Even more amusing, a lot of the problems will come from programmers assuming things that were perfectly fine to assume as long as they decided no different versions would play together, and that's the most common way to do things in videogames because it works.

First, that just taking away that chunk has no repercussions for other bits. That entirely depends on their scripting and how their data is organized. To take an extreme example, each object could be referred in-game by an ID based on their position in a table of contents. Remove one chapter of the table, and all the objects after that have new IDs and so IDs are different for identical objects across both versions. Poof, all those won't synchronize. That may be stupid but it's easy, works and is not a problem as long as everyone plays on the same version. You'll easily find tons of things that were built on similar assumptions for the sake of simplicity.

Second, detecting each version used in a multiplayer game and merging the differences isn't something that's usually done in game engines, simply because it's several orders of magnitude more complex than just forcing all players to play on the same version. Playing on the same version requires a single check. Conciliating differences requires individually tagging all the content that would be different, overhauling all the loading code to check for such tags, and playtesting all the possible combinations to check nothing's being broken. If they hadn't planned from it, they aren't gonna add it now.
 

Skyzard

Banned
You're instinctively assuming several things that shouldn't be assumed. Even more amusing, a lot of the problems will come from programmers assuming things that were perfectly fine to assume as long as they decided no different versions would play together, and that's the most common way to do things in videogames because it works.

First, that just taking away that chunk has no repercussions for other bits. That entirely depends on their scripting and how their data is organized. To take an extreme example, each object could be referred in-game by an ID based on their position in a table of contents. Remove one chapter of the table, and all the objects after that have new IDs and so IDs are different for identical objects across both versions. Poof, all those won't synchronize. That may be stupid but it's easy, works and is not a problem as long as everyone plays on the same version. You'll easily find tons of things that were built on similar assumptions for the sake of simplicity.


Second, detecting each version used in a multiplayer game and merging the differences isn't something that's usually done in game engines, simply because it's several orders of magnitude more complex than just forcing all players to play on the same version. Playing on the same version requires a single check. Conciliating differences requires individually tagging all the content that would be different, overhauling all the loading code to check for such tags, and playtesting all the possible combinations to check nothing's being broken. If they hadn't planned from it, they aren't gonna add it now.

That's what I was thinking, I meant sidemission sequences named in that way (not levels). That would be really bad. I heard that's how they planned zelda OoT bugs for speedruns.

I didn't think about the missing game objects being identified like that, fair enough. Thanks again.

And if they don't know about whether or not they can include the weapons it's a pain as well.


But the announcement was still pretty inflammatory.
 

BigDug13

Member
We can't allow people to think there are any positives in using drugs, got it? Ok, so I'll see you at the pub later?
 
As mentioned earlier, Fallout 3 got past this by using real drugs, then renaming them as fictional drugs after getting RCed. I have no idea how the fuck fictional alien drugs get you RCed. Should have started off with heroin so they could bargain down.

Regardless, if Australia doesn't want my money someone else can have it. Will paypal overseas GAFers for the uncut Steam version.
 

TheDanger

Banned
I don't get why anyone is really upset about this, I mean if importing is cheaper anyway why would anyone buy any Australian version of any game? Importing is cheaper in my country (Austria) too, but as imports hardly come with a German voice track it's not an option for a lot of people. Australians don't have that problem so why would anyone buy Australian versions?
 

Skyzard

Banned
I don't get why anyone is really upset about this, I mean if importing is cheaper anyway why would anyone buy any Australian version of any game? Importing is cheaper in my country (Austria) too, but as imports hardly come with a German voice track it's not an option for a lot of people. Australians don't have that problem so why would anyone buy Australian versions?

To play with other Australians who didn't import? Like their casual buddies.
 
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