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 America's Army Deploy Client Mini-Review
Post by trog @ 09:00pm 10/10/08 | Comments
A new system for distribution of America's Army is now out. And trog doesn't like it. We've been mirroring a lot of America's Army stuff over the last few years (in fact it's one of our most popular downloads), and I've always been really impressed with the efficiency of the US Army in getting this thing out - they are always very organised at getting mirrors set up with the client before the release and making sure everyone is ready so that gamers don't have to deal with struggling to find a place to get this whopping multi-gig client.
 The new Deploy Client is clearly designed to try to make things easier, but I'm finding it a lot more painful. It's not a simple client like the Blizzard downloader - you can't just run an executable and be away, you have to install it first (which involves installing the .NET runtime, so if you don't have that the 9mb Deploy Client download suddenly doesn't seem so small and efficient), then run it, then click some things, and then finally wait for it to download. The client is peer-to-peer as far as moving the bits around goes, although it looks like it utilises dedicated seeds provided by certain partners. While this sort of seems like a good idea on the surface, the main reason to use p2p is when you don't have a good, solid, existing distribution network. Now, the US Army already had such a network - made up of many of the biggest gaming sites all over the planet, combining to make it almost utterly trivial for anyone to get the game. So this certainly seems like a step backwards - especially when I look at my download speed of a measly 190k/s and I think of all the times I've downloaded it from AusGamers, or Internode, or GameArena, or FilePlanet, or FileShack, or FileFront - and gotten significantly faster speeds, all at the simple click of a button directly from my web browser. Of course, the other problem that is caused by peer-to-peer distribution is that it sucks for people on limited download plans that are hoping their ISP can mirror the file. When you're downloading chunks from all over the Internet with a client like this, it's tough to manage your quota effectively. One thing that it will make easier is it effectively solves the problem of downloading large files. We get a lot of user requests about the best way to resume downloads - not that it's particularly hard, but most people aren't aware of the best way to do it and often need a bit of a hand. The Deploy Client pretty much stops this from being an issue. Overall, it'll be interesting to see what the user response is. We have contacted the America's Army team to find out if we can still mirror it the old fashioned way - we expect a response pretty soon as they're very switched on, so check back for updates. Update 13th October 2008: We've heard back from the America's Army team and they have informed us that there will not be a standalone installer that we can mirror. |
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