I’m a PC gamer to the core and I’ve never had a bad word to say about those that prefer console gaming. I’ve always found the us vs them dick waving (on BOTH sides) to be silly in the extreme. Please don’t tell me I have a proclivity towards anything.
Sorry but there is workable DRM. There’s plenty of DRM that doesn’t punish legitimate customers. What you’ll never have is DRM that stops the cracking crews. You’ll never have DRM that stops people from downloading from those groups. What you can have is DRM so punishing that you kill your own PC sales. The owner of Stardock has openly said he doesn’t worry about pirates because you shouldn’t count the sales of those that are never going to buy. That’s what DRM is about. Counting the sales you’ll never have as long as they keep counting they’ll keep making things worse and not better.
I don’t think PC gaming and console gaming has any more problems living together than a Wii gamer and a PS3 gamer and a X-Box gamer has. It’s just another platform. DRM will only make PC gaming just that much more inaccessible and intolerable to gamers. Driving it even further from the mainstream. Sure it may not be the cause of the ‘death’ of PC gaming but it is another nail in the coffin. A big unneeded one.
Well um…thanks for revealing the new world order? We already have that with Steam (which if I remember correctly they released the source code for so any developer can use it. I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong about that) Steam is insanely popular and aside from a few critics doesn’t have PC gamers fighting it. That hasn’t stopped insane DRM schemes.
If PC gaming is killed tomorrow console piracy will be the next big thing. The people pushing this issue won’t stop coming up with ridiculous numbers to justify intrusive policies their target will just move.
They tried that with Starcraft(N64) and Diablo(Playstation). If it was successful I’m sure they’d still be doing it.
And of course there’s the train wreck that was SC:Ghost.
Believe it or not Uncharted does look excellent. I haven’t played the second one since playing a shooter with a gamepad is about as much fun as having a tooth pulled. But the first one looks as good as any PC game I’ve played on my rather high end gaming rig with 1920x1200 resolution. 720 or higher matters little compared to a competent art team. And upscaling blurs the image in such a way as to eliminate the need for AA, while at the same time not being very noticeable(at least not at the resolutions we’re talking about) except on text. If you’re playing a PC game at very high resolutions chances are the textures are being upscaled anyway so all you are really getting is sharper lines at the edges of polygons and a UI that takes up less space(assuming it’s rendered in 2d as most, but not all, UIs are). It’s not like it makes a huge difference.
Quite. Steam is an example; it’s effectively DRM, but it not only is non-punitive, it actively encourages users away from piracy by offering significant (and almost unprecedented) convenience. The advantage is such that people I know who used to pirate everything now exclusively buy games from it. Similarly, people who used to pirate their entire music collections now happily pay subscriptions to Spotify because the ease of access surpasses anything previously available.
This is the most frustrating thing. It’s perfectly possible to add a layer of security in a way that doesn’t punish the paying user. It’s surely desirable to do so. And yet company after company comes out with technologies that actively impede the paying user, while inconveniencing the pirates not one whit. Regardless of one’s opinions on the whys and wherefores of piracy, that’s a fucking stupid policy.
I’m rather sure you don’t know what you are talking about. Upscaling a surface that is not anti-aliased will only make the situation worse. What was one or two pixel staircasing now becomes 3 or 4. Ugly. I’ve seen it on my friend’s big screen TV. Some xbox games look horribly aliased. It’s like I took a trip back to 1999.
Higher resolutions on the Pc almost always also come with higher resolution textures. Just compare games like Mass effect 2 or Dragon age. No comparison in terms of textures. They are much more detailed on the PC. not surprising since your average gaming Pc has 1 gig of video page buffer and the xbox has 256 MB.
Maybe Ubisoft was just throwing this horrid DRM out there so that when they implement something slightly less offensive people will thank them for it.
If the jaggies are getting worse when it’s being upscaled that just means the upscaling is being poorly done or it’s simply being increased way too much. Most upscaling uses a pixel averaging that creates a blurring effect not all that different than AA(nowhere near as good as AA, of course, but similar). But it doesn’t really work if you’re increasing by more than 35ish% or so.
Still “eliminate the need for AA” was a poor choice of words. “Somewhat lessen the need for AA” would be better.
True but usually not quite to the level that a really high res monitor at arms length would need. And some else wise good looking games have almost bizarrely low res textures. Or at least very uneven quality. The rocks in Fallout3, for example, had really low res textures.
True enough. The only place I’ve seen truly spectacular textures even at high resolutions lately is in a few PC only games and Dirt 2. I think the textures are excellent, though of course you’re never really super close to anything in that game.
Ah yes, but the point of that wasn’t copy protection at all.
Rather, it’s either a gladiatorial entertainment, or an underhanded attempt by a disgruntled rogue programmer to create and propagate the first true AI. Let the byzantine DRMs fight it out for survival, between themselves and the player who tries desperately to shut them down in order to, y’know, play his own fucking game. Whichever program evolves sentience first wins, takes over your machine, and through it, the Internet.
The missiles launch shortly thereafter. You have been warned.
I meant it in a technical sense. I mean - if they just ported the code to run the same game over on the PC, without even using the extra processing power to your advantage by beefing up the graphics, just having it run at a much higher resolution at a higher frame rate with high end post processing effects would make it look better, and hence, it can’t be “just as good” on the PS3.
You took my comment on that technical issue to give me an entire counter-argument that encompasses the whole argument on PC gaming vs consoles, which I wasn’t looking to engage in. And for that matter, I don’t think people want this hijack since we’ve done this before. If you want me to respond to the rest you said in this post, one of us could make a new thread to rehash the debate.
You are too focused on the technical numbers associated with “graphics”. Using your thought process here the PS3 looks better than the 360 because it has more power and more capable processors. This is not the case though as most games looks better on 360 than they do PS3.
I’m saying even just talking about the same game, it would look way better at 1920x1080 with 16x anisotropic filtering (especially the fancy new anisotropic filtering in dx11) and 8x MSAA (or higher even) and a higher frame rate. It would still have the same art, the same models, the same animation - there’d be no downside, it would just look flat out better.
As far as the 360 vs PS3, I’m under the impression that the Xbox has the better graphics processor - at least more flexible. The ATI gpu they use is sort of a pre-dx10 hardware era card that has 40 unified shaders (for comparison, new ATI cards have 1600… and running a lot faster) whereas the PS3 is solidly locked into DX9 hardware with no unified shaders. It might have slightly more pixel pushing power - I’m not sure, I’d have to look it up. The weird processor setup in the PS3 is essentially good for certain types of math problems but it’s complicated and not so great at ordinary gaming functions. So as far as I know, the 360 looking better is not inconsistent with the hardware they both have.
When I was in Malaysia, I went looking for PC games to buy because- compared to Australia- almost everything is cheaper in Malaysia. I found maybe four shops selling “legitimate” PC games in Kuala Lumpur, and the average price of a new game was about RM150 (AUD$50). There were heaps of guys at the markets flogging pirated games for RM15 (AUD$5) but I was advised to (and took the advice to) avoid them because of the high likelihood they A) wouldn’t work and B) might have viruses or other problems.
But the fact remains that even in Malaysia, legitimate PC games were expensive by local standards but HALF what they cost here in Australia. Even, so pirated copies were readily available and being sold at a price the locals could afford (the average wage in Malaysia not being very high).
It got worse when I got to Singapore, though- a legitimate copy of Bioshock 2 from a legitimate retailer was SDG$57 tax-free (AUD$45 or so). Singapore’s population is c.5 million or so, Malaysia’s is 27 million or so.
Now, given that almost no-one in Malaysia is buying legitimate PC games (There were heaps of console games stores about), and a Singaporean dollar is worth a bit less than an Australian one but it’s still a solid currency, there’s no reason for a new game like Bioshock 2 to cost AUD$90+ when the same game is available in Singapore for quite literally half the price.
Or, to put it another way, if PC games didn’t cost so much, fewer people would pirate them. I’m not for a moment defending or excusing piracy, but for a lot of people the high cost of games combined with the fact that DRM is getting more an more invasive is going to cause people to just drift away from gaming in general, or towards consoles.
As soon as someone works out how to have a console with a useful, full-function keyboard and mouse and still have great graphics without the DRM hassles of PC games, then gaming on the PC as we know it will be truly doomed IMHO.
That would be a Mac? Seriously. You are describing what is essentially a PC, except that it would be completely locked down. As in, you would need permission from the manufacturer for any and every piece of software that lived there. And hardware upgrades if any will likely cost astronomical amounts (just look at the cost per Gig of a hard drive on the xbox compared to one for a PC, it’s like 10x the cost).
I weep for humanity if that really is something people would actually WANT. A totally locked down platform. It’s like being happy at the prospect of a TV that can only show one channel, and won’t let you watch a DVD unless it’s flagged to be ok by some corporate jack ass in some cubicle somewhere.
I’m kinda missing your point with this post. Console games are routinely MORE expensive than PC games. The cost of the games are hardly causing people to pick consoles over PC’s.
Sure an argument can be made for the hassle and the cost of hardware upgrades but PC game prices are one clear advantage over console games. Also I’m sure those same shady shops also sell pirated console games as well.
Console games are more expensive but they can still be traded in (most games stores here will trade in console games- there’s only one place that trades PC games as well and their “Used PC Games” section is tiny for reasons that have been outlined pretty well in the thread).
Also, console games are region-encoded. You can’t buy a copy of Assassin’s Creed 2 for the Xbox 360 in Singapore and run it on an Xbox 360 in Australia.
You can buy a copy of Bioshock 2 for PC in Singapore and run it on a PC in Australia, though.
And you’re right, I’m sure the dodgy shops were also selling pirated console games, but I didn’t see any. What I did see was a lot of shops dedicated exclusively to console games, selling legitimate stuff, and four shops in KL (population about 2 million) selling legitimate PC games, and of those four, only two had a respectable selection, and even then the selection was laughable compared to any Game or Electronics Boutique store in Australia or the US.
I asked some of the people I was helping out in Malaysia where the best place to get legitimate PC games was and their answer was the shops I’d already found, plus another one I’d need a car to get to, or “Singapore”.
And even if console games are expensive (and they are, no arguments) that still doesn’t change the fact that games on all platforms are incredibly expensive, and one of the reasons people pirate anything (Games, DVDs, wacthes. designer clothing & accessories) is because the original is just too expensive for most people to afford.
I’m not sure about the very latest batch of games but my brother (a hardcore Xbox 360 gamer) has purchased legitimate Xbox 360 games overseas before and been unable to run them on his Xbox 360 here.
PSPs died here years ago and the DS here is aimed at little kids or housewives who want to play Sudoku, so I don’t know anyone who owns one that plays enough games on it to find out if they are region encoded or not.
Heaven forbid someone might want to install a game on a PC in a location without internet access. Or install it on a laptop then play it on the go, away from the WIFI and whatnot.
Assassin’s Creed 2 has been cracked and is available for download on the internet six days before their official release date. But hey, as long as you don’t see a box of it on the used games bin at gamestop the DRM is doing its job.
