Is PC gaming on the way out?

[SenorBeef]

@Dave_Hartwick

I suppose that you’re aware that your opinion is completely out of whack with both the critical and user reception of Skyrim.

How in the world is this relevant? Do you expect every review from Xbox Magazine to start with “well, clearly this game isn’t what it could be if instead of developing it for 9 year old gaming machines we took advantage of technology we’ve had today…”? Of course not, they’re just going to compare it to other games that are coming out, and those are limited in the same way.

Obviously, I can’t really say your opinion is wrong, but I think it is wrong-headed. You seem to be so intent on blaming consoles for some undefined crime against gaming that you level unwarranted accusations against a good game, simply for the crime of being cross-platform.

If a game is developed for the lowest common denominator among multiple platforms, we get the worst possible implementation of that game.

You also misstated Moore’s Law. What do you mean by “processing power”? Speed? If so, no. PC speeds don’t double every other year.

Moore’s law is about transistor count, and if you want to get specific about it, doesn’t directly touch on “speed” - in fact, available processing power can increase more than increased transistor count because of efficiencies gained in instructions per clock or instructions per transistor.

It sounds like you’re criticizing me for misusing Moore’s law, and then assuming that because clock speeds don’t double every 2 years it’s bunk, which is a much greater error than you’re even implying I’ve made.

Do you really want to go down this path, getting specific about technical advancements? Because it isn’t only transistor count. The PS3 uses a geforce 7800 with half the raster units as the actual 7800 card. Do you have any idea how incredibly out of date that is? That’s before the transition to unified shader architecture. We’ve had, depending on how you want to count some of the half-generations, 4 to 5 generations of graphics cards since then.

It was the worst possible time to choose your hardware too, because we were on the verge of a major revolution in hardware design and gaming APIs. Which ended up happening in 2006-2007 - at least, the revolution happened on the hardware side, and the developer API side, but couldn’t actually happen on the gaming side because for the next fucking decade games would have to be developed for pre-revolution console bullshit. Games could be cheaper/easier to produce for the same quality, and faster/more detailed at the same time, except we got stuck in time at the worst possible time to choose to design a console.

Finally, in 2014, we’ll have a new generation of consoles and games that can be revolutionary, that can use this technology to change the face of game development and gaming - except this revolution, and all the great games it could’ve spawned, and all the lower budget games that would’ve become viable, and all the high budget games that could’ve been more amazing never came to be, even though we’ve had the technology sitting there since 2007. 7+ years of gaming limbo instead of revolution.

And a PC from 8 years ago would be called a relic, or at least Kinthalis would say so. The 360 is not “out of date”-- it is still fully supported by the manufacturer, games still are released. Can it do all the same things as a PC? No. Was it ever supposed to be? No.

So wait, is the 8 year old PC - which, if it’s a good gaming machine, was already better than an xbox to start with - is still better than an xbox. Why is the 8 year old gaming machine, that’s still better than the xbox 360, which can still play all the games the xbox 360 can play a relic, and the xbox 360 is not?

It’s only a “relic” relative to what a modern PC can do - and somehow you think this supports your argument when it actually puts the nail in the coffin against you. Yes, an 8 year old PC would be a relic compared to a modern PC, but if the 8 year old PC was better than the xbox, it’s still better than the xbox, because the xbox is also a relic compared to a modern PC - by an even bigger margin. Your argument here seems to be essentially “wow your 8 year old PC is as shitty as my xbox, and that’s really shitty, therefore xbox awesome!”

See, this is another instance of your interesting blindness. I was contrasting your “consoles ruin everything” line with Alessan’s PC Pangloss act. You said you only came in to the thread to set some nonsense straight but failed to notice the pro-PC nonsense. And, unfortunately, you added nonsense of your own.

There has been no other nonsense as ridiculous as Justin Bailey’s that I felt compelled to respond to. This gotcha ya line of argument is retarded.

A prime piece of nonsense is that we live in a particularly bad time for gaming. I’ve got news for you: There have always been a lot of really shitty games. I’m talking complete crap. Sometimes they didn’t even work at all. I don’t have a lot of nostalgia for the early days of video games. It’s about a million times better now, what with the moving pictures and all.

Sure, there’ve always been crap games. I suspect you’ve never been a PC gamer - I mean more than the occasional game of civ 4 or whatever - because you don’t understand what it is to be amazed in technology and gaming. Back in the golden days of PC gaming, the technology development was amazingly fast. Every few months, we’d see a game that pushed the boundaries on what gaming had been, and showed us something new. We’d get a bigger world, or more realistic physics, or more detailed characters, or amazing new effects - all the time. There’d be several times a year where a game would come out that would simply wow you because you’d never seen anything like that before. You were watching technology evolve right before your eyes. Games advanced more in any given 18 month period between, oh, 1985 and 2004, than they will advance from 2004 to 2014.

And then we will have a brief revolution - as the next generation of consoles come out, and we can finally actually use the technology that’s developed in the last decade, the stuff we could’ve and should’ve been using for the last decade. But then we get into the same problem - 2022 rolls around, and we’re still playing outdated 2014 technology games until the next xbox comes out.

And I’m wondering how you could possibly have such a misguided opinion, and it occurs to me: genre. It all comes down to genre. You can’t see that consoles completely ruled the sports genre for years because you didn’t care about sports games or you weren’t around to see it. You talk about a time when PCs were dominant, but they were never dominant in any wide measure; console titles have been the better sellers right through the decades.

But there have been niches where PC titles were dominant, but aren’t anymore, right? And it came to me, especially seeing your examples of Counterstrike and Red Orchestra. You’re talking about FPS games. At one time, the PC really was the dominant platform for that genre, just as it always was, and still is, for 4X strategy and RTS. So if we restrict your comments to that one genre, your opinions are less nonsensical. Maybe consoles really have led to a dumbing down and crippling of that genre, and maybe the majority of FPS games are stupid crossplatform shit made for adolescents. There are plenty of good games in other genres, though. You just don’t see them.

FPS games have suffered particularly, yes. FPS games have traditionally been cutting edge moreso than other games. I guess it’s because they’re all fundamentally so similar compared to other types of games that you need to distinguish yourself by making your world more beautiful, your physics more realistic and interesting, etc. But apparently now being all fundamentally similar is actually a plus - since the call of duty games, all almost the exact same shit, sell a billion copies ever year.

That’s actually a pretty good example. In the same amount of time we went from Duke Nukem 3d to Crysis, we’re going to go from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare to… Call of Duty 10: Modern Warfare 4. The difference between Duke Nukem 3D and Crysis is mind boggling - the difference between Call of Duty 4 and Call of Duty 10 will be hard to even notice.

So yeah, even ignoring the absurd control issues (which does hurt pc gaming, even if you play with a kb/m, because levels are designed differently when developers know you’re going to be awkwardly fumbling at thumbsticks with all the grace of a walrus playing the piano), the switch from the PC fps development golden age to console development stagnation is a particularly good example of why gaming is so shitty.

I think I first noticed mods back in Civ II days, and maybe that’s where I got my bad opinion of them. The ones I checked out were junk. Even with a modern game like Torchlight 2 most of the early mods are just cheats, IMO. Potions that let you redo your specs and shared stashes full of godly loot, stuff like that. Using that sort of mod just kinda… dumbs down and cripples the game, don’t you think?

Mods are bad, because someone can choose to use a mod that makes the game easier? This argument is too dumb to even address. In any case, torchlight 2 just came out last week - the first batch of mods are going to be very basic stuff like cheats or unlocking respecs and stuff like that. Once modders have had some time, there will be level-generation mods, or mods that add new enemies or abilities or all sorts of shit.

Anyway, I’m willing to take your word on it that the capacity to mod PC games is less common now, although I suspect that again you’re really just talking about one genre. Seems to me that that means that customers don’t care that much about mods. I went and had a closer look at the Game Room D3 gripes thread, by the way. Four pages of complaints and not one mention of the lack of mods. Even the whiners don’t care.

Not all games have mods, and that’s fine. The ones that do are more useful, and - I think this is a key point that you’ve probably had no experience with - in addition to enhancing games with tweaks, mods have also been used to create free games (free to anyone who owns the base game that is) that can be essentially completely new games. Counterstrike is the most played game of all time (there’ve been 50,000+ people playing that game 24/7/365 for over a decade, more if you include the different versions) and yet it wouldn’t even have come to be in today’s market. It was a free mod by some hobbyist developers.

So you’re saying it’s the PC manufacturer’s fault for not educating the market?

What PC manufacturer? Who is it that’s supposed to be doing education? Is HP or Compaq or toshiba supposed to come out with commercials for the general superiority of PC gaming? Even though most gamers build their own systems from various brands of parts anyway?

Or maybe-- just maybe-- some games actually worked better hooked up to a TV in the living room where you could play with your friends? And they needed a way to control them, so over time, controllers were developed to play them? Really nice controllers, too, incidentally. The Xbox’s controller is a lot better than the early ones I remember. Even the N64 controller is pretty bad in comparison.

Consoles do local multiplayer pretty well, that’s pretty much their only clear cut upside. (I’d say “ease of use” is the other main upside they have, except I think it has quite a lot of downsides - the way they enforce having the same experience makes it easier to get into, but you don’t get the benefits from having more control over your gaming experience - so to me it’s actually a net downside)

But every single time anyone has ever talked about this subject, they’ve said “consoles are better for sports games, because controllers are better than a keyboard!” - I’ve heard this dozens of times. Perception becomes reality - if no one is bothering to play these games on PC, they don’t get sold. They used to make Madden on PC up until 2008, but no one ever bought them because lol why would you play madden with a keyboard!!!

It’s strange too because you could say the same thing about racing games, and yet racing games are all over PC - diverse, widespread, all sorts of games and all sorts of controllers.

Well, to answer my own question, based on what I’ve been able to find, no, there aren’t any motion control boxing games for the PC. In fact, as far as I can tell, fans of boxing games are better served by consoles, just going by titles available and the fact that PC boxing titles tend to be ports. That’s always been the case.

And you know what? If consoles specialized in shit like motion control boxing games, I would be pro-console. If they focused on the sorts of games that actually work better on consoles - great. Fantastic. I’m not one of those assholes who wants things they don’t like not to exist - I just want them to stop ruining my experience. I’ve actually made it clear in pretty much all of these threads that I’m not anti-Wii at all. I don’t care about the Wii, it exists in a different world. It has its own hardware, its own games. It doesn’t hurt me. I even play it from time to time when I’m at my friends’. It’s not trying to be a pale imitation of a PC like the xbox 360/ps3 are, and the games I want to play aren’t ruined by being cross platform with it.

Blindness again, or at least spotty reading. I said I prefer PC gaming right off the top. My main argument is that consoles may be the better choice, depending on factors like genre, budget, and playing preference.

Sure, if you’re helpless and shit yourself at the thought of doing something so complex as operating a PC, consoles are great. If you’ve decided that you won’t actually own a PC for any purpose, great.

Again, I actually don’t give a shit about people who play consoles. I only give a shit about games that are ruined by being co-developed for consoles. No one gave a shit that you had an SNES or playstation or dreamcast or whatever, because we weren’t being harmed by it. But then console manufacturers realized how good the technology in PCs are, and just decided that they’d become shitty little PCs. I don’t think console players at all appreciate exactly what their console is - the PS3 has a whacky processor (that no one likes, which has shown no actual real world benefit), but otherwise those machines are just 2004 era PCs. They aren’t even particularly good 2004 era PCs - their 512mb combined system/video ram would’ve been a joke even then. In this very post, you mocked the idea of an 8 year old PC being a relic, but that’s what you’re playing on.

Consoles used to do their own thing - create their own hardware, their own graphics libraries, their own games - and that was great. Then they decided just to ape PC gaming, except to rob it of all that makes it good in the process. That’s the issue here. This isn’t some bullshit pepsi vs coke, ford vs chevy or whatever stupid shit that people get worked up over to try to prove their side is better. I don’t give a shit if your side is good or bad or even if it exists - I only care in so far as it hurts my hobby. And it does. We’re in a dark age of gaming and it’s the new normal. Instead of an era of amazing new technologies, we’ve deliberately been stagnant. It’s a complete waste.

[John_DiFool]

@SenorBeef

Sure, there’ve always been crap games. I suspect you’ve never been a PC gamer - I mean more than the occasional game of civ 4 or whatever - because you don’t understand what it is to be amazed in technology and gaming. Back in the golden days of PC gaming, the technology development was amazingly fast. Every few months, we’d see a game that pushed the boundaries on what gaming had been, and showed us something new. We’d get a bigger world, or more realistic physics, or more detailed characters, or amazing new effects - all the time. There’d be several times a year where a game would come out that would simply wow you because you’d never seen anything like that before. You were watching technology evolve right before your eyes. Games advanced more in any given 18 month period between, oh, 1985 and 2004, than they will advance from 2004 to 2014.

I’ve started typing my point of view on this several times since this thread started, only to give up and cancel it just out of sheer ennui and pointlessness. But yes, to this long-term and admittedly-jaded PC gamer it sure does seem like we’ve been stuck in a rut for quite awhile now. I don’t know if it is because of SenorBeef’s main thesis here, or if devs and publishers are simply far less ambitious than they were before, or what, but I hardly ever get my socks knocked off by a new game or its trailer or a preview of it somewhere. I’m primarily a “gameplay” gamer, tho astounding amounts of chrome, in service of solid gameplay, can certainly get my attention. Very little has of late, however.

Exhibit A would be the “World of” series of MMO tactical skirmishers-World of Tanks, Planes, and soon Warships. You are simply dropped into a canned tactical situation and kill everything you see for 10-20 minutes, at which point that round ends, you have some time to upgrade your vehicle, and then you go at it again. Wowee. A truly ambitious and creative design team could really do a lot more with that core concept, but the sheer lack of vision here astounds me; 15 minute deathmatches from now to the end of eternity. It’s crap like that (and some other, more personal reasons yes) why I haven’t bought a new game in like almost a year.

[Airk]

From a technological standpoint, PC gaming finally realized that sinking huge amounts of money into mindblowing graphics just restricted people from being able to play your game on anything but the shiniest new hardware. It’s to the advantage of the creators to make a game that runs on a lot of stuff, and looks good on it, rather than a game that looks AMAAAAAZING on super high end stuff and bluh on everything else. Also, lets be honest, we’re never going to see a technological leap on the scale of say, VGA graphics again.

From a gameplay/innovation/ideas standpoint, well, games cost a LOT more to make than they used to, which tends to drive away people’s willingness to risk on new ideas.

Hopefully if the technology stagnates for a few more years, devs will have some time to work out how to bring costs down and start being a little more daring again.

Mercifully, in the meantime, crowdfunding and indie titles are here to provide more “niche” experiences with more innovative ideas, if, generally, less wow-inducing visuals.

I don’t really think consoles are “holding the PC back” from anything other than shinier graphics, which, frankly, I don’t give a damn about, so cross-platform development doesn’t bother me from that standpoint. It bothers me from the standpoint that now console developers seem to be chasing the next Call of Warfare Modern Duty 6 instead of making the sorts of games that originally interested me in console gaming, but that’s market convergence, and if anything, I blame the PC for ruining console games, not the other way 'round.

[FoieGrasIsEvil]

@John_DiFool

I’ve started typing my point of view on this several times since this thread started, only to give up and cancel it just out of sheer ennui and pointlessness. But yes, to this long-term and admittedly-jaded PC gamer it sure does seem like we’ve been stuck in a rut for quite awhile now. I don’t know if it is because of SenorBeef’s main thesis here, or if devs and publishers are simply far less ambitious than they were before, or what, but I hardly ever get my socks knocked off by a new game or its trailer or a preview of it somewhere. I’m primarily a “gameplay” gamer, tho astounding amounts of chrome, in service of solid gameplay, can certainly get my attention. Very little has of late, however.

Exhibit A would be the “World of” series of MMO tactical skirmishers-World of Tanks, Planes, and soon Warships. You are simply dropped into a canned tactical situation and kill everything you see for 10-20 minutes, at which point that round ends, you have some time to upgrade your vehicle, and then you go at it again. Wowee. A truly ambitious and creative design team could really do a lot more with that core concept, but the sheer lack of vision here astounds me; 15 minute deathmatches from now to the end of eternity. It’s crap like that (and some other, more personal reasons yes) why I haven’t bought a new game in like almost a year.

Skyrim?

[Jophiel]

@Airk

From a technological standpoint, PC gaming finally realized that sinking huge amounts of money into mindblowing graphics just restricted people from being able to play your game on anything but the shiniest new hardware.

I don’t think it’s just graphics (and John DiFool mentions not being impressed with “chrome”). I’m using a GeForce 9800 GTX+ which came out in early 2008. It still plays modern stuff and looks better than the PS3 on the same game. When I bought it in 2009, I spent all of $119 on it. The thing about “mindblowing graphics” is that (A) You can scale them down to lower specs and (B) it doesn’t take much to blow away today’s console graphics.

@FoieGrasIsEvil

Skyrim?

I wouldn’t call Skyrim especially innovative. It’s a prettier Oblivion and a fantasy world Fallout 3. Nice enough game but it didn’t feel groundbreaking to me.

[Airk]

@Jophiel

I don’t think it’s just graphics (and John DiFool mentions not being impressed with “chrome”). I’m using a GeForce 9800 GTX+ which came out in early 2008. It still plays modern stuff and looks better than the PS3 on the same game. When I bought it in 2009, I spent all of $119 on it. The thing about “mindblowing graphics” is that (A) You can scale them down to lower specs and (B) it doesn’t take much to blow away today’s console graphics.

If you don’t think it’s “just graphics” then what do you think “it” is? I confess, I’m not really clear what you’re trying to say here.

I maintain that for a lot of PC games, investment in additional graphic oomph is a waste of money. Lots of people won’t be able to see it. Lots of people who do see it won’t really care. Nobody’s mind is going to be blown regardless.

So why should they spend the extra cash on it? Game developers need to be leaner about these sorts of things so that we can get out of this “This next game needs to sell like Call of Duty or we’re going to go bankrupt” mess that the industry has inflicted on itself with high dev costs.

[SenorBeef]

“It” is a lot of stuff. World size, AI complexity, accuracy of physics simulations, flexibility to have more objects/characters/etc. on screen - that’s not just a graphics issue but very much can affect gameplay. In general, the amount of stuff and the level of detail of stuff you can have in your world. How much in the world is interactable or modelled physically.

There are hundreds of things you can do with more graphics power, more ram, more cpu power than just making everything shinier or more detailed. But for that matter, I think everyone who says “I value gameplay over graphics” is an elitist hipster prick anyway. As if there’s a slider bar where if you slide it towards the graphics side, you’re taking it away from the gameplay side. Making things look more real makes the world more interesting, and the experience more immersive. Having fewer limitations on what you can show gives artists creative freedom to realize their dream.

I’m tired of people who like to take the snobbish position that if you can appreciate the fact that your racing game has super realistic lighting and particles and really makes you feel like you’re in the moment, then you must be some uncultured plebian who can’t appreciate the finer things in life because you’re just chasing after shiny things. Fuck that whole attitude. Not only can good gameplay accompany beautiful graphics, vast and detailed worlds, realistic physics, etc. but the product as a whole is better when the technical side is better.

Edit: Not talking about anyone in particular, or the last post - it’s a valid point about the costs and such - I just got off into a pre-emptive rant I guess about all the people who try to dismiss discussion of technical advancement of gaming by snobbishly claiming you’re dumb if you care about that sort of thing.

[Kinthalis]

I think the ballooning of game costs have a lot to do with marketing, trying to squeeze modern visuals out of outdated hardware, and the sunk in cost of retail.

Modern hardware and API’s = better, more powerful, more efficient tools to work with.

Think about it. A game like The Witcher 2 looks amazing on PC (granted they do use DX9, and kind of rely on the PC’s muscle to get it to render some pretty amazing level design), and it was done by a relatively small Eastern European Studio. Same goes for Crysis 1 - which is still one of the most impressive looking games on PC (sad actually as it came out in 2007) with a budget of 10 Million, including marketing.

On the flip side, Call of Duty has a HUGE budget, a budget that dwarfs Crysis 1 AND The Witcher 2’s budget many times over… and yet it’s running on an outdated, ugly, limited engine.

I think what could of happened 3 years ago, but likely didn’t because of the lack of new consoles are third party engines like Unreal 4 coming out. That’s the wave of the future for smaller developers looking to get into high end gaming, and it could have meant a lot more impressive titles having come out on PC around this time.

Also modern hardware doesn’t just equal better graphics. It’s more powerful developer tools as I mentioned before, tools that empower artists and level designers. It also means more complex physics interactions, better pathfinding, possibly better AI (I think the software part of this still has a bit to go), larger worlds, more players on servers, etc, etc, etc.

A game like Assasin’s Creed couldn’t have been made in the previous gen of consoles. The hardware just wasn’t there to make that game a reality- so it really is more than just graphics, although that’s awesome too.

[John_DiFool]

Note that I did not imply (or intend to) that said dichotomy is an either-or proposition. When driving my racing sims, the sky, weather, trackside scenery etc. can definitely make things more enjoyable and immersive. When I savage modern devs for their timidity tho, it is indeed on the gameplay side of things that I do so-as SenorBeef intimated in his first paragraph in #127, there’s such a thing as process intensity-how many outputs do I get out of this input?

In an MMORPG, what happens if my team sacks that Orc outpost? In most typical MMO’s, the outputs generally devolve into “We get more loot and XPs!”, along with some “We just pissed off the Orcs something awful!”, but never anything like “Yeah, we took control of a vital river crossing, but we just made a delicate political situation that much more unstable” or “Ulp! The Frost Giants just took advantage of our being distracted and backstabbed us!” or even “We just let the enemy know about our nice shiny new spell of Armpit Flea Infestation.” Actions should have multiple consequences beyond the immediate and obvious.

[Dave_Hartwick]

@SenorBeef

How in the world is this relevant? Do you expect every review from Xbox Magazine to start with “well, clearly this game isn’t what it could be if instead of developing it for 9 year old gaming machines we took advantage of technology we’ve had today…”? Of course not, they’re just going to compare it to other games that are coming out, and those are limited in the same way.

We’re talking damn near universal positive reviews from critics and high user reviews. Skyrim was one of those games that transcended the hobby and got attention from media outlets that usually don’t have time to cover games. It will have a continuing impact and people will now expect more from RPGs. You’re calling a game crippled and dumbed down and then asking how good reviews could possibly be relevant. I don’t get it.

If a game is developed for the lowest common denominator among multiple platforms, we get the worst possible implementation of that game.

Which leaves me wondering, why are some cross platform games (like Skyrim) so well received? Borderlands 2 is a more recent example, with Metacritic scores of 90 and 89 for Xbox and PC. The last major bad implementation of a cross platform game that I remember was GTA IV, which had a lot of problems on PC. You have yet to demonstrate how cross platform implementation hurts gaming.

Moore’s law is about transistor count, and if you want to get specific about it, doesn’t directly touch on “speed” - in fact, available processing power can increase more than increased transistor count because of efficiencies gained in instructions per clock or instructions per transistor.

It sounds like you’re criticizing me for misusing Moore’s law, and then assuming that because clock speeds don’t double every 2 years it’s bunk, which is a much greater error than you’re even implying I’ve made.

You misunderstand: I mean to say that you misstated Moore’s Law, and that if you mean to claim that PC speeds double every two years, they don’t.

Do you really want to go down this path, getting specific about technical advancements? Because it isn’t only transistor count. The PS3 uses a geforce 7800 with half the raster units as the actual 7800 card. Do you have any idea how incredibly out of date that is? That’s before the transition to unified shader architecture. We’ve had, depending on how you want to count some of the half-generations, 4 to 5 generations of graphics cards since then.

It was the worst possible time to choose your hardware too, because we were on the verge of a major revolution in hardware design and gaming APIs. Which ended up happening in 2006-2007 - at least, the revolution happened on the hardware side, and the developer API side, but couldn’t actually happen on the gaming side because for the next fucking decade games would have to be developed for pre-revolution console bullshit. Games could be cheaper/easier to produce for the same quality, and faster/more detailed at the same time, except we got stuck in time at the worst possible time to choose to design a console.

Cite please that because consoles exist that all games are tied to the level of development consoles. There are plenty of PC exclusives. I’m willing to grant that the existence of a lucrative console market does take attention and talent away from PC game development-- something that pretty clearly happened with Japanese RPGs, which started out on desktops and moved to consoles as local manufacturing changed-- but still, plenty of PC exclusives. Day Z, based off ARMA, for instance. Which looks like ass.

Finally, in 2014, we’ll have a new generation of consoles and games that can be revolutionary, that can use this technology to change the face of game development and gaming - except this revolution, and all the great games it could’ve spawned, and all the lower budget games that would’ve become viable, and all the high budget games that could’ve been more amazing never came to be, even though we’ve had the technology sitting there since 2007. 7+ years of gaming limbo instead of revolution.

Is there anybody credible who shares this opinion?

So wait, is the 8 year old PC - which, if it’s a good gaming machine, was already better than an xbox to start with - is still better than an xbox. Why is the 8 year old gaming machine, that’s still better than the xbox 360, which can still play all the games the xbox 360 can play a relic, and the xbox 360 is not?

Well, for one thing, it can’t play all the games an Xbox can play, as you know. For another, the goalposts keep shifting on a PC. New software comes out with higher requirements, taking up more space, then there’s a new operating system or two, and you want to take advantage of HD output but you don’t have an HD port, etc. Or maybe it just gets screwed up with malware, something console owners don’t have to worry about.

It’s only a “relic” relative to what a modern PC can do - and somehow you think this supports your argument when it actually puts the nail in the coffin against you. Yes, an 8 year old PC would be a relic compared to a modern PC, but if the 8 year old PC was better than the xbox, it’s still better than the xbox, because the xbox is also a relic compared to a modern PC - by an even bigger margin. Your argument here seems to be essentially “wow your 8 year old PC is as shitty as my xbox, and that’s really shitty, therefore xbox awesome!”

You sure like to say “shit” a lot.

Anyway, I’m aware that Xboxes aren’t as powerful as PCs. I never said they were. I said they were cheaper.

There has been no other nonsense as ridiculous as Justin Bailey’s that I felt compelled to respond to. This gotcha ya line of argument is retarded.

Well, it was after you replied to me that you said you had to get involved because of all the nonsense, so don’t blame me for your lack of clarity.

Sure, there’ve always been crap games. I suspect you’ve never been a PC gamer - I mean more than the occasional game of civ 4 or whatever - because you don’t understand what it is to be amazed in technology and gaming. Back in the golden days of PC gaming, the technology development was amazingly fast. Every few months, we’d see a game that pushed the boundaries on what gaming had been, and showed us something new. We’d get a bigger world, or more realistic physics, or more detailed characters, or amazing new effects - all the time. There’d be several times a year where a game would come out that would simply wow you because you’d never seen anything like that before. You were watching technology evolve right before your eyes. Games advanced more in any given 18 month period between, oh, 1985 and 2004, than they will advance from 2004 to 2014.

Actually, I’ve been a PC gamer since the early 80s. I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about the changing technology requirements, though. To take an old example, color graphics are nice, but for the types of games I liked best, they often weren’t required. Same with the more recent change from 2d to 3d. It is of little importance to me in terms of gameplay if a strategy or war game has 3d graphics, but it made a difference to my wallet.

As for your observation that games advanced more rapidly in the period '85-'04 than after. Well, yes. So did computers. Changes to, say, automobiles was also more radical in the early days. Compare a 1908 Model T to a 1937 Ford, then do the same with Fords from recent years, like the first and sixth generation Taurus. Clearly the changes made in the early days were of a different scale than what you see with mature technologies. I’m not sure that the revolution you’re expecting will come to pass. I think we’ll see new gimmicks, but probably not entirely new genres, like what was seen in the 80s and 90s.

And then we will have a brief revolution - as the next generation of consoles come out, and we can finally actually use the technology that’s developed in the last decade, the stuff we could’ve and should’ve been using for the last decade. But then we get into the same problem - 2022 rolls around, and we’re still playing outdated 2014 technology games until the next xbox comes out.

Yeah, you still haven’t convinced me that PC games are in any way held back by consoles. Technological differences between the platforms really don’t matter, because the PC version will take advantage of the greater capacity. It’s like you’re saying that if somebody made a game for both the Wii and PC that the PC version would have the same graphics as the Wii’s. At least one company has, incidentally. The game is Anno 1404, and the two versions look nothing alike.

FPS games have suffered particularly, yes. FPS games have traditionally been cutting edge moreso than other games. I guess it’s because they’re all fundamentally so similar compared to other types of games that you need to distinguish yourself by making your world more beautiful, your physics more realistic and interesting, etc. But apparently now being all fundamentally similar is actually a plus - since the call of duty games, all almost the exact same shit, sell a billion copies ever year.

What’s your reason for saying FPS games have traditionally been cutting edge? Do you mean resource hogs? I agree with that. Maybe Quake was cutting edge. Doom, definitely.

I think that maybe what has happened is that the formula has simply been narrowed down, and the formula looks like CoD.

That’s actually a pretty good example. In the same amount of time we went from Duke Nukem 3d to Crysis, we’re going to go from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare to… Call of Duty 10: Modern Warfare 4. The difference between Duke Nukem 3D and Crysis is mind boggling - the difference between Call of Duty 4 and Call of Duty 10 will be hard to even notice.

Kinda like the Ford Taurus.

So yeah, even ignoring the absurd control issues (which does hurt pc gaming, even if you play with a kb/m, because levels are designed differently when developers know you’re going to be awkwardly fumbling at thumbsticks with all the grace of a walrus playing the piano), the switch from the PC fps development golden age to console development stagnation is a particularly good example of why gaming is so shitty.

Have any cites from designers on the subject? Seems to they’d simply make targeting easier for the console.

Mods are bad, because someone can choose to use a mod that makes the game easier? This argument is too dumb to even address. In any case, torchlight 2 just came out last week - the first batch of mods are going to be very basic stuff like cheats or unlocking respecs and stuff like that. Once modders have had some time, there will be level-generation mods, or mods that add new enemies or abilities or all sorts of shit.

You’ll note that I didn’t say all mods are bad, just gave examples of bad mods. Without the efforts of talented amateur modders, we’d never know what Sims look like naked. Or what a wallhack was.

I am interested in several mods that Whack-a-mole kindly listed, especially the Oblivion revamp, as I’ve been thinking about getting Oblivion anyway. I probably will eventually get around to installing the Total Realism mod. The only reason I haven’t done so back when I was playing RTW a lot is that our old PC probably couldn’t handle it-- same deal with Fall From Heaven.

However, my point remains, mods are of limited appeal, and a more minor consideration in the question of PC vs console, which, as I see it, is best weighed on cost, available titles, preferred genre, and how one likes to play-- i.e., controller vs mouse.

Not all games have mods, and that’s fine. The ones that do are more useful, and - I think this is a key point that you’ve probably had no experience with - in addition to enhancing games with tweaks, mods have also been used to create free games (free to anyone who owns the base game that is) that can be essentially completely new games. Counterstrike is the most played game of all time (there’ve been 50,000+ people playing that game 24/7/365 for over a decade, more if you include the different versions) and yet it wouldn’t even have come to be in today’s market. It was a free mod by some hobbyist developers.

Yes, thanks, I’d already heard of Counterstrike. Most played game of all time, though? More than chess? Tag? Hide the sausage?

What PC manufacturer? Who is it that’s supposed to be doing education? Is HP or Compaq or toshiba supposed to come out with commercials for the general superiority of PC gaming? Even though most gamers build their own systems from various brands of parts anyway?

I think you have a habit of attributing what you and possibly your friends do to a wider group than is actually warranted. In other words, do you have a cite that most gamers (by which you mean PC gamers, by which you dudes who like shooters) build their own systems?

Anyway, you were saying that the only reason consoles came to dominate sports games is that people were ignorant of the fact that you could use a gamepad with a computer, if I recall. I think that’s an oversimplification. I’ll go into why I think so if you wish, but I think you’ll agree that we’re going long and maybe should stop dropping less important items of contention.

Consoles do local multiplayer pretty well, that’s pretty much their only clear cut upside. (I’d say “ease of use” is the other main upside they have, except I think it has quite a lot of downsides - the way they enforce having the same experience makes it easier to get into, but you don’t get the benefits from having more control over your gaming experience - so to me it’s actually a net downside)

As you like, but don’t forget title availability and cost as other advantages of consoles.

But every single time anyone has ever talked about this subject, they’ve said “consoles are better for sports games, because controllers are better than a keyboard!” - I’ve heard this dozens of times. Perception becomes reality - if no one is bothering to play these games on PC, they don’t get sold. They used to make Madden on PC up until 2008, but no one ever bought them because lol why would you play madden with a keyboard!!!

You must’ve notice that I did not say that. I cited title availability as the reason why consoles were once superior to PCs for fans of sports games. Glad I could help break your streak of misfortune. Fun fact: Madden started as a PC title, but only took off with the Sega.

It’s strange too because you could say the same thing about racing games, and yet racing games are all over PC - diverse, widespread, all sorts of games and all sorts of controllers.

Agree, that is strange. The best selling racing title all time is Mario Kart, though.

And you know what? If consoles specialized in shit like motion control boxing games, I would be pro-console. If they focused on the sorts of games that actually work better on consoles - great. Fantastic. I’m not one of those assholes who wants things they don’t like not to exist - I just want them to stop ruining my experience. I’ve actually made it clear in pretty much all of these threads that I’m not anti-Wii at all. I don’t care about the Wii, it exists in a different world. It has its own hardware, its own games. It doesn’t hurt me. I even play it from time to time when I’m at my friends’. It’s not trying to be a pale imitation of a PC like the xbox 360/ps3 are, and the games I want to play aren’t ruined by being cross platform with it.

Again, I think your analysis is off. At most, I’d say that consoles may have attracted more young players to the FPS genre, which might account for the simplification you dislike. Markets change.

Sure, if you’re helpless and shit yourself at the thought of doing something so complex as operating a PC, consoles are great. If you’ve decided that you won’t actually own a PC for any purpose, great.

Or maybe you can’t afford a gaming rig, or you want to play on your lounge, or your friends all own PS3s, or any of a number of reasons.

Again, I actually don’t give a shit about people who play consoles. I only give a shit about games that are ruined by being co-developed for consoles. No one gave a shit that you had an SNES or playstation or dreamcast or whatever, because we weren’t being harmed by it. But then console manufacturers realized how good the technology in PCs are, and just decided that they’d become shitty little PCs. I don’t think console players at all appreciate exactly what their console is - the PS3 has a whacky processor (that no one likes, which has shown no actual real world benefit), but otherwise those machines are just 2004 era PCs. They aren’t even particularly good 2004 era PCs - their 512mb combined system/video ram would’ve been a joke even then. In this very post, you mocked the idea of an 8 year old PC being a relic, but that’s what you’re playing on.

What I think you actually dislike is popular games. The big budget, multi-platform game is here to stay, I think, and I think they will continue to be well received. Luckily for you single-platform games-- i.e., PC only will also continue to be made. Can’t you be happy with that?

No, you can’t, because that’s not really the problem, is it. It seems much more likely to me that your favorite genre is simply changing to meet marketplace demand and not in a direction that you like.

Consoles used to do their own thing - create their own hardware, their own graphics libraries, their own games - and that was great. Then they decided just to ape PC gaming, except to rob it of all that makes it good in the process. That’s the issue here. This isn’t some bullshit pepsi vs coke, ford vs chevy or whatever stupid shit that people get worked up over to try to prove their side is better. I don’t give a shit if your side is good or bad or even if it exists - I only care in so far as it hurts my hobby. And it does. We’re in a dark age of gaming and it’s the new normal. Instead of an era of amazing new technologies, we’ve deliberately been stagnant. It’s a complete waste.

I notice you dropped the point about how we all totally have to own a PC to post here. That’s wise, seeing how I won it.

Again, and I hate to belabor the obvious-- not that you share my limitation-- but the era of radical change is probably over. You’ve failed to convince me that consoles are holding back the development of PC games or that a revolution has been stymied. And I’d like cites to back some of your claims, please.

[Dave_Hartwick]

On the subject of graphics vs gameplay:

In some genres, 3d graphics actually add very little. The 2d graphics of Civ II were good enough-- I mean, it’s just a damn map. All you need to be able to discern are terrain, units, and buildings. But every strategy game has 3d graphics now, because uncultured plebian boobs demand them. And they probably have shit on their shoes and impacted dandruff, too. Not talking about anyone in particular.

Actually, two of the best looking games I can think were 2d, and quite old: Disciples II and Rise of Nations. With games like that, it isn’t about extreme realism and tiny details, it’s more about having a good artists who can do a landscape that doesn’t look like a sty with dirt highlights or a crankfreak’s Christmas tree.

[bump]

@Justin_Bailey

Until 2005, when Microsoft made the wired Xbox 360 pad PC-compatible out of the box, there was no guarantee that a gamepad would work with your particular PC or the game you wanted to use it with.

I think both platforms have their place. There are games that are indisputably better on the PC- ones that require a lot of buttons or control inputs, or that just flat-out won’t work without a mouse & keyboard. The Total War games come to mind.

However, there’s one overriding reason that I play my FPS games and a lot of more arcade-ish games on my Xbox 360, and that’s standardization. Back when all I had was a PC, there was so much variation involved with playing a game- you had to get all the updated drivers relevant to your particular setup, and frequently the game patches relevant to you as well. Then you had to configure it all. Sometimes you had to install PunkBuster or something similar. You had to dick around with installing Ventrilo or Skype for in-game chat. And, if you’re lucky, you have adequate hardware to play the game.

I eventually got tired of the constant hardware rat-race, and got really tired of getting walloped by guys running the latest and greatest hardware, because they could see things at their higher resolutions that I couldn’t, or their computers just flat-out did things faster.

Consoles even all that crap out; you ALL have the same hardware, with the exception of the TV or monitor, and I’ll go out on a limb and say that the majority of Xbox gamers are probably playing using HDMI connections to a HD television.

I noticed a huge lack of pain-in-the-ass-ism when I moved to playing predominantly console games. Yeah, the graphics aren’t quite there, and the gamepad is a little restrictive, but not having to deal with needing a new video card or more memory every year or so, and having to update drivers constantly more than makes up for it.

That being said, I fully intend to get XCOM: Enemy Unknown for my PC. It’s the type of game that promises to be much better on the PC.

[Kinthalis]

@Dave_Hartwick

However, my point remains, mods are of limited appeal,

Says you. Even console gamers might disagree - just take a look at the popularity of user created content for Little Big Planet, and Halo. It’s the number one feature console gamers request when anything Skyrim comes up. Just take a look at some of the mod videos on Youtube. It’s mostly console gamers going: I wish this was on console! Why can’t Bethesda allow this on consoles! I would pay Bethesda money if they would pick up the best mods and released them on disc!

and a more minor consideration in the question of PC vs console, which, as I see it, is best weighed on cost, available titles, preferred genre, and how one likes to play-- i.e., controller vs mouse.

I think ultimately you get what you pay for. PC gaming is all about options for the hobbyist (and even options for the ultra casual too).

How you want to play, experience and share the gaming experience is, for a large part, entirely up to you. On consoles, for the most part, it’s entirely up to what Corporation X wants.

Do you want a cheap, budget game box to hook up to your TV and play with a gamepad from your couch. You can have that.

Do you want a super immersive, tripple monitor, graphics extravaganza, responsive and accurate mouse and keyboard gaming experience? You can have that.

Do you like boxes cluttering up your home? You can have that.

Do you want an exclusively digital-download gmaing existance - you cna have that.

Console gaming is like going to Burger King. You know what you’re going to get. It’s limited, and it’s not the best of food, but whatever. And it’s not like I don’t have a hunkering for a Whopper once in a while.

PC gaming is like being on one of the great restaurant boulevards in the world. Beef Wellington? There’s this great French Restaurant down the block. Rack of lamb? Can’t beat the Italian place next door. Burger King? Sure, just turn the corner.

Also, my 300+ gaming library would have bankrupted me on consoles. Steam sales have EASILY saved me as much money on game titles over the years, as console hardware would have saved me over PC hardware.

[Hoopy_Frood]

@Dave_Hartwick

Yes, thanks, I’d already heard of Counterstrike. Most played game of all time, though? More than chess? Tag? Hide the sausage?

Pedant much?

Are you trying to support your side by taking an obviously context-relevant statement out-of-context?

Really?

Because I highly doubt any individual computer chess program has come anywhere near the number of players that Counter Strike has had, and I’d love for you to prove otherwise.

[Hirka_T_Bawa]

@Dave_Hartwick

You skipped my mention of licencing. Used to be that you couldn’t get some of the better sports/fighting/arcade franchises because they were licensed to consoles. Some franchises still are-- I expect some people bought the Wii just to play Mario or Zelda.

Speaking of the Wii, how are the PC motion controllers? I’m still looking for a good boxing game that uses motion controls. How many out there for the PC?
.

I have owned every Nintendo console since the original NES, and I have bought them solely for Zelda… If it wasn’t for Zelda I wouldn’t have gotten a Gamecube or Wii.

However, for everything else I’ve been PC. I’ve had a working PC since the days of an XT in the 80’s. I’ve gone through all the PC upgrades, XT, to 286, to 386DX to Pentium 100, AMd K6, to Athlon 1000, XP 3000, X2 4200, and now my new I7-3770k.

I’m currently on my PC, reading the SDMB. once I finish this post, I’m going to load and play Borderlands 2, while sitting on my couch, looking at my 55" HDTV, I’m going to play (and kick ass), using my wireless keyboard and mouse…

Why do we need consoles again?

I’ve been a PC gamer since I started, I played game on my Commodore 64 (as a little baby, I’m not THAT old!) since I started, then advanced to the PC’s when they came out… my first console was the NES, and I’ve owned every Nintendo console since then (never owned an XBOX or Playstation however).

While I’ve noticed consoles do better in such games as Fighters (Street Fighter, Mortal Combat, etc), and platforms (Mario. Sonic, [heck even Command Keen would be good on NES] ), I’ll even give competitive racing (Mario Kart, F-Zero), most games are better on the PC. Nothing beets a keyboard and mouse for a FPS, why else would they not allow PC vs;. console in MP games?

I’ve also noticed the games I’m most interested in, Stratagy, Simulation, and the like, games that require more on the CPU to advance from the previous version, are most popular on the PC… I personally think that is because that is the platform that grows. and can keep up with the demands.

I’m of the belief that consoles are holding PC’s back, I remember back in the 90’s when everything was desperate, things advanced at a record pace… Now in the 2010’s, I don’t see much difference between Fallout 3 (released in 2008), and Borderlands 2 (out in 2012).

[Dave_Hartwick]

@Hoopy_Frood

Pedant much?

Are you trying to support your side by taking an obviously context-relevant statement out-of-context?

Really?

Because I highly doubt any individual computer chess program has come anywhere near the number of players that Counter Strike has had, and I’d love for you to prove otherwise.

Sure, I’d like to give a cite that a particular chess program was more popular than Counter-Strike. I’ll start looking right after somebody fetches me one that supports the claim that Counter-Strike is the most played game of all time. Closest thing I could find was from Wikipedia:

The game was the most played Half-Life modification in terms of players, according to GameSpy in 2008.[4]
As of August 2011, the Counter-Strike franchise has sold over 27 million units.[5]

Wii Sports sold over 79 million. It doesn’t have chess, though. It has bowling instead. The Angry Birds franchise has over a billion downloads, by the way. That’s 1,000,000,000.

I’ll buy that CS was the most played mod of Half Life. I’d even believe that it was the most played mod of all time-- what do I know?

But game? Ha ha ha, cite, please.

Do you really think for a second that Counter-Strike could possibly be the most played game in the history of the world? Really? Because that is what he said.

Is pointing that sort of huge ass kindergarten class error pedantry? Color me pedantic. My bad, I guess.

[Dave_Hartwick]

@Hirka_T_Bawa

I’m of the belief that consoles are holding PC’s back, I remember back in the 90’s when everything was desperate, things advanced at a record pace… Now in the 2010’s, I don’t see much difference between Fallout 3 (released in 2008), and Borderlands 2 (out in 2012).

Got any evidence for that claim, like expert opinion from somebody in the industry? Man, if I was a PC game programmer and consoles were somehow keeping me from doing my job, I’d be all pissed off and talk about it.

And why aren’t PC exclusives way more awesome? How could consoles possibly hold back PC exclusives? This is starting to sound like tinfoil hat territory.

[Nava]

@Doubticus

… the 360. The ability to sit in front of a large HDTV and jump right into and out of a game is very appealing to me. Contrast that to … sit hunched over the computer desk for hours at a time.

Your postural problems are your own - my computer works just fine connected to the big HD TV in the living room (advantages of sharing a flat with a guy who broke up with his live-in-SO recently: #1, his TV is huge; #2 he’s never at home), with the keyboard and mouse on a Proper Table.

[Kinthalis]

@Dave_Hartwick

Got any evidence for that claim, like expert opinion from somebody in the industry? Man, if I was a PC game programmer and consoles were somehow keeping me from doing my job, I’d be all pissed off and talk about it.

And why aren’t PC exclusives way more awesome? How could consoles possibly hold back PC exclusives? This is starting to sound like tinfoil hat territory.

John Carmack has said that it was a huge mistake to write a game engine (he was talking about Rage) with consoles in mind because PC’s had just blown past them so damn fast. Cliffy B has recently talked about PC development and how it’s not only the way to go (Developer’s conference earlier this year), but that it has been next gen for a while now.

And take a look at games like Planet Side 2. Huge open battlefields with thousands of players on the same map. It’s not something current gen console architecture could handle, luckily it’s a PC exclusive

[Jophiel]

@Kinthalis

Also, my 300+ gaming library would have bankrupted me on consoles. Steam sales have EASILY saved me as much money on game titles over the years, as console hardware would have saved me over PC hardware.

That’s true. I built my computer in April 2009 for $650. At the time, a 60gb XBox 360 was $300. So my initial costs were higher (this is ignoring the obvious fact that I do more than play games on my computer). However, since 2009, I’ve bought about 140 games for the PC for a sliver of what they’d have cost on a console. I suppose this matters less if you only use your console to play Modern Warfare or Madden and nothing else but, for people who like a huge variety at their fingertips, you’ll make up that start-up cost difference very, very quickly.