You’re getting the cause and effect relationship mixed up.
“Fighting games are better on console”
“Why?”
“Because those games are better on gamepads”
“Ok, I guess I’ll buy those games on console”
[result, pc sales for those games are low, future games aren’t made for it]
“See! Fighting games are better on console! They’re not even available on PC!”
It’s based on the attitude that games that play better on gamepads are better on console, but that’s simply ignorance of the fact that you can use gamepads on PCs just fine.
Most console advocates are just ignorant about the gaming PCs. I hear “oh yeah well have fun with your $5000 gaming computer when it’ll be obsolete in a year”, “why would you play sports games on a keyboard?”, “PCs don’t have graphics advanced as an xbox!”, “no way PCs have as many games as xbox!” type shit ALL THE TIME.
Fair enough, it looks like I was mistaken about the EVO thing. Maybe I was misremembering another tournament or something.
For competitive fighting game tourneys, where guys are counting frames to glitch into combos, you want to be sure that everyone in the world learns from the same performance baseline. That’s impossible with PCs. A 360 in Maine is the same as a 360 in Japan.
And rest assured that if they did do it with PCs that every graphical option available would be turned off to ensure the smoothest possible gameplay anyway.
In competitive tournaments, both players are on the same machine. Xbox 360, PS3, or PC doesn’t matter when it’s local like that. If it isn’t local, then identical hardware isn’t nearly as important as stuff like netcode or client/server. If it isn’t client/server, one player gets a latency advantage. That’s bad. If the netcode is shitty, which apparently it is for SF4 if it can’t handle frame drop, that’s bad. Never mind that they don’t even run identical hardware while using a console, since everyone has a different fight stick. Anyone serious about SF4 on PC would just set it up such that they got the 60 FPS cap anyway. Identical hardware really doesn’t mean anything in the competitive scene.
heh last time that happened to me on a roam, with about 35 people on teamspeak, they ganked the guy when he wouldn’t stop, and tossed him out of their corp so he had to contract someone to haul all his shit back to empire from null …
Yeah, but you forget that the effect has a cause of its own. A platform that (rightly or wrongly) loses customer base means that its multiplayer functions are less valuable. In a genre like fighting games, that means everything.
alright i have not kept up with the news. i don’t have consoles but i used to love fighting games. assuming i buy the game and controls, would i be able to challenge someone online, replicating the experience of challenging someone at the arcades? is there lag, cheaters or a match-making service like battle.net?
Occasionally there’s lag, rarely are there cheaters, and usually there’s a match-up service. But you never get the pure joy of lining your quarter up on the bottom of the glass screen like in an old fashioned arcade.
ugh. this plus Microsoft Games, Securom and no cross-platform multiplayer means i wouldn’t bother trying it. intentionally or not, proper PC support for the game doesn’t appear to be there.
Some games/devs still do both PC exclusives and multi-plats that take good advantage of the hardware/input devices available to modern gaming PCs.
Valve and DOTA as well as Team fortress 2, Blizzard with WOW, diablo, and starcraft, Dice with BF3 and bad company 2, and a bunch of other PC exclusive devs like the Witcher 2’s devs.
I’m not sure THIS is true, however. Since there are only two devices involved, I don’t really think there is a “server” per se, beyond the fact that one box has to “advertise” for the game in SF4. I’m not familiar with the technicalities though, so this could be incorrect, but if it is, no one has ever pointed this out to me as an advantage.
This, however, is completely false. The problem in the article I found was an issue with two machines synching up because the machine with lower specs was incapable of keeping up with the 60FPS VIDEO, and there are apparently two settings for how to handle that, and the default setting is stupid.
If both players configure their setup for “fixed FPS” then the problem is mitigated by dropping frames on the slow machine. (Note: Mitigated. Dropped frames still suck, they just suck less than slowdown.)
Actually, anyone serious about SF4 period wouldn’t be playing on the PC, because there’s virtually no community for it. But seriously…different fightsticks count as different hardware? Nonsense. They don’t affect your frame rate, or your lag, or your reactions. Heck, some people would rather play with a pad. No one would prefer to drop frames.
Yes you would. Though if we’re talking about on the PC here, we’re also talking about a probably tiny community, since it was never large and most people with a serious interest in these games don’t want to be playing the two year old version. There can be lag (hard to avoid when the internet is involved, and fighting games require much more precise timing than say, an FPS.), there really aren’t “cheaters” unless you could people who “rage quit” when they’re about to lose to preserve their ranking (Which is pretty irrelevant if you’re just playing for the game, rather than for the magic numbers.). I’m not sure exactly how matchmaking works on the PC, but there is certainly a rudimentary one - it’s not like you have to find people outside the game and then schedule a match somehow, or tell someone your IP address in order for them to find you. Generally you just tell the game either “Find me a match, I don’t care who” or “Find me a match with these parameters of max allowable latency/player ranking/region.”
That’s all generic info though - none of it (except community size) is specific to the PC version. You’re right about the lack of cross platform, which I find somewhat inexplicable - PC to 360 matches should certainly be within the technology (Though I can understand that Sony might not want to play nice there.).