Slashdot Mirror
The Future of PC Games, According to Microsoft
Geaty writes "Gamespot has an article up about Microsoft's big PC plans. Topics covered include why DirectX 9 will be the last DX for a while, the increased game support in Longhorn, and a 'standard' PC controller. Looks to this ignorant reader like Microsoft is trying to tackle the games market (again?), cornering matchmaking and patching. The controller issue seems like an attempt to bring to the PC platform some of the uniformity that consoles have."
All computers already have 'standard' controllers: they're called keyboard and mouse. Works like a charm in most game genres I prefer (FPS and RTS).
At least in terms of generating new hardware and software sales. Right now a 3 year old machine runs most business and office type applications adequately and there is very little incentive to upgrade. Unlike the good old days when an upgrade was need approximately every 1.2 years just to run the newest spreadsheet which had features that you desperately needed.
Games on the hand are much more intensive and often hook into unique operating system facilities that provide an incentive to upgrade. Case in point I just bought my son a new jet sim game this week end and it would not run wn Win2000 but would on XP. It was dog slow and often froze on my ancient 450 K5 and 900 Mhz Duron. And had be tbinking of buying a new machine while I sat waiting to reboot the system every 30 minutes.
I can't see the keyboard mouse combo going anywhere anytime soon..
Try playing Street Fighter II with a keyboard and mouse. Watch me whip you with a PS1 controller connected to the PC through an EMS USB2 adapter.
Try connecting more than one keyboard and mouse to one computer. One computer per player is much too expensive.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Microsoft doesn't want DirectX on the PC to get too far ahead of the Xbox. They don't want developers and people to realize in 2 years the Xbox is a 3 year old PC equilivant of what their grandmother is using.
No, it's not just you.
FPS games (which get the majority of my time) almost require a keyboard and mouse to play properly. While games such as Goldeneye may be perfectly playable on a console for most people, purists like myself want to vomit at the lack of control. Likewise, the additional buttons on the keyboard and pointing precision of the mouse make them a much better choice for RPG and RTS games.
On the other hand, sports, fighting, and driving games are better suited to console controllers. This is especially true in that these sort of games are often best experienced with a buddy or two playing next to you. Sharing a keyboard with your opponent is just no fun, as players of earlier PC sports games will be glad to tell you.
A platform with both options is well on its way to the perfect game machine. A PC with a standardized control pad is rather close to an Xbox. Funny, that. Good move on Microsoft's part.
Game... blouses.
they're called keyboard and mouse. Works like a charm in most game genres I prefer
Unfortunately, you don't prefer the same game genres that some other Slashdot users such as myself prefer. Would you want to play Tekken or Tetris Attack on a keyboard?
Hope their new standard includes support for daisy chaining controllers. Not that LAN play isn't vastly superior to split-screen, but since they're trying to do it right they might as well go all the way.
Ignore the Microsoft connection and look at what they are basically pitching: An operating system designed with a set of standards that will make it easy for developers to design games. Right down to the controller.
:)
The only drawback I can find is that it's a "super console plus!" situation. I'm a gamer, and I'm fine with that.
I've often speculated that a distribution of Linux should be made that is specifically geared toward gaming. Coordinate hardware support with the major vendors so their product works with ease, and build the OS specifically to deliver fast processing for gaming. Anything that has nothing to do with playing games is cut out of it.
Keep it free. Let game distributors bundle it with the games they sell. If the OS was good enough to deliver DoomIII on the day of retail, and you were able to tie down some major title support, it could work. Suddenly every gamer out there is running a Linux distribution to play their games. Suddenly every major developer is developing games just for Linux. Why? Because the OS functions well as a gaming OS (by design), and because it's free so everyone can have it.
In effect, you create a Linux standard for gaming, that can run top quality games, and is free.
Many of us have Windows because the best games work on it. Games are designed to work on Windows because most of us have Windows. Circular, but true.
If Doom III, GTA IV, and EverQuest 2 all came out for Mac and Mac alone, I'd be typing this on a blue keyboard right now. If they all came from Linux, I'd be typing this in a Mozilla window.
Mind you, I'd try this myself, but I can't code myself out of a 486 and have to feed my kids so I can't go urchin and skip on the rest of my life.
Grimwell - old, cranky, mean, obsessive
I wonder whats so great about being able to play from the CD? Personally, I'd much rather have it the other way... install the game once, then store the CD somewhere because it won't be needed any more. Having to track down the stupid CD every time you want to play a game would be a pain. Not to mention the problems if it gets scratched or melted or whatever.
I mean, whats the attraction to being able to run off CD? Hard drive space is pretty cheap these days. I guess maybe there are some people who get intimidated when they try to install software, but if that's the issue it should be fixed by making software installation easier.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
I don't want to be forced to use a single console for a game, on a standarised system, playing games that can't be modded (Palladium), written using proprietary medium formats (DVD+/-), and using a single, specific OS. The computer is the Nascar of electronic gaming; in my opinion, consoles are just "street legals."
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
While I agree with you that a gamepad is nice for multiple players on one machine - but I can count the number of games that both support USB and multiplayer on one machine on one hand. Meaning that, right now, the PC is piss poor for console games, and the PC already has a good architecture for gamepads and games - Atomic Bomberman is a dream with 8 players and a good USB hub ($10 gamepads and a good USB hub are all you need).
That being said, the problem is Microsoft. Directplay stupidly names the axes and assumes how they are meant to be used. Really, the axes should be unlabelled and rebound at the users discretion. The whole glory of PC hardware is that it embraces new standards as it needs. The SpaceOrb would never exist on a console (they tried, it didn't work).
Personally, I don't want PC standardized pads - it would encourage PC game developers to slack-off on configurability of the controls the way they do on consoles (like UT for Dreamcast console has NO standard Turok style setting - its 4 available setups are all unplayable if you want the alt-fire and jump available).
The fact is that PC's dont come with gamepads, and so gamepads will never be standard. That creates the reciprocal relationship that gamepad-oriented games (fighting games, platformers) do not catch on on PC's.
I don't see it as a problem with the gamepads. PC gamepad system is good and the USB+Directplay is an excellent and good enough standard (for MS boxen). The problem is the games. If MS wants to fix the problem, they need to publish some console-style multiplayer PC games. I've got 4 directplay compatible gamepads collecting dust because I've found 4 games that can handle them all, and one of them I made myself.
Think about this:
When I want to aim, I want accuracy and speed. With a mouse I can just flip it and fire, a joystick of any kind interferes with that.
When I want to move forward I either want to run(fast) or walk(silently). A joystick for movement usually results in me breaking it or hurting my wrist trying to get every last degree of motion.
Gamepads are good for fighting games, they are good for 2d Zelda games, but nothing can take the place of a mouse in first person shooters. That said, a left-handed joystick and a mouse might be better than a k/b. I'll try it if I ever get the ambition.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
How many different console systems can you name that have the same controller?
I thought so - now think of how easy you have changed your binds on another person's pc when you are about to start gibbing.
thought so.
Is you have a range of $500-$4000 consoles that play mostly the same games.
Ask 3DO how well it works out to sell consoles for around $700.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When they pry it from my cold dead fingers, and toes.
Same goes for my flight stick.
The PC is *not* a console. That's kinda the point. It's a *general purpose* machine which one can adapt as one likes. Hell, they've even had to supply wheel and pedal sets for consoles now. Using anything else for seriously playing driving sims doesn't even make sense.
I like adaptation, of the machine to me. Not the other way around, and I've never seen no "game pad" in a Fokker DR1.
KFG
A) How can you patch a game that isn't installed? Seriously, this doesn't seem possible.
B) Microsoft wants to certify certain hardware for Windows, and now Microsoft wants to create PCs built to a certain specification... does this strangely sound like Microsoft telling a lot of hardware vendors that they will either have to make clones of other pieces of hardware (and face the patent and copyright police) or to stop producing for the PC?
C) Microsoft, with its' Microsoft Messenger Matchmaker, is going to severly harm or kill match making software such as GameSpy. All your patches will come through something very similar to Windows Update and most everything will be in a Microsoft sounding "My Games" area. This company wasn't split because the US Govt. thought that they were not a monopoly?
D) One controller, for all games... doesn't this sound like Microsoft needing to give permission to people like Logitech if they want to invent something new (like, force feedback back before it was invented)?
One last thing, with you needing to go through all of these Microsoft services, running all of this Microsoft signed equiptment, and alike... I fear that privacy will be hard to enforce, at best...
Also, try to tell all the Overclockers and other insane computer people buying the latest hardware to speed up their machine that it won't be possible to do that anymore, instead they will need to go for a package deal and run at Microsoft specs... will this elite group of hardcore shoppers (willing to spend tons of money) stick around for these new terms? Somehow, I don't think so.
I think you got a bit carried away there. ;)
Take a PlayStation 2 game. It'll run on any other PS2 (in that region, anyway) because they all have the same hardware config. The game will run on later revisions of the PS2 (the PSone was revised several times, you can tell from the version numbers and designs). A PC game can not possibly have been tested on every hardware config out there, so it's almost inevitable that bugs/glitches/weirdness will arise on someone's system.
As for controllers, PSone and PS2 controllers are interchangeable; PSone games and memcards work on a PS2. You can get affordable adaptors to use just about any console's controller with any other console's controller ports.
The uniformity you describe could make for one of two things: not much functionality in order to cater for all games, or too much functionality to the point of confusion. (I could be misinterpreting your post, but do you even play games or are you just bashing on consoles?)
Look at a few of the games lately, WC3 shipped with both mac and win versions on the same cd, SC4 is coming out for the mac, Moo3 just shipped with portability IN MIND, and mac is coming quite soon now). This is a bit of a trend that is becoming more common. What I think is that Microsoft wants to stop this sort of thing or make it extremely difficult. While it would be natural for that, Microsoft might have an ace up its sleeve trying to make something very tempting to use.
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
If MS is so interested in gaming for the PC why don't they port some xbox games?
This is my sig, there are many like it, but this one is mine...
the man from Microsoft suggests that longhorn will give users the ability to play games directly from the cd, without installation. Which is great in theory, but what does that mean? Either your loading the whole game into RAM, *shudder* or it will include a program to automatically install when you run the game, and uninstall the program when you finish. At least that's what I think, if somebody can think up other possibilities, I'm all ears.
Yes, because the old Playstation has enough RAM to cache a complete CD. And an internal HD that Sony just didn't tell you about.
Oh, wait, it doesn't have either of those, how can it play games straight from the CD?
Firstly, I will say in Microsoft's defense that the only thing they ever did right was the original Sidewinder joypad. I used it for years with win games, dos games, and emulators -- worked perfectly with all.
A standard gaming controller, distributed with new PC's, is not a bad thing. The keyboard and mouse are great for FPS games, but any time things go over the shoulder or oldschool platformer the keyboard/mouse combo tends to lack. Wanna know why the PC didn't get a port of Sly Cooper, or something equally fun? It's not just that Sony ownz it for the forseeable future -- the PC market has been overloaded with RTS and FPS games because that's really all it's good at with its controller set. Add in a standard gamepad which all developers could count on in the same way you can cound on a keyboard to have 80+ keys (laptops) and a mouse to have 2 buttons, and suddenly I think we'd be seeing a lot more platformer / puzzler / fighting games on PC again. When you think about it, who else but Microsoft has the power in the PC industry to throw something like this together?
As for "levels"... I don't like the idea of Microsoft implementing them, but I think they'd be a good thing. The largest problem in PC gaming is the fact that developers never have time to get used to a select set of specs before the next set comes out and gamers are clamoring for games that use the latest and greatest hardware. Look at UT2K3. Does it play any better, really, than UT? Not really. Could the same gameplay have been squeezed out of lesser hardware? Most certainly. Why didn't the developers try to fit more graphics into lesser hardware with more clever optimizations and geometry? Because they didn't have to. The reason Conker's Bad Fur Day on the N64 looked like a Dreamcast game was because the developers had been working with the hardware for 5 years, and knew exactly how to squeeze that last bit of power out of it.
Levels on a PC would do the same. If a developer knows exactly how much power a PC is going to have, they don't have to worry about whether or not their pretty particle engine will make the game drop frames on your machine -- they just boot up their own level XX machine and test. If a bunch of people out there have Level 1 PC's, chances are there will be a lot of Level 1 games produced for that demographic, and as many people don't go out and upgrade all the time, it'd be safe to assume that the Level 1 Demographic would be around for at least a couple of years, not unlike a standard console.
Then again, what do I care? Warcraft III plays great on my iBook, my Redhat PC's in parts, and for real gaming I hit up my Game Cube.
- Cloud