Slashdot Mirror
Unreal Creator Proclaims PCs are Not For Gaming
An anonymous reader writes "TG Daily is running an interesting interview with EPIC founder and Unreal creator Tim Sweeney. Sweeney is anyway very clear about his views on the gaming industry, but it is surprising how sharply he criticizes the PC industry for transforming the PC into a useless gaming machine. He's especially unhappy with Intel, which he says has integrated graphics chipsets that 'just don't work'."
Oh please. I don't understand you console jockeys at all- FPS can. not. be played on a controller. None of them can. Halo came somewhat close to playability, but anyone who ever seriously played the terrible PC port of one of the first two Haloes can attest that without the added challenge of dealing with a joystick input, the game is ridiculously easy, and multiplayer is a joke- anyone with moderate railgun skill can just crank up their resolution, grab a sniper rifle, and score nonstop headshots from a mile away. Sorry Wii, the input should be seamless and not the only thing that makes a game challenging. The mouse is obviously the easier input device for FPS, so it alone should be used. Ever wonder why the console versions of multipleyer FPS can never play with the PC versions of the same game? The first time they tried that was with Quake 3 on the dreamcast and on the PC. Even if you've never played the game yourself, you know the reputation- ridiculously fast amphetamine-twitch gameplay. The PC players absolutely curb stomped the dreamcast players until they were drowning in the blood pouring out their eyes.. it was a huge joke at the time because the dreamcast players just couldn't even score a kill- you'd look at the scoreboard and it would be like naturally the top half of the scoreboard is reserved for PC players, the bottom half for dreamcast players.. the controller just sucks that much.
I just bought a new motherboard with integrated Intel GMA3100 graphics. I ended up buying a low end Nvidia 8400 for 40 EUROS because it sucked so much. The Intel can barely run Google Earth. It runs Quake3 worse than a 6 year old Geforce. The 8400 runs ET:QW at 30 fps @ 1680x1050, medium-low settings with shadows disabled. That's not £300, just £30, and it's capable of running recent games decently.
/. still can't display the EURO sign, what the fuck is wrong with you people? *
So yeah, the guy's right, Intel's graphics adaptors are terrible. I don't know about the X3xxx series, they're supposed to be much better, but I wouldn't count on it.
* OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE
That's twice that someone from epic say pc gaming is dead. I think that's because they have sour grapes that UT3 sales failed.
The problem is that they failed on many points:
1. They shouldn't have released an unfinished games to meet seasonal sales, because in the end they missed much more than just christmas 07 - they made people ignore the game altogether.
2. When you release a primarily multiplayer game with the idea that it's third parties who'll host most of the servers, you have dedicated linus server binary available on the release day. On release day people had to host servers on windows with a retail CD in the drive for fuck's sake.
3. When you release a successor to ut2004 that had tons of maps and mostly the same gameplay and game mechanics (minus the bugs and unfinished features of ut3 like spectating), don't expect people to upgrade just for the visuals - especially since ut2004 can run so well on today's machines.
4. And they should have listened to complains and answered them on their forums instead of deleting any post suggesting ut3 is far from a perfect game in the hope that other potential buyers wouldn't otherwise find out (how stupid can those PR fucks be?). That or just don't have forums at all.
All your other points are well taken, though. It does take some thinking ahead to make a PC that is silent (as in the hard disk being the loudest component), and suited for gaming at the same time. And it doesn't end with the hardware, you also have to know how to choose the right settings for each game.
We do scale down graphics to the GMA950 ... and below. The fun part happens when you get this big divide in user reviews due to the scaling down. Some claim the graphics "sux" and others claim the graphics "rox". There is also only so much you can scale down. It takes a ton of resources to remodel/re-rig a character at a low-poly for the integrated cards and a high-poly for everything else. We end up just shipping ridiculously low polygon models that anything with hardware T&L is barely taxed. In short, we game developers are generally intelligent people and we do our best, and there actually is a problem in these integrated cards... A pc may not have been purchased as a gaming PC but little Timmy is still just as pissed when the game doesn't perform well on it.