Slashdot Mirror
PC Gaming 'a Generation Ahead' of Consoles, Says Crytek Boss
Crytek co-founder Cevat Yerli spoke recently about the growing gap between modern PCs and consoles like the PS3 and Xbox 360, saying that the desire to develop for multiple platforms is hampering creative expression. "PC is easily a generation ahead right now. With 360 and PS3, we believe the quality of the games beyond Crysis 2 and other CryEngine developments will be pretty much limited to what their creative expressions is, what the content is. You won't be able to squeeze more juice from these rocks." One reason this trend persists is because of the perception that PC game sales are not high enough for most developers to focus on that platform. Rock, Paper, Shotgun says this indicates a need for the disclosure of digital distribution sales numbers, which could dispel that myth. Yerli's comments come alongside news of Crytek's announcement of a new military-based shooter called Warface.
Most of the really good Wii titles don't even use the Wii motion controls for anything more than a gimmick, though. Frequently, shaking could have been replaced with a simple button press (and that would have been far more accurate--I'm looking at you, New Super Mario Bros. Wii) Pointing at the screen gets quite a bit of use, at least since it's got a fairly obvious application (aiming in a FPS.)
The accelerometers were a gimmick, and I think that Nintendo knows it. It worked out for them--they did a good amount of business while in competition with two other giants. What I think Nintendo has proven in this generation is that 2D side-scrollers (or 2.5D or whatever) aren't dead and are actually quite popular, as long as the controls and gameplay are good.
I don't see much of a need to go HD, other than to finally get rid of the last holdout for analog input on my TV.
I would say the main problem with the Wii is its library. And this comes from somebody who owns one. I really don't care about its graphics, but there just isn't much that interests me on the platform. I have 7 Wii games, while I have 42 or so PS3 games and 17 360 games. Granted, there are a few games that I'm interested in, but it's only 3 or so. So much of the library is dedicated to shovelware games and kid stuff.
I think the culprit behind this is that publishers want to make multiplatform games to maximize returns. It's easy to match the 360 and PS3 games, as they're of like performance. The Wii? Not so much (due to both the hardware limitations and the different default control scheme). Exclusives for it would be better, but exclusives aren't what make the most money these days. So developers make the big games for the 360 and PS3, but give the Wii spin-offs or other budget titles that just aren't as good. Case in point: the 360 and PS3 got Resident Evil 5. The Wii? Umbrella Chronicles and a re-release of RE4.
Of course, none of this matters to Nintendo, as the Wii is basically a license to print money. It's great for those who were never really into gaming before this generation, but the "traditional" gaming segment is more or less left out.
(Or maybe I need to look harder?)
If you can't convince them, convict them.
No, you stop this bullshit. It's pretty clear that they're talking about graphics capabilities here. The word innovative doesn't even appear anywhere in the summary or articles. Every fucking time we talk about games or movies, its the same shit. "Omg, it's shiny it sucks". Shiny and "creative" and "fun" and "innovative" are all largely orthogonal to each other. Their only real conflict is the budget. And this is goddamn Crysis. It's a game which is meant to be a tech demo. Like UT. Of fucking course their making it shiny.
And you know what? Crysis was shiny as fuck when it came out. It was slightly innovative within the FPS field (the multi power suit thing). And it was FUN. Maybe you didn't like it because you were clouded by your "only play games that can run on old hardware" snobbery, but I got to run around blowing shit up and throw chickens at people. And I look forward to doing it again. In New York.
Seriously I'm tired of this shit. It's not like these new shiny games are a torture to play or anything. You just refuse to enjoy them. Did you insist on Half Life being playable on 10 year old hardware when it came out too? Doom?
No, that's like saying that a photographer with a good DSLR or a film SLR camera can be more creative than a photographer with a cell phone that takes 320x240 photos. The photographer with a good camera can make his photos low resolution, but he can also take high resolution photos where you see every detail, while the photographer with a cell phone cannot take high resolution photos even if he wants to.
You can make a low resolution PC game (Minecraft or any old PC game) but you can also make a high resolution game if you want to. If you were creating a game for the NES or a PC 15 years ago, you would not be able to create a game with good graphics even if you really wanted to.
I don't see first person shooters as immersive at all. I feel like I'm playing a floating camera with a gun attached. I prefer third person shooters for a number of reasons, 1) They don't give me dizziness and headache from the camera movement 2) They give me a much better idea of the relative position of my character compared to everything else, and doesn't make it feel like the character is floating when he climbs ladders or whatnot 3) They allow the character to have much better movements as you can see in more then one direction 4) They allow you to have more game-play mechanics like interesting melee combat.
Third person shooters can also be made competently with PC controls in mind, for instance Global Agenda is a great Team Fortressish shooter that's third person and designed for PC and I find it much nicer to play then Team Fortress 2.
To be fair, developing on a PC is DAMNED HARD. To extend your analogy:
You have to build a house. You don't know what bricks you have, what materials the walls will be made of, or even the amount of space you have to put the house in. You have to build the house in such a way as to take advantage of a 512 mb lot, or an 8gb lot. The floors might be made by nVidia, ATI, or a prefab floor by intel. Each room might be bigger or smaller than you thought.
So you've gone from a console, where you know EXACTLY the dimensions, building materials, etc of the place you're building, to one where you're building an abstracted concept of a game that is supposed to build itself from available materials and still function.
The ______ Agenda
You can make a game 20% more immersive by increasing visual fidelity, but you can't put enough lipstick on it to call it art. The concepts that made Shadow of the Colossus art could have been executed on a SNES. There is a 2D flash Portal that still feels exactly like Portal.
There is a trap in there: Visuals always make something *better*, therefore if we polish the visuals enough the game can be any arbitrary level of good. And that's just not true. You have to have a core, a soul, that makes it appealing on a human level. That's not going to be true of Crysis. Don't get me wrong, Crysis was fun. But it was bubblegum. Half-Life 2 looked amazing, but it also had the gravity gun, a story, and an eerie flip on the usual hero mythos.
The ______ Agenda
There is a lot of truth to this.
I worked on an EA title once. Everything was going fine until one of the higher ups panicked, afraid that we weren't going to meet our launch date, and took charge. The first matter of business was to reduce the bug count. This was accomplished by simply not reporting any new bugs (save for bugs that would cause us to fail cert). A lot of the cert bugs were silly things that most users wouldn't notice or care about, but they took precedent over everything else. Under my producer's instructions, I regularly packaged numerous bug fixes into single changelists, since we were only permitted to submit changelists pertaining to specific bugs (and had to cite them). I also successfully petitioned to get a few non-cert bugs fixed for the more serious issues.
The crazy thing is in the month leading up to cert, I had very little to do. I wasn't allowed to fix anything. I had about two dozen changelists that they simply wouldn't let me submit - regardless of how simple or safe the bug fixes were, or how serious the bug was. I held onto them, but they never made it into any patches either. They simply did not care about the quality of the game. It was all about getting it out the door.