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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.
Before you start saying that these consoles are essentially tapped out, keep in mind that the PS3 isn't near its full potential yet.
PS3 still not maxed out - Andrew House (SCEE President)
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=248275
PS3 hard to develop for on purpose - Kazuo Hirai (SCEE Chairman)
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=248275
Now, when you've finally "tapped out this rock", then come back and complain. Until then, blame yourselves for your inability to develop good games that take full advantage of these platforms.
I haven't seen anything innovative done on a PC that couldn't have been done on a PS2. Crysis 2 is innovative? Oh please. Two extra bullet-points on the back of a box do not make a game "innovative". Portal: innovative. Tower of Goo: innovative. Minecraft: innovative. What do they have in common? They could run on hardware that is 10 years old.
I think the Mr. Crytek fails to see past his own problems: that the shiny that his company specializes in does very little to make a game special.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
a new military-based shooter called Warface
Sorry, facebook will insist that you change it's name.
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
And it has happened again as it has happened every single generation of consoles and as it will in every future generation.
One platform is constantly shifting and upgrading, the other doesn't.
What do you think happens in the gap between console releases?
Unfortunately they're currently too busy trying to milk motion controls and using that as an excuse to not release new hardware. Hopefully Nintendo will just out of nowhere drop a magic console developed using their profits from their current gen console.
Either way some games are better on consoles (fighting, local multiplayer, driving games etc) , while other games I prefer my mouse and keyboard support (simulation, rts, fps, etc)
as long as the developers target the consoles and PC then you only have to match the specs of that console generation.
PC games are written by people who could not code on embedded machines if their life depended on it.
You mean some PC games are written by sloppy coders. Some other PC games are written by people with experience coding for 8-bit microprocessors. Still others are written by people who specialize in PC only due to console makers' institutionalized discrimination against small businesses.
Why can't, say, Dell or Gateway make a PC in a home-theater-PC case for 599 US dollars and call it the new fourth console?
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.
PC is easily a generation ahead right now.
Wii showed that graphical output isn't the only thing that defines a hardware generation. In the seventh generation, while Microsoft and Sony were moving their output forward by a generation, Nintendo moved its input forward by a generation by bundling a Bluetooth handheld pointing device with the console. It took the other guys years to come up with Kinect and Move to match the Wii Remote.
But the major consoles are still ahead of PCs in how many simultaneous players a game will usually support. This is in part because consoles are ahead in what monitor size their makers can encourage their users to connect. Sure, using a TV as a monitor has been easy since HDTV became common starting in 2006, but home theater PCs are still a rarity for some reason. Is it usability, or is it a plain old path-dependent Catch-22?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There's another thing to blame for the Wii's library limitation: Nintendo's marketing. Like Disney, the company is very dependant upon protecting their image as wholesome and family-friendly now, and must do their best to protect it from the taint of being associated with anything sexual or violent. So they are quite strict about what they allow to be published for the Wii. It's not entirely devoid of violent games, but it has fewer of them proportionally than the other major consoles. If you like U-rated games, on the other hand, it's got loads.
To understand the poor coding, you must understand the game industry and the choices they make. I'll explain using analogies that everyone can understand.
Example 1: Your task is to build a house. You can make your own brick, cut your own lumber, pour your own concrete foundation using concrete that you mixed, do your own plumbing, etc. The quality of your house is based on however much time you feel like spending to do it yourself. Obviously this would take far far too long, so you opt to use materials already created. You buy all the ingredients. Obviously some may not be up to your standard, but the loss of quality is relatively low compared to the vast amount of time you will save. You've given up a little and gained a lot.
Example 2: Your task is to build a house. You have three days to do it. The previous house, using the components you purchased, took several weeks to build. Your only solution is to use modular components. AKA, bed room. Living room. Kitchen. Bathroom. Assemble with a crane, connect together on a foundation, voila. A house. The quality suffers quite a bit using this pre-built solution, but you got the job done on time. It was the only way you could do it. You gave up a lot to get the job done on time.
Example 3: Your employer now realizes you can build houses in three days, and that there's a high demand for your house building services because you did such a good job in example one. Still, your employer thinks you can build it a little faster. Two days to build the house now. They know people won't care about the quality because once they've bought it, they've paid for it. As long as it still meets the most basic definition of a house and doesn't endanger the lives of the people living in it, it's suitable for sale. Your only option is to make a house factory and simply air lift the house in once complete. You don't even have time to secure the thing to the damn foundation.
So we've gone from perfect house to shitty house that will slide off its foundation in a strong wind. This is how the game industry is. They HAVE to use shitty tools and shitty coding to slop things out the door as fast as they can, because the marketing team has promised Call of Duty Black Ops 2 and 3 to be out by February and won't even tell the developers this until January 25th. Guess what department the executives are in?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
It's also an issue of market. High-end game PCs make up only a small part of the whole PC market. If you indeed did make games that required the horsepower of a $2000 gaming machine, I doubt you would see much profit. Yes, technically consoles are a generation behind, but if you're looking at selling lots and lots of copies, you want stable hardware specs. Most PC games are probably sitting in the generation, or at least half-generation, behind the full throttle systems as well, simply because you want as large a market as possible, and so have to have at least some level of playability on mid-range PCs. The same rules apply.
I fail to see what hardware has to do with creativity anyways. Yes, better specs can certainly improve graphics, but that's only one piece of the puzzle.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Think a lot of people are missing the point here.
They are talking about hardware, not what the current PC games compare to their console counter parts.
See, this is the problem. PC are capable of so more, yet we get a dumbed down console port instead of a game tailored to the extra stuff modern PC's can bring you.
Most PS3 & 360 games are barely 720p, usually less. Crappy AA on them, etc.
Modern PC can do the 1080p, max AA and not break a sweet. And not break your bank. Get a Nvidia 460 1gb card for $200 and you got yourself a nice card that kicks ass.
And yes, I'm a gamer. Been so for 30+ years. I prefer my PC for gaming (even got me 3D Vision, which rocks), but I do have a Xbox 360 (jtag'd), a Wii (softmodded) and will have a PS3 whenever I get enough money for it (ya, and I'll hack it also, because that's how i roll).
It's funny, because I remember when arcade games were the better graphics systems, and computers & consoles tried to be that good. Then the computers surpassed both the consoles & arcade games. And we, the computer gamers have been paying for it ever since.
(sorry, when the PS3 & 360 game out, their graphics weren't really on par with computers, they were already behind, and it's a bigger gap now).
Be seeing you...
Like Disney, the company is very dependant upon protecting their image as wholesome and family-friendly now
Yet explain how a Disney subsidiary green-lit Kill Bill.
I would have thought that was obvious, Miramax was bought by Disney in 1993 in order to allow them to release more adult orientated films without hurting their brand. A disney subsidiary green lit Kill Bill precisely because it was a subsidiary and not the main brand.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
I promise you it is not the graphics that stop me from playing games on the Wii.
It's the fucking awful games.
It's the controls.
Every Wii game I've played has come in one of two flavours: /without/ standing in front of a TV.
a) Trying to use the Wii-mote as advertised, the result being horribly awkward and ultimately impossible-to-enjoy inconsistent fumblings as the Wii really sucks at motion control.
b) Games where the developers realized the limitations of the Wii, and compensated by making the controller a prop which doesn't actually do anything. "Let's pray pretend! Now you're a sorcerer! Here, hold this stick, it's a MAGIC WAND!" entertaining for five minutes, maybe, but once you realize that your moving the stick around doesn't actually have any more effect on game than sitting on the controller at the appropriate time, it loses its appeal fast. I can play pretend all by myself
I have heard that WiiMotion+ improves greatly on what amounts to Nintendo saying it had a great idea for a console, then getting really hung over and writing its homework out in five minutes before class. I don't have a compelling reason to blow money on it, when apparently all it has going for it is "Makes Wii act like they said it would, on some new games designed for it." Especially when there's a new motion controller for another console which doesn't even need to make wild guesses about where your arms are.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I can slap a disc in a $300 box with no buttons, and play it.
Unless the game isn't for your $300 console. Imagine that your friend has recommended a PC game to you. You check the developer's web site to see if a version is available for your console, but you find that the developer has posted a rejection notice from the console maker. Various overheads associated with becoming an authorized console game developer are part of why indie games tend to be PC exclusive. Even among major-label games, many are exclusive to a console you don't have, and by the time you've bought all three consoles, you've spent more than a gaming PC costs.
Hundreds of dollars for video cards, extra memory, high-end CPU's? You gotta be kidding me.
Yeah, it is silly, especially when a $300 ION nettop with a GeForce 9400 GPU can run indie games, older games, and even some newer games at lower graphics settings.
Hasn't someone told you that here on slashdot we only understand car analogies? Get out of here, and take your damned houses with you!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Miramax was bought by Disney in 1993 in order to allow them to release more adult orientated films without hurting their brand.
So here comes the analogy: Why can't Nintendo likewise start a separate brand to release edgier games?
I would agree that there is a generational gap between true gaming PCs and consoles. That's always going to be the case. The upgrade and refresh cycles of gaming PCs are going to be much shorter than consoles. However, the console market is much larger than the true gaming PC market. In order to expand the market beyond this niche, game developers have to target "standard" PCs, and that is where the variability is hardware capabilities is an issue. If I develop a game for a console, every user is going to have essentially the same hardware (storage and peripherals may differ, but the core product is the same). Microsoft has tried to address this with WinSAT scores and games for Windows certifications, etc. However, at some point game developers have to compromise on a common denominator for hardware specs. To match the size of the console market, my guess is that the PC specifications would be comparable to or possibly less powerful than the latest generation of consoles (XBox 360, PS3).
Maybe someone should tell him that it's the GAMEPLAY that matters, not flashy graphics. I never did like Crytek's games because they felt more like tech demos that real games. Also, consoles have one more advantage. If I want to play a game I just stick the disk in and that's it. No worries if my drivers are current, or if my combination of mb+graphics would cause a problem etc. Also it's much cheaper to be a gamer on the consoles. Sure, the games are more expensive but ask yourself how often do you have to upgrade you machine? I did it every 6-12 months and each time i spend around $500 on it (new mb, new graphics and usually a new cpu) just so I could play the latest games with details on max
So lets look at some games:
- "World of Warcraft" just had The Shattering which revamped the graphics and game flow of the world adopting tech and design they learned from 6 years of successful gaming.
- Steam just told me that "Poker Night at the Inventory" is available for cheap. Although it is basically a poker game, the fun part is the conversations and jokes in the game.
- "Farmville" is still going strong
- "Minecraft" would be a hard sell if not impossible on consoles
So yeah, if you say so. I don't think flashy and poorly coded are a PC feature but something that comes from the developer regardless of their target platform.
Fortunately for us, Nintendo, Blizzard and Valve don't play by those rules.
That's already happened - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: Reflex for Wii, Call of Duty: Black Ops for Wii
I've never played them, so I don't know how they compare to CoD on the HD consoles or PC, but they certainly exist. It's not really been heavily publicised though, so I doubt the kind of person that'd be swayed by it would know about it. Heck, a lot of people I know who're into CoD think it's a 360 exclusive purely because it plays the 360 logo animation, thing, at the end of the ads.
SLASHDOT TRANSLATION:
Example 1: Your task is to build a car. You can make your own frame, cut your own windows, pour your own plastic bumpers that you mixed, do your own drivetrain, etc. The quality of your car is based on however much time you feel like spending to do it yourself. Obviously this would take far far too long, so you opt to use materials already created. You buy all the components. Obviously some may not be up to your standard, but the loss of quality is relatively low compared to the vast amount of time you will save. You've given up a little and gained a lot.
Example 2: Your task is to build a car. You have three days to do it. The previous car, using the components you purchased, took several weeks to build. Your only solution is to use modular components. AKA, Engine. Interior. Axles. Rims w/ the Rubber already on them. Assemble with a crane, connect together using screws, voila. A car. The quality suffers quite a bit using this pre-built solution, but you got the job done on time. It was the only way you could do it. You gave up a lot to get the job done on time.
Example 3: Your employer now realizes you can build cars in three days, and that there's a high demand for your car building services because you did such a good job in example one. Still, your employer thinks you can build it a little faster. Two days to build the car now. They know people won't care about the quality because once they've bought it, they've paid for it. As long as it still meets the most basic definition of a car and doesn't endanger the lives of the people driving in it, it's suitable for sale. Your only option is to make a car factory and simply ship the car in once complete. You don't even have time to test drive the thing to the 10 Kilometers.
Yeah, but that was practically a demo. I haven't tried Wii Punch Out--does it use a similar mechanic?
One of the things I really disliked about Wii Sports was that the motions you made only barely correlated with the motions your character could perform. Tennis is the best example of this--where you halt your swing determined what type of swing your character took (most people I knew tried to swing as though they were swinging a real tennis racket--which didn't work particularly well.) Most of those minigames had similar quirks.
Better, more precise motion might be useful. However I think that motion itself is vastly overrated. Between the difficulty with repeating the same motions precisely (the ability to do this separates the average person from sports players) and the difficulty of the Wii in interpreting your motions, I'll take discrete button presses any day.
That was a car analogy. It was just a really sloppy one, because he was working under a deadline.
http://xkcd.com/756//
Disney didn't make your TV so the subsidiary doesn't care that Kill Bill is out on DVD. Contrast this with the Wii, where it matters not who made the game, it is known to its users as a "Wii Game", and thus has a direct association with Nintendo's brand and image. You play it on a Wii, it says "Nintendo" on the packaging... you get my drift.
Nintendo's kid-friendly image is a huge part of their business strategy, they automatically win all the overprotective parents who are terrified of the Xbox and its filth-laden Live service, where everyone and everything is a "nigger" and/or "faggot" according to its prominent users. I can't speak of the PS3 since I don't have one, but I would speculate that the it is not much different, due to being marketed to the same adult / hardcore crowd as the Xbox. Hell, there was a (shitty) game on the old Xbox where victory resulted in a "Girls-Gone-Wild" style clip being presented as your reward. You'll never see vodka-doused tits on a Nintendo console, that's for sure!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I hesitate to point this out, but:
Your Example 1 could describe most OSS games.
Your Example 2 could describe most commercial games.
Now go do a side-by-side comparison of the two, for any given genre.
And I say this as an OSS advocate.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Just look at the newest games and how badly they perform on supposedly "powerful" machines.
That is wrong. At the default (mainstream) settings virtually all games play well on the current level of gaming computers. Although I will concede that there have been some console ports that perform so poorly that you wonder whether they are running under a console emulator. But that is not representative of all PC games.
The people who complain about poor performance are those who insist on pushing all the game settings up to maximum. The reason they have the adjustable settings in PC games is for those people who spend stupid amounts of money on their systems, to extend the shelf life of the game by future-proofing it, and to make pretty screenshots to help sell the game.
People often use your argument as a reason for why console gaming is better, but that it because console games don't have the option of increasing the video settings to maximum. They are fixed at the mainstream level. And often the default mainstream settings on a PC game will still look better than the console versions.
Finally, if you decide to revisit an old game in a few years time, your console game won't age as well as a PC game because you will be able to use all the maximum settings on your upgraded PC. That comparison is assuming your PS4 or XBOX 720 will actually run the old software.
Look man there is nothing wrong with liking gameplay. I am a full supporter of the "games need to have good gameplay" idea. However there is also no need to hate on graphics, which seems to common on Slashdot. A kind of techno luddism. "Oh these games would be just as good with older graphics on low end hardware." No, sorry, but that is false. A game is a rich experience. Part of that experience is visuals and good visuals go a long way to making that experience immersive.
So holding gameplay up as the One and Only Thing is no more valid than holding up graphics as the One and Only Thing. Also, guess what? There's more that a PC offers than just graphics. A big one that DOES relate to gameplay is memory. If you want to have a game with a big world, with a lot that goes on, memory is needed. This is part of the reason that the PC still sees the best strategy titles (keyboard and mouse are another). 512MB that you have to share with the video card, or 256MB that you don't (360 and PS3 respectively) is awful tight to try and store a big, active, world in. A PC can easily give you a gig or more for your dedicated use.
I agree that Crytek needs a bit of STFU since their gameplay is for shit they are graphics-only game makers. However let's not get up on the "Fuck graphics," techno-luddism crap. I play many games from many eras. I emulate old games from my youth, I play current high end games. While a good story (where applicable) and fun gameplay are key, good graphics and sound are great too.
Wolfenstein 3D is probably forever the most innovative 3D shooter since it invented the genre. However I'm sorry, but some of its less innovative modern counterparts are far better. Call of Duty 4 was a great game, and part of that was the wonderful graphics and sound. You couldn't do that game on a 286 like Wolf3D. Cut all the graphics, sounds, AI, levels, and so on back to what was required and the game wouldn't even be the same thing.
Progress on ALL fronts in game design is a good thing. Also holding "innovation" meaning doing something that has never been done before, up as the be-all, end-all is also silly. It is hard to be truly original and that isn't really a bad thing. We as a species have imagined a lot of thing, and there is nothing wrong with building on what is out there. Even most innovative things do. They are more original than some things, but you can still point out heavy influence from past works and other media.
I have to agree with Crytek that PCs have it better when it comes to games. They can do any console game out there that someone bothers to port and can do it higher resolution, higher FPS, better graphics and so on. They can also do titles the consoles can't. Look at Civilization 4 and 5 vs Civilization Revolutions. You can't do the full Civ games on a console, they lack the memory to handle it (among other things).
I am sick and tired of nerds calling their PCs rigs and referring to their IT workplaces as a windows "shop" or linux "shop". You guys are not blue collar workers and you would be laughed out of any bar that had real blue collar workers in it.
rig - noun - apparatus for some purpose; equipment; outfit; gear: a hi-fi rig; Bring your rod and reel and all the rest of your fishing rig.
Thank you for confirming that you have some irrational hatred of PC gaming and that your opinions on the subject are therefore irrelevant.
Read Pynchon.
How about large game worlds? Consoles, with their tiny memory amounts, put real limits on that kind of shit. As an interesting study in this, look at Deus Ex 1 vs Deus Ex 2. DX1 was PC only, running on Unreal Engine 1. Levels were more or less large, continuous, zones. You'd start and just walk around the whole thing, no loading. Also it wasn't streaming, the whole level was active, NPCs moved around freely and did things off camera. DX2 was designed for consoles, using Unreal Engine 2. Despite being a number of years later and requiring better hardware, the zones are tiny. You are in a little area and have to move through doors or other interlocks to reach a new one. The reason is that the Xbox, which it also ran on, had only 64MB of memory. Zones had to be kept small to fit in that.
Now you can fake this, to a degree, with streaming. Stream the data from disc as needed. But you can't have a truly free world where everything is loaded and active all the time. Look at Grand Theft Auto 3 or Vice City. You discover that other than special objects, like police chasing you or cars for missions, nothing exists that is out of your FOV. Look at a street, turn around, then turn back. It changes because it is regenerated. Again, done because of the small memory on the PS2 which it also runs on.
These are gameplay affecting things. A designer has to engineer around that limit rather than making the game as they want.
Also I'm sorry, but graphics have a long way to go. They are good, but they aren't fooling me they are real. Until that day, more power is needed. The limit should be the imagination, not GPU power. As a minor example, take resolution. The consoles are only 720p devices (1280x720). Yes, they do basic upsampling but you gain no detail with that. Other than a few rare PS3 games (which suffer in therms of textures and so on because of it) that run at 1080, they all run at 720, and sometimes even less.
On a PC you can do far more. I like my 1920x1200 gaming, but really I want more. I want smaller pixels on a bigger display. I want the beyond 2k screens that are out there (2560x1600) and I want it at a smooth 60fps. PCs can handle that, generally, with high end hardware.
Of course past just resolution there are plenty of other things that could be made to look better too.
The idea that what we have now is "good enough" is silly. You could say that of any time in the past, but then when presented with somethign better, suddenly that better thing is rather nice.
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
I see you've never head of pathfinding AI. Hundreds of units moving around, all having to figure out where they want to go over a gigantic map with different speed values for every tile of terrain. Having to do that can make almost any processing unit shake in sheer terror. Not something console FPS games have to deal with.
And go upgrade your memory you caveman.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
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.
Wii Sports Resort, which came bundled with more recent consoles and uses the MotionPlus accessory, is much better in this regard.
I was in japan a couple months ago, played a fucking awesome wii fps. [snip] Probably helped that I was drunk and a cute girl was giving me a blowjob at the time (^_^)
This was clearly a dream
Consoles have always had a simple weakness. Memory. Developers love it, consoles don't have it.
Netbooks now come with 2GB. The PS3 comes with 512mb. That is all, video and main memory and in some ways it really only 256mb. When was the last time you had a computer with 256mb main memory? Or for that matter a 256mb video card? Oh okay, my current netbook has but then I would hardly call it a gaming machine.
A perfect example was Morrowind, it performed horrible on the PC at first with frequent loading between "zones". Until a PC only expansion was added which increased the memory usage. Foila, no more loading. The original game had been designed with the console in mind and so was extremely conservative with the amount it used.
Games like Fallout 3 show it as well. My DUAL core PC not only has higher resolution textures by default, it can even run smooth with insanely high definition user made textures. That is a DUAL core PC, two cores are better then 6(or 3 I believe for the x-box)? Why yes, because while the consoles are chugging along with constant streaming from a slow HD, my humble PC just has it in memory, in the 1 gig (4x video memory of the console) video memory.
Further proof lies in the horrible PS3 as a linux machine performance. Seriously, who would want a linux desktop with 256mb memory? Why not just try to run linux on the DS and really hurt yourself... oh wait... someone is doing just that.
But can't clever programming offset this? No, not really. That same clever programming after all also works on PC's so they get the same benefit and STILL have tons more memory. While you can make a lot of fun games that use little memory, a lot of games just don't fit. You can't have a large open persistent world where you can zoom around and have non-streaming optimized content (Think GTA where you have lots of car models but only a couple loaded at the same time) in 512mb.
And no, it ain't just shooters. Think the Sims 3. All that user created content, were is it going to fit? A decent installation with a owner who wants her sims to be JUST right already can bring a PC to its knees with its memory demands. On the console forget it! The HD would catch on fire.
The simple fact is that once all the tricks on the PS2 were learned, it was still a horribly obsolete machine compared to an average PC. Only people that don't game think different. Why do think we still got PC only games? MMO development is PC only (the recent FFXIV is such a failure that it can't be counted)?
Somehow I think the guys at Crytek know better then some console fanboy.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
However I have a hard time plopping down $1000+ for a gaming PC when games on a $300 xbox or playstation look only marginally worse.
However I have a hard time spending $300 on an xbox/playstation when I can buy a $100 graphic card for my PC and get graphics that looks marginally better than any console.
Well you can get a perfectly capable gaming PC for $800, and you can save money in the long term by upgrading individual parts instead of buying a whole new console. Also PC games are often much cheaper than their console equivalents. So I think really it's not true that it's much more expensive to be a PC gamer. :)