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Putting Up With Consolitis
An anonymous reader tips an article about 'consolitis,' the term given to game design decisions made for the console that spill over and negatively impact the PC versions of video games.
"Perhaps the most obvious indicator of consolitis, a poor control scheme can single-handedly ruin the PC version of a game and should become apparent after a short time spent playing. Generally this has to do with auto-aim in a shooter or not being able to navigate menus with the mouse. Also, not enough hotkeys in an RPG — that one’s really annoying. ... Possibly the most disastrous outcome of an industry-wide shift to console-oriented development is that technological innovation will be greatly slowed. Though a $500+ video card is considered top of the line, a $250 one will now play pretty much any game at the highest settings with no problem. (Maybe that’s what everyone wanted?) Pretty soon, however, graphics chip makers won’t be able to sustain their rate of growth because the software is so far behind, which will be bad for gamers on consoles as well as PC."
Here I thought this was going to be about Nintendo Thumb.
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
If anything games are becoming more like computer games overall. Traditional console RPGs look more like MMOs now, games require patching and even have DRM...a few quirks introduced by lazy companies that do lazy ports don't make "consolitis".
In fact it's likely to be a good thing, programmers will need to make the most of current hardware rather than skipping out on optimisations just because they know new faster hardware is always around the corner. Just look at the way the graphics quality of games on consoles increases over the lifetime even though the hardware stays the same.
Video cards push pixels and the number of pixels has stalled in the last couple of years. 1920x1080 is the norm, and there appears to be no push to go higher. I read a great rant last year that effective summed it up. You can't blame console games for the fact that PC gamers have screens with the same resolution as their TVs. Blame either the manufacturers for failing to increase pixel density or consumers for failing to demand it. You've got to go to a 30" monitor to get a higher resolution, and the price of those beasts scares most people away. Why pay $800+ for a 30" when a pair of 24" 1080p monitors costs half that?
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Still waiting for my in-retina display.
So you're complaining because you can spend a relatively modest sum to play any game that you want without having to worry about a $500-1000 upgrade every year or two? Get the fuck out! This is unequivocally a Good Thing(tm).
The summary should have read "FiringSquad ad revenue is on the decline, here's an article about nothing, for you to linkspam".
Yeah, console games usually make for shitty PC ports, which is freakin' pathetic since the console title had to be developed on a PC in the first place, and today's middleware makes the distinctions largely irrelevant. This is not news. The same was true back in the 80's (minus the middleware).
My biggest peeve ? Not the shitty controls. Not the slightly degraded textures. Not the total lack of post-release fixes. No, my biggest peeve is when a stupid console port restricts your choice of display resolution. It is trivial to pull a list of API-sourced geometries and run with it, rather than hardcode for 720p and 1080p... or worse yet: 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768. Yeah ok, I was running 1024x768 fifteen years ago, it's kinda tired.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
"Though a $500+ video card is considered top of the line, a $250 one will now play pretty much any game at the highest settings with no problem. (Maybe that’s what everyone wanted?) Pretty soon, however, graphics chip makers won’t be able to sustain their rate of growth because the software is so far behind, which will be bad for gamers on consoles as well as PC."
Making content that looks good at 1080P (or 1920x1200 for some PC monitors) is hard. Some amazingly specialized people spend a lot of time working on it; the more powerful the graphics processor, the more that is possible, but the more art assets have to be created (along with all the associated maps to take advantage of lighting, special effects, shader effects...) and the more programming time has to me spent. Much like the number of pixels increases far faster than the perimeter of the screen, or the volume of a sphere increases faster than its surface area... the work to support ever-increasing graphics power grows faster than the visual difference in the image.
It's not sustainable, but those advancing graphics processors are a big part of why game developers are moving to consoles: a shinier graphics engine costs more money to develop, which increases the minimum returns for a project to be successful. Anyone who looks at the business side can see that the market of people who have $500 graphics cards is much tinier than the market of people who have an Xbox360 or Playstation3. If you're going to spend that much money on the shiny, of course you're going to shoot for a bigger return too!
When it takes a big team to develop something... well, that's generally not where the innovation is going to happen.
--Matthew
I really, really miss Loki.
I still want to kick someone at Epic in the nutts for not following through with the promised Linux port of UT3. (My copy is still sitting there waiting to be played for the first time)
If you use SDL and Open GL you can make it work on everything easier! /rant complete, my version of PC gaming covered, go back to bitching about consoles and Windows Microsoft weenie.
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Pretty soon, however, graphics chip makers won’t be able to sustain their rate of growth because the software is so far behind
Well, that seems good to me. One of the deterrents of PC gaming is the everchanging hardware specs. If consoles have proved already that we can live with the hardware power from 6 years ago and still make games that look quite impressive (at least, sufficiently good), perhaps it's time that computer videocards slow down and allow the population to catch up. It sucks buying a $250 video card just to have to replace it in 2 years, whereas this-generation-consoles have lasted 6 years. The solution is, of course, to buy a $500 videocard, which will be good for a few years, but with that money you can get a console with controllers and one or two bundled games, so why bother? Not to mention buying a decent mouse, keyboard, screen and speakers.
Perhaps we should even learn from the wii and the indie games, which can run on computers 7 years old! Why must we have a new hyper-mega-powerful new $600 video card every year?
Sure, one could argue that video-game developers could actually take advantage of the new hardware (DX 11, anyone?) and have amazingly-looking games, but why bother? Do we really want more realism, graphics-wise, than the MOH and COD franchises currently offer? I think that the success of those franchises, specially the last three CODs, speak for itself. We don't need a new over-hyped video card every six months; we don't need a thousand different model-names that no one understands; we don't need cutting-edge technology to make games. And certainly, we don't need to have such a hostile environment like what PC gaming is, which just turns away most would-be gamers.
That is, truly, what the consoles do right. You don't have to know anything about computers or videogames to pick up one and within minutes start playing your new videogame. You need not install, tweak or configure in any way your games or consoles. You need not update to the latest card drivers. You need not replace any part of your console (except the ones that stop working) every two years; you don't need to worry about system specs, and figuring out if your GT 250 is better or worse than a GT 260 or a HD 5730. Finally, while I'm on it, you need not worry about fucking DRM in your console games, although that's another story (and perhaps the trade is fair, for PC gamers need not fear that their PC manufacturer suddenly bricks their computer... unless sony is involved).
Besides, everyone keeps complaining how games nowadays focus on looking stunning and having great sound effects and, basically, taking too much effort into the media part of the game, while slacking off in other areas, like immersiveness, story, character development and all that. Now they're saying "we should have better graphics now!". I call bullshit.
It's just what we wanted. Yes, we, that almost certainly includes you. Remember those times when we were playing our precious games, misunderstood by surroundings? When we wished they would try, and understand?
... and BTW how virtually every "PC magazine" from a decade ago was marveled for some reason about "PC console" (while openly shunting "old school" ones) looks even funnier now)
Guess what - it happened! Be happy. Games are now made for general consumption (which impacts also traditional console games / many characteristic genres almost disappeared, possibilities of controllers are also underutilized, presentation is not what it used to be, even UIs often forget that scrollable nested menus is what works in this world. What the author whines about are hybrids - probably helped by Xbox, how it brought very universal SDK
General population also doesn't like constant upgrade cycles BTW. But...no technical innovation? How hard was it to, say, miss the recent ruckus about Kinect?
And overall, I really don't know what the problem is. Sure, a lot of games "sux"...but even when limiting myself to games of the past, I'm pretty sure I would have good things to play for the rest of my life.
One that hath name thou can not otter
It's not big deal, really... I had my consils removed from me when I was a kid and I turned out (mostly) fine. Now I game on PCs and I'm better for it.
10 years ago, a good chunk of gaming was done on PCs because consoles were crap - standard def, too-small TVs, and the like, so people bought nice high-end PCs and invested in them. Dropping $2000+ on a PC wasn't unheard of nor unusual.
These days, spending more than $500 on a PC is very unusual - only Apple and PC gamers do that stuff, and really, it's no surprise why. And that $500 gets you a monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers and other accessories.
Who's the #1 graphics chip maker in the world? It's not nVidia or AMD, it's Intel. (Sure, nVidia and AMD have the discrete graphics market, but that's a really tiny chunk of the whole PC market). When PC prices plummeted below $1000 and then below $500 (and laptops became "netbooks" below $500) manufacturers know that the average PC buyer cares about Gigs (hard drive space), Gigs (RAM) and Gigs (CPU GHz). Nowhere do they really care about graphics - after all, Windows does just fine on Intel graphics, and that's all the user sees.
The higher end PCs with discrete graphics sell far less, even one with a low-end graphics may be considered a gaming PC (and little Jonny's mom and pop aren't buy a PC for games, oh no, they want so Jonny can work).
PC gaming is huge - after all, FarmVille and the like don't require super high end ultimate graphics chips and many popular indie tities have lightweight requirements that even the cheapest of netbooks can play them.
The problem is, as we all know, Intel graphics are crap (though they're supposed to get better now with nVidia), and can barely do 1080p video decoding and high-def gaming.
So people buy a console as well - and with HDTV, they get high-def and on the big ol' 52" HDTV versus their 17"/20" PC monitor (or whatever is free these days). They could buy it on a PC as well (it's easy enough to do), but that requires spending money buying more PC - they could build/configure a great PC for $600, but that's over the "cap" of PC prices of $500. (Everyone gasps at the price of a $1000 MacBook Air, comparing it to a $300 netbook (despite better graphics (Intel vs nVidia) and CPU (Core2Duo is old, but runs rings around Atom), SSD, RAM, etc.).
Hell, I tried to convince someone to spend $1000 to buy a decent laptop and they balked.
No, it's not consoles limiting graphics of games - it's PCs themselves. The number of people with high end $600+ video cards (or probably any nVidia or AMD graphics cards of the past say 4 years) is very small compared to the total PC market. And we know PC gaming is larger than console gaming, but they're all for games that can play on the #1 video card on the market.
And developers go for the money - there are more console gamers out there than hardcore PC gamers with power graphics cards (and the willingness to upgrade yearly or so) - even though there are more PC gamers in general. Other than that, consoles and PCs are pretty much plug-and-play (and Sony's making the PS3 a PC experience with installers, EULAs, serial keys, online DRM, oh my).
Don't generalize, I never wished for such a thing.
I just wanted and want to have fun period, all my friends and I are gamers since the 80s. And most of us find the current game generation to be horrid outside of indie gaming or rare gems.
Who (except graphic card manufacturers) regrets the time where you had to buy a super-expensive video card to play recent games ? Of course everyone want to run their games on the cheap PC they have.
Personally, I prefer game graphics to have great artistic design, instead of higher resolution.
Dunno, it seems to me like when greed is good explanation, that's probably at least a good chunk of the real explanation.
Displays had been sold for an awfully long time by diagonal size, to the point where some people think that a 21" is a 21". In reality at the same diagonal, the closer to square it is, the bigger the surface, and the more wide format it is, the lesser the surface. It's only basic geometry.
For CRTs it didn't make much difference for the total cost, but for flat screen panels it does. Also because less surface means less pixels at the same pixel size, thus less transistors and incidentally less chance for bad pixels too.
So the biggest push for 16/10 displays was from manufacturers who figured they could sell more displays for the same materials, rather than for any real market demand. The market was basically mostly just dumb enough to think they're still getting a 21" so it's not like it's smaller or anything; and hey, it's a little cheaper too.
Now 16/9 happens for largely the same reason.
Mark my words, in a few years you'll see something like 256/81 screens.
If displays had been historically sold by megapixels like the cameras, we'd probably have square ones instead. But the measurement was made for CRTs which don't even really have a native resolution and are more limited by bandwidth instead. So inches was the simplest way to tell Joe Average what he's getting.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
While the intended console port was a limiting factor, I think by far the biggest problem was their being made by Cryptic. In fact by the original guys who couldn't even do the maths to see that a "situational" power could be made to stack with itself twice over at level 22, in COH, or produced balance swings so extreme as to go from City Of Blasters (a devices blaster could floor any enemy's accuracy) to City Of Tankers (tanks became basically invulnerable even to hundreds of enemies at a time.) COH has in the meantime been mostly fixed by Positron (in as much as possible without pulling a Sony-style NGE and ripping out the existing game's core), but Statesman and a good chunk of the gang of innumerates responsible for the COH fuckups went on to make CO.
CO suffered from a lot of problems, from a badly thought out game system, to poor graphics, to just plain old barely enough content to even level you up. Cryptic basically aimed at developing it on a shoestring budget, and it really showed. I don't think it would have been a huge success even with a COH-like mouse and keyboard interface.
STO was largely the same deal. It was a game which took one of the biggest franchises in history and... aimed for a 20,000 player base. No, really, the budget was such that it was to be viable even if it failed badly. And as happens when you aim to suck so badly that only the worst fanboys stick with you, it did.
Again the game had plain old too little content, and worse yet, you could miss out on missions by just not being in the right quadrant when you ask, so you could easily end up seemingly with nothing more to do except grind randomly generated and not very interesting "exploration" missions until the next contact wants to talk to you.
To hammer on the impression of too little content, the game launched with exactly two factions, and one of them (the Klingons) didn't even have any content except doing (the STO equivalent of) battlegrounds all the time.
It also generally had plain old too little of everything, including character slots. (Everything more than 3 had to be bought with real cash.)
It also didn't help that the game was more of a merchandising exercise than aiming to tell its own story. You know, like putting Spock's face on a t-shirt, not because it makes it a better t-shirt, but just because lemmings will pay more for that.
And I'm not against a little merchandising for theme and flavour, but in STO it was badly done. The game insisted on shoving it down my throat all the time that this is where Riker used the Briar Patch like Bre'r Rabbit, this is the gang that Picard met on some date, etc. At some point I was afraid I'd one day go to the toilet and the game would inform me that I'm using the same urinal Riker did in some episode ;)
In simpler terms, they didn't even remember the "show, don't tell" rule. They had to keep telling me how this connects with some episode or another from the series, and it got repetitive fast.
Etc.
Don't get me wrong, I really wanted to like both games, not the least because I'm kinda fed up with medieval fantasy games. Well, "fed up" is probably too strong a term: I have nothing against them per se, but I've already played plenty and some SF for a change is a nice change. But they both aimed very low
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Most of the games I play STILL only use 1 core. It's soooo nice to see the game flogging along at 12% CPU usage with 8% GPU utilization on my GTS-250.