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PC Gaming's 10 Commandments

Posted by Soulskill on from the thou-shalt-not-use-a-trackball dept.

An anonymous reader tips a Tech Report article laying out ten sacred conventions of PC gaming. Quoting: "VI. Keep thine configurations options exposed. PC gamers are used to being able to configure things. That comes from both necessity and whim, and while one doesn't necessarily need to cater to the latter, the former is a must. Games don't have to expose a 1000-line menu for every conceivable detail level on the torches of King Whatever's castle entrance, but we'd like at least some amount of granularity. ... X. Honor thine modders and mod communities. Not every game benefits from mod support, mind you. When they do and the tools exist, however, the result is almost invariably a much bigger and more pervasive community (especially on the multiplayer front). That, in turn, leads to a constant stream of sales. It truly is a win-win situation."

4 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Good list... by JosKarith · · Score: 4, Insightful

    User-remappable controls are a neccessity. It's less of a problem now but there's plenty of games that I never bothered with more than 1/2 hr of because of idiotic control schema.
    Oh, and if you insist on 5 minute long unskippable cutscenes followed by a hard bossfight for the love of Xenu have an autosave between them. Your beautifully rendered cutscene gets really tedious when you've heard the joke half-a-dozen times.

    --
    'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
  2. Re:GFWL, DIAF by KiloByte · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Wait, what? You _want_ intrusive DRM and think this is a "good" thing?

    Steam, Battle.net -- no deal. Local DRM like SecuROM rootkit is at least easily avoidable thanks to cracks. And no, I will never allow a rootkit to be installed on a system that's run natively, even on a throw-away partition.

    These days, it's groups like Razor and Skidrow whom you can trust...

    --
    The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
  3. Cut scenes by david.given · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Don't forget these:
    • All cut scenes shall be skippable, or else the FPSers will hunt you down and kill you.
    • All cut scenes shall be repeatable, or else the RPGers will hunt you down and kill you.

    Corrolary:

    • Thou shalt not put a five minute unskippable cut scene immediately before a boss fight. Or else everyone will hunt you down and kill you.
  4. Re:Good list... by PopeRatzo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "XI: If thou art an fps and if thou art not a realistic military simulator, thou shalt stick any ideas regarding two-weapon limits quite firmly where the sun shineth not.

    While you're a lot more knowledgeable about games than I am, RogueyWon, I think the good thing about this list is that it avoided making "commandments" about issues regarding the actual play of the game. Every commandment is about technical issues, like interface conventions, key bindings and modding communities.

    I think when you start talking about how many guns you can carry, it becomes trickier to force any commandments. Military sims aren't the only games where you might want to place some arbitrary limit on the player's ability.

    But I understand where your frustration comes from. I played Duke Nukem Forever too (at least I started it - I doubt I'll finish it). When you have a game that revels in over-the-top silliness, having a limit on weapons is kind of pointless (as you have pointed out in your excellent journal review of the game).

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.