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How To Ruin Your Game's PC Port
An anonymous reader writes "An article at Ars goes through some of the biggest sins game publishers commit when porting a console game to the PC. At the top of the list, predictably, are annoying DRM and inconvenient game settings. From the article: 'PC gamers like to play with their mouse settings, adjust the amount of detail in the characters or environment, and change the audio mix between the music and the sound effects. We want to adjust the resolution, the aspect ratio, and even the field of view settings. The more options given to PC gamers, the better. While some engines support more options than others, there is a minimum amount of tweaking that should be available when we jump into the game. For an example of how badly PC gamers can get screwed on this issue, we can take a look at Bulletstorm when it was launched. Not only was mouse smoothing turned on as a default, but there was no way to turn it off. You had to find the configuration files, which were encrypted for some insane reason, and then install a third-party program to be able to turn off mouse smoothing and get the game feeling like it should on the PC."
Note how 3 of the 5 things actually mean extra work for the game developers and QA department. That work probably causes the 4th thing to happen: delayed release.
Easy: just disconnect your joystick, connect your game port to the electric grid and the electronics will blow.
... have I (as a PC gamer) encountered crappy console conversions. Three examples off the top of my head:
Mirrors Edge: Yes, you could configure the controls, but in-game they were still referred to by their Xbox 360 identifiers. I.e. you could set jump to space, but in the tutorial it kept referring to non-existant buttons. Made the game virtually impossible to play since you'd get confused by the bad labeling.
Blur: Insane keyboard controls and completely unconfigurable. You had two keyboard layouts to choose from, both pre-defined and written in stone. Or you could use a 360-controller. Completely retarded. Various references all through the game telling you not to turn off your "console" while saving.
Assassins Creed: Completely un-intuitive console controls. Impossible to change.
Feel free to provide more examples.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
I know I do - nothing is as annoying as having optical disk randomly spin up during gaming (I have a very quiet system with optical drive being the strongest noise source by far). Even worse is crap like GFWL, which you end up having to crack just to get better overall gaming experience, or sometimes a working game in general.
Also, Witcher2 seems to have sold well in spite of being an AAA title with no DRM (at least as far as the genre is concerned).
Why should 'software development craftsman' be exempt from the rules/expectations required of real world craftsmen?
You demand equal protections from the law, regulations, and business practices for your IP...or is IP something ephemeral and aether-like?
You insist on calling yourself 'engineers'.
Hmm. So I guess it's 'Hurray for me, and Fsck you!'
Make up your mind/s already.
[generalized warning...outliers expected]
I guarantee you that I can 'hack and crack' the physical world far more than anyone can do so in any game. MacGyver be damned, for a n00b and amateur.
Why not approach it from a 180 degree, player POV, instead of 'what will make next quarter profits'. It is not a binary choice....there is a middle ground.
It has been arguably documented that a strong 'mod community' helped promotion/sales*KaChing!$* for said game.
YMMV, but it seems to correlate with the perceived value of the game to the user/buyer to your game.. (hint:GIGO from POV)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
1. Require Games for Windows Live to be installed.
2. Require Securom to be installed.
3. Sell the game on steam with the above two.
Design for console, then port to pc.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
When I read "How To Ruin Your PC's Game Port", I thought "Easy! Just apply an overvoltage!" and immediately thought about all the wonderful hacks that we did, driving stepper motors via the parallel port and reading ultrasound proximity sensors via the game port...
*sigh*
Those were the days...
He isn't claiming that EVERY SINGLE PC GAMER is like that. He is saying the majority of PC gamers are like that. And so far it does seem that's in fact true.
I grade your comment C-.
With my ISP randomly disconnecting at random times, any offline game which proposes to boot me out several times a day just because the ISP crapped... yeah, it just told me I'll need a cracked version just to be able to enjoy the game.
In fact, it's starting to make me think about plain old piracy. I haven't pirated games since early college, but maybe I should look into it again. The idea of being counted in the success story of that DRM stupidity if I buy it and then have to have to crack it just to be able to play, is seriously unappealing.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Minecraft, probably the current king of indie games, only runs at 800x600...
Yeah, there's a fix for that, too...press the "Maximize" button.
I've been buying more games lately and have been amazed at how many have to be run in windowed mode, run at an incredibly low resolution, or both.
I haven't used Solitaire for Windows 7. Can it go into full screen? Because Solitaire for Windows XP is still limited to windowed mode. Title bar and taskbar remain if I maximize it.
Minecraft, probably the current king of indie games, only runs at 800x600
And Super Mario Bros. only runs at 256x240.
The last time I checked the numbers, console and handheld games sales accounted for something like 7x the sales of PC games in the U.S. (about $1 billion a year for PC games, and $7 billion for console and handheld games) And that gap has been widening for years.
So which do you think they're going to prioritize?
In fact, considering those numbers, I'm shocked that any developer still releases any PC-only games at all. If they're not developing console ports, they're basically throwing away most of their money.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Because most people don't hook computers up to their TVs.
Then why are people willing to hook up things like Logitech's Google TV box or a PLAYSTATION 3 console but not a similarly priced small-form-factor PC with an AMD CPU and NVIDIA graphics?
as far as PCs go, it's a much better experience to just play over a network, with each person having their own screen.
I agree with you with respect to FPS and RTS. But in a game like Street Fighter series or Bomberman series, what advantage would there be to give a distinct view of the action to each player?
I never understood why so many people liked goldeneye.
Because buying three extra TVs, three extra N64 consoles, and four copies of the game would have been cost prohibitive. There was a serial port on the original PlayStation for precisely such games, but the PSOne redesign didn't have it because so few games used it because it did turn out cost prohibitive.
I read this as "How To Ruin Your PC's Game Port"
My first thought was they still make PCs with game ports?
My second thought was I wonder what they are using the game port for that it gets ruined...
My third thought was I've been playing games on my PC for a long time...
My fourth thought was I wonder if I can get Tie Fighter working on windows 7
[The Universe] has gone offline.
My games library has rapidly grown to contain far more indie titles than recent AAA titles. I get accused being some sort of "I liked it when it was obscure!" hipster because of it. And I reply, "No, I just prefer giving my money to people who seem to want it and don't punish me for it."
Details cost money. A while ago I worked for a large company that produces printed content. During a presentation the presenter was very proud they had managed to get rid of a guy who was unwilling to adjust to changing times by retraining. The guy's job? Proof reading. He was a proof reader and that is what he wanted to do and continue to do. So when his position was made redundant, he was fired for being unwilling to change. This was meant to tell us that we had to be flexible and go with the flow. What it told me? I don't know, I was to busy noticing all the spelling errors in their publication.
How does this relate? Stuff like the driver setup used to be a part of the core development team and the reason big companies made better titles. It wasn't glamorous work but there are many developers who are no good with the latest 3D tech but who can write a reliable installer and test it over and over again on varying hardware and keep the program up to date. But it isn't glamorous.
So when companies can cut that job, they will. It used to part of every large publisher to have an installer routine that would handle all the setup. Now? That is an afterthought. When consoles became more capable then the xTh platformer, those companies that shifted towards the console instantly gave up configurability. There are a lot of console games where you can't even turn the music off. It just ain't an option. Why? Because it is easier, one less thing to test, one less setting that can be messed up.
But as the article rightfully notes, PC gamers expect more. So we ignore the bad ports and game companies think that the PC gaming market is dying (plugging their fingers in their ears to avoid hearing Blizzard laughing all the way to the bank for year after year).
Mind you, bad ports are nothing new. I remember some fairly old games that had it. Console producers can't do PC games. It is a different market. For instance, when I recently finally played on a console for the first time in over a decade I was quite surprised to see game go to a black screen to save progress at SAVEPOINTS... on a PC I just hit quicksave and it saves instantly never interrupting the game flow...
Poor console gamers. They don't just have to deal with poor design in ports, their native games suck too.
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.