Video Game Consoles Are 'Fundamentally Doomed,' Says Lord British

zacharye writes "Microsoft sold nearly one million Xbox 360s last week alone, but we're nearing the end of the road for video game consoles according to one industry visionary. Richard Garriott, known for having created the fantasy role-playing franchise Ultima, says converged devices such as computers, smartphones and tablets will soon render dedicated game consoles obsolete: '... the power that you can carry with you in a portable is really swamping what we've thought of as a console.'"

Comments

What he talks about

[InsightIn140Bytes]

He doesn't really talk about consoles being doomed per se. He talks about how tablets and smart phones are soon so powerful that they can render the same quality graphics that consoles can, and people can just plugin their smartphones to TV to play. He also says the technical limitations again push people to make fun and interesting games instead of just going for the graphics. He then mentions how Facebook games are an interesting platform and they're fundamentally very same to MMO games which sell users items, just that they are played on Facebook. He also said that mobile phone games have given him much more fun than computer or console games. As far as computers go, he didn't say computers are going to render game consoles obsolote - just that people are going to play on Facebook, or their service, using them.

And I agree with him. The technical limitations does make developers concentrate on the fun side of things. But that is also true for indie titles. Indie developers don't have the budget to make the best looking games, so they have to concentrate on making them fun. But I have to admit, large companies have started to notice too. They do have their big name franchises like Call of Duty and Battlefield, which are very fun in their own ways, but you have to admit that even large companies have put out very fun games lately.

Of course, Valve was again one of the first western companies who saw this and did it right with Team Fortress 2. They put out the game for free and let people buy weapons and miscelannelous items from the store. Yet, the weapons people can buy are not overpowered and can be got via drops, trading or crafting too. In some cases the stock weapons new players get are actually the best ones. The other ones only vary your gameplay style, so it's up to you which you use, but none is really better than another. And the game is absolutely fun and hilarious online, as it has great comedic aspect too.

As much as Slashdotters hate everything-Facebook, I do like some games there. It's getting really really better lately, and is only going to do so as companies are starting to fight to gain users. This is only good, as it means better quality games which aren't out there just to make quick cash. They have to put out quality to get any new players. The social aspect in Facebook games is great. I have several South Korean girls I play Sims Social with and have had interesting chats with them on the side (and they're cute too, ofc ;-).

I also played Civilization World, which is Facebook version of Civilization series. You get assigned to some server with up to 200 players (if some of your friend is already playing, you usually end up on same). If you don't join others you're independant nation, but if you do and it's recommended, you're one city of the civilization you join. You improve your own city, take battles by assigning your troops along with other players troops from your civ, and just work together. Even if it was still a little bit buggy, I had a late fun night playing with some US guy when all others had already went to sleep and we had to defend our civilization together. As the battles take time (so that players have time to come put more troops even if they're not in the game all the time), it got hectic and a gamble of which weather (and effects) we would get to defend against much larger nation.

So yes, game consoles might be going away, but not the way it's implied.

Re:What he talks about

[Tapewolf]

While my 17 years in game programming falls quite a bit short of Garriot's, I don't think the Ultima series was particularly taxing of the hardware the same way large open world 3D rendered games are.

Oh, it was. Ultima 6 was designed to run in 256 colours, in about 1990 IIRC. They had to provide dithered fallback modes for EGA, CGA and the others for it to work on the other hardware.

Ultima 7 was developed on something like a 386-33, but the target platform was a 386sx-16, if I remember the Ultima Dragons newsgroup correctly. The big problem they had was that the program was 16-bit, but needed to be able to access far more than the usual 640k in order to work correctly. After an enormous amount of optimisation, they got about 1 fps if they used swap, 4fps if they used XMS, 6fps via EMS and a whopping 16fps by using the flat-realmode hack on the 386. It was only that which allowed the game to ship, and it made the game pretty much impossible to run under Windows 95 and later until DOSbox came along.

Pagan (Ultima 8) used DPMI16 and 386 assembled optimisations to make it playable on the hardware du jour. This again caused major problems because the 16-bit protected mode interface only preserved the lower 16 bits of the registers, so when an interrupt occurred it would sometimes destroy the contents of EAX, ESI, EDI etc and crash the game randomly. This was fixed by hacking the DPMI kernel with some bizarre hack known as "Spanky" IIRC. "Protected mode kernel hacking" is listed in the credits of the game.

Ascension (U9) was released about a year too soon and was filled with software rendering and other weird things. It would only work at all on GLIDE at first and it had to be patched from 1.00 -> 1.03 -> 1.07 -> 1.18 before it really worked via Direct3D. I remember that though it worked nicely on a 400MHz machine with a 3DFX card, a far more powerful DirectX card would give you a slideshow until 1GHz machines came out.

Re:What he talks about

[jo_ham]

The "anyone who has an opinion different to mine is obviously a shill" thing on slashdot is getting tiresome.

It *is* possible for people to like things that the /, groupmind dislikes without them being paid to do so.

Good

[masternerdguy]

As a PC gamer I can't wait for consoles to finally die, fewer crap console ports and PC exclusives tend to be better anyway.

Re:Good

[BenoitRen]

The obsession with high quality graphics is a large part of what's wrong these days on both platforms. Stop kidding yourself.

Re:Good

[CastrTroy]

Not to mention that the best thing about consoles is that everybody is playing on the same machine. You don't have to worry about whether you have a good enough machine and how good the framerate will be on your machine when buying console games. You don't have to worry about silly driver issues, or upgrading your machine every year because. All the current consoles are at least 5 years old. Even if you bought the original PS3 60 GB for $600 at launch (chosen because it was the most expensive), you still go an amazing deal, because that's 5+ years (still no replacement in the next year or two) without having to spend a single penny on upgrades. If you ask me, consoles will be all anybody owns in the future. I've seen where this is going. Most people will have a console, a tablet, which can be hooked up to a monitor keyboard and must when you have some work to get done. Desktop PCs with crazy specs and prices to go along with it will be the territory of a small set of enthusiasts. And everyone else will be exteremely happy because they no longer have to worry about driver issues, upgrades, minimum requirements, and all that other stuff. Me, I'll still own a desktop PC for many years to come.

Re:Good

[hairyfeet]

Ya know, I want to hate the consoles but I have to say there is a nice side effect to the little bastards and that is how cheap I can offer folks an HTPC nowadays. Back in the olden days of the late 90s you were looking at a $150 GPU about every year to year and a half just to be able to play the games coming down the pipe and now I have several folks that are quite happy with HD4830s that i picked up for less than $50 a piece. And there is still more kick ass PC gaming for cheap than any other machine i know of, where else can you get games at the price of the big Steam Xmas sale while still having graphics that make my customers drool? you want to talk about an easy sale, all i have to do when they ask "But what can it do?" is fire up Just Cause II and set off some demo charges on the smokestacks. watching my guy walk into the sunset as these huge towers come crashing down and its "Sold!".

So I wouldn't bitch TOO much, the consoles keep game PCs quite cheap while still letting us have some pretty impressive visuals, and while its true that the specs on them suck at least there are still games coming out with enhanced graphics for PCs while allowing us that don't have "ePeen" money to still enjoy gaming. I just hope when the next consoles come out it won't take a couple of years for GPUs that match or beat them to become cheap enough for the masses as I REALLY don't want to go back to $150+ a year in GPUs just to game. Hell at the way things are going with any luck i may still get another couple of years out of this soon to be Thuban desktop ;-)