I'm not saying that racing and fighting games are all I've tried. I've been playing on consoles since the Atari 2600. I've tried all kinds of games. It's just that they're about the only ones that I enjoy playing on a console. Most of the other stuff is either very shallow gameplay-wise, or the control scheme sucks and I can't help but think how much better it would be to play on the PC.
But it doesn't matter that you can upgrade the PC, because for the lifetime of the console all the games made for that console will play on it.
I can play practically anything too if I don't crank up all the settings. Only if there's a very major jump in graphics quality would I likely have to upgrade in order to play a new game.
The difference between console games and PC games is that while console game graphics might improve a little over its lifespan, PC game graphics improve a lot, but you may need a hardware upgrade to take advantage of it. Or you can turn down the settings and get the same visual quality you had from the start. It's just a more flexible system.
Yes, you can upgrade you CPU and GPU...how much did it cost you? Wouldn't you rather not have to deal with upgrades and spend more money on games or would you rather "play" benchmarks for bragging rights for your e-penis.
I don't do it for bragging rights. Hell, I don't have a lot of gamer friends, so there's not really anyone to brag to. I upgrade when I want to because it will improve my gaming experience for the types of games I like. Primarily RPG or FPS, and some RTS games. Those just tend to completely suck to play with a gamepad, and RPG and FPS games especially tend to have interesting mods for them, so I prefer the PC versions anyway. Wouldn't play Oblivion without mods, ever.
The keyboard isn't optimal either, it's not analog. Analog movement is much more intuitive than WASD. Also try playing Diablo on your PC. How long can you play before your hands tell you to quit. Now try the PS1 version. You'll be able to play a lot longer with more comfort.
I played Diablo and Diablo 2 for a long time. No problems for me. As for analog movement, I have the mouse, which makes movement very smooth and intuitive, so I don't need an analog controller. It would be less precise and therefore a disadvantage. You can't tell me that all the FPS players out there would benefit from an analog controller over the current setup. When it comes to moving and aiming in those games, precision is everything.
If by "cutting edge" we're only referring to graphics, then you may have a point. I think that part of the problem is that there's too much attention being paid to graphics and not nearly enough to actual gameplay. So we end up with a lot of pretty but very shallow games, like Bioshock. At least games like Sins try to do something different. The PC is the last bastion of innovation in gaming. Console publishers feel that every game needs to appeal to the widest possible audience, and that usually makes for lousy games.
Who said anything about acquired? I certainly didn't. (I also didn't mention anything about them being in-house either.)
"Under their umbrella" is pretty vague. Seems like the studios that they acquire would best represent their goals and intentions, which is what this was about.
ACES Studios is a nice example of an in-house one. Have you seen Flight Simulator on the Xbox? No? Didn't think so.
True. Flight sims are definitely a PC niche. It could never work on the XBox. It just has a very dedicated audience.
Ensemble Studios is also an in-house developer for the PC, Halo Wars excluding.
Ensemble and FASA Interactive are both defunct now. And I realize that they were PC developers, but Microsoft was turning them into XBox developers. XBox 360 was the lead platform for them on their final games.
Bungie was never a PC studio. They started out on the Mac, and then switched to Xbox-exclusive games when they were acquired.
Traditionally, no, but Halo was originally slated for simultaneous release for Mac and Windows.
Oh, really? Did you learn that from Obama's buddies "I hate white people" Reverend Wright or Louis Farrakahn, or, did you learn that from "I'm not sorry for being a terrorist", William Ayers?
People he's distanced from and whose statements he's rejected. He didn't pick them for VP did he?
I'm sure that must be the absolute truth.
No, but in typical partisan fashion, you'll dismiss any and all transgressions by party members, simply because they're party members. I'm incredibly sick of the team-loyalty-at-all-costs mindset that pervades politics these days.
What exactly did Obama do where he was the executive of anything more than 670k people? That's the whole point. Obama hasn't done anything except for get a fancy degree, spend twenty years at a racist, communist, church that despises the USA, and then runs for office.
The fact of the matter is, while Barrack Obama was running around trying to win a popularity contest a bunch of guys that hate white people, Sarah Palin was balancing budgets first as mayor, and then as governor.
Not that it matters in the slightest, since none other than Karl Rove himself was previously publicly deriding the possible democratic VP selection of Tim Kaine, former mayor of Richmond, VA, and Lt. Governor, and then Governor of Virginia for being too inexperienced because Richmond is only the 105th largest city in the country. Is Wasilla even in the top 1000? 2000? Apparently experience only matters if they want it to matter.
If Valve went into receivership them I doubt the bankruptcy courts would look favourably on their directors nuking their most important asset!
If they're to remain assets, then the auth servers would need to remain up. If they aren't up, then you are nuking the value of the company and all its properties by royally screwing its customers.
One example is a counter-argument? Not that I'm disputing the example, as I haven't played it. But is this a lone example, or is there some secret stash of hard-core style games on the console that I'm not aware of, or games like that just the exception that proves the rule?
The only games I tend to play on consoles are driving games and fighting games. I'm not really interested in sports games, even though I would prefer them on the console as well. I picked up Soul Calibur IV last week, but other than that I haven't found much else that seemed interesting.
It might be a bit of work but some well crafted letters (via snail mail) to the CEOs of the various companies may actually help. It may not have an immediate effect but if there's enough interest generated the stock holders may take notice and this may result in changes. Slow changes, surely, but there's a slim hope.
That assumes that the CEOs actually read random letters sent to them by people they don't know. I'm sure they're screened, and probably filed as complaints, and maybe the total number of them makes it into a bullet-point on some quarterly status report. Shareholders will never hear of the specific arguments, and the CEO probably won't either.
You cite one example that doesn't counter the perception of the people who drive the larger companies.
Maybe because nobody but Stardock has bothered to even consider the issue? Therefore they have nothing other than their preconceived notions to counter it with. People don't like getting ripped off. They don't like to buy something that they can't return if it doesn't work. Can the other publishers out there really be so dim that they can't grasp that concept? I guess they must be so rich they just don't understand the little people anymore, huh?
Complain to the developers, not about the console. It supports mice just fine, I always have a mouse attached to the PS3 (and the PS2 before it). The PS1 had a mouse as well, you could even play Warcraft II with it, which surprised me when Starcraft was released for the N64 and not the PS1 (where all the other RTS's ported to console had gone)
Yeah, but who cares if they let you use a mouse if they've already stripped out and "simplified" enough stuff to make it playable with a gamepad?
At least Games for Windows games actually *work*. Unlike, for example, Battlefield: 2142 and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, two games I bought recently that did not, in fact, work.
First of all, if you bought Dark Messiah recently, you need serious help. The Battlefield series has always had issues, which is why I've never played it. How many console games require patches these days? Do you guess that that number is higher or lower than last year? For every example you point out of buggy PC game, I can point out one that works great, or a console game that is buggy as well.
Yes, the console games tend to get more scrutiny, but they also have the advantage of a single hardware spec to test on. Infinite hardware combination possibilities are part of the reason PC games will always require patching. It's just the way it is, and the way it will be for the foreseeable future. It's never really been a problem for me since I'm rarely one of those people waiting in line on release day for a game. I pick it up a couple weeks later after I've had time to hear about it and see if it has any major issues. It does make the recent increase in console bugginess seem a bit less acceptable though, when you think about it, especially factoring in the extra 10 bucks that most console games cost over a PC game.
Have you ever asked yourself why the PC version of Oblivion needs to suck up gigabytes of HD space when the Xbox 360 version, which is virtually identical, takes no more than needed for virtual memory?
Because it doesn't get stream-loaded from the DVD? Because I have a close to 1TB of dirt-cheap hard drive space and can't be bothered to care? Because I don't know how much space it actually takes up because I have about 100 mods loaded up as well which have turned it into a completely different and VASTLY better game experience that I'm still playing to this day even though I gave up on the original game by the time I reached level 14? *gasp* I don't know. Take your pick.
Have you ever wondered why you have to type in a 25-digit annoying product key to play Dark Messiah on PC online, when you can play Dark Messiah over Xbox Live with nothing more than the disk?
Nope. It's a crap game that I've never played, aside from the demo. The online games that I play almost all use Steam, which is no trouble at all.
I'm all for these "Gamer's Rights," and I'm all for "Games for Windows" because when you come down to it, they both have one goal: upping the quality of PC games to that of console games.
Whatever the goal may have been, the effect has been to dumb-down the games that are released on the PC.
First off - playing with a gamepad can be a lot easier and more relaxing than playing with mouse / keyboard combo. For C&C3, you should be using mouse / keyboard. For GoW, Bioshock, Assasin's Creed, you're better off with the gamepad.
AC maybe. The others, not a chance. Do we need to revisit the mouse/kb vs. gamepad precision argument again? When it comes to aiming, mouse/kb wins hands-down every time, no exceptions. So if a game requires aiming, thumb-knobbies just don't cut it. That's why they have add in all that auto-aiming crap for console shooters, as well as slowing down AI reactions and retarding their aiming abilities as well.
Secondly - have you played a lot of the 360 ports? The 3 above are pretty good games.
I've played Bioshock and AC. Didn't finish either of them. They got very repetitive and boring. AC combat is the same thing over and over again, and there's little skill involved in most of the running around. You just hold down the button and the game does most everything for you. Pretty lame.
Bioshock had great visuals and a pretty good story, but there wasn't a single meaningful choice to be made in the entire game as far as I could tell. The weapons and plasmids are all basically interchangeable, and you can use any or all of them as you please, so there's no meaningful choices or real tailoring of the character. They should have stuck closer to System Shock 2 in their design.
Not only that, but many are different than the typical FPS / RTS / TBS / MMO / etc that are on PCs. They're not $3 casual games, but they're not as hardcore as typical PC titles tend to be.
PC gamers like the hardcore games. It's not that we don't like more casual games as well, it's just that with consoles there isn't really a choice. All you get is casual or hard-core-lite type games. They want to claim that they have deep gameplay and awesome graphics like PC games, but they have to deal with hardware limitations and the fact that publishers want to market every single game to everyone with a pulse. This pretty much distills them down to the lowest-common-denominator features that have to be so simple that a retarded monkey could play it to completion. Otherwise it must be too difficult and we wouldn't want to have a game out there that required any real though or effort to master, would we?
Consoles have always been highly developed for compared to PCs. It's just a little different now because consoles have more or less caught up in power -- keep in mind they have to produce 3D for a much smaller screen resolution (what is the worst case, 1080p? Bah. That's so 1997) so they'll always have higher quality in some aspects (smooth motion, mirroring, etc.)
Consoles always catch up and seem like they're almost right there with the PC, and then they get released and the PC is already a generation ahead in video and CPU processing power, with about 2-4 times the RAM and infinitely more storage. It's never even a contest for very long, and by the time the console is halfway through its lifespan, it has long been surpassed by the PC. It retains the benefit of being a stable hardware platform though, so that can help too, but not enough to matter all that much.
That's so 1997) so they'll always have higher quality in some aspects (smooth motion, mirroring, etc.) while PC games are always trying to jam that into a much higher resolution, which they can't without having 1 fps. Thus the PC lags in the latest and greatest visual tricks beyond pure resolution.
Only if you ignore the fact that you can easily turn down the resolution and settings to be a bit closer to the console and get great performance at a resolution that's still higher than any console can manage. Then there's also the fact that more and more often it seems, console games have some real issues with framerates as well, so that's not a problem isolated to PC games.
The real issue isn't graphics though. Graphics have been good enough for a while now to do pretty much anything a developer wants to do. The issue is gameplay, which has suffered a lot due to the focus on console development. Designing every game to be played with a gamepad is just very limiting. It's not the optimal controller for most games, and has be shoehorned in, and all sorts of "simplifications" must be made in order to get it to work well enough. PC gamers have much more flexibility in control schemes and developers don't have to oversimplify everything because of that.
On the rest of the stuff I mostly agree. We've seen consoles become more and more PC-like with each generation. I expect that to continue. What I think they're going to have a hard time reconciling is the open-ness of the PC that allows us to have things like the huge mod communities and all the innovation that that generates, as well as the vast variety of control options that make pretty much any kind of game possible.
As long as there's a gatekeeper for the console, it will not supplant the PC. The PC will become the central media device, not the console. Nobody wants to have Microsoft or Sony controlling everything. There has to be open standards.
Besides, the idea that Microsoft is trying to kill off gaming is pretty laughable - many of the studios under Microsoft's umbrella are pretty much PC-exclusive. (And, for what it's worth, all those that are release under the GFW banner.)
Are you kidding? Name a PC game studio that they've acquired that hasn't turned into an XBox studio? Bungie? Lionhead? FASA Interactive? Digital Anvil? Ensemble? Nope. I can't think of a single one.
"Don't forget about Microsoft! Games for Windows is a cruel joke. It seems to be primarily about them padding profits by giving the PC sloppy seconds on games that get shoveled out for the 360."
*Looks at the Sins of Solar Empire box he just purchased*
Wow! Danse's right. Just look at the sloppy seconds, games for Windows tagged box I just got. Whatever will I do?
Fair enough. I got Sins too. But, let's consider the rest of the games released this year. How many are not console games as well? You can count them on one hand I bet. It's just encouraging publishers to release on both platforms and cater to the lowest common denominator, which means that the strengths of the PC are ignored most of the time.
That being said, I think large publishers like EA and Ubisoft are trying to kill PC gaming. It's not really as big a revenue stream for them as console games.
Don't forget about Microsoft! Games for Windows is a cruel joke. It seems to be primarily about them padding profits by giving the PC sloppy seconds on games that get shoveled out for the 360. They tend to look like ass and play even worse because nobody bothers to make the games actually play like PC games and take advantage of the strengths of the platform. Seems like Microsoft is more determined than anyone to kill PC gaming.
Excellent point. This is a very silly way to 'protest' about DRM. The best way to get companies to stop using DRM is to reason with them, contact them, and let them know how you feel.
Corporations like EA are set up to prevent you from contacting them. They make you jump through hoops to even talk to a human being at all, let alone someone who has the power or inclination to help you contact anyone that could possibly care what you have to say.
Unless it's going to make the news or some other highly visible outlet, then they just don't see how it affects them. Corporations are not people. They're made up of people, but they don't act like people. They understand profit and loss, risk and reward, and they definitely understand media attention, especially the negative kind. So you work with what they understand and make your grievances as visible as possible. That's how you get their attention.
Incidentally, if the Kurds are so pissed off at the USA, then, why has there not been a single American combat casualty in Kurdish Iraq -during the entire war-. Seems to me, that between the no-fly zone first and then the removal of Saddam, second, the Kurds are actually pretty damned happy with the USA.
Because they know they can't win by fighting the US. Yeah, they were rightly pissed that we didn't give them the support that we had promised, and they got smacked down hard by Saddam. That doesn't make them stupid though. They want their own government, and they weren't going to get that if they fought us, and they knew that. They're just doing what they have to do.
Similarly, the lion's share of American troubles in Iraq were with the Sunnis, who were associated with Saddam.
Since when? Iraq was under control before we invaded again. Iran and N. Korea were the real threats. I don't see how you can say that the Sunnis were more of a problem. They're the minority, and even though they controlled Iraq, we had Iraq locked down pretty well. Bush had to invent a bunch of bullshit about WMDs and yellow cake uranium to create an incentive to invade. Only later did he fall back on the "we did it to spread democracy" crap. So we kill countless Iraqi civilians, take thousands of losses of our own, spend hundreds of billions on a war that won't make us any safer, but does happen to make a lot of the people pushing for it even richer than they were, and what do we get from it?
I mean, if you sincerely believe that the USA's sponsorship of putting in dictatorships in the 1950s was the cause of today's terrorism, then doesn't it make sense that Bush's policy of removing the dictatorships the USA installed, at least in Iraq, seem to be conceptually the right thing to do?
It very well may be a good thing to do, but that wasn't what Bush told us we were doing. He said we were going in because Saddam had WMDs and was trying to build nukes. He threw so much bullshit out there that some of it stuck. So you can't say that that was the reasoning behind us going in. It wasn't. Even if it was, then we should have been told up front that we were going to be nation-building and it was going to be long and expensive. But no. They said it would be quick and cheap. They lied. Period.
The assumption in this case is that you already went through the low level area once. You are now returning to the area that you already beat purely because you need more experience points. It wasn't meaningless the first time; it's meaningless to repeat it once you've become sufficient powerful to make it easy to beat.
Then, like I said, that's just bad game design. You shouldn't have to repeatedly play through the same content just to level up. That doesn't mean that all the content should stoop to your level. There should be enough there that you don't have to repeat, but can still become powerful enough to move on to tougher areas that would have kicked your ass earlier.
I do have the PC version, and they did not remove any of the lameness for it.
I didn't mean Bethesda removed the lameness. I meant modders removed the lameness. There were mods within a few weeks that fixed most of the most egregiously bad gameplay issues. They've evolved tremendously over the last couple years. There's mods to change practically anything you want about the game, as well as adding so much new stuff that it's a whole different (and vastly improved) game.
They've fixed the stealth system, the magic system, there's improved combat mods, archery mods, tons of improvements to the NPCs, many new quests, dungeons, improved graphics if you like, seriously, I couldn't possibly even scratch the surface of everything that is available. Go browse the forums for an idea of how much has changed. It's really an incredible game once sufficiently modded.
I tihnk you just laid out pretty much every major complaint with vanilla Oblivion as it was released.:) It definitely matches my experience with it. I played my first character up to level 14 and then quit because it was boring as hell and very immersion-breaking for the reasons you give.
I didn't pick it up again until a few months later when I discovered all the mods that had been created that fixed many of those problems (i.e. the level scaling and enemies with ridiculous equipment) as well as adding a lot of new creatures, equipment and a MUCH better UI. I'll never understand how anyone could like the vanilla game.
But that's just the plot itself. The scaling of the levels actually meant no challenge, even on the hardest difficulty. My friends and I found very little challenge throughout the game. After finishing the game, I felt zero accomplishment. I just sat back and said to myself, "that really was a waste of time". I haven't played the game since.
Should have gotten the PC version. All the lameness has been fixed (and the leveling crap was the first thing to go). There's now a ton of new content as well. Console versions of games like this just suck, horribly.
Doctor_Jest: having the difficulty for a place in the game be such that you need to be level X to play it forces you into meaningless activities purely to gain levels. This is boring.
If all of the areas that a low-level player could handle are somehow less meaningful than a more difficult area, then that's just bad design. There's absolutely no reason that low-level areas and quests should have to be "meaningless". There should be plenty for a low-level character to do without having to grind for levels to get to interesting content.
because since I finished Oblivion, I've wanted something to continue that open-ended realistic world feel, but nothing's come close...
It's called Oblivion + lots of mods! There's a ton of mods out there that add huge amounts of content to Oblivion. They make it into an almost totally different game. Much deeper. Many more interesting quests and storylines. All-around better gameplay and a much prettier world to explore. It's just ridiculous how much new content has been created.
They need to have the toilet be able to give a shower or open the door automatically after a length of time. In particular, I would think that it should open up after 5 minutes UNLESS the person pushes a button within that timeframe.
Supposedly these things open automatically after 15 minutes with no chance to override. I don't see how having an override button would improve the situation. I guess people couldn't sleep in there too well, but drugs and prostitution would still be a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying that racing and fighting games are all I've tried. I've been playing on consoles since the Atari 2600. I've tried all kinds of games. It's just that they're about the only ones that I enjoy playing on a console. Most of the other stuff is either very shallow gameplay-wise, or the control scheme sucks and I can't help but think how much better it would be to play on the PC.
But it doesn't matter that you can upgrade the PC, because for the lifetime of the console all the games made for that console will play on it.
I can play practically anything too if I don't crank up all the settings. Only if there's a very major jump in graphics quality would I likely have to upgrade in order to play a new game.
The difference between console games and PC games is that while console game graphics might improve a little over its lifespan, PC game graphics improve a lot, but you may need a hardware upgrade to take advantage of it. Or you can turn down the settings and get the same visual quality you had from the start. It's just a more flexible system.
Yes, you can upgrade you CPU and GPU...how much did it cost you? Wouldn't you rather not have to deal with upgrades and spend more money on games or would you rather "play" benchmarks for bragging rights for your e-penis.
I don't do it for bragging rights. Hell, I don't have a lot of gamer friends, so there's not really anyone to brag to. I upgrade when I want to because it will improve my gaming experience for the types of games I like. Primarily RPG or FPS, and some RTS games. Those just tend to completely suck to play with a gamepad, and RPG and FPS games especially tend to have interesting mods for them, so I prefer the PC versions anyway. Wouldn't play Oblivion without mods, ever.
The keyboard isn't optimal either, it's not analog. Analog movement is much more intuitive than WASD. Also try playing Diablo on your PC. How long can you play before your hands tell you to quit. Now try the PS1 version. You'll be able to play a lot longer with more comfort.
I played Diablo and Diablo 2 for a long time. No problems for me. As for analog movement, I have the mouse, which makes movement very smooth and intuitive, so I don't need an analog controller. It would be less precise and therefore a disadvantage. You can't tell me that all the FPS players out there would benefit from an analog controller over the current setup. When it comes to moving and aiming in those games, precision is everything.
If by "cutting edge" we're only referring to graphics, then you may have a point. I think that part of the problem is that there's too much attention being paid to graphics and not nearly enough to actual gameplay. So we end up with a lot of pretty but very shallow games, like Bioshock. At least games like Sins try to do something different. The PC is the last bastion of innovation in gaming. Console publishers feel that every game needs to appeal to the widest possible audience, and that usually makes for lousy games.
Who said anything about acquired? I certainly didn't. (I also didn't mention anything about them being in-house either.)
"Under their umbrella" is pretty vague. Seems like the studios that they acquire would best represent their goals and intentions, which is what this was about.
ACES Studios is a nice example of an in-house one. Have you seen Flight Simulator on the Xbox? No? Didn't think so.
True. Flight sims are definitely a PC niche. It could never work on the XBox. It just has a very dedicated audience.
Ensemble Studios is also an in-house developer for the PC, Halo Wars excluding.
Ensemble and FASA Interactive are both defunct now. And I realize that they were PC developers, but Microsoft was turning them into XBox developers. XBox 360 was the lead platform for them on their final games.
Bungie was never a PC studio. They started out on the Mac, and then switched to Xbox-exclusive games when they were acquired.
Traditionally, no, but Halo was originally slated for simultaneous release for Mac and Windows.
Oh, really? Did you learn that from Obama's buddies "I hate white people" Reverend Wright or Louis Farrakahn, or, did you learn that from "I'm not sorry for being a terrorist", William Ayers?
People he's distanced from and whose statements he's rejected. He didn't pick them for VP did he?
I'm sure that must be the absolute truth.
No, but in typical partisan fashion, you'll dismiss any and all transgressions by party members, simply because they're party members. I'm incredibly sick of the team-loyalty-at-all-costs mindset that pervades politics these days.
What exactly did Obama do where he was the executive of anything more than 670k people? That's the whole point. Obama hasn't done anything except for get a fancy degree, spend twenty years at a racist, communist, church that despises the USA, and then runs for office.
The fact of the matter is, while Barrack Obama was running around trying to win a popularity contest a bunch of guys that hate white people, Sarah Palin was balancing budgets first as mayor, and then as governor.
Not that it matters in the slightest, since none other than Karl Rove himself was previously publicly deriding the possible democratic VP selection of Tim Kaine, former mayor of Richmond, VA, and Lt. Governor, and then Governor of Virginia for being too inexperienced because Richmond is only the 105th largest city in the country. Is Wasilla even in the top 1000? 2000? Apparently experience only matters if they want it to matter.
Hillary Clinton can't help but be offensive! :-)
Well, we do agree on that anyway.
If Valve went into receivership them I doubt the bankruptcy courts would look favourably on their directors nuking their most important asset!
If they're to remain assets, then the auth servers would need to remain up. If they aren't up, then you are nuking the value of the company and all its properties by royally screwing its customers.
One example is a counter-argument? Not that I'm disputing the example, as I haven't played it. But is this a lone example, or is there some secret stash of hard-core style games on the console that I'm not aware of, or games like that just the exception that proves the rule?
The only games I tend to play on consoles are driving games and fighting games. I'm not really interested in sports games, even though I would prefer them on the console as well. I picked up Soul Calibur IV last week, but other than that I haven't found much else that seemed interesting.
It might be a bit of work but some well crafted letters (via snail mail) to the CEOs of the various companies may actually help. It may not have an immediate effect but if there's enough interest generated the stock holders may take notice and this may result in changes. Slow changes, surely, but there's a slim hope.
That assumes that the CEOs actually read random letters sent to them by people they don't know. I'm sure they're screened, and probably filed as complaints, and maybe the total number of them makes it into a bullet-point on some quarterly status report. Shareholders will never hear of the specific arguments, and the CEO probably won't either.
You cite one example that doesn't counter the perception of the people who drive the larger companies.
Maybe because nobody but Stardock has bothered to even consider the issue? Therefore they have nothing other than their preconceived notions to counter it with. People don't like getting ripped off. They don't like to buy something that they can't return if it doesn't work. Can the other publishers out there really be so dim that they can't grasp that concept? I guess they must be so rich they just don't understand the little people anymore, huh?
Complain to the developers, not about the console. It supports mice just fine, I always have a mouse attached to the PS3 (and the PS2 before it). The PS1 had a mouse as well, you could even play Warcraft II with it, which surprised me when Starcraft was released for the N64 and not the PS1 (where all the other RTS's ported to console had gone)
Yeah, but who cares if they let you use a mouse if they've already stripped out and "simplified" enough stuff to make it playable with a gamepad?
At least Games for Windows games actually *work*. Unlike, for example, Battlefield: 2142 and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, two games I bought recently that did not, in fact, work.
First of all, if you bought Dark Messiah recently, you need serious help. The Battlefield series has always had issues, which is why I've never played it. How many console games require patches these days? Do you guess that that number is higher or lower than last year? For every example you point out of buggy PC game, I can point out one that works great, or a console game that is buggy as well.
Yes, the console games tend to get more scrutiny, but they also have the advantage of a single hardware spec to test on. Infinite hardware combination possibilities are part of the reason PC games will always require patching. It's just the way it is, and the way it will be for the foreseeable future. It's never really been a problem for me since I'm rarely one of those people waiting in line on release day for a game. I pick it up a couple weeks later after I've had time to hear about it and see if it has any major issues. It does make the recent increase in console bugginess seem a bit less acceptable though, when you think about it, especially factoring in the extra 10 bucks that most console games cost over a PC game.
Have you ever asked yourself why the PC version of Oblivion needs to suck up gigabytes of HD space when the Xbox 360 version, which is virtually identical, takes no more than needed for virtual memory?
Because it doesn't get stream-loaded from the DVD? Because I have a close to 1TB of dirt-cheap hard drive space and can't be bothered to care? Because I don't know how much space it actually takes up because I have about 100 mods loaded up as well which have turned it into a completely different and VASTLY better game experience that I'm still playing to this day even though I gave up on the original game by the time I reached level 14? *gasp* I don't know. Take your pick.
Have you ever wondered why you have to type in a 25-digit annoying product key to play Dark Messiah on PC online, when you can play Dark Messiah over Xbox Live with nothing more than the disk?
Nope. It's a crap game that I've never played, aside from the demo. The online games that I play almost all use Steam, which is no trouble at all.
I'm all for these "Gamer's Rights," and I'm all for "Games for Windows" because when you come down to it, they both have one goal: upping the quality of PC games to that of console games.
Whatever the goal may have been, the effect has been to dumb-down the games that are released on the PC.
First off - playing with a gamepad can be a lot easier and more relaxing than playing with mouse / keyboard combo. For C&C3, you should be using mouse / keyboard. For GoW, Bioshock, Assasin's Creed, you're better off with the gamepad.
AC maybe. The others, not a chance. Do we need to revisit the mouse/kb vs. gamepad precision argument again? When it comes to aiming, mouse/kb wins hands-down every time, no exceptions. So if a game requires aiming, thumb-knobbies just don't cut it. That's why they have add in all that auto-aiming crap for console shooters, as well as slowing down AI reactions and retarding their aiming abilities as well.
Secondly - have you played a lot of the 360 ports? The 3 above are pretty good games.
I've played Bioshock and AC. Didn't finish either of them. They got very repetitive and boring. AC combat is the same thing over and over again, and there's little skill involved in most of the running around. You just hold down the button and the game does most everything for you. Pretty lame.
Bioshock had great visuals and a pretty good story, but there wasn't a single meaningful choice to be made in the entire game as far as I could tell. The weapons and plasmids are all basically interchangeable, and you can use any or all of them as you please, so there's no meaningful choices or real tailoring of the character. They should have stuck closer to System Shock 2 in their design.
Not only that, but many are different than the typical FPS / RTS / TBS / MMO / etc that are on PCs. They're not $3 casual games, but they're not as hardcore as typical PC titles tend to be.
PC gamers like the hardcore games. It's not that we don't like more casual games as well, it's just that with consoles there isn't really a choice. All you get is casual or hard-core-lite type games. They want to claim that they have deep gameplay and awesome graphics like PC games, but they have to deal with hardware limitations and the fact that publishers want to market every single game to everyone with a pulse. This pretty much distills them down to the lowest-common-denominator features that have to be so simple that a retarded monkey could play it to completion. Otherwise it must be too difficult and we wouldn't want to have a game out there that required any real though or effort to master, would we?
Consoles have always been highly developed for compared to PCs. It's just a little different now because consoles have more or less caught up in power -- keep in mind they have to produce 3D for a much smaller screen resolution (what is the worst case, 1080p? Bah. That's so 1997) so they'll always have higher quality in some aspects (smooth motion, mirroring, etc.)
Consoles always catch up and seem like they're almost right there with the PC, and then they get released and the PC is already a generation ahead in video and CPU processing power, with about 2-4 times the RAM and infinitely more storage. It's never even a contest for very long, and by the time the console is halfway through its lifespan, it has long been surpassed by the PC. It retains the benefit of being a stable hardware platform though, so that can help too, but not enough to matter all that much.
That's so 1997) so they'll always have higher quality in some aspects (smooth motion, mirroring, etc.) while PC games are always trying to jam that into a much higher resolution, which they can't without having 1 fps. Thus the PC lags in the latest and greatest visual tricks beyond pure resolution.
Only if you ignore the fact that you can easily turn down the resolution and settings to be a bit closer to the console and get great performance at a resolution that's still higher than any console can manage. Then there's also the fact that more and more often it seems, console games have some real issues with framerates as well, so that's not a problem isolated to PC games.
The real issue isn't graphics though. Graphics have been good enough for a while now to do pretty much anything a developer wants to do. The issue is gameplay, which has suffered a lot due to the focus on console development. Designing every game to be played with a gamepad is just very limiting. It's not the optimal controller for most games, and has be shoehorned in, and all sorts of "simplifications" must be made in order to get it to work well enough. PC gamers have much more flexibility in control schemes and developers don't have to oversimplify everything because of that.
On the rest of the stuff I mostly agree. We've seen consoles become more and more PC-like with each generation. I expect that to continue. What I think they're going to have a hard time reconciling is the open-ness of the PC that allows us to have things like the huge mod communities and all the innovation that that generates, as well as the vast variety of control options that make pretty much any kind of game possible.
As long as there's a gatekeeper for the console, it will not supplant the PC. The PC will become the central media device, not the console. Nobody wants to have Microsoft or Sony controlling everything. There has to be open standards.
Besides, the idea that Microsoft is trying to kill off gaming is pretty laughable - many of the studios under Microsoft's umbrella are pretty much PC-exclusive. (And, for what it's worth, all those that are release under the GFW banner.)
Are you kidding? Name a PC game studio that they've acquired that hasn't turned into an XBox studio? Bungie? Lionhead? FASA Interactive? Digital Anvil? Ensemble? Nope. I can't think of a single one.
"Don't forget about Microsoft! Games for Windows is a cruel joke. It seems to be primarily about them padding profits by giving the PC sloppy seconds on games that get shoveled out for the 360."
*Looks at the Sins of Solar Empire box he just purchased*
Wow! Danse's right. Just look at the sloppy seconds, games for Windows tagged box I just got. Whatever will I do?
Fair enough. I got Sins too. But, let's consider the rest of the games released this year. How many are not console games as well? You can count them on one hand I bet. It's just encouraging publishers to release on both platforms and cater to the lowest common denominator, which means that the strengths of the PC are ignored most of the time.
That being said, I think large publishers like EA and Ubisoft are trying to kill PC gaming. It's not really as big a revenue stream for them as console games.
Don't forget about Microsoft! Games for Windows is a cruel joke. It seems to be primarily about them padding profits by giving the PC sloppy seconds on games that get shoveled out for the 360. They tend to look like ass and play even worse because nobody bothers to make the games actually play like PC games and take advantage of the strengths of the platform. Seems like Microsoft is more determined than anyone to kill PC gaming.
Excellent point. This is a very silly way to 'protest' about DRM. The best way to get companies to stop using DRM is to reason with them, contact them, and let them know how you feel.
Corporations like EA are set up to prevent you from contacting them. They make you jump through hoops to even talk to a human being at all, let alone someone who has the power or inclination to help you contact anyone that could possibly care what you have to say.
Unless it's going to make the news or some other highly visible outlet, then they just don't see how it affects them. Corporations are not people. They're made up of people, but they don't act like people. They understand profit and loss, risk and reward, and they definitely understand media attention, especially the negative kind. So you work with what they understand and make your grievances as visible as possible. That's how you get their attention.
Incidentally, if the Kurds are so pissed off at the USA, then, why has there not been a single American combat casualty in Kurdish Iraq -during the entire war-. Seems to me, that between the no-fly zone first and then the removal of Saddam, second, the Kurds are actually pretty damned happy with the USA.
Because they know they can't win by fighting the US. Yeah, they were rightly pissed that we didn't give them the support that we had promised, and they got smacked down hard by Saddam. That doesn't make them stupid though. They want their own government, and they weren't going to get that if they fought us, and they knew that. They're just doing what they have to do.
Similarly, the lion's share of American troubles in Iraq were with the Sunnis, who were associated with Saddam.
Since when? Iraq was under control before we invaded again. Iran and N. Korea were the real threats. I don't see how you can say that the Sunnis were more of a problem. They're the minority, and even though they controlled Iraq, we had Iraq locked down pretty well. Bush had to invent a bunch of bullshit about WMDs and yellow cake uranium to create an incentive to invade. Only later did he fall back on the "we did it to spread democracy" crap. So we kill countless Iraqi civilians, take thousands of losses of our own, spend hundreds of billions on a war that won't make us any safer, but does happen to make a lot of the people pushing for it even richer than they were, and what do we get from it?
I mean, if you sincerely believe that the USA's sponsorship of putting in dictatorships in the 1950s was the cause of today's terrorism, then doesn't it make sense that Bush's policy of removing the dictatorships the USA installed, at least in Iraq, seem to be conceptually the right thing to do?
It very well may be a good thing to do, but that wasn't what Bush told us we were doing. He said we were going in because Saddam had WMDs and was trying to build nukes. He threw so much bullshit out there that some of it stuck. So you can't say that that was the reasoning behind us going in. It wasn't. Even if it was, then we should have been told up front that we were going to be nation-building and it was going to be long and expensive. But no. They said it would be quick and cheap. They lied. Period.
The assumption in this case is that you already went through the low level area once. You are now returning to the area that you already beat purely because you need more experience points. It wasn't meaningless the first time; it's meaningless to repeat it once you've become sufficient powerful to make it easy to beat.
Then, like I said, that's just bad game design. You shouldn't have to repeatedly play through the same content just to level up. That doesn't mean that all the content should stoop to your level. There should be enough there that you don't have to repeat, but can still become powerful enough to move on to tougher areas that would have kicked your ass earlier.
I do have the PC version, and they did not remove any of the lameness for it.
I didn't mean Bethesda removed the lameness. I meant modders removed the lameness. There were mods within a few weeks that fixed most of the most egregiously bad gameplay issues. They've evolved tremendously over the last couple years. There's mods to change practically anything you want about the game, as well as adding so much new stuff that it's a whole different (and vastly improved) game.
They've fixed the stealth system, the magic system, there's improved combat mods, archery mods, tons of improvements to the NPCs, many new quests, dungeons, improved graphics if you like, seriously, I couldn't possibly even scratch the surface of everything that is available. Go browse the forums for an idea of how much has changed. It's really an incredible game once sufficiently modded.
Check it out:
Oblivion Mods Forum
I tihnk you just laid out pretty much every major complaint with vanilla Oblivion as it was released. :) It definitely matches my experience with it. I played my first character up to level 14 and then quit because it was boring as hell and very immersion-breaking for the reasons you give.
I didn't pick it up again until a few months later when I discovered all the mods that had been created that fixed many of those problems (i.e. the level scaling and enemies with ridiculous equipment) as well as adding a lot of new creatures, equipment and a MUCH better UI. I'll never understand how anyone could like the vanilla game.
But that's just the plot itself. The scaling of the levels actually meant no challenge, even on the hardest difficulty. My friends and I found very little challenge throughout the game. After finishing the game, I felt zero accomplishment. I just sat back and said to myself, "that really was a waste of time". I haven't played the game since.
Should have gotten the PC version. All the lameness has been fixed (and the leveling crap was the first thing to go). There's now a ton of new content as well. Console versions of games like this just suck, horribly.
Doctor_Jest: having the difficulty for a place in the game be such that you need to be level X to play it forces you into meaningless activities purely to gain levels. This is boring.
If all of the areas that a low-level player could handle are somehow less meaningful than a more difficult area, then that's just bad design. There's absolutely no reason that low-level areas and quests should have to be "meaningless". There should be plenty for a low-level character to do without having to grind for levels to get to interesting content.
because since I finished Oblivion, I've wanted something to continue that open-ended realistic world feel, but nothing's come close...
It's called Oblivion + lots of mods! There's a ton of mods out there that add huge amounts of content to Oblivion. They make it into an almost totally different game. Much deeper. Many more interesting quests and storylines. All-around better gameplay and a much prettier world to explore. It's just ridiculous how much new content has been created.
They need to have the toilet be able to give a shower or open the door automatically after a length of time. In particular, I would think that it should open up after 5 minutes UNLESS the person pushes a button within that timeframe.
Supposedly these things open automatically after 15 minutes with no chance to override. I don't see how having an override button would improve the situation. I guess people couldn't sleep in there too well, but drugs and prostitution would still be a problem.