Nlite is a great tool designed exactly for this. I've used it for several installs, and have created a CD that will install XPSP2 with hotfixes and all my drivers, and none of the extra crap that gets installed by default. It starts up in my LCD's native res, includes all my critical apps (firefox, etc.) right on the CD, and is completely unattended.
But seriously, you must be relatively new to PC games. Fine, I'll bite. I've been playing games since my old TI-99, which was in some ways more like todays consoles than a PC.
I agree that games have gotten vastly easier to get working on a PC than they ever were before. Years ago, I spent most of a weekend tweaking a boot disk to play Master of Orion on my 486, trying to find the exact combination of drivers that would satisfy the game's requirements and not run out of memory. We're at a point where automatic configuration should be the default, and some games, as noted above, are utilizing it.
The other problems (painful copy protection, long wait for installation, succeptibility to viruses/spyware, etc.) facing PC gaming are the bigger issue. If the PC game market wants to continue to compete with consoles, they're going to need to make some changes and figure out ways around these problems. I should be able to take the game home, put it in my computer, and play (assuming I've got the hardware requirements - a solution to that is probably a long way off, though Half-Life 2 took a big step).
I addressed this is my other reply, below. Yes, this is a major issue, and I think it's fairly inexcusable. It's one thing if its a hardware incompatibility issue, which are a lot less of a problem in recent years, but almost every PC game gets patched, and many of the patches are for critical, game-breaking bugs. As you said, console games generally don't have bugs of this magnitude, so why is it that PC games are so error-prone?
This is something that the PC games industry, as a whole, should be addressing. It's obviously possible to ship a game with the critical bugs fixed, but they rely on patches instead.
You make some good points, and as I said, consoles have their strong points, but I'd like to point out a few things...
- huge size of existing game library, with a lot of quality titles. PCs don't have a huge library of exsisting titles?? I can go from playing Half-life 2 to DooM to Nethack and everything in between. Thanks partly to emulators, I can play a huge variety of games from the last 20 years or so. Try doing THAT on an XBox.
- variety of genres: fighting, racing, rpgs, FPS, platform, action/adventure Again, PCs have just as much variety. Some types of game work better on a console (fighting games in particular) and some work far better on PC (western-style RPGs, RTS, FPS)
- tends to be more originality on console (pikmin, steel battalion, viewtiful joe) PCs make an easy platform for indie coders to show off their talent and originality. For every Katamari Damacy, there's at least four original games on PC. Most of them don't have AAA budgets, but that doens't make them less fun. Liquid War, Orbital Eunuchs Sniper, Pontifex 2, etc.
- gamepad: nice vibration feedback, analog movements and buttons, ubiquity (can be used to fight, drive a car, fly a plane, or shoot). Yes, gamepads have some pretty nice features. I wish there were better-quality gamepads for PCs. Analog buttons add a lot to the possibilities for control, and the vibration feature is nice for immersion (you can get the same vibration on force-feedback peripherials). But ubiquity of purpose? My keyboard and mouse have helped me fly space fighters (I prefer a joystick for this, but Freelancer got it right) cut through legions of orcs, sneak through the shadows and blackjack unwary guards, and command my battalions of tanks to overrun an enemy base, and when I was done gaming, they went on to help me write slahdot posts, plan out my next D20 Modern adventure, write code, and learn quite a lot about a whole lot of things thanks to Google.
This is exactly what I was talking about. The PC gaming industry is destroying itself by over-complicating things and generally making it a pain in the ass to play a game. Over-zealous copy-protection that makes me uninstall other software, "hardcore" options menus that normal people don't have a hope of understanding, the fact that it's basically standard practice to release a game with a plethora of known bugs and patch it later, and on, and on...
Partly it's a bias on my part - I'm just used to playing games on my PC. Consoles make a more stable target for development, a closed system where the developer can hard-code those options that normal people won't understand. Many times, the "big name" games require a serious investment into new hardware to play on a PC. But that's not how it needs to be, or how it SHOULD be. Some games buck the trend - the one that comes to mind if Call of Duty: It does a great job of automatically figuring out what level of hardware the user has, and adjusting all the complicated options to fit the hardware. Half-life 2 scales down to run on 2-3 year old systems (not very well, on some, but it does an admirable job overall).
If the industry would focus a little more on simplifying the PC gaming experience through better-designed automatic configuration, easier and less intrusive copy protection, and scheduling more time for quality assurance testing to get the bugs worked out, the PC might become a competitive platform again.
This is just one of many reasons that I'm annoyed at the games industry for pushing consoles at the expense of PC gaming lately. There are numerous advantages to playing games on a PC, resolution being one of the big ones.
Sure, consoles have advantages too, but it seems to me that the industry is killing off the PC market, deliberately or otherwise, and then doing thing like this - wowing people with the fancy 1280x720 resolution that they can get just by buying a new console, a new game, and a new TV. And people complain about PC gaming requiring constant upgrading...
I can't stand puzzle games that force you to solve puzzles for nothing more than plot advancement, where it feels like half of the puzzles were only put in for the sake of having puzzles, with no thought to how they relate to anything.
You mean like Myst?
Every puzzle in Myst is part of a larger system of puzzles - they may not appear to have any connection to each other at first, but when you look deeper, you realize that each puzzle in an area relates to all the other ones. Together, they form a complete system, and that system exists in the game world for a purpose. Figuring out that purpose is the key to solving the puzzles. Once you understand what the system exists to do, solving it becomes rather simple.
Though that game didn't even have plot advancement, really.
The Myst series does, in fact, have a plot. A rather good one, especially if you read the accompanying novels. The plot doesn't jump out and beat you over the head, and like the puzzles, it takes a while to figure out, leading to the (apparently common) perception that Myst had no plot. It's there, but you have to think to see it. And isn't that the whole point of a "thinking" game?:)
As the series went on, the plots have gotten more and more obviously stated. Myst 3 focused on the plot a lot more than Myst or Riven did - it helps that the technology has advanced to the point of allowing them to insert actors into their world more convincingly. Myst 3 had Brad Dourif in the prominent role, who you might recognize from A recent movie.
I've heard very good things about the Syberia games, though I've never played them - I'm a huge fan of Myst though. The Myst games have always been at the top of my list for absolutely amazing "thinking" games. I can't stand puzzle games that force you to solve puzzles for nothing more than plot advancement, where it feels like half of the puzzles were only put in for the sake of having puzzles, with no thought to how they relate to anything.
Myst has always felt more like the puzzles were just there - parts of the environment. Most of the time they're some mechanical contraption that you need to figure out. First you need to figure out what it does, then how it does it, and finally what you need to do to make it work. The way everything fits together so neatly, it feels like the designers actually went to these places and wrote down what they saw, rather than creating it out of nothing.
Aside from having fantastically designed puzzles, and beautiful graphics, the Myst series has one of the most intriguing settings I've ever seen. The story and environment are top-notch. I'm eagerly awaiting Myst 4 to see how the story unfolds.
Over the last 3-4 years, I've noticed that my local Electronics Boutique has steadily migrated the PC games from taking up the front third of the store down to three little shelves in the back, with a couple racks for used games. It makes me sad every time I go in there, because it clearly shows that in the eyes of publishers and retailers, PC gaming is quickly becoming defunct. Why pursue a less-profitable market when you could just release your game on XBox and make a killing? Plenty of reasons.
Mods. If you make a halfway decent game with a very modifiable engine, you stand a good chance of selling far more copies than your game would sell on its own merits. The obvious (and overused, but only because its' such a perfect example) one to point out is Half-Life. There are still more people playing HL than most other online games combined, and not because HL itself was that good. It was an amazing game, but it would never have had the longevity that it did without the amazing mods that have been (and still are being) released for it.
Some genres just work better on PC. As noted above, RPGs, strategy games, and various other styles of game just work better with a mouse and keyboard than they do with a controller. Sure you can buy a mouse and keyboard for your console, but not everyone will.
Multiplayer. Again, XBox can do multiplayer, but under certain limitations. When was the last time you had an XBox LAN?
Patches. Also discussed above, some games really come into their own after being patched. What was released as a virtually unplayable mess can still be resurrected as a decent game after patching. However, too many developers rely on this and release their games without testing enough.
Open Source. You can't feasibly do open-source games on consoles. This relates to mods, since to make modding possible, you need to release at least some of the code, but I think the idea could be taken another step or two. Why not release the entire code for your game, or at least the engine the game is built on. If you really wanted to let fans go nuts, you could give them the source for the engine while keeping the art assets, levels, etc. closed and proprietary. That way, if people want YOUR game, they'll still have to pay for the proprietary bits like the levels, story, and character skins, but other people could make completely different games built on the same engine.
Exactly! Settlers is not only a fantastic example of game design, it's also a great way to pass an evening laughing hysterically. Any game where two of your main resources are sheep and wood is bound to lead to some interesting comments.
It's also a great game for social interaction. The interpersonal dynamics that show up are always interesting - it never fails to amaze me how fast the tables will shift when people realize someone's winning. Suddenly, that person can't trade for any useful resources, as everyone allies against them.
At the moment, I can't find anyone to play with either, which is why I found Sea3d.
Hopefully this will mean it is map and mod-friendly like most Unreal engine games.
This is, arguably, a more important engine feature than raw rendering capabilities and performance are these days
I have always felt that the Thief series did the right thing to focus on the gameplay and style, rather than on the poly count. I'm happy to see the series getting a significant visual upgrade, as hopefully this will make it more accessible to gamers who haven't played the first two, but the important thing to me is that they keep the same atmosphere. What we've seen of the City in the previous games has a wonderful feel to it - dark, mysterious, and just a touch surreal. As long as they maintain that core style, I'll be happy.
Being one of the aforementioned poeple whose lifelong dream is to make games for a living, this issue is one of my biggest concerns. Much as I'd love to design and/or code games for a living, I'd also like to see my family more than once a month. Maybe its not realistic of me, but I'd like to think that much of this problem can be eliminated through a combination of more realistic scheduling and careful design, stressing re-use of components. There are starting to be some impressive third-party game development libraries out there (Havok comes to mind) - between libraries like that, and well-designed, re-usable in-house components like GUIs, factories, event systems, and other such suitably generic components, much of the development time can be cut down, at least after the first game to use them is developed.
Personally I think it's a little worrying that budgets for games have spiralled up so quickly to approach the level of hollywood blockbusters, while the process of making games is still somewhere in the early 1900s, by hollywood standards. I'm glad to see studios favoring quality over quantity, but I'll be happier when the processes mature to similarly modern levels. Once we cut out the majority of wasted work, schedule overruns, and plain old bad planning I think we'll start seeing what games can really do.
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Nlite is a great tool designed exactly for this. I've used it for several installs, and have created a CD that will install XPSP2 with hotfixes and all my drivers, and none of the extra crap that gets installed by default. It starts up in my LCD's native res, includes all my critical apps (firefox, etc.) right on the CD, and is completely unattended.
But seriously, you must be relatively new to PC games.
Fine, I'll bite. I've been playing games since my old TI-99, which was in some ways more like todays consoles than a PC.
I agree that games have gotten vastly easier to get working on a PC than they ever were before. Years ago, I spent most of a weekend tweaking a boot disk to play Master of Orion on my 486, trying to find the exact combination of drivers that would satisfy the game's requirements and not run out of memory. We're at a point where automatic configuration should be the default, and some games, as noted above, are utilizing it.
The other problems (painful copy protection, long wait for installation, succeptibility to viruses/spyware, etc.) facing PC gaming are the bigger issue. If the PC game market wants to continue to compete with consoles, they're going to need to make some changes and figure out ways around these problems. I should be able to take the game home, put it in my computer, and play (assuming I've got the hardware requirements - a solution to that is probably a long way off, though Half-Life 2 took a big step).
I addressed this is my other reply, below. Yes, this is a major issue, and I think it's fairly inexcusable. It's one thing if its a hardware incompatibility issue, which are a lot less of a problem in recent years, but almost every PC game gets patched, and many of the patches are for critical, game-breaking bugs. As you said, console games generally don't have bugs of this magnitude, so why is it that PC games are so error-prone?
This is something that the PC games industry, as a whole, should be addressing. It's obviously possible to ship a game with the critical bugs fixed, but they rely on patches instead.
You make some good points, and as I said, consoles have their strong points, but I'd like to point out a few things...
- huge size of existing game library, with a lot of quality titles.
PCs don't have a huge library of exsisting titles?? I can go from playing Half-life 2 to DooM to Nethack and everything in between. Thanks partly to emulators, I can play a huge variety of games from the last 20 years or so. Try doing THAT on an XBox.
- variety of genres: fighting, racing, rpgs, FPS, platform, action/adventure
Again, PCs have just as much variety. Some types of game work better on a console (fighting games in particular) and some work far better on PC (western-style RPGs, RTS, FPS)
- tends to be more originality on console (pikmin, steel battalion, viewtiful joe)
PCs make an easy platform for indie coders to show off their talent and originality. For every Katamari Damacy, there's at least four original games on PC. Most of them don't have AAA budgets, but that doens't make them less fun. Liquid War, Orbital Eunuchs Sniper, Pontifex 2, etc.
- gamepad: nice vibration feedback, analog movements and buttons, ubiquity (can be used to fight, drive a car, fly a plane, or shoot).
Yes, gamepads have some pretty nice features. I wish there were better-quality gamepads for PCs. Analog buttons add a lot to the possibilities for control, and the vibration feature is nice for immersion (you can get the same vibration on force-feedback peripherials). But ubiquity of purpose? My keyboard and mouse have helped me fly space fighters (I prefer a joystick for this, but Freelancer got it right) cut through legions of orcs, sneak through the shadows and blackjack unwary guards, and command my battalions of tanks to overrun an enemy base, and when I was done gaming, they went on to help me write slahdot posts, plan out my next D20 Modern adventure, write code, and learn quite a lot about a whole lot of things thanks to Google.
This is exactly what I was talking about. The PC gaming industry is destroying itself by over-complicating things and generally making it a pain in the ass to play a game. Over-zealous copy-protection that makes me uninstall other software, "hardcore" options menus that normal people don't have a hope of understanding, the fact that it's basically standard practice to release a game with a plethora of known bugs and patch it later, and on, and on...
Partly it's a bias on my part - I'm just used to playing games on my PC. Consoles make a more stable target for development, a closed system where the developer can hard-code those options that normal people won't understand. Many times, the "big name" games require a serious investment into new hardware to play on a PC. But that's not how it needs to be, or how it SHOULD be. Some games buck the trend - the one that comes to mind if Call of Duty: It does a great job of automatically figuring out what level of hardware the user has, and adjusting all the complicated options to fit the hardware. Half-life 2 scales down to run on 2-3 year old systems (not very well, on some, but it does an admirable job overall).
If the industry would focus a little more on simplifying the PC gaming experience through better-designed automatic configuration, easier and less intrusive copy protection, and scheduling more time for quality assurance testing to get the bugs worked out, the PC might become a competitive platform again.
This is just one of many reasons that I'm annoyed at the games industry for pushing consoles at the expense of PC gaming lately. There are numerous advantages to playing games on a PC, resolution being one of the big ones.
Sure, consoles have advantages too, but it seems to me that the industry is killing off the PC market, deliberately or otherwise, and then doing thing like this - wowing people with the fancy 1280x720 resolution that they can get just by buying a new console, a new game, and a new TV. And people complain about PC gaming requiring constant upgrading...
I can't stand puzzle games that force you to solve puzzles for nothing more than plot advancement, where it feels like half of the puzzles were only put in for the sake of having puzzles, with no thought to how they relate to anything.
:)
You mean like Myst?
Every puzzle in Myst is part of a larger system of puzzles - they may not appear to have any connection to each other at first, but when you look deeper, you realize that each puzzle in an area relates to all the other ones. Together, they form a complete system, and that system exists in the game world for a purpose. Figuring out that purpose is the key to solving the puzzles. Once you understand what the system exists to do, solving it becomes rather simple.
Though that game didn't even have plot advancement, really.
The Myst series does, in fact, have a plot. A rather good one, especially if you read the accompanying novels. The plot doesn't jump out and beat you over the head, and like the puzzles, it takes a while to figure out, leading to the (apparently common) perception that Myst had no plot. It's there, but you have to think to see it. And isn't that the whole point of a "thinking" game?
As the series went on, the plots have gotten more and more obviously stated. Myst 3 focused on the plot a lot more than Myst or Riven did - it helps that the technology has advanced to the point of allowing them to insert actors into their world more convincingly. Myst 3 had Brad Dourif in the prominent role, who you might recognize from A recent movie.
I've heard very good things about the Syberia games, though I've never played them - I'm a huge fan of Myst though. The Myst games have always been at the top of my list for absolutely amazing "thinking" games. I can't stand puzzle games that force you to solve puzzles for nothing more than plot advancement, where it feels like half of the puzzles were only put in for the sake of having puzzles, with no thought to how they relate to anything.
Myst has always felt more like the puzzles were just there - parts of the environment. Most of the time they're some mechanical contraption that you need to figure out. First you need to figure out what it does, then how it does it, and finally what you need to do to make it work. The way everything fits together so neatly, it feels like the designers actually went to these places and wrote down what they saw, rather than creating it out of nothing.
Aside from having fantastically designed puzzles, and beautiful graphics, the Myst series has one of the most intriguing settings I've ever seen. The story and environment are top-notch. I'm eagerly awaiting Myst 4 to see how the story unfolds.
Exactly! Settlers is not only a fantastic example of game design, it's also a great way to pass an evening laughing hysterically. Any game where two of your main resources are sheep and wood is bound to lead to some interesting comments.
It's also a great game for social interaction. The interpersonal dynamics that show up are always interesting - it never fails to amaze me how fast the tables will shift when people realize someone's winning. Suddenly, that person can't trade for any useful resources, as everyone allies against them. At the moment, I can't find anyone to play with either, which is why I found Sea3d.
But of course the real point is: could you tell the difference?
Being one of the aforementioned poeple whose lifelong dream is to make games for a living, this issue is one of my biggest concerns. Much as I'd love to design and/or code games for a living, I'd also like to see my family more than once a month. Maybe its not realistic of me, but I'd like to think that much of this problem can be eliminated through a combination of more realistic scheduling and careful design, stressing re-use of components. There are starting to be some impressive third-party game development libraries out there (Havok comes to mind) - between libraries like that, and well-designed, re-usable in-house components like GUIs, factories, event systems, and other such suitably generic components, much of the development time can be cut down, at least after the first game to use them is developed.
Personally I think it's a little worrying that budgets for games have spiralled up so quickly to approach the level of hollywood blockbusters, while the process of making games is still somewhere in the early 1900s, by hollywood standards. I'm glad to see studios favoring quality over quantity, but I'll be happier when the processes mature to similarly modern levels. Once we cut out the majority of wasted work, schedule overruns, and plain old bad planning I think we'll start seeing what games can really do.