Annoyed gamer gives some suggestions for PC devs

No replies? I'm surprised.

awesome and so true, except i haven't gotten my playboy model yet

or maybe its more like

Console games are dumb games. Historically, there is almost no PC game that wasn't neutered, dumbed-down, and stripped for the 'console crowd'. The only one I can recall would be the Orange Box, which was not without its share of stripping. There are also just as few console games that actually had some relevant depth to them.

Standards as a whole have dropped significantly. Bioshock is praised as the best FPS game ever made, and yet to anyone with gaming experience, it was extremely mediocre. The FPS part was boring and really didn't do anything new or exciting. The story was great until the halfway point where it disappeared completely. It didn't redefine the FPS like was promised. The 'Little Sisters' part was ridiculously stupid, and had none of the depth that we were told inspired the game. The game was an FPS with a decent story for the first half, and just an FPS on the second. System Shock 2, it wasn't even 15% as good as.

Were Oblivion to have been released a good six years ago +, it'd have flopped as an embarrassing RPG. Now it's set the standard of RPGs, a standard that is so low it's offensive. There was not one redeeming quality of that game, but it contained elements of "RPG" as the casual, philistine gamer sees it, enough to make them think it WAS an RPG. Again, this game alone shits on everything that came before, from Fallout to even Deus Ex.

Like it or not, stereotype or not, PC gamers tend to be both more vocal about their games, and expect a LOT more out of their games. Franchise games do extremely well on consoles, because they're easy - you can simply copy the last game. Franchises that do this don't fare as well on the PC.

To me, it's like an art gallery. The PC section is (or was) where you'd find the Monets and the Rembrandts. Sure there was the occasional crappy sculpture, but whatever. Then the console wing was for the kids who thought art was 'gay' and 'boring', and it just plays Dave Matthews over the speakers and has TVs and skateboards lying around.

In short - developers need to stop 'mainstreaming' games. Damn near 90% of PC games are shitty, stupid Xbox games copy-pasted to the PC. We don't want your crap. This is probably the real reason developers don't want to develop PC games, using piracy as a scapegoat - it's simply harder to make PC games, because you can't just hurl flashy graphics, explosions, blood, and whatever the latest fad in gaming is at us.

It makes sense.

Screw WoW.

Screw Crysis-like games with super graphics.

And bring some depth and originality back into PC gaming (Sins has already done an exceptional job with this)...I can even play Sins with my shitty processor, which makes me want to go over to Stardock HQ and hug the dev team affectionately in a non-homosexual manner.

And yes consoles are horrible, but so are games like Crysis and WoW.

A great example of the dumbing down is the Call of Duty series. CoD 1 was a very competitive, fast moving game, all the weapons were difficult to use in some manner. Now we have Call of Duty 4 and all the guns are now no recoil, super fast, laser accurate weapons, with regen, air strikes and other elements of random idiocy.

Couple things:

1) Crysis wasn't a bad game. It could've done a lot more to be better, but I personally enjoyed it more than Bioshock.

2) I wouldn't even go so far as to say 'screw Crysis-like games', because it was SUPPOSED to push the limits. Everyone SHOULD have games made for them, and if someone (like me) has a really kick-ass computer, why SHOULDN'T I get to play a game every now and then that really lets me see what modern technology can do?

If you don't like RTS games, don't play RTS games and then bitch that it needs less RTS elements. Crysis WAS its immersion. Anyone who thought otherwise is a fucking idiot. Anyone who saw the back of the box or the screenshots and thought "MY RADEON 9800 BETTER RUN THIS OR ILL BE PISSED" is also a fucking idiot.

The entire POINT of Crysis was hyper-reality. One of the most underrated parts of the game was the audio quality. Compared to a game like Call of Duty 4, which was an aural ABORTION (I've heard better sounds out of my N64), if you turn the sound (and you have a great speaker system) way up, Crysis becomes ridiculously immersive.

3) Crysis probably wouldn't have been as fun or interesting without the high degree of immersion present in it. It *WAS* the game. Just because you can't enjoy that doesn't mean it was a bad game.

Not every game should require such bleeding-edge technology that they do, especially games like COD4 where there really isn't that much meat to it. But to say "THIS GAME SUCKS BALLS BECAUSE THIS DELL I BOUGHT 5 YEARS AGO CANT RUN IT" makes you sound like a fucking twat.

Everyone enjoys better graphics, even if you say you don't (which makes you a liar). If you could get better quality out of your game with no performance hit, you would do it. However, if every game was chasing sales numbers and refused to push the limits like they do in terms of content, the industry would stagnate.

There needs to be a happy medium. If every game looked like WoW, which, to be honest, looks like it fell out of 2002, well, it would get boring quick.

I still think it's horrible for a few reasons.

1) Graphics don't make a game (at least not in my opinion)

2) The multiplayer gameplay is horrid. (I never touch SP for FPS games, nor do I intend to, so you could go on about the SP, which is what you seem to be implying, however multiplayer makes an FPS. That is why I never even glanced at Bioshock.

3) Immersion? You mean shell-shock and other cute little things such as ricochets, the sound? Again, these trifles do not make a game. Sins proves that, (the graphics although *good*, are not amazingly detailed and Crysis-like). I played Call of Duty on a horrible sound card, but I did not care about the level of detail of the sound, all I cared about was if I could determine what direction I heard from.

They are many games worse looking than WOW. Look at the casual game market with very simplistic graphics. I guarantee you that the number of sales from casual games will make several big name publishers jealous.

Well, I hardly found the performance for sins to be great, especially for a top down game that should have zero stutters.

People also act like stardock does nothing against piracy, but that's not true. They just don't do anything invasive or crazy like the bioshock thing or starforce. Those are really aimed at actual crackers, to slow them down, but it's really not going to do much better than a normal keygen.

As for PC games being shit, it's because they have become mainstream. It used to be only smart people had computers and only specialty stores had computer games. Now computers are just another appliance sold alongside tvs and washing machines. Everyone has them, and to get shelf space they have to make the sort of sales consoles make, and to do that they are dumbed down as much as possible because even 300k sales is not enough to survive any more even thogh it used to make a game a smash hit.

Different people have different views, but you look at Crysis and expect to find a very well crafted fps. And it is well crafted, but not how you think. Crysis is not meant to make you go "Wow, this gameplay kicks ass!" (Although it is very good) It's meant for you to go, "HEY GUYS, I CAN RUN THIS FUCKIN GAME ON VERY HIGH, HOW COOL IS THAT!!!" In fact, Crysis is more of an interactive 3DMark than a full blown fps. Its the game by which all computers are judged. Don't bitch about Crysis sucking just cause you can't run it on your piece-of-shit computer.

Yeah me to. The article had the quality of being funny enough to just barely make up for it's overall annoying tone.

I found the first half of Crysis to be very entertaining. The sandbox gameplay was well executed, and the nanosuit gave me options at both a high and low level. It was rather fun playing through the game like Splinter Cell.

Yeah but there's a reason they're casual games - because the market interested in them have HP Pavillions with 'integrated graphics' cards that couldn't draw anything with more than a dozen polys.

Mate i'm running sins on a notebook comp from 03 and it runs great with no stutters with medium graphics....
(on huge maps allso)

Cheers
Warder

While I agree with his general idea, I disagree with a few specific points.

1) Cutting edge graphics - it's not good when everyone and their mother are trying to make games that require quad CPUs with SLI graphics card to run at 30fps, especially when a lot of those games are crappy to begin with and try to cover that up with pretty graphics. However, that doesn't mean that every game should cater to the common denominator (talking only graphics here). There should be a few games that push the boundaries of what can be done, like Crysis, because without that we wouldn't get anywhere - we'd still be playing Commander Keen.

2) MMOs - it's stupid to ask to stop making a certain type of game. The fact that you don't enjoy these games, or even that they're all crappy, doesn't mean they shouldn't be made at all. Just means they should be made better. I don't want to play WoW clones but I do want someone to come up with an MMO that's going to be fresh and interesting, with a solid story that rivals traditional RPGs.

Actually he states exactly that. Don't just read the headline and skip what he has to say.

The spinning Dwarven Fortress strikes Graphics in the upper body!
It explodes into gore!
Graphics have been struck down!

Crisis fell into the graphics trap. It required a super computer from the future to run decently. Games like Dwarven Fortress and SoaSE show that games don't need to look pretty to be fun. Graphics are merely a medium to play the game with. As long as they push the point across it doesn't matter how good they look as long as it doesn't interfere with the game play.

Games that scale down are the way of the future which a lot of companies need to accept. This is why games like Sins, team fortress, WoW, etc... do so well because many different consumers from different PC stand points can play and enjoy those games. Wth the exponential growth of computer technology and limited resources from consumers the gap will only widen between PC generations.

But the guy is dead on for the most part. What if when sins released we were waiting for 1.03 for it just to be playable out of the box? That is the level the PC gaming industry is at right now.....just push a product out the door asap and hope it gains profit, regardless of how well it plays.

I guarantee you Stardock would be worried about their reputation. At least they know how to run things.