Why Consoles Rule the Earth (v. long)

[BlueTemplar]

Exactly. I think they always had this philosophy, to release the game "when it's done".
I know for sure it was the case for Starcraft (operation CWAL: Can't Wait Any Longer!) and Diablo II.

[PicassoCT]

Blizzard is also famous for netver trying out anything new - everything in there Games, is it Backgroundstory or Gameplaymechanics, has been used, tested and "approved wellworking" by other "Guinea Pig" Companys, who didn´t have the time & Money to perfect it. So if every other PC-Game-Company dies, Blizzard will have nothing to Copy from - would be interesting to see there reaction.. maybe EA & Blizzard would start to copy from each other... sort of Quality&Quantity-incest... horroroz

[Aeon_Illuminate]

Game that never was: Starcraft Ghost

[SwiftSpear]

Blizzard is also famous for netver trying out anything new - everything in there Games, is it Backgroundstory or Gameplaymechanics, has been used, tested and "approved wellworking" by other "Guinea Pig" Companys, who didn´t have the time & Money to perfect it. So if every other PC-Game-Company dies, Blizzard will have nothing to Copy from - would be interesting to see there reaction.. maybe EA & Blizzard would start to copy from each other... sort of Quality&Quantity-incest... horroroz

You can only try so much new stuff when you only make a game every 4 years.

[pheldens]

Linux's anchorpoints are open standards, and distros.
But I agree that for a commercial game developer it's not an attractive platform if they don't use open standards for their engines themselves. Then they could rely on porting companies (Loki(rip) LGP) or emulating companies (codeweavers) to do it for them. But this still has extra costs that aren't earned back easily.

Personally I love tinkering with free games and perpetual WIP games.

Spring (XTA) is one of the best games available for linux thanks for the great work.

[PicassoCT]

Blizzard is also famous for netver trying out anything new - everything in there Games, is it Backgroundstory or Gameplaymechanics, has been used, tested and "approved wellworking" by other "Guinea Pig" Companys, who didn´t have the time & Money to perfect it. So if every other PC-Game-Company dies, Blizzard will have nothing to Copy from - would be interesting to see there reaction.. maybe EA & Blizzard would start to copy from each other... sort of Quality&Quantity-incest... horroroz

You can only try so much new stuff when you only make a game every 4 years.

They could try stuff, especially if you have all the time in the world to beta& panneltest it... but no, they really just copy things that have developed themself into asort of highquality proven standard. for Example, take GW: Tabletopstyle. They really never ever risk to be a step ahead, but i am pretty shure, the day TA/Springs Interface becomes Standard even within the LowEndsection of RTS, Blizzard will take it and will deliver the Best Wacraftspring-Frankenstein ever!

[Zpock]

There's some exceptions to the rule, the hero system of WC3 for example. Also there's a lot of things that's easy to miss, like the awesome map editors, lots of little details with the mechanics... those could be considered part of the "perfection" maybe.

They deliberately do not put in "innovative" stuff like " supcom physics" however as a part of designing the game as a game 1st and not wannabe real life simulator or latest graphics technology demo...

I really am not a big fan of games that pack tons of features but the game content core is really hollow. Then talking about how modding can fill it in later...

[j5mello]

Iron Lore Entertainment the company that made Titan Quest and Dawn of War: Soulstorm closed its doors last week. The CEO made a post on the subject which can be found summarized here: http://pc.ign.com/articles/856/856392p1.html

Full Post is here: http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk ... hp?t=42663

For the TL;DR crowd,

He cites piracy, hardware vendors, audience, and reviewers as some of the nails in ILE's coffin.

(For the those who just read the IGN summary the auidence part in that isn't well represented. The full post better conveys his point about them)

[BlueTemplar]

Wow, I didn't suspect the piracy rates were so bad for PC games: 70-90% !!! EDIT: Where do these figures come from btw?
OTOH, making an anti-piracy check to look like a game crash was a REALLY bad move...

[Argh]

It sounded like the Iron Lore folks shipped some bad products that sank their ship. The stuff about audio seemed especially strange, considering that we're using pretty standard sound code in Spring and it works quite well... I can understand working around video card hardware being a nightmare, if you're really optimizing, but meh, I would think that you'd get it stable and slow, first, then start tweaking, so that if all else fails, you have a good platform that just runs more slowly than is optimal.

When I hear guys going off about all this nitty-gritty stuff, I get a bit suspicious that they just wrote fairly cruddy software, period, and were so far behind schedule that their engine developers were helping on production code most of the time they should have been doing QA.

[SwiftSpear]

Spring doesn't really do anything demanding in terms of audio... We don't even have stereo sound, or background music.

[Argh]

We have stereo sound, and music... well, let's say that it's coming...

[SwiftSpear]

It's not in the current version though... so we really can't say we have the product testing experience to verify that advanced audio systems are easy to make bug free.

[Argh]

Er, I thought 0.76b1 had .OGG support, not just SVN...

<reads changelog>

Yup, it does, just nobody has used it yet, so far as I'm aware. I'm planning to deploy it in P.U.R.E.'s next version, but I'm concerned about running multiple OGG streams, because of the CPU load associated with them, because I'd like OGG to get used for map ambient stuff as well. Could be this will turn into an interesting challenge to get it all working nicely, but I just don't know yet.

[BlueTemplar]

They say OnLive will remplace both gaming PC's and traditional consoles.

Honestly I can't see how it will still be able to work once it becomes popular.
And if it does it would be IMHO a regression for the Internet back towards a centralised system (a trend that was started by services like YouTube).

[Pxtl]

Holy threadsurrection batman!

this thread requires braaaiiiiiiins.

[Hoi]

Epic rez?

Anyway, console gaming is getting bigger, but I don't think pc gaming will die, everyone thinks piracy is such a big factor, but it's not that big.

[SwiftSpear]

PC gaming is moving to steam. Where, pending some massive break down, it will always be more affordable than any subscription service.

[SpliFF]

PC gaming might be bad for some publishers (Valve and Stardock are doing pretty well) but who gives a fuck? As Argh pointed out most publishers brought this on themselves. The point being ignored is that things have never been better for PC *gamers*.

All gaming sophisticates seem to agree that gameplay is the most important thing, which I certainly agree with. If that's the case then it really doesn't matter that much if a game is new. Taking that into account you suddenly wind up with a PC games catalogue going all the way back to the early 90's containing 100's of games that were fucking brilliant (and 10's of 1000's that were average) yet now cost $10 or less.

With the exception of maybe 5 or 6 *must have* games I have never bought a game on release day. I pay, on average $20 AUD (that was about $10 US before the economy was torpedoed) for my games. Pretty much any classic game (and in the PC world that means more than 6 months old) can be bought in some kind of budget pack or collection. There is over a million hours of quality gameplay out there that can be purchased for pennies.

There's also games that slip 'under the radar'. While games by Valve, EA or Id are hyped to death there are always enjoyable and creative charms going mostly unreported by the gaming press. One of these was 'Soldat' with was heavily played in Europe but mostly ignored in the West.

Then there's mods. With all the games I have I can now access thousands of mods. Maybe 90% will be crap but that still leaves 100's of hours of new gameplay.

In summary, by staying at least a year behind the trends I have managed to accumulate over 300 quality titles for less than it would cost to buy 20 new ones. All of the games stood the test of time and have enough patches to avoid the 0-day bugs that most new games seem to ship with. In addition many of these games still look fantastic due to the insanely high settings that nobody could actually run on release (ie TA can run at 2056x1600 despite this resolutions not existing at release). If I never bought another game I would still never run out of fun games to play or replay.

[Argh]

Wow, this is old, I can't believe anybody rezzed it.

Soldat rocked. I still think my analysis was right. Pretty much all I have to say about this.