Will there be less and less PC games?
- 主题发起人 Nemeo
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Darian
Sergeant Knight at Arms
Depths of Peril says hi.Nemeo 说:
The Xbox has arguably the most intuitive, ergonomic controller ever, so it's not surprising that it won you over. I'm a PC gamer at heart, but it's definitely a thing of beauty, and if I was going to get a console it would be the Xbox without a doubt. Having said that, the mouse and keyboard still rule the strategy and FPS genres. The analog sticks are nice, but they simply aren't as precise and intuitive as a mouse (especially a good optical one).Nemeo 说:
What you don't seem to realise is that console shooters incorporate a technique known as aim assist" (also disparagingly referred to as "auto-aim"); this automatically moves the shots and/or crosshair towards targets, as such making them easier to hit and headshots and other critical hits easier to pull off, and artificially making the pad feel much more accurate than it really is. I'm not making this up, this is how games like Halo work. Watch this video for an experiment that demonstrates it in effect. A well-designed aim assist system is hard to spot, but it is always present in console shooters.
"Lock-on" is also a fairly common feature in non-shooters, and again is intended to make aiming easier to compensate for the lack of accuracy--however you won't find it in any PC games, except for the occasional port, and even then it's typically disabled when not using a controller.
TheSlightFeelingOfRegret
Squire
MrCrotch 说:
Absolutely, console games are very much "pick up and play."
It is undeniable that console games are generally based more around fun gameplay than any kind of plot driven immersion. Whereas a PC gamer perhaps looks for a more cerebral single-player experience, in my experience.
Producing PC games has never been profitable, since the very beginning only 15% of PC games have ever turned a profit. With the advent of the easily obtained consoles the market grew and some large publishing houses took oligopolistic control, now altering the games that are produced by the publishing houses as they know the features that will sell a game. Meaning that the PC gamer is more and more rarely catered to in the market because there just aren't enough of us.
However, now that digital provison of games is becoming more viable the publishing houses can be cut out of the business. Likely to give PC games a new lease of life and the developers a chance to be judged on their own merit.
I do not think we need be worried about running out of PC games. There is demand and the supply will be provided, just in a different way.
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Also, as PC games are a countable quantity, the word "fewer" (not "less") should be used to describe a reduction in their numbers.
TheSlightFeelingOfRegret
Squire
phbbbt107 说:M@ster-$ 说:Archonsod 说:
Good gamesBut they are not Diablo-clones, they are RPG/RTS
There's no RTS elements in it whatsoever. Having party members doesn't make it an RTS. There's no resource gathering, no base building, not unit construction, not researching, nothing.
You wouldn't classify Sudden Strike as RTS then?
I notice the producers' website calls SS an RTS, wikipedia however calls it a RTT (meaning Real Time Tactics.)
Personally, I do not enjoy Real Time Strategy games. They are far more arms race than actual strategy. Medieval: Total War is one of the few games that accomplishes this genre for me, by dividing the game into strategic and tactical parts the tedium of clalculating and clicking ones way through a path to victory is alleviated.
TheSlightFeelingOfRegret
Squire
phbbbt107 说:
Indeed, in the small amount of my now completed post that you could have seen in the time you wrote that response I was drawing attention to the fact; the features you describe are typical hallmarks of a strategy game, but they do not have to be present. It is strategy and tactics played in real time that should define an RTS though people often do not recognise the difference between those two, and, in my opinion, there have been so called RTS games that do not possess either.
Darian
Sergeant Knight at Arms
What you have to remember is that Windows has no restrictions on game design. A console game has licensing costs, has to be rated, and has reproduction costs. PC games are never licensed (except for Games for Windows, which is voluntary), don't have to be rated unless sold at normal retail outlets, and has no reproduction costs if distributed digitally (Steam and the like) or as shareware (like Mount&Blade). Development tools are freely available (unlike consoles, where the development software and test hardware is very expensive), and some cost nothing (the Ogre 3D engine, for instance). As a result, companies can develop "risky" games that they might have decided against if they had to cover the additional overheads of a console release.TheSlightFeelingOfRegret 说:
Take Dungeon Lords, for instance; it's one of the worst games I've played in recent years--the first release was almost unplayable, and even the final version has empty, unfinished areas and more bugs than a rainforest. It's cheap and nasty shovelware, but since it comes from a "real" developer it's covered by news sites just like any other game. It is very unlikely that they would have risked releasing this on a console because it's simply too poor to be worth the overheads involved. However, despite poor sales and near-unanimous ridicule, their obviously minimal budget meant they still turned some sort of profit, and they now intend to blight the 360 and PS3 with a sequel (as well as the mandatory PC version, of course). It's trash like this that you have to take into account when talking about games that lose money.
In addition, the market can only support so many products; games with high production budgets have to sell a huge number of copies to even break even (let alone secure profits for future titles), whereas games tending more towards the indie side (like Mount&Blade and Sins of a Solar Empire) have very low budgets. If a game like Mount&Blade sells, say, half a million copies at retail, the developer considers it a success because its development costs weren't anywhere near that (due to an in-house engine, small development team, no Patrick Stewart, etc.)--for a game with a multi-million budget due to dozens of employees, shiny graphics and lots of licensed technologies, half a million copies is a disaster. It is at this point that the developer comes out and bemoans how their losses were caused by those greedy, dirty pirates, rather than due to the market simply not being able to provide enough turnover to cover their product's high development cost.
Also bear in mind that you can't just look at North America. In North America, console game sales have started taking over from PC game sales due to the technological gap being much narrower (in the days of DOS, the most complex or ambitious games were always on the PC because consoles were simply too weak), and this effect is worsened by digital distribution services which do not disclose their profits and sales figures to groups such as the NPD. In Europe and Asia, however, PC games still sell tremendously well. Series such as Gothic are held about as highly in Europe as Halo is in America. As for Asia, the Koreans hold StarCraft in such high regard that they have three TV stations dedicated to professional StarCraft tournaments (I'm not making this up). They also have dozens of MMOs the English-speaking world has yet to see, all of which are exclusive to Windows.
PC games also have to compete with previous games, sometimes from several years ago, and if they don't equal or outdo those older titles many players simply won't touch them. Take Unreal Tournament 3, for instance. It sold well on consoles but not particularly well on PCs; it is theorised that this is because many players are still playing 2k4, 2k3, or even the original UT, and don't want to pay more for an update or don't like the changes it makes to gameplay. Its low sales are reflected by low player counts on the servers, which further impacts its potential sales. Whereas any modern version of Windows can run about 70-80% of all Windows games ever released (and a surprising number of DOS games) without needing any major compatibility tweaks, console gamers have a severely limited back catalogue. Backwards-compatible titles also don't receive any improvements--on the PC I can play a ten-year-old game online with voice chat and so forth as well as maximised graphics and a much higher resolution than would have been feasible back in the day; backwards compatible console titles have the same visuals and resolutions as the original system (sometimes slightly worse due to emulation limitations) and don't support the new system's improvements to multiplayer. As a result, playing Halo 2 on the Xbox 360 isn't as cohesive an experience as playing Halo 3, whereas on Windows an older title can inherit various improvements as long as they are able to run in the background or be forced in the driver or whatever.
TheSlightFeelingOfRegret 说:
According to dictionary.com, strategy is : "the science or art of combining and employing the means of war in planning and directing large military movements and operations." In other words,the arms race portion of most RTS's is actually strategy, since you're essentially planning your attack and the composition of your forces.
Unless you were trying to be ironic, then my assertion still stands. Dungeon Siege has no RTS elements.
And no Sudden Strike isn't an RTS. Wikipedia is right in calling it an RTT. There is tactical planning, but no strategic planning.
TheSlightFeelingOfRegret
Squire
phbbbt107 说:
Number 1) I don't care about Dungeon Siege, Dungeon Siege is not the issue.
Number 2) An Arms Race is a strategy, I know that full well (you may or may not be interested to know that sarcasm is a kind of irony, from your use of the word I suspect that you do know, but it is much the same thing here.) I am saying that it is not an enjoyable strategy, it is time spent clicking or calculating and at the end you see something explode. I do enough of that in my everyday life, though explosions are rarely the positive outcome. I find any satisfaction gleaned from such a playing experience to be fleeting at best. Cutting off supply lines is also strategy, forming alliances is strategy, organising superior reconnaisance is strategy. I find these far more enjoyable.
Sudden Strike contains elements of strategy, though it is mostly tactics. The actual game is not the point, it's the way that I think strategy games should be is the point.
Worbah
Grandmaster Knight
Darian 说:
The **** it is. Let's compare turn based and real time strategy. In TBS, most games have none of the base building, troop recruiting, etc. ****e, yet when you merely tranfer to real time, surprise cockfags, you're no longer a playing a strategy game. I always thought that the battles in Total war games were real time strategy, but holy ****ting **** nipples, I was wrong, wasn't I? Let's make a few comparisons:
Turn based strategy: Steel Panthers, The generals series (fantasy, panzer, etc.)
Turn based tactics: Silent Storm, Jagged Alliance
Real time strategy: Dark Omen, Mark Of Chaos
Real time tactics: Brigade E5, 7.62mm
Saying that Dungeon Siege isn't an RTS because it has no base building is like saying that Doom isn't an RPG becaus it doesn't have elves. Sorry if I'm being a nazi about this, but "in this, as in all else, I am an innovator an may freely adress you as... Piss midget!"
Darian
Sergeant Knight at Arms
Uh, "etc." is a fill-in-the-blanks word. I named the most common RTS elements that I could think of off-hand, but there are others; the time factor of the combat system is irrelevant, these traditions apply just as much the TBS genre (Civilization and the like). Of course there are RTSes that don't use all typical RTS elements, and there are those that include elements of another genre (Warcraft III had RPG-style heroes, and there has been at least one where you can zoom down to take part in the action using FPS-style controls), but Dungeon Siege does not fit most gamers' ideas of the RTS genre. Period.
Are you honestly telling me you'd lump Dungeon Siege alongside the likes of Age of Empires simply because both happen to combine a real-time combat system with some amount of strategic decision-making? Most players and reviewers class Dungeon Siege as an action RPG, albeit with more strategy than Diablo and the like due to its party system.
Are you honestly telling me you'd lump Dungeon Siege alongside the likes of Age of Empires simply because both happen to combine a real-time combat system with some amount of strategic decision-making? Most players and reviewers class Dungeon Siege as an action RPG, albeit with more strategy than Diablo and the like due to its party system.
Worbah
Grandmaster Knight
You misunderstood me. I meant that Dungeon Siege isn't an RTS. However saying that the lack of base building is what lacks from it to prove it an RTS is just... wrong. If it lacks all of the major characteristics of a genre, why should you focus on something like base building?
"This cradle isn't a car because it doesn't have cruise control"
"This cradle isn't a car because it doesn't have cruise control"
Worbah
Grandmaster Knight
M@ster-$ 说:
an RPG. ****'s sake... Why not a football mangare game while we're at it? Fishing simulator? Call me a faggamoffyn, but IMO merely having swords and magic doesn't make a game an RPG. Are you truly comparing Dungeon Siege to the likes of Baldurs gate? Dungeon Siege is a hack&slash clickfest, nothing more. Don't try to draw deeper meaning from it, there's none.
