Domicinator said:
DarkFury said:
This is not just an issue of hardware. Building the art assets to show off on top-of-the-range PC is very expensive undertaking. So even if theoretically Game Devs could build incredible-looking games for PCs, they need a financial incentive to do it. Just because you can do it, doesn't mean that it makes sense. |
Absolutely. Ask Crytek. They made a big budget follow up to FarCry (IMHO, Crysis was just FarCry with better graphics and a different plot) that was being hyped as the game that would open peoples' eyes to PC gaming again, and all that happened was that people pirated the hell out of it, and it wasn't even really released as a finished product. I remember seeing endcaps at Best Buy with stacks and stacks of copies of Crysis--nobody really bought it. Even Crytek admitted that the game needed polish. I'm sure if I were to reinstall it now and patch it all the way up to the most recent version, it would probably run better now. But at launch, everything after the part where the island freezes ran like garbage. So basically, you had a game that looked great and raised the bar on the PC, and nobody really cared that much about it. As I recall, the multiplayer didn't even work right at launch, and that was one of the big reasons I bought it!!
I'm an all or nothing type person. My attitude about PC gaming was that if I'm going to play on the PC, I'm going to play at max settings with smooth frames. If I have to dumb down my video settings just to get good performance and play without interruptions, then why play on the PC, especially when I'm no fan of MMOs or RTS games? I was long overdue for a new video card when the 8800 Nvidia cards launched, and I was building a PC specifically to play Crysis. I was at Fry's on launch day with $600 in my hand to pick up the 8800GTS. I took it home, threw it into my quad core rig, overclocked it, and got ready to have no life for at least a couple of months while I was playing the single player campaign and 12 hour long multiplayer matches.
And it didn't happen. Crysis wasn't a very good single player game, the multi player was sub par, and the graphics only looked good if you didn't mind playing a slide show. That's when I started to look around at the kinds of games I play and realized that none of the stuff I play is exclusive to the PC anymore, and certainly doesn't look any better on the PC. And so I made the move.
That's just me. I used to be the guy railing on people for liking consoles over the PC, but at some point you start getting sick of the hassle. Or you have kids and can't justify the expense anymore. I don't care how you try to put it to me, PC gaming is a huge expense if you actually want to see the advantages of the PC. If you are going to buy middle of the road graphics cards and running everything on medium to low, there is absolutely no point in playing on your PC. In my opinion, of course. If you want to play The Sims and WoW 24 hours a day, more power to you. For me, it is unfortunate that PC gaming has gone that direction.
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