Civilization: Beyond Earth - Fall 2014 PC

[Pemalite]

SvennoJ said:

Nope haven't played an RTS on a DS4 yet. I have tried Tropico on 360 but it ran like crap. I moved the pc to my projector instead and played Tropico 3 and 4 from pc on my 92" screen. Balancing a keyboard and mouse on the couch however sucks.

We'll see with Tropico 5 what was 'sacrificed' for consoles. The pc versions didn't seem to have suffered from the 360 port in previous installments. If you like games, than certainly those games reaching a bigger market is only a positive. Maybe Flight simulator and AoE would still be around if they could have been made relevant on consoles. And what's the excuse for sim city, biggest dumbing down of a series I know of. Terrible path finding, tiny 'cities', buggy mandatory online features.

Bigger "Market" is debatable.
The PC is a much larger market than all the Next-Gen systems combined currently.
It's also larger market than the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3.

I'm all for expanding PC game's to new platforms to reach more gamers, but ONLY and I must stress the "only" when it doesn't impact the PC version. - Not all developers are that kind, considering I am on my way to owning 1,000 games on the PC (Steam, GOG, Disc etc'), I know all to well what console development does to PC games compared to what we used to get 10-15 years ago, not all games are like that however.

On the flip side, more console exclusives should also go to the PC, I wouldn't mind giving Uncharted/Last of Us/Halo 3+4+Reach+ODST+Wars another shot with actual decent graphics.

As for Sim City, that was dumbed down for the casuals, the "Social Media" integration kinda' hinted towards that... And it's EA/Maxis. (Say no more after Spore!)



And in other news... Civilization: Beyond Earth is going to support Mantle, thus, those without hex-core Core i7's should see some fantastic boosts especially during turn processing. :)
(Provided you own an AMD card.)
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/civilization-beyond-earth-amd-mantle,26540.html

SvennoJ said:

zarx said:

The biggest problem with Civ on consoles would really be the interface on a TV. They would have to scale up the UI and narrow the FOV a lot to make it readable on your average TV setup. That is why Civ Rev looked like this

Civ Rev was in 720p with rediculous safety margins because it had to work on HD Ready CRT, 720p, 768p and 1080p panels all with different ways of scaling.
The new consoles can display the game at 1080p. 1080p tvs nowadays have a dot by dot mode or native resolution mode, no need for huge overscan margins. Same with readability, much better in 1080p. Launch games have already started using small fonts. Sit closer if your tv isn't big enough.

That's part of the problem, true.

However, people generally don't sit close to the TV, they usually sit farther back, requiring larger fonts, GUI elements, icons and navigation that's dumbed down and controller friendly... etc'.
Essentially when that's translated to the PC, it looks downright horrible.

There is a reason why Steam has a "Big Picture Mode" for those who prefer to play PC games on a television, running the default client/skin is next to useless otherwise.