| JEMC said: They won't hire anybody because that means extra costs for a feature that, given its absence, they don't think they need. And the benchmark, if they want to do it right and be representative of something, has be feature different hardware configurations. At the very least, they should go with something that could be called middle-range, and feature Intel & AMD CPUs (even one of each and dissable cores to simulate other chips could work), and AMD & Nvidia GPUs (two or three of each brand). But again, that is time consuming and means having one guy doing all those tests for at last a couple days to get only one article. They're clearly not interested. And just because they do the PC show, that doesn't mean that they put a lot of money into it. We don't know how much do the sponsors give and how much does the whole show cost. For all we know, the part PCGamer invests could be rather small and be perfectly reasonable for the advertising and publicity they get for it. As for Anno, I didn't say complicated, I said complex. The econonmy or resources systems could be more complex and give the game some much needed deep without making the game complicated, just more demanding. |
And that is where they fail, and why I don't bother visiting their site anymore.
They can easily go with at least 2-3 mid range cards, 2 high end and a possible 1-2 low end. That alone will not cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for a start. Digital Foundry managed to hire one guy to take on their PC side of news, and that's already begun to slow down and become far more simplistic.
PCG clearly isn't interest much in actual PC gaming. They seem far more content in covering early access, e-sports and casually written articles. With each year, they slowly become a site that's just akin to one huge marketing ad, rather than a side dedicated to core PC gaming values and information.
I said before that they scrape money for the PCG show. I never said they don't put money into it. It's obvious that they've been putting money into it, money which they seem to have garnered more of over the years to make such a yearly event possible, which to me shows that they actually do have a good chunk of funds to hire people and gather some hw for benchmarks. Benching alone is far cheaper than a yearly event, and paying all sorts of parties to come and attend said events.
Complexity lends itself to complications of understanding a concept or how it functions. Making something complex, that could easily be understood by someone who knows it's ins and outs, but to someone else it could be too "complex" to get into, and thus become complicated for them to understand.
Just how complex could the resource system be?. How far does it need to be taken to be incredibly fun?.
I've been playing Kingdom's & Castles, and I'm perfectly fine with it's resource system. The only thing it fails at, is properly updating for when you acquire enough food for your villagers. The castle adviser complains about not storing enough food, yet I have hundreds of farms and plenty of large granaries to store said food, with plenty of room left over. The system does not update properly when you're running at max speed, which leaves that to being a dev issue to sort out.
I'd love for RTS's to make a large comeback, but they do not need to be needlessly complicated.
Mankind, in its arrogance and self-delusion, must believe they are the mirrors to God in both their image and their power. If something shatters that mirror, then it must be totally destroyed.
