So devs can either go balls out and give us the option of personalizing our experience, or neuter their games for weak consoles and we settle for somewhere in the middle.

I'll take developers going balls out and letting me decide which experience I want for myself.

Agreed. That's why I posted it. I just wondered how many people would take a possitive from this but not look at what it could create long term. People who choose the higher quality graphics over a slightly better framerate will have a disadvantage in multiplayer and so eventually everyone will lower the quality of graphics, making the choice pointless. Developers will no longer need to optimise their code because all they have to do is say 'we've given you a choice, what more can we do?'

I highly doubt the difference is 30 v 60. Also, console gamers can still play the game and not worry about settings.

So I just found this out.

Tales of Symphonia run 60 fps on the Gamecube and 30 FPS on PC, Ironically.

More power doesn't count for shit if you can't program worth a damn and this kind of choice/option can easily lead to shit programming.

Agreed. A slippery slope. 

very good give and take option 

THANK YOU! Take notes, you lazyass developers.

Really.... Nice! Hope to see that kind of option, in future game from now on!

CoD will always strive for 60fps over everything else, so that's not a realistic example. Also, we're not talking about multiple settings here and a double the frame rate difference. It's one setting users can toggle if they want a slightly better looking game or a slightly better playing game. Again this has been going on in a much deeper and complicated fashion in the PC market for decades and yet many PC games are still optimized perfectly fine for a wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide array of rigs. There are magnitudes less things that can go wrong with a console where you're working with one hardware build. So any optimization worries should be directed at the developer, not the idea that giving gamers choices means the games won't be optimized.

Ubisoft already makes poorly optimized games that routinely have issues. Even if they settled for somewhere in the middle, or picked the lighting or picked the framerate, the game will still probably have issues. However, developers who routinely put out quality made games will still put out quality made games. I mean, you're worried about what "lazy devs" are going to do.. we don't have to wait to see any future ramifications of this. "Lazy devs" are going to be lazy devs and put out games that reflect that, whether they have 20 different visual customization toggles, or 10, or 0.

I'm all for turning chromatic abberation and depth of field off, yet letting the user change things that can have a big impact on frame rate is a slippery slope. For now console games are optimized to run at a mostly stable frame rate throughout. PC games are not and I often have to change settings midway. For example I can have shadows on ultra while in space in ED, on planets it tanks my frame rate to 12fps and below.

I doubt console developers are going to ensure a stable performance for each setting. It's more likely you'll see more severe performance dips which you can 'solve' yourself. Why bother with dynamic resolution scaling or optimizing the amount of detail in each scene if you can add an option to turn off lighting effects.