Sunday, April 17, 2011

Are consoles holding back PC gaming?

People close to me know what my answer to this question is. A resounding yes. I've played a variety of games in recent years and I own a couple consoles (ps3 and wii) as well as a decent gaming PC (though it is a couple years old now). One game from the last few years that really got me interested was Borderlands. I'm one of the people that is of the opinion that FPS games are best controlled with a keyboard and mouse, and are therefore always better on a PC. I got the game for PC and as I played it, I noticed a huge annoyance in the way the menus worked. It was almost always better to take your hand off the mouse when in the menus and use the arrow keys and enter key to navigate them. This is terrible. The mouse was designed to make user interfaces better and more accessible but in Borderlands, the mouse is unusable for the interface entirely. Sadly, Borderlands is not the only game that I've played in the last few years to have this problem.

Today I found a blog post from the developer of Battlefield 3 about their position on this subject. They believe, like I do, that pc games in recent are plagued with engines, graphics, and user interface designed for consoles with minor changes to the PC version. To quote the Battlefield 3 blog, "console games are generally ported to the PC with some higher resolution textures." It is good to hear that Battlefield 3 is being developed in the opposite way. The PC version is the definitive version while the console versions are going to be ports with scaled down textures. I hope that more developers will see the light and develop for the PC when the game in question makes more sense as a PC title. They can still release console versions, but PC games should be PC games primarily, and console ports second. I suppose mobile phone ports could come third since people only really want to play angry birds on those platforms, but that's a discussion for another day.

3 comments:

  1. definetly...this has become a more dire issue with console games coming up to par with computer graphics...

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  2. I wouldn't exactly call console games up to par with pc graphics. When is the last time you saw a gaming computer rendering at 1280x720 resolution that isn't a laptop? Computers have been at 1080p for many years and console games are only occasionally able to do that with great optimization. Imagine what you could get out of a gaming pc if the developers could optimize for a particular setup.

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    1. And it's only a beginning. There are many multi-displays technologies from both leading video cards producers. Aircraft simulators on 6 displays, FPS or race games on 3. There are no limits. Single video card can do that. LCDs costs also is not a problem any more, since their prices are at reasonable level.

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