16th August 2007, 10:30 PM
Quote:And to be honest I don't really agree there. To hear this sort of thing PC gaming (or console gaming, or gaming in general, or some very specific genre) has been going "downhill" since the Pentium 1 came out. Well I've seen a lot of neat stuff recently, and if that's downhill, I'll meet you at the bottom.
Thief 1 and 2 and Deus Ex... to Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3.
Baldur's Gate I and II and NWN... to KotOR and Jade Empire.
Arena and Daggerfall (and Redguard) ... to Morrowind and Oblivion.
Or this one... Activision's MechWarrior and MechWarrior 2 (plus expansion; they are mech sims, just like the X-Wing games) to Zipper/Microprose's MechWarrior 3 (still a sim) to FASA/Microsoft's MechWarrior 4 (more arcadish than the previous games in the series but still on PC) ... to MechAssualt and MechAssualt 2... console action games. And then after MechWarrior 4 FASA made Crimson Skies, the console flight action game (as opposed to the earlier PC flight sim -- not a super-realistic sim, but just enough to be interesting) and then Shadowrun...
Or how about Interplay, reduced from being the greatest RPG studio in history (1997-2002) to publishing Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel...
[On that note, here's a complete list of major (actually get games to retail) PC-only RPG developers still operating now.]
[End list]
While I know that the "PC gaming is dying" thing has been said for many years, and for a long time I disagreed, really, I think that since about 1999 PC gaming HAS been slipping. Oh, sales are still good, thanks almost entirely to online games (all major PC games are MMOs, FPS games, or RTSes, pretty much. Genre variety has disappeared beyond the extremely niche (online sales, stuff like that) level.), but it's not like it used to be. Looking at any PC Gamer (or even CGW, PC Games, or Computer Games Strategy Plus) magazine (oh, and the latter two of those four are out of business. And the second one is rebranded "Games for Windows". And PC Gamer is at best half and sometimes a quarter as long as it was in 1997.) makes this blatantly clear... not just the length, and the volume of content, because "online killed magazines" could be said there, but the number of games reviewed and demoed. Far, far fewer.
Quote:Maybe if you're a PC freak who just put down $1,500 for the latest hardware. For everyone else, including those people who don't have that $1,500, an Xbox360 port is the best thing that could possibly happen to this game.
Not when it mean a simplistic, consolized version of a great game it doesn't. As I said it looks like Irrational has probably managed to avoid that trap this time, thankfully, but you can never take it for granted anymore... :(
Seriously, the consolization of PC games is a major, major problem these days, and it's a big part of why the PC gaming industry has fallen so far. Back in what I'd call the PC's best era, the '90s, you almost never saw that! Oh, sure, there were some games that would show up on both consoles and PC, but they were usually either console games ported to the PC later or PC games ported to the console later. Not games simultaneously designed for both. But in the last few years, virtually every single major PC game gets a console port, often simultaneous. Why? Obviously, it's because they think that the PC isn't a successful enough console anymore to make many exclusive games for it, something that was almost never true in the past. Anyone who likes PC gaming would NOT see this as a good thing. Even if the PC was clearly the original design and the X360 version is 'just' a port (far from a guarantee these days, as I said, but possible -- see Prey, among others, perhaps, or better those RTSes EA ported to the 360) the message it sends is bad. I'll bet that it was Take-Two's idea to do the 360 port, not Irrational's.