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Proving that Consoles are throttling Game Potential
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ShadowHearth wrote: »I dont know what to make of it, but my buddy installed that 50kb mod and tried out the upgraded visuals. He says it looks balls awesome and actually runs better...
And it even comes with a free copy of Sim Ant
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johnny_ultimate wrote: »I think the only thing this discovery 'proves' is that the Watch_Dogs PC port has been a serious mess, and one that ran into serious practical and technical difficulties.
It would be nice to think PC could become a technological wonderland that unified games around the world and allowed developers to realise their wildest dreams without restrictions. But yeah... the imagined utopia is not equal to reality.
AAA gaming at the moment is reliant on consoles - no doubt whatsoever you'd see more developers and publishers targeting PC first and foremost if it wasn't the case. This is for many reasons, but mostly financial. Those crazy expensive retail copies of games are what fund these mega blockbusters, whereas many PC gamers refuse point blank to buy a game full price - they'll wait for a Steam Sale, or maybe buy it off a semi-dodgy Eastern European key site. Won't even mention piracy! PC gaming is so vast and so varied that it's incredibly lucrative for many types of games, from free to play to indie titles, but it's the big blockbusters that PC is a distant second in terms of supporting (although on the plus side they have a longer shelf life PC, where seasonal sales and the like will give them a second lease of life).
The fragmentation is both an amazing asset and significant liability for PC gaming. Sadly, it's a niche audience that has the hardware capable to run games at their best (and are willing and able to keep it that way), and it'll be a generous publisher willing to fund the resources to fully optimise a game for that small market - certainly one that is fit for market and not just a couple of high end machines. When you make a PC version of a game, you have to make compromised versions anyway to ensure a wide enough audience will get to play the thing, not just those with the most powerful machines. The AMD and Nvidia arguments going on at the moment are also a cause for concern - Watch_Dogs is a game whose performance is affected by your graphics card manufacturer of choice, which would be a fairly grim development if that turns into a trend!
And hey, sometimes a single, set hardware is a useful thing - many artists perform best under limitations, and being able to design a game and release it on a platform where everyone has the same specs or SKU is clearly an attractive proposition, practically speaking: everyone gets to play the game as the creator intended.
PC has countless advantages over consoles, and sure in a hypotethical world where consoles disappeared tomorrow I'm sure you'd see a near instant jump in the level of graphical fidelity in new games. But the various financial and practical eccentricities of PC gaming mean that's unlikely to be the case barring a radical change in mass market perception.
On the plus side, these AAA games aren't exactly the ones that are going to be truly pushing games' potential one way or the other: graphically, yes, but they're always going to be some of the most conservative, 'safe' titles out there anyway. Like in Hollywood, the irony is the productions with the funding to go a step beyond are the ones that are always going to be held back from doing so. Luckily there's people out there redefining the medium's true potential all the time with innovative design and gameplay, and there's no shortage of them on PC and consoles alike
I get awful stutter on stock high or ultra, I get zero stutter with the e3 mod. What gives? Makes zero sense. i7 4770 R92900 -
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ShadowHearth wrote: »I wonder if they had it all along like that, then in a year or something make: ULTIMATE BIG BALLS EDITION WITH ENCHANTED VISUALS! UPGRADE FOR ONLY EXTRA 30EU!!! :pac:
All they would need to do is just change a few "0" in to"1" and "false" to "true"....
Remastered edition?
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Oh neither do I, that being said, I've yet to see anyone in the industry actually say that specifically either.I dont agree that a pirate is a lost sale. Sometimes it's a try before you buy, and that seems to be the case among friends that check games out that way. It's a lost sale if the game sucks, I suppose, but if the game is good, it is frequently bought.
As for the game being good, well the paper you linked covers that. Logically it will (or at least should) sell better due to the increased quality but it also makes it target for higher bittorrent activity which hurts the PC sales more so than its console brethren.
Could be a few things. The effect being used could have caused adverse effects on other setups leading to its exclusion, the effect was replaced by a Gameworks implementation which would have improved performance on nVidia hardware but was hobbled on the AMD equivalent or the effect was only suitable for the PC version and was replaced by the console equivalent which was unoptimised for usage on the platform.I get awful stutter on stock high or ultra, I get zero stutter with the e3 mod. What gives? Makes zero sense. i7 4770 R92900 -
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I ended up buying Witcher 2 twice. One collector's edition, and then later in a Steam sale so I had it in a nice neat list with 99% of my other games and didn't have to worry about scratching DVDs and the like.
You can add non-steam games to your library.
I whip up custom banners for em' in grid view. They work with overlay too, even PS2 games with a bit of work. It's pretty cool having the overlay on PS2 games that still even go online like Biohazard Outbreak although it's more of a novelty for me since I dual-monitor but it could definitely be useful for single-monitor users who need a browser and chat system overlayed on the game which is preferably played full screen (i myself keep all that on the secondary display).
With in-home streaming there's some interesting developments in that regard, too.I dont agree that a pirate is a lost sale. Sometimes it's a try before you buy, and that seems to be the case among friends that check games out that way. It's a lost sale if the game sucks, I suppose, but if the game is good, it is frequently bought.
This is why demos are rarer these days... they statistically reduce the sales of a game because the player is now more informed and they typically don't like the game and do not purchase - So publishers like blind, uninformed purchases... not really a surprise.
That said, I will admit I have pirated to see if I like a game(Sims 3, no thanks) and for other reasons. One is that I used to own a disc version in my old home and don't have access to it anymore, or in some other way owned the game but don't have it anymore. I got Shinobido on PS2 for full price yonks ago when it was new in HMV... but there's no way I'm going all the way to Dublin to get my disc back just to rip the content onto my rig so I got an online ripped copy. Is that even technically pirating(?) since I own a license for the game and receipt (somewhere) for proof of purchase. Bit of a grey area, but I don't feel a shred of guilt... They got my £50.
Anyway, little bit off topic here.
I'm more interested in the suposed performance increase the modded Watch Dogs gives. Graphics is one thing, but throttling the game's stability down to framerate is quite WTF to be honest. There's also the issue that this game was released on last-gen consoles... Which brings the question as to what GAMEPLAY aspects where removed from the game or other such technical limitations of the platform. Isn't GTAV PC getting an A.I increase?
I shouldn't really care since both of these games are crap-tier and from publishers who have gone full-retard as of late but am just keeping an eye on the industry. As of right now, there's no WAY I'm going to buy Ubisoft games unless they outright apologise and release the mother of all patches for these games... but we all know Ubisoft is never going to do that and just release their platoon of damage control soldiers. What with them saying that the Ultra settings for Far Cry 4 are going to be equal to PS4/XBOne versions... does this mean we're getting 30fps caps? Either way, not very innovative or progressive attitudes going on at Ubisoft HQ and there's a WHOLE lot of smoke... and where there's smoke...0 -
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As I'm sure you're quite aware, people have been saying PC gaming is dying since the beginning of time so I wouldn't really use that as a reliable metric for such an assertion. Hell the early 2000s saw absolutely huge releases on the platform such as Unreal Tournament, Black & White, Baldur's Gate II, Deus Ex etc... Granted the same period also saw the meteoric rise of the PS2 but, like now, the PC continued to preform despite the trend towards consoles. Also, I didn't say piracy figures were increasing, with only anecdotal evidence available I don't really feel it's possible to prove a shift in either direction. All that we can really say for sure is that it still happens from the figures that are still available for some titles.BlitzKrieg wrote: »I dont have a direct example of piracy decline, it mostly comes from an observation that the pc market went from being close to death in the early 2000s with talk that only MMOS like WOW and wide appeal titles the Sims could survive in the market to now, though I can ask the same of you to show proof that it is increasing.
Yea, I had another look for the top games downloaded and the last one available is the 2011. That being said, in the context of this discussion, the fact that Crysis 2 tops the poll and PC downloads far exceed console ones are quite important.
As for raw numbers, just ignore VGChartz, it's next to useless these days for the reasons you outlined. 0 -
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Quite true, however the death of those companies had little to do with falling sales due to piracy, more so poor financial management from Interplay and an exodus of senior staff from Ion Storm. Epic, on the other hand, are a prime example of a company shifting focus to where the money is. Which leads me to the Crysis issue.BlitzKrieg wrote: »2 of the 4 companies that made those titles went out of business (black isle & Ion Storm), 1 moved away from making exclusively pc titles to making console and ios titles predominantly (Epic) and is only *now* (with the upcoming free to play unreal tournament) returning to make exclusive pc titles and the last (lionhead) was acquired by microsoft.
While Crysis 2 may not have been as PC centric as its predecessor (whom also made it to that list in a previous year) it still looked pretty fantastic on a high end machine, even if it took the post-release DX11 and HD texture packs to truly shine. My point is more to do with the trend of a company like Crytek who really pushed the boundaries on the technical side of things not really being rewarded by the community whom they quite openly targeted. While sales for the original were ultimately deemed to meet expectations, it took a considerable amount of time for them to reach those levels, indicating that a lot of those fans who cried foul at the change in direction for the sequel weren't the ones who bought the game at launch, instead waiting for significant price drops. Meanwhile piracy figures are multiple times actual sales and console sales totally eclipse the PC ones. The net result is that they, like Epic, change focus in order to remain profitable.BlitzKrieg wrote: »While pc being larger is no surprise, I'm not sure why crysis 2 topping the poll is such an issue.
It was not a big pc centric title like the first crysis was, in fact it was criticized in the run up to its release by large part of the originals fanbase for dumbing down the series for consoles.
A bigger point would have been if a more pc centric title had topped the chart for example if The Witcher 2 which was named earlier for being pirated massively had topped the poll (it's not even in the top 5) or if a title with a strong PC bias at least had topped. Battlefield 3, a title which was clearly praised for being better on pc then consoles was beat out by call of duty mw3 a title mostly slated for having a sh*t pc port but undeniably more popular on console
those top 2 might indicate a different trend (closer to the original topic) of titles that look like they've potentially sh*t the bag on the pc port get pirated more then titles that get the most out of the platform.
Again though, I don't really want to focus on piracy as, in the context of why PC ports get less love than console versions, it's far easier to talk about actual sales data with PC and console versions than hypothetical lost sales on the PC. 0 -
As I'm sure you're quite aware, people have been saying PC gaming is dying since the beginning of time so I wouldn't really use that as a reliable metric for such an assertion. Hell the early 2000s saw absolutely huge releases on the platform such as Unreal Tournament, Black & White, Baldur's Gate II, Deus Ex etc... Granted the same period also saw the meteoric rise of the PS2 but, like now, the PC continued to preform despite the trend towards consoles. Also, I didn't say piracy figures were increasing, with only anecdotal evidence available I don't really feel it's possible to prove a shift in either direction. All that we can really say for sure is that it still happens from the figures that are still available for some titles.
Yea, I had another look for the top games downloaded and the last one available is the 2011. That being said, in the context of this discussion, the fact that Crysis 2 tops the poll and PC downloads far exceed console ones are quite important.
As for raw numbers, just ignore VGChartz, it's next to useless these days for the reasons you outlined.
Console piracy has never really worked through torrents though. I'd imagine the current gen is pretty solid atm in terms of preventing it, but I remember the ps1 ps2 days when it was rampant.. at least around here. Used to go up to Jonesborough market every Sunday with a 10er and coming home with 3 PlayStation games. I don't know if it was possible last gen to get the consoles chipped, but if they were I'd imagine it worked in a similar fashion with most people getting their games via someone they know.0 -
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I would PREFER for a DRM-free system that also automatically updates, but I get more VALUE from Steam because it saves me time.ShadowHearth wrote: »Dont prefer, but better value. I am confused...0 -
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