Quality reply right there.

shamino wrote:

I have no use for modern consoles. If anything, I resent them for the influence they've had on many PC games, which have shifted from being designed for the PC to being designed for the console market and then ported back.

I kinda agree with this. I remember the 360/PS3 period when most of the major titles (Fallout 3 etc.) looked like crap on a PC and required a lot of custom mods to make it look and feel as good as it should've in the first place. The graphics and controls were always lacking and only in recent years have we had better PC titles. That being said, I do enjoy playing all the simple platformers on a console where I don't have to concentrate or think much. Those games are perfectly playable from a couch with a pad, anything else (IMHO) needs a precise control like mouse and a keyboard.

shamino wrote:

I have no use for modern consoles. If anything, I resent them for the influence they've had on many PC games, which have shifted from being designed for the PC to being designed for the console market and then ported back.

This kind of thinking pops up very often. And it is not new, people have been saying this for two decades now. It is also wrong to think like that. The problem with this attitude is that it is the same as resenting the good looking football player in high school because he gets all the good looking girls. There is a reason he gets that and there is a reason games are tailored for consoles.

* Consoles are cheaper to develop for, as they stay unchanged mostly for the a decade.
* Games on the console are also more stable due to that.
* It is a defineable market game companies can aim for.
* They lose very little, if anything, due to piracy

The only reason people started feeling like this now, is because for 15 or so years games are multiplatform. Hence people feel like they "lose" something if they play on PC. But the same arguments I made before have been valid since NES and will be valid in the future too.

I said it before, consoles are here to stay. You can either hold your mouse and keyboard and act resentful or you can act normally and deal with the situation and make the best out of it. For example instead of buying a newer nVidia card and a new CPU buy instead a new 65" TV so that Fallout really looks amazing.

Do not let this go where these threads usually go. If so it'll be locked.

If you want the real blame for the recent "consolized" game design influence, blame Microsoft. They're the ones demanding for the mandatory DLC, the mandatory achievements, timed platform exclusivity by YEARS, and critical patches being held back because of a required cost for a company to issue them (And go through their lengthy approval process) which caused all the multiplatform games to keep in sync with their Xbox builds. These things shouldn't be blamed for a system dedicated to a television set.

Likewise, you can blame Sony for encouraging developers to cap to 30hz or less since the Playstation 😀 the effect of that was definitely had on the pc ports of many psx games. The original intent was for picture clarity (due to the interlaced flickering), but in the PS2 era this was relaxed a bit for a framebuffer flicker reduction hack until the PS2 was pushed a bit more and had to do it for "cinematic" reasons since.

vladstamate wrote:

* Consoles are cheaper to develop for, as they stay unchanged mostly for the a decade. * Games on the console are also more sta […]
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* Consoles are cheaper to develop for, as they stay unchanged mostly for the a decade.
* Games on the console are also more stable due to that.
* It is a defineable market game companies can aim for.
* They lose very little, if anything, due to piracy

I agree with these points that publishers have good reasons to like consoles, but I don't personally feel any desire to use them anymore. The only feeling I bear towards them is not being happy about the influence they increasingly bear over the design of PC games, economically justified though it may be for the publishers. 😀

Consoles encourage a style of game design that differs from what the PC encourages. I would argue (perhaps oversimplifying) that consoles generally encourage games to be simpler and faster, while the PC encourages more complexity. It used to not matter because the console and PC world were very separate. Now game publishers have found it to their advantage to merge these markets, so consolized game design now affects major releases on the PC.

I'll give a specific example close to my heart, and I apologize for the phrasing, but it's how I feel about it:
When Elder Scrolls devolved into an almost mindless hack and slash, I blame that on the developer chasing the console market. One of the most interesting, complex RPG universes has been permanently watered down because the console gamer with a Dual Shock on their couch isn't in a good position to exercise the attention span, the text reading ability, or the mouse to play the real game. It isn't because they're dumb, it's just the way that platform works and feels to the player using it.
Skyrim is an okay game on it's own merit, but as it defines the ongoing direction of a series that was previously PC-centric, it makes me sad. On the flip side, I imagine that Morrowind on the XBox didn't feel as engaging as it does on the PC. I just don't think the console and PC markets mesh well, but in today's market they've been merged anyway.

As I mentioned earlier, I do like 2D era consoles, but from around the mid-90s onward my interest in them waned rapidly. I greatly enjoyed them at a time when I felt they had more to offer. To this day I still play older consoles, I just don't care for the modern ones.

The closest I came to buying a console in the last 15 years was the Wii. Some relatives bought them and I had some fun with it. It was a unique experience and a throwback to the days of family gaming in front of the Atari. People were surprised I didn't buy one, but I think if I had one here I'd just be playing it by myself and it wouldn't be nearly as fun. When I see Wiis at thrift stores, I still think about it.

Although I dislike the console-PC game design merger that has occurred, it isn't the end of the world. There are a billion games out there and I won't live long enough to play all of them.

Whether you like it or not, devs tend to favor consoles and keep awesome games exclusive to them. For example Witcher3 would not be possible to exist in the way the game released without the console ports (as per dev words - meaning they invested on the console revenues since pc alone would not be able to support their investment).
There are many great games for all recent consoles, where else would you play Bloodborne or Horizon or Uncharted or God of War or Zelda BoTW or Mario Odyssey or some other MS exclusive game? You just can't and you miss out great games.

I also don't buy the whole "consoles watered down our games" , this is where the industry is going: over-simplification. You can see it everywhere, even on your OS.

If one think themselves as a gamer then some consoles are needed to run exclusives: this was true in the 90s and it is still true today.

I would have preferred that PC games had their own unique titles just like console had their. At the time of the original Doom, console developers had to port the game to their hardware not the contrary. I imagine that nowdays with all the PC API layers complexity so much is lost in low level optimization. With the kind of CPU and GPU power nowdays I'd expect impressive results that I don't really see. Many always talk about resolution, like it's the main point of having a PC to set higher ones. But I'd prefer newer effects to improve realism, even at 1024x768, I don't care.
For example global indirect illumination nowdays should be standard.

I see an unbelievably large quantity of indie games of all sorts and complexities being available for PC today. Thanks to the amount of cheap/free middleware available. You can find whatever you might be looking for. It's like a zillion late '90s-sized development teams but they can do more because of the middleware that's available. Lots of risk taking going on there and it's exciting I think.

Modern AAA games are way too expensive to build and need to go after the absolute largest audience. So they are what they are. I still enjoy some of them. Dishonored 2 and Prey worked very well for me with their incredibly detailed settings and refined gameplay. I hear they didn't sell well though.

I had a PS4 for awhile to check out some exclusives like The Order 1886, Last of Us, and Until Dawn. Until Dawn was pretty cool and fun with friends.

swaaye wrote:

You can find whatever you might be looking for.

Agreed and I think that extends to many aspects of modern life - we're spoiled in so many ways. People will always find something to complain about tho.

I hate having so much choice. It makes decisions so difficult!

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ElectroMan wrote:

Not sure if you added some sarcasm to the sentence - but I agree with the sentiment to certain degree. […]
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gdjacobs wrote:

I hate having so much choice. It makes decisions so difficult!

Not sure if you added some sarcasm to the sentence - but I agree with the sentiment to certain degree.

To clarify - in my opinion all the easy stuff makes people lazy and complacent - stream, play, watch whatever you want. I used to be excited about things like Spotify until I just stopped to care at all and returned to my lossless and cd collection.

For me a lot of value comes from actually owning content and stuff, or better yet to have some physical medium I could touch, interact and tinker with. And while I may be in the minority, I believe I'm not alone (yet) 😵.

So for me the modern consoles are very boring to say the least, but I could see how and why many people would enjoy it.

I understand your point of view and the same thing I'd say for most nowdays "essential" things like social net. Everything's becoming a "service" nowdays soon even cars maybe will be a sold as service more than something you bought to use when and where you want or not.

Scali wrote:

No, just no.

Here's another tidbit from the upcoming Forza 7 (DX 12). And if you're wondering, 1440p is similar, but 2160p (4K) changes. Note the RX 580 is a full 45% faster than the GTX 970 (avg fps) or 51% faster in 99th percentile fps. RX 580 gets around 40+ fps at 4K. So the XBox One X having 25% more CU's (along with better optimizations) getting 4Kp60 in this game is not unreasonable to fathom.

https://www.computerbase.de/2017-09/forza-7-b … rza-7-2560-1440

I think NV has some kind of driver problem going on there. Or DirectX 12 is again showing us how touchy it is across different architectures.

swaaye wrote:

I think NV has some kind of driver problem going on there. Or DirectX 12 is again showing us how touchy it is across different architectures.

Probably, I believe the German site states that the latest NV drivers officially support Forza 7.

Usually, the problem is Radeon cards have downright terrible initial performance and it takes months to catch up. For DX12/Vulkan titles, it has been the opposite for the most part. And unfortunately (or fortunately), from a marketing perspective, it makes a HUGE impact. When you search 'Radeon RX480 review', you get a bunch of initial RX 480 results. So you have people like scali that believes the RX 480 is on par or slightly faster than a GTX 970. Which was true at launch. Now it is not even close.

My perspective, I still believe titles like Doom/Vulkan, Hitman:Absolution/DX12, Ashes of the Singularity/DX12 to have huge advantage for Radeon. However, Nvidia has released drivers over the months and the gap has narrowed or reversed. Unfortunately, the initial perspective is hard to overcome unless one specifically researches the topic.

It all depends on how you want to cherry-pick.

Scali wrote:

It all depends on how you want to cherry-pick.

Picking AAA graphics intensive PC gaming titles as they come in? The next big ones will be Destiny 2 and SW: BattleFront II. Do you disagree with this?

dexvx wrote:

Scali wrote:

It all depends on how you want to cherry-pick.

Picking AAA graphics intensive PC gaming titles as they come in? The next big ones will be Destiny 2 and SW: BattleFront II. Do you disagree with this?

Depends on what you're interested in. Is it:
1) The performance of video cards (and their drivers) in actual games
2) The performance and capabilities of the actual hardware (and their drivers)

They're not the same thing.

Scali wrote:

Depends on what you're interested in. Is it:
1) The performance of video cards (and their drivers) in actual games
2) The performance and capabilities of the actual hardware (and their drivers)

Aren't 99.9% of people interested in #1? Your inability to concede a point makes for exasperating reading - I'm guessing you don't get invited to many dinner parties 🤣