It is quite strong opinion among gaming "society" that PC gaming is going through nice renaissance. I'm not completely sold (though I hope they are right) - I think this effect is more due to current console gen getting really old and console gamers holding back for next gen, while PCs improve every year, and performance gap is moving some people back from consoles to PC. But release of next-gen consoles will spike interest in consoles again... for a few years... and as next gen starts showing age, tide will move again toward PCs.
The really interesting thing happening now is the new high-end consoles are using x86 PC hardware. This potentially means they wouldn't even have to recompile the games but they probably would optimize them differently. Suffice to say, PC development no longer requires a lot of extra effort to port over. If Haswell is going to have decent enough GPU power, the minimum performance bar will be around the 640M:
That can play Battlefield 3 on high quality. I figured PC gaming would gradually fade out as developers just turned games to console exclusives but the PC audience is huge and being able to easily do simultaneous releases will be such a big help to developers. It might even make it easier to port straight to the Mac although there's still the DirectX/OpenGL issue. If they all do OpenGL 4 and Apple gets a move on with support for it, they'll have feature parity with DX11.
The appeal with mobile platforms, especially with the indie developers is that there's low expectations for quality, the publishing costs are low and the audience is bigger than all of the consoles combined. The top-tier developers aren't showing enough interest in it yet. I don't think it has to be a case of one or the other, they both have a place in the gaming world and there will be more convergence as time goes on. They'll be able to do simultaneous AAA releases to mobile eventually.
Consoles have nothing to fear from tablets or phones.
I don't care if the skin has subsurface scattering and a porous material algorithm applied to it when the performance is wooden and the writing is transparent.
Some of the best games have zero graphics at all. If you think that's the deciding factor in purchasing, why isn't Terragen a multi-billion dollar company?
I don't care if the skin has subsurface scattering and a porous material algorithm applied to it when the performance is wooden and the writing is transparent.
Some of the best games have zero graphics at all. If you think that's the deciding factor in purchasing, why isn't Terragen a multi-billion dollar company?
Well of course it's a mix of both. If it weren't, we would still be playing on Amiga, but we are not.
One of the most acclaimed games this year, and one of the most original ever, Journey, is simple in design but still needs a lot of tech to achieve that 'simple' look.
Beyond : Two Souls, is an upcoming game that sports extremely impressive motion capture acting, including by Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe.
And what about The Last Of Us?
It will take several years for tablets and phones to reach that level of graphics, and even then, games of that scope and quality are very expensive and can't possibly be sold at a few dollars. And even if, no reasonable person would play those on any other support than a good big screen.
Well of course it's a mix of both. If it weren't, we would still be playing on Amiga, but we are not.
One of the most acclaimed games this year, and one of the most original ever, Journey, is simple in design but still needs a lot of tech to achieve that 'simple' look.
Beyond : Two Souls, is an upcoming game that sports extremely impressive motion capture acting, including by Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe.
And what about The Last Of Us?
It will take several years for tablets and phones to reach that level of graphics, and even then, games of that scope and quality are very expensive and can't possibly be sold at a few dollars. And even if, no reasonable person would play those on any other support than a good big screen.
You're still talking about graphics. There's one sentence in there where you sort of partially kind of halfway accept that the story and gameplay are part of at least halfway what make a game great. I guess that's a start, but they're roughly 90% of what makes a game worth playing.
When I talked about motion capture that was what I was talking about. Facial motion capture to be precise. Just a look at the trailer shows a level of emotion and realistic characters never attained in games anywhere. And I agree emotion is primordial for some kind of games. You talked about performance and writing. The problem is that performance can't be transcribed without a lot of tech and power. I still have to see a tablet game that arrives to the level of PS1 games like Metal Gear Solid or Final Fantasy. Writing, on the other hand, isn't related to tech, but oddly, even in that department iOS games lack. The first game that comes to my mind is Superbrothers sorcery (or whatever the name). It has great writing and is one of the best games of the past years, whatever the support. But that's one of the very few exceptions in a catalog of games that are mostly puzzles (in videogame terms). That's not a bad thing per se. I loved a lot of them, but this genre for me is uncapable of delivering the same level of immersion as 'bigger' games. Well, they mostly don't deliver any immersion at all. One of my favorite games ever is Osmos on iOS, though it was initially developed for Steam. The music is fantastic.
Well of course it's a mix of both. If it weren't, we would still be playing on Amiga, but we are not.
One of the most acclaimed games this year, and one of the most original ever, Journey, is simple in design but still needs a lot of tech to achieve that 'simple' look.
It will take several years for tablets and phones to reach that level of graphics, and even then, games of that scope and quality are very expensive and can't possibly be sold at a few dollars. And even if, no reasonable person would play those on any other support than a good big screen.
I'd say it has to be a mix of both too and it goes beyond visual appearance. There are AI and physics simulations that improve the immersion in a game and there is the scale of an environment - it depends on the type of game of course. A good book can be more immersive than a big budget console game but poor quality game titles stand out a mile and mobile platforms have far too many of them. Great games can be made with current mobile resources though. Vice City is one example, which came out for mobile a couple of months ago:
[VIDEO]
A few titles are quite laughable like Splinter Cell:
[VIDEO]
Once you get into the game itself, it's just terrible even compared to PS2 equivalents:
The game prices probably will have to rise to justify dedicating more development effort to them and time will tell if that happens. In terms of processing power, the next mobile chips will allow PS3/360 console quality and at the very least there can be more ports of older AAA games.
One very real problem for developers is visibility in the store. With console titles, they would be 1 out of maybe 200-400 titles. When it's 1 out of 500,000 titles, you could end up not being noticed at all without a significant marketing budget. I really wish they'd have an option to hide the low utility apps - they can check the binary sizes. Apps that turn the LED on are useful when they are needed but they clutter up the place otherwise. Just a display mode that lets me see apps that developers have spent more than 5 minutes making.
You're still talking about graphics. There's one sentence in there where you sort of partially kind of halfway accept that the story and gameplay are part of at least halfway what make a game great. I guess that's a start, but they're roughly 90% of what makes a game worth playing.
It depends on the type of game you're talking about. If you're talking about Madden or COD/Battlefield, the focus is on pushing the graphics envelope and multi-player while story is an afterthought. The graphics help push the story in ways never before, when you see characters react like a normal person, see that human emotion or just a lush landscape that makes the world your in more believable, it enhances the game like never before.
With that said some of the best games that stand as timeless were focused on delivering a great story in the 16bit days, but the graphics can make or break a game nowadays unlike the old days where almost every game looked similar with the story setting them apart.
Nothing i've really played on iOS has a great story unless it was a DS port or remake of something from another console. It's not to say that it can't be done but developers aren't even attempting to push that envelope of smartphone gaming, its about super polished graphics on top of a monotonous game with microtransactions left and right, or port their old games and get people to buy them or make a half ass game with the name of their console counterpart (EA mainly) to get people to just buy it.
Comments
Consoles have nothing to fear from tablets or phones.
The really interesting thing happening now is the new high-end consoles are using x86 PC hardware. This potentially means they wouldn't even have to recompile the games but they probably would optimize them differently. Suffice to say, PC development no longer requires a lot of extra effort to port over. If Haswell is going to have decent enough GPU power, the minimum performance bar will be around the 640M:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-640M.71579.0.html
That can play Battlefield 3 on high quality. I figured PC gaming would gradually fade out as developers just turned games to console exclusives but the PC audience is huge and being able to easily do simultaneous releases will be such a big help to developers. It might even make it easier to port straight to the Mac although there's still the DirectX/OpenGL issue. If they all do OpenGL 4 and Apple gets a move on with support for it, they'll have feature parity with DX11.
The appeal with mobile platforms, especially with the indie developers is that there's low expectations for quality, the publishing costs are low and the audience is bigger than all of the consoles combined. The top-tier developers aren't showing enough interest in it yet. I don't think it has to be a case of one or the other, they both have a place in the gaming world and there will be more convergence as time goes on. They'll be able to do simultaneous AAA releases to mobile eventually.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Psych_guy
I can't even remember the last time I turned on my PlayStation 3.
Pfft
Originally Posted by ClemyNX
Consoles have nothing to fear from tablets or phones.
I don't care if the skin has subsurface scattering and a porous material algorithm applied to it when the performance is wooden and the writing is transparent.
Some of the best games have zero graphics at all. If you think that's the deciding factor in purchasing, why isn't Terragen a multi-billion dollar company?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
I don't care if the skin has subsurface scattering and a porous material algorithm applied to it when the performance is wooden and the writing is transparent.
Some of the best games have zero graphics at all. If you think that's the deciding factor in purchasing, why isn't Terragen a multi-billion dollar company?
Well of course it's a mix of both. If it weren't, we would still be playing on Amiga, but we are not.
One of the most acclaimed games this year, and one of the most original ever, Journey, is simple in design but still needs a lot of tech to achieve that 'simple' look.
Beyond : Two Souls, is an upcoming game that sports extremely impressive motion capture acting, including by Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe.
And what about The Last Of Us?
It will take several years for tablets and phones to reach that level of graphics, and even then, games of that scope and quality are very expensive and can't possibly be sold at a few dollars. And even if, no reasonable person would play those on any other support than a good big screen.
Originally Posted by ClemyNX
Well of course it's a mix of both. If it weren't, we would still be playing on Amiga, but we are not.
One of the most acclaimed games this year, and one of the most original ever, Journey, is simple in design but still needs a lot of tech to achieve that 'simple' look.
Beyond : Two Souls, is an upcoming game that sports extremely impressive motion capture acting, including by Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe.
And what about The Last Of Us?
It will take several years for tablets and phones to reach that level of graphics, and even then, games of that scope and quality are very expensive and can't possibly be sold at a few dollars. And even if, no reasonable person would play those on any other support than a good big screen.
You're still talking about graphics. There's one sentence in there where you sort of partially kind of halfway accept that the story and gameplay are part of at least halfway what make a game great. I guess that's a start, but they're roughly 90% of what makes a game worth playing.
I'd say it has to be a mix of both too and it goes beyond visual appearance. There are AI and physics simulations that improve the immersion in a game and there is the scale of an environment - it depends on the type of game of course. A good book can be more immersive than a big budget console game but poor quality game titles stand out a mile and mobile platforms have far too many of them. Great games can be made with current mobile resources though. Vice City is one example, which came out for mobile a couple of months ago:
[VIDEO]
A few titles are quite laughable like Splinter Cell:
[VIDEO]
Once you get into the game itself, it's just terrible even compared to PS2 equivalents:
The game prices probably will have to rise to justify dedicating more development effort to them and time will tell if that happens. In terms of processing power, the next mobile chips will allow PS3/360 console quality and at the very least there can be more ports of older AAA games.
One very real problem for developers is visibility in the store. With console titles, they would be 1 out of maybe 200-400 titles. When it's 1 out of 500,000 titles, you could end up not being noticed at all without a significant marketing budget. I really wish they'd have an option to hide the low utility apps - they can check the binary sizes. Apps that turn the LED on are useful when they are needed but they clutter up the place otherwise. Just a display mode that lets me see apps that developers have spent more than 5 minutes making.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
You're still talking about graphics. There's one sentence in there where you sort of partially kind of halfway accept that the story and gameplay are part of at least halfway what make a game great. I guess that's a start, but they're roughly 90% of what makes a game worth playing.
It depends on the type of game you're talking about. If you're talking about Madden or COD/Battlefield, the focus is on pushing the graphics envelope and multi-player while story is an afterthought. The graphics help push the story in ways never before, when you see characters react like a normal person, see that human emotion or just a lush landscape that makes the world your in more believable, it enhances the game like never before.
With that said some of the best games that stand as timeless were focused on delivering a great story in the 16bit days, but the graphics can make or break a game nowadays unlike the old days where almost every game looked similar with the story setting them apart.
Nothing i've really played on iOS has a great story unless it was a DS port or remake of something from another console. It's not to say that it can't be done but developers aren't even attempting to push that envelope of smartphone gaming, its about super polished graphics on top of a monotonous game with microtransactions left and right, or port their old games and get people to buy them or make a half ass game with the name of their console counterpart (EA mainly) to get people to just buy it.