Off Topic - FFXI newsFollow

Things that I take for granted on PC after upgrading like higher framerate/resolution seems to be a paid premium on consoles.

Since I own a gaming PC, I don't see much of a point in getting a PS4, Xbox One or Wii U. I can get most of the generic triple A titles on Steam, if I want to.

Going from Playstation to Playstation 2, my family finally got a DVD player in the house. It was not an amazing DVD player, but it was still miles ahead of VHS. Playstation 2 later on got upgrades such as hard drive and online gaming which I found very interesting since I had never played any games online prior to PS2. I never really got to play with the online features of the PS2 and the hard drive got canned in Europe and I never got the chance to play FFXI on the PS2.
Going from Playstation 2 to 3 was an upgrade in many ways. Going from analogue signal to digital video signal made the games much cleaner and crisp and looked like games played from a PC monitor which was amazing. Since the PS3 came with both network adapter and hard drive preinstalled it was possible to store saved games and play with others online, a feature I missed out on the PS2. The biggest leap was probably the ability to buy games online and download them directly to the PS3, if I found a good deal on the PSN store I would be able to just download it from my own living room and save myself a tripe to the store. You could also use it as a media server, but I eventually stopped doing so as it doesn't support file formats such as .mkv.

And then comes current generation, or "next generation". Besides a faster machine that does not run any of my older games as it's not backwards compatible, there's nothing here that makes me think "this is amazing!" or "I have waited a long time for this!". Since I own a very decent gaming computer, I can just get the games I want from there as most of the good games from this gen are multi - platform. I don't game in the living room and if I did, I would look for one of those Steam machines rather than the consoles available today.

On this line of thinking, you shouldn't lump in the Wii U with the PS4/Xbone.

The Wii U is a horrible system for playing the generic triple A titles, because major third-party developers have pretty much abandoned the Wii U. What makes the "U" so enjoyable though are its superb Nintendo exclusives that you can't play on any other system or find on Steam. Mario Kart 8, as noted above, is simply amazing -- and it looks fantastic despite gamers' gripes that it's on a "less powerful" system. I can't wait for the new Zelda game to come out! I still need to get Hyrule Warriors, too.

Also, totally agree about the Wii U's tablet controller... it's a little wonky at first, but totally easy to use once you get used to it. And the ability to play games off the TV is awesome (you have to pay hundreds more dollars to do that on a smaller screen on the ps4).

Another failing of the video game industry (outside of Nintendo) is the sacrifice of couch/living room co-op gaming in exchange for "multi-player" games. Yeah, multi-player games are great -- obviously, I play them -- but there's something to be said for being able to play the same game with the person sitting next to you. Most of Nintendo's games feature some kind of couch co-op gameplay, which is probably the biggest reason why the Wii U is so much fun. Multi-player games are social in some ways, but they're also very isolating. True co-op games are purely social, and most people enjoy that whether they'd like to admit it or not.

Edited, Mar 24th 2015 8:54am by Thayos

If you disliked it, it's fair to say SE is on the right track.

Hey! Why is damn on a god damn blacklist? Damn you all, damned damsels!

Although I some what agree with you, people play Apps for different things. It takes seconds to load up and you can play it while you wait for a train.

Big games are going to exist for a long time, kind of reminds me of those that claim Consoles are dead but guess what we not long had an XBOX/PS releasing a brand new console. There was talk that they were not even going to be made yet they did. Consoles are being adapted for the average gamer and hard CR gamer.

Games/Consoles like many things are going to be around for a long time. For SE and XI - that's one game that's very old, very large and let's face it require a lot of maintenance to keep alive. Being responsible for multiple servers here at work, even though most of them just sit there and run - when you add up the man hours a year to maintain them and configure throughout the year it is a lot of work. That's effectively a 1-2 man salary and not a simple fresh out of College Student can maintain.

Yeah it's mostly licensing more than anything, but at the same time, some concepts simply work better for consoles when you get down to it. Hell a lot of reason people love using gamepad for certain PC games is because M+KB controls simply don't work for that type of game and usually on the PC, despite all the power available seem to struggle with some games. So while any game can be ported to the PC a lot of them simply don't work well on the PC compared to designed on the console.

Not to mention while a lot of people have a PC of some kind, game consoles are still more readily available to your consumer base which means more overall money and more potential buyers for even obscure type of titles...but then again given the crap that gets past Steam Greenlight these days,, who knows.

Edited, Mar 30th 2015 6:42am by Theonehio

In my opinion, hindsight shows they did it backwards with FFXI. They designed a game for the PS2 and locked themselves into years of PS2 limitations with a game that was difficult to upscale. With FFXIV, they customized a different game engine to make a better-performing game client specifically for the PC, and then they created a lower-end client that would run on the PS3.

In the short term, that meant making a few design decisions that would accommodate the lower-performing PS3 client -- decisions such as making smaller zone maps. In the long run, though, SE can drop support for the PS3 and go bonkers with content for the PC and PS4 clients. Growing the game into the future will be much easier. And Yoshi-P has strongly implied in interviews that the PS3 may not be part of ARR's long-term plans.

The alternative to all of this would have been just kicking the PS3 to the curb when developing ARR, but I personally think that would have been very unwise for a couple of reasons.

And then when they try it, they'll realize how much more work (and additional money) it takes to maintain their gaming PC. If you buy a PC today, you don't know how well it's going to run a game that comes out in 3 to 4 years. If you buy a console today, you know it's going to run whatever new games come out for it in 4 years.

The biggest issue with PC gaming is that building a gaming PC is a remarkably user unfriendly thing to do. It's great for people like me that enjoy doing it, but if you just want to play cool games it sucks quite a lot, and there are about a bazillion ways to F it up.

There are services that have been popping up in the last few years that help to take care of this for you, but they're still pretty new and many are unreliable right now. I think this is probably the biggest hurdle that PC gaming is going to have to overcome before consoles are declared obsolete and the PC master race rules over all mankind.

This. Not to mention a lot of the install base of computer gaming also usually do it on the side, which means there's a good chance unless they have the money to blow, they're going to be upgrading parts fairly slowly which means that GTA V they've been waitin for since they don't own consoles will likely run assy till they drop $200-$400+ on a new card or even processor.

So you could invest in a good rig, like my $600 custom built one runs everything perfectly fine on max settings (that even matters to be maxed, some games on max/ultra doesn't really change much but the ones that does makes it worth it) and I've had it for over 4 years now and only upgraded the GPU simply because the XFX 5x line were long outdated.

Consoles are cheaper, fully supported by (most) companies you like usually and you're guaranteed to save more money since computers are more prone to minute issues that consoles aren't. Either path is fine but console gaming/handheld will never truly phase out because it's just the best way to reach gamers. "PC Master Race" usually tend to be: "yay graphics! yay mouse and keyboard control!"..ok. Now about that gameplay. That's why I feel PC gaming isn't really the platform to go to for 'innovation', and why console gaming still pretty much will be what keeps pushing gaming forward...at least used to. Right now we're too fixated on pretty graphics.

I'm betting that most first time gaming PC builders couldn't successfully stay under a $600 budget AND have a machine that ages that well over 4 years. Someone with experience could probably plan purchasing various components at the right time and from the right sources to get the best bang for their buck. Someone trying to build a PC for the first time is probably going to wind up paying far more than that, or settle for lower quality components, or both. And then there's the possibility of getting components that are defective right out of the box. A novice PC builder isn't going to have the experience to know whether the component is bad or if things aren't working because they're doing something wrong.

Another factor that hasn't really been touched on is availability when multiple people share a PC. Sure, you could invest $600 or more on making a gaming PC that also does a lot of other things. But all those other things it can do is precisely what makes it difficult to share among family members. The wife is on Facebook, writing an email, or doing some online shopping? Can't play games until she's done. The kids want to watch some stuff on Youtube or play some web based games of their favorite cartoon? Can't do that at the same time as your gaming. Relying on a gaming PC for all your gaming needs makes sense if you live by yourself. But it starts to become less attractive as a solution when you have to start sharing time on that PC with other people. I suppose you could have multiple PCs around the house. But that cost starts to ramp up really quickly. It's probably much cheaper to have a PC plus one or two gaming consoles for a family, particularly if they already have a couple of TVs around the house to start with.

This isn't entirely accurate. Yes, technically the current gen consoles are PCs with proprietary OS and BIOS. However, the difference is that game devs can push the console hardware to a much greater degree than a PC with similar specs. This is because the system is completely standardized and thus there is no need to take into account million hardware configurations when creating games. With that said you can't just look at the console HW and PC HW and make direct comparisons based on that info.

My next gaming hardware will most definitely be a PS4. I am freaking tired of having to micromanage practically ALL my new games for hours before they function correctly. ARR was a nightmare in this regard, the micro stuttering was completely out of hand. I've lost count how many days I've spent trying to make my gamepad work correctly on some of the games I play. PC allows more flexibility but I'm honestly not feeling the trade off.