[General Battuta]

Look, coming from a huge Crysis fan, the large open outdoor areas with huge drawing distance that often allow you to explore with little restrictions and offer multiple routes to your goals were nothing particularly impressive given all the good open-world games on consoles. I'm sure Crysis had a lot more pixels in its large open areas but if you could have fun with Half Life pixels ten years ago you can have fun with merely a hundred times Half Life pixels today instead of a hundred thousand or whatever.

I have a powerful homebuild PC running all the latest titles with plenty of mods and I have a console and frankly I can't pick which is the better deal.

[NGTM-1R]

Yeah. I've got to say, Crysis was actually really unimpressive on a lot of the points it was offering. Were the graphics really, really pretty? Sure. But at the cost of crippling load times and other ugliness in trying to start a level. It's the only other game in recent times besides EVE that will flip out trying to load you into an area in my experience. Was it open? Yeah. But GTA3 and its close cousins did that too a long time ago, and did it better. Crysis was open-world, but it wasn't actually dynamic all that much. All the pretty and open is sort of wasted when your objectives, your enemies, and your resources are essentially fixed.

[Klaustrophobia]

i for one thought crysis was masterful all around, except how short it was. 

[TrashMan]

Look, coming from a huge Crysis fan, the large open outdoor areas with huge drawing distance that often allow you to explore with little restrictions and offer multiple routes to your goals were nothing particularly impressive given all the good open-world games on consoles. I'm sure Crysis had a lot more pixels in its large open areas but if you could have fun with Half Life pixels ten years ago you can have fun with merely a hundred times Half Life pixels today instead of a hundred thousand or whatever.

Crysis was awesome.

I remember playing he same level several times, finishing it in several different ways. yay for freedom.

That level where you have to sink a warship - once I sneaked around the coast..and another time I found a way to the sewers and sneaked below them. The third time I took a swim and came in from the harbor. the fourth I circled around on foot and came from the other side.

Then there was that level with the tanks. It was glorious.

Consoles simply can't give the same level of freedom and options and graphics.

[Unknown Target]

I ran through Crysis and found it to be relatively stale - the "gimmick", besides the graphics, was the nanosuit, and for me the power for all the abilities didn't last long enough to actually do something fun with it, so most levels I was just pew pew. And while there was the "option" of going out and doing something else to do the mission, it often required you to do the less efficient thing - trudging halfway through the brush to kill three guys instead of just walking up and shooting them in the face was kind of lame.

It was basically Far Cry but prettier, and at least Far Cry's opening levels were more notable IMO.

[Mongoose]

Consoles simply can't give the same level of freedom and options and graphics.

They can easily do two out of three, and the third is pretty much just wankery at this point.  I can't be alone in thinking that we've hit the point of diminishing returns as far as graphical improvements are concerned.

[Unknown Target]

We totally have, Mongoose. It's something myself and my colleagues discuss regularly. Graphics have kind of leveled out and games are starting to have to get more creative visually to get attention.

The next wave, IMO, is going to be about pushing handheld graphics.

[TrashMan]

Consoles simply can't give the same level of freedom and options and graphics.

They can easily do two out of three, and the third is pretty much just wankery at this point.  I can't be alone in thinking that we've hit the point of diminishing returns as far as graphical improvements are concerned.

If they can do 1 out of those 3 right I'll be impressed. But I've yet to see a console game that did that.

[Flipside]

There's also the question of 'how much more do we need?'.

I remember watching a documentary about, I think, Rockstar at one point, and they were saying something like "This is Dave, he works on the walking animations, and this is Simon, he works on the seated animations...." etc, and I must admit thinking to myself "and at which point, exactly, do you get to the guy who writes the damn game?"

[General Battuta]

Rockstar has excellent writing. Some of the best in the business. (Though their pacing, hrrrrngh)

[Flipside]

True, but I do find myself wondering how much of a games budget is used up in graphics design/development, and what impact it would have on the quality of the game itself if that were reduced.

[Spoon]

I just want a few great games like master of orion and starcontrol to keep me busy for the next few years... 
What happened game industry?

[StarSlayer]

Good Lord who cares?  Seriously if the idea that "My PC is the most dominant thing ever!" is so important to their sense of self worth just let em have it.  Who cares?  You think other folk's opinion affects my enjoyment of a platform one iota?  Hardly.  It should be obvious by now  they're buried deep as ticks and no amount of convincing is going to dig them out.  Keep this up it will be the Allegory of the Den, only you'll end up beating yourself to death in exasperation.

Enjoy the fact that you're a cross platform gamer and let it drop. 

[General Battuta]

Good Lord who cares?  Seriously if the idea that "My PC is the most dominant thing ever!" is so important to their sense of self worth just let em have it.  Who cares?  You think other folk's opinion affects my enjoyment of a platform one iota?  Hardly.  It should be obvious by now  they're buried deep as ticks and no amount of convincing is going to dig them out.  Keep this up it will be the Allegory of the Den, only you'll end up beating yourself to death in exasperation.

Enjoy the fact that you're a cross platform gamer and let it drop.

But Starslayer it is important that we be correct because otherwise there may come a day when

okay i got nothin

[T-LoW]

What happened game industry?

They try to make games for everyone - not only for gamers. Before the dark times. Before the EMPIRE... wait, that belongs somewhere else.

[Dilmah G]

Good Lord who cares?  Seriously if the idea that "My PC is the most dominant thing ever!" is so important to their sense of self worth just let em have it.  Who cares?  You think other folk's opinion affects my enjoyment of a platform one iota?  Hardly.  It should be obvious by now  they're buried deep as ticks and no amount of convincing is going to dig them out.  Keep this up it will be the Allegory of the Den, only you'll end up beating yourself to death in exasperation.

Enjoy the fact that you're a cross platform gamer and let it drop.

[General Battuta]

Actually I think this debate is illuminating in the sense that it may eventually converge on some meaningful difference between PC and console games. Really I think the only one that bugs me is the reduced option space for control inputs on consoles. Maybe they should go to kb/m (in a manner that doesn't require third party adapters and ****).

The notion of a standardized platform is in and of itself a pretty good one.

[Dilmah G]

Yeah, I reckon that you can still fit a few more buttons onto gamepads, but still, nowhere near as many as a keyboard, obviously.

[Nuke]

most of the recent conoles have used fairly standard interfaces for input, usb or bluetooth. its cheaper to use something off the shelf than to design something from scratch. i kinda think consoles in general will go the way of the mac and just be x86 machines optimized for games instead of multitasking, and with a minimal os. this would make things better for the slew of cross-platform titles since the cpu architecture would essentially be the same.

as for mouse and keyboard interfaces for consoles, its already possible, you just need the device, and games that support it.

[NGTM-1R]

I just want a few great games like master of orion and starcontrol to keep me busy for the next few years... 
What happened game industry?

Nothing.

You happened, though. You happened to lose the childlike sense of wonder. You happened to get bored more easily. You could still be out there playing Civ IV and Civ V and the TW games worth a damn and Sins and Space Empires and Galactic Civilizations and even SotS as lolrious as it is. And I'm only listing the ones in vaguely the same genre.

But you won't. You'll just stand around asking where the good games are.