That's Carmarck's ideal he's talking about, not his realistic view of the current/future situation about which Sweeny is talking. It was John Carmack who said they'd base their development environment on Xbox 360 2 years ago after all.
Unreal creator Tim Sweeney: "PCs are good for anything, just not games”
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Betanumerical
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Do a search on Quakecon 2005, although it's a bit of a moot point considering that their efforts towards idTech5 are of a multiplatform nature.
Not every "serious gamer" can afford to spend $60/week or more on video games, or even has the time to play the games he wants to play when they come out. Being a "serious gamer" by your definition would mean spending 20% of my paycheck or more on games (that's how little I make). Sorry, can't afford it. That's why I'm still a last-gen and last-last-gen gamer.
The problem with PC gaming comes from a lot of directions. From the hardware position you have these great CPUs and crap GPUs in most models. But this makes sense--CPUs do almost everything and GPUs do very little. Even if gaming and 3D accelerated tasks consume 30% of computer time for casual users, it is difficult to justify the additional expense "for gaming."
If GPUs could find themselves doing more tasks in the PC they could justify OEMs shifting some of the bill of material budget to the GPU. As it stands it is a chicken-or-egg scenario: GPUs are mainly used for gaming; for more general purpose utilization the average PC needs more software to benefit from GPUs, but for more software to benefit from GPUs more PCs need quality GPUs (large number of fast GPUs) that makes good business sense to invest in them. By investing in software designs that require hardware that only a fraction of the market has is a problem.
So until there are more "killer apps," that are not games, that demonstrate the benefit of a higher BOM for a solid GPU I don't think there will be a good solution (unless MS, publishers, and OEMs bite the bullet and go with some tiered market approach to emphasise capable systems and/or some sort of console crossover). It doesn't help all the pirates, who will argue until they are blue in the face that their actions don't have any impact whatsoever on the industry, is a major issue.
If GPUs could find themselves doing more tasks in the PC they could justify OEMs shifting some of the bill of material budget to the GPU. As it stands it is a chicken-or-egg scenario: GPUs are mainly used for gaming; for more general purpose utilization the average PC needs more software to benefit from GPUs, but for more software to benefit from GPUs more PCs need quality GPUs (large number of fast GPUs) that makes good business sense to invest in them. By investing in software designs that require hardware that only a fraction of the market has is a problem.
So until there are more "killer apps," that are not games, that demonstrate the benefit of a higher BOM for a solid GPU I don't think there will be a good solution (unless MS, publishers, and OEMs bite the bullet and go with some tiered market approach to emphasise capable systems and/or some sort of console crossover). It doesn't help all the pirates, who will argue until they are blue in the face that their actions don't have any impact whatsoever on the industry, is a major issue.
I agree. Being a serious gamer has nothing to do with the type of games you play, what you play them on or how long you wait to play them after release.
[strike]Cemetery[/strike] Seminary will do that to you
Now I'm back in regular vanilla grad school, making a fat $1200 a month take-home. Still not enough to drop $60 or more a week...which is why I'm playing Turok 2 again. I have a suspicion that I'm turning into a miser, and after I'm making grown-up money, I'm still not going to be buying games at launch day.
Serious gamer entails a number of different attributes. Some absolute, some nil. I'd say it's more a percentage of your free time than anything else. I'm sure their are people who have huge 16 bit collections, haven't bought a game in a while and only do that on most of their free time. That's a serious gamer.
PC's will be around for a while and I don't see consoles taking it anytime soon. Not completely anyway.
Why?
MMO's. One alone has 10 million active subscribers. Now factor in all the others with their million here, hundred thousand there and the soon to be release secrete blizzard project, then age of conan, and later of warhammer.
Consoles are not mmo friendly. And mmo's or other largely interactive games are the future in my opinion.
Why?
MMO's. One alone has 10 million active subscribers. Now factor in all the others with their million here, hundred thousand there and the soon to be release secrete blizzard project, then age of conan, and later of warhammer.
Consoles are not mmo friendly. And mmo's or other largely interactive games are the future in my opinion.
In what way? ArenaNET have shown interest in PS3, and we know there are MMO's in development. Now that they have hard drives, can support KB+M, have efficient billing systems, I see nothing about consoles that's anti-MMO. Quite the contrary, consoles offer a far better minimum performance level to target, which means better MMO's than the low-spec PCs being targeted.
Panajev2001a
Veteran
PS2, no online connectivity out of the box (until PSTwo came out), no built-in HDD. Two MMORPG's, both successful enough (FFXI far more than EQ: OA IIRC).
Why should PS3 and Xbox 360 (or Wii for that matter) be MMO unfreindly ?
Consoles are way below min spec for a modern MMO for one reason and one reason alone. RAM. Unless your idea of an mmo is going to consist of mostly you alone and instance caps of 20-30 people you're talking about two different games in my opinion. I'd bet good money the PS3 couldnt handle a raid in EQ2 or the like as well as a semi-decent PC and that game was released 4 years ago.
Kyyla
Veteran
I'm platform agnostic. For me this boils down to the different profiles of games on pc and the consoles. I can't play Civ IV, Supreme Commander, Combat Mission, The Witcher, Crysis, Gothic, NWN, GalCiv, TF2 (properly), HOMM, etc with an Xbox.
Aside from the FPS games, the games I play are slower, and require more thinking than the usual console game.
Aside from the FPS games, the games I play are slower, and require more thinking than the usual console game.
archangelmorph
Veteran
I wouldn't consider RAM that big an issue.. There are console FPSs which support upto 50 players in a single game instance so i'm sure a much slower paced MMO wouldn't be too much of an issue..
Aside from the fact that any data you send across the network per player has to be extremely lightweight anyway (all your heavy data; e.g. textures is managed locally..) you could still scale back the number of 'visible' character's in view whilst still updating their logic in the background (a la dynasty warriors).. Granted its looked a bit pants in the past depending on the game & the viewable actor capp but to be honest anymore than 30-40 actors in view will occlude almost everything else so that you wouldn't really notice too much..
Also not every MMO has to be an RPG will massive army 'raids' either..
WoW minimum specifications said:
In practice the 360 would probably have room to spare over this in terms of memory.
I don't think that RAM would begin to stop the 360 or PS3 doing a massively multilayer game, especially if it was built with the systems' limitation in mind.
Panajev2001a
Veteran
FFXI Minimum requirements:
Processor: Intel Pentium III, Pentium 4 recommended.
Memory: 128MB RAM, 256MB recommended.
Graphics: DirectX8.1 AGP compatible, Nvidia GeForce 3 recommended.
Yet it runs very well on PS2
.Switch FFXI with a newer MMORPG and PS2 with PS3 and the result would not change IMHO
.WoW is hardly a good example which is why i didnt mention it but EQ2 instead. The Console crowd is far more critical of graphics than PC gamers so of course they would need something that looks 'omg amazing!'. Another example, Eve Online, 1GB min recommended system ram.
You lost right away with what you said there. RAM is probably the single most important component to a smooth running and impressive looking, as well as decent scale, MMO. And comparing an MMO to the multiplayer of Halo or Resistance is like comparing a Tomato to an Onion.
This is true if developers try to alienate the classic interpretation of an MMO. The Agency will be the best example to date that i know of.
FFXI Minimum requirements:
Processor: Intel Pentium III, Pentium 4 recommended.
Memory: 128MB RAM, 256MB recommended.
Graphics: DirectX8.1 AGP compatible, Nvidia GeForce 3 recommended.
Yet it runs very well on PS2
Switch FFXI with a newer MMORPG and PS2 with PS3 and the result would not change IMHO
No MHZ rating and a GF3 recommended for a game looking noticably better on the PC than PS2 at much higher resolution, yes? I even recall it being a quite bad port!
And really weak looking compared to other MMO's for PC.
Now what completly flaws your argument is that this game (FFXI) was made for the PS2 with its limitations in mind, then ported to PC. On the reverse porting a PC MMO to console can prove difficult just becouse of what has been said in here.
