Crysis 2 PC edition OT

[N_B]

Technical limitations and addressing a younger market often make this the case. You can't have massive levels and draw distances, huge textures and open environments on the consoles.

Excluding huge textures, consoles can do all of that.

Yeah, the consoles do great at platformers or party games, but we're not really talking about what is the console's forte, but about the PC games that have been "re-imagined" for the consoles. By making them console friendly, we've lost what made them great on the PC in order to pander to the console market. And it always seems to be the case that the PC version loses out in order to make the console version work. We rarely see the console version raised up with the things that made the PC version great.

If this does happen, there is no reason for it. Perhaps it's ideas still lurking around from 2 generations ago when the average age of a console gamer was much lower than it is now. Still, the potential for PC and console centric designs to produce great games is equal, so it's not always a loss.

It doesn't make the game cheaper to make; they've said themselves that the budget was significantly higher than the first game, it can easily be double that of the previous game. And it certainly doesn't automatically mean they will get higher profits going multiplatform, because of the reasons mentioned previosly in the thread. They are just foolishly short sighted with customer satisfaction and thinking that giving consoles gamers great graphics and easy gameplay and that throwing loads of money at the wall and see what sticks along with marketing/advertising will fix everything. It's often the case that the management of videogeam™ companies is incompetent.

It's likely impossible to seperate the costs of Crysis 2 from Cryengine 3, any evaluations on the success of going multiplatform will have to wait until CE3 goes out of use.

 

[green.pixel]

It's cheaper as in, make one game and sell it to all markets instead of making a different game for the PC. The accountants who run the industry probably tell the publishers that it's a greater return on investment by going multiplatform, whilst only making the one same game for everyone.

And when they release half-assed console ports, they will bitch and whine and wonder why the games don't sell as well as Blizzard and Valve's.

It's likely impossible to seperate the costs of Crysis 2 from Cryengine 3, any evaluations on the success of going multiplatform will have to wait until CE3 goes out of use.

Not that it would matter much I think. Their bread and butter is engine licensing to non-gaming industries.

What kind of non-game stuff do you do?

CY: There is a whole industry in serious games, and we have a lot of contracts going on from gas and oil companies, General Electric, all the way to SOCOM. We have a lot of military companies working with our technology, in fact.

So you provide simulation and training software?

CY: Technologies, simulations, contract work, whatever they need and whatever they want. We have a studio for serious game development. That studio is a subsidiary of Crytek, but it's not called Crytek. It's studio number seven -- so secret I didn't even mention it! [laughs]

 

[aaronspink]

I would argue that not telling the player what to do, just dropping them into very difficult combat scenarios is not good design. Especially considering the frequency of encounters and surprises, and the length of load screens after a death. There's a reason a lot of people recommend mods that reduce the difficulty.

I hope that is addressed in Stalker 2. You can still have a difficult and punishing game (see Demon's Souls) without denying basic information to the player. Telling the player about the games fundamental elements (the HUD, anomalies, bleeding, radiation) and how to treat them isn't handholding or dumbing down, it's good design.

No, it is dumbing down. Whatever happened to exploration and learning? It isn't like anything in Stalker was complicated or hard unless you were basically brain damaged.

 

[aaronspink]

I have issues with the idea that console design is irrefutably worse than PC design, as there are many, many console games that are just as good or better than PC games (and vice versa).

It is different. Console design is all about designing for idiots that have horrible controls and cannot figure anything out to save their lives.

Also because as I said there's really no reason for it, console and PC gamers are the same,

No, not really.

 

[aaronspink]

A lot of that would have been due to technical difficulties. Consoles aren't anywhere near as limiting today as they were back then.

No, they are relatively much more limiting today than in the past. The current generation of consoles were/are the most underpowered compared to PCs when they were released. And it has only gotten worse over time.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

That's mostly because nowadays (including the past 5-6 years) you can build PCs with more than 2 cores and 2 graphics cards at a relatively reasonable price point. Heck, what's the max you can get in a desktop system nowadays, four CPUs with four cores each and 3 or 4 GPUs?
This allows for a much greater performance relative to the silicone density we can achieve, back in 2000 even a dual system was extremely expensive and after the Voodoo5 you had no multi GPU capability either, so the speed was limited by what a single chip could do and that was much closer to the average system. Today the average system has a dual core CPU and a single GPU, so you can increase that performance by more than 10 times.

 

[green.pixel]

Whatever happened to exploration and learning?.

Big budgets and high production values happened, which leads to dragging design and mechanics down to the lowest common denominator.

 

[Mize]

The best thing about Crysis 2 was that Metro 2033 was on sale on Steam last weekend; it helped me forget playing a crap console port on my PC.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

You also want to make sure that the content you make is content that's actually seen. If there's a lot to explore, there's a chance a lot of the players won't ever see it, meaning you've practically wasted a large part of your art and level building budget.

In fact content is so expensive nowadays that almost every game resorts to at least two encounters per setting... or even more. Why do you think there are so many fights in FPS games with reinforcements, instead of just the standard get in and clean the room stuff? It's not like they're lazy and spend a year sitting around instead of making two times as many levels...

 

[Mize]

That's a crap argument Laa-Yosh. The logical extension of it is to put games on rails per iPhone, etc. We can all play arcade zombie shooters where all we control is the gun. Yay.

IMHO exploration and finding that content that "I only want to play different versions of Halo" console gamers miss is exactly why I play PC games.

Who the hell really wants yet another space marine who can jump 8 feet in the air and fire a rocket launcher game anyway?

I can't believe this is even up for debate anymore. As Halo 4 Crysis 2 would deliver on expectations.

As "Crysis 2," the sequel to Crysis, it is an utter and abominable disaster.

 

[Davros]

Consoles do produce different games, but they're not worse or dumber than PC.

They have to be if your limited to a gamepad, name any console game that has a 700 page manual

 

[Mize]

Davros, I think N_B is saying some people like Pong better than Half-Life.
(where Pong = console and HL = PC in my analogy)

IMHO, the very best console games (like Red Dead Redemption, KZ2 or Uncharted 2) would have been way better on a PC.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

There are maybe like 50-100K people willing to get through a 700 page manual before they start to play.
Back in the age of Falcon 3.0 that was still enough to make a profit, but today it isn't. As soon as games will get cheaper to make we'll get the super size manuals back, but until that point there's just not enough demand for it.

 

[Davros]

Thats one thing I have trouble understanding, if they could do it back in the falcon 3 days why cant they do it now, when falcon 3 came out the only person I knew with a pc was me. Now i dont know many people without one

 

[green.pixel]

They have to be if your limited to a gamepad, name any console game that has a 700 page manual

Complexity and depth can be only compared between games inside the genre. I think that you can't evaluate them across genres since there is no common criteria to define them. That's why they are different genres in the first place.

 

[L. Scofield]

As Laa-Yosh pointed out, it's all about costs. Certainly developers could make the games very open and complex, but they would probably not sell enough to recoup the costs and the company would go under.

Of course, they could simply make lower quality assets to save money but then the games would sell even less due to the gamers whining about them not looking as good as the competition.

 

[Mize]

Why are the costs so much higher today than say 3 or 10 years ago?
How much did Crysis 1 cost to make? 10x or 100x Crysis 2?

 

[L. Scofield]

Art assets are the reason for the most part. Crysis 1 cost a fraction of C2 because it had very few unique assets in comparison.

 

[Mize]

Art assets are the reason for the most part. Crysis 1 cost a fraction of C2 because it had very few unique assets in comparison.

Does anyone have a list of game budgets? I know many spectacular games are made on low budgets and then their shit-ass sequels cost fortunes because the developers finally get their turn to rape the publisher (which I have no problems with), but I'd really love to see a comparison list.

Crysis 1 does have fewer "unique (art) assets," but I doubt it justifies the proportionate increase in cost over Crysis 1 or other great games. A list would be great if anyone has one.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Obviously they are heavily guarded secrets most of the time. And even when a figure is revealed it's usually done with a purpose, like when Epic said that Gears 1 took 10 million to make. Incidentally, they were selling Unreal Engine 3 at the same time and it was in their interests to promote their middleware as a way to keep costs down. On the other hand Factor 5 has always mentioned in their presentations that Lair was a very expensive project, probably to build an image that their tech and workflow is solid enough to gain publisher trust of that level (at least that's the impression I got at the time, anyway).

One possible clue would be the size of the staff. Developers earn somewhere between $55K to $100K per year, they also need at least one new computer and a major software upgrade for the project, they require office space and furniture, and there's HR overhead. These costs scale with the size of the team, and you can get a pretty good idea about that from the credits lists. Although it's also important to know how long the team was working in full production scale, sometimes there are hundreds of devs for less than a year, sometimes there's only a couple dozen but for a much longer time.

All in all, the point is that games are getting more and more expensive, which is mostly related to the amount and quality of their content. It's not the days of Doom1 anymore when John Romero could put together a level in a few days, completely on his own. And with achievement statistics, the publishers will also get a pretty good feedback on how many people actually find and play that hidden level, and they can make pretty solid decisions about investing resources into such optional content.

I mean just look at how Oblivion or Fallout looks compared to Uncharted. Naughty Dog builds the entire level by hand, in Maya, they don't have some level editor with brushes or anything, but the price of that is that you don't get to roam around freely.