One title I always feels get overlooked from the Xbox era is Far Cry Instincts Evolution. The world was opened up a bit compared to Instincts and the world felt quite big, and the graphics still felt impressive for the Xbox.
Gameplay wise I even prefered both Instincts and Evolution over the PC release.
I dont think the disruption will happen by a company with small market share. Extremely good price to performance metrics?
Well we will have to define that and the rate of adoption.
It needs someone who already has huge market presence or who will gain huge market presence.
Everything is tight to how many own what hardware and the software. Everything is much more set in stone than before, ton of software are designed already around what the current market leaders have.
Developers want as unified environment as possible to be able to port as easily their titles to as many platforms and hardware configurations as possible.
It's gonna be a very big outlier if we ever get something exotic again.
I d say that Microsoft is somewhat responsible for this. Before their entry in the market, console and PC gaming were more distinct experiences, with many games being exclusive on consoles forever and some finding their way later on PC. The platform holders in the console space were focusing on the unique console experience and how to differentiate their console, so they tended to invest on unique hardware features. As long as this was the norm, a lot of console games stayed on console, and less PC games found their way on console. For that reason the markets were more distinct, and more people were shifting away from PC to the console space for their gaming needs. Sony had the room to experiment and do crazy things, knowing that the Playstation was home to countless of exclusive games of which many were from japanese developers.
Microsoft on the other hand had other plans.
MS wanted to unify the two to support gaming and entertainment on Windows and turn PC and console into one in the process. To achieve this they had easy ports between PC and console in mind. The hardware was designed around this idea.
The XBOX was the first console I ever played were I felt I was playing PC games on. By the time that happened, hardware standardization and the importance of PC ports were hastened in the console space.
Western developers of which many were predominantly PC developers found their way on console and popularized their IPs there, whereas the big japanese developers started making all their games available on PC as standard.
The difference between console and PC are more blurred than ever. And with that the motivation to experiment on exotic and unique solutions vanished as it makes less business sense with the standardization, risk involved and huge R&D costs.
This may have been because the since the i386, scaling bitmaps (incl. rotation) was relatively simply to do on the CPU. You tended to do this on the graphics chip when the CPU was fairly low-powered. The 1990s were an interesting time for graphics techniques with methods bouncing between graphics hardware, software on the CPU and a bit-of-both.This started before Microsoft. There were plenty of games that launched on saturn , playstation and n64 along side pc releases. What changed things really was going from a general purpose cpu to a general purpose cpu with a dedicated graphics chip. See before 3d accelerators pcs sucked at doing sprite scaling and other things that consoles were specifically built to do.
No it didnt because thats not what I said. With Microsoft the console was designed with portability in mind and PC<->Console portability and hardware unification became a standard.This started before Microsoft. There were plenty of games that launched on saturn , playstation and n64 along side pc releases.
That was a change, but an irrelevant one to the point I made. Back then there were multiple and more diverse participants in the hardware acceleration.What changed things really was going from a general purpose cpu to a general purpose cpu with a dedicated graphics chip. See before 3d accelerators pcs sucked at doing sprite scaling and other things that consoles were specifically built to do. It's why such a big deal was made of ID's super mario port. But then the graphics accelerator came and the pc was jumping leagues above what the console hardware could do and was refreshed extremely often.
I don't know if Microsoft's action really had the impact of standardizing hardware in the console space as much as the cost of developing custom hardware becoming much more expensive.
Before PS2 you had the seeds of middleware already bearing fruit in the PC space. Unreal and Quake engine games were relatively easy to port to exotic hardware once it became powerful enough, like Dreamcast and PS2. And then came Renderware. I don't know if Microsoft's action really had the impact of standardizing hardware in the console space as much as the cost of developing custom hardware becoming much more expensive (look at the consolidation in PC graphics chips compared to what we had in 1999 when PS2 launched), and custom hardware's advantages being held back by one size fits all middleware with the goal of feature parity among the platforms.
Are you sure? Doesn't some insane percentage of games on PS2/XB/GC run on Renderware? Like 20-40%. There weren't engines with that sort of adoption on PS1, N64 or Saturn. And that doesn't even count the Unreal powered games.Unreal and Quake engines back then werent fully suitable for all types of games and werent fully compatible with hardware like PS2. Developers were relying more on custom engines.
No it didnt because thats not what I said. With Microsoft the console was designed with portability in mind and PC<->Console portability and hardware unification became a standard.
If some games were being ported to multiple consoles back in the 32-64 bit days it is irrelevant.
Overall the console and PC space were more distinct and despite the fact that PC surpassed consoles during the 32 and 63bit era, nothing stopped developers releasing exclusive titles on consoles and not bothering with PC and vise versa for a lot of popular titles. The console space was still owning the gaming market.
That was a change, but an irrelevant one to the point I made. Back then there were multiple and more diverse participants in the hardware acceleration.
Even after graphics cards came along, the DC, the GC and the PS2 chose different logics and architectures and they were state of the art when they were released, each with different logic and focus.
Especially the PS2 and the GC were designed with what the platform manufacturers wanted the console to output and less about portability.
The "game" changer is nothing else than the market's effort to strive for standardization with MS leading it in the console space for it's own business purposes, which succeeded.
Doesn't some insane percentage of games on PS2/XB/GC run on Renderware? Like 20-40%. .
Oh seems im not the only one then. It still looks nice today (considering the hardware then), The xbox versions had some effects not present in the pc version if i recall correctly. very impressive for 2001 hardware (and even older). Unreal championship the liandry conflict was one of those aswell taking advantage of the xbox. It did graphics not seen anywhere else on any 6th gen machine, all at a fluid 60fps (and it was fun as hell).
People think its a 360 game.
Unreal Championship 2 is not a solid 60 fps. I think it also runs without vsync so lots of tearing. I was playing that about a month ago and reading old threads here about how it's probably very cpu limited.
I must have played the matches/maps that didnt stress the system as much as the ones you have. It felt like a solid 60, but then again i never exploited the game so much when i re-played the game again (offline against bots). Im sure if i would blast some hours on different maps etc i would notice the same problems.
'Constant 60fps' titles where not all that common anyway for the 6th gens, not i know off atleast. ZoE2 (60fps) did see serious drops, so did Transformers 2004. MGS2 PS2 could see drops too. Maybe tekken tag/dead or alive.
I was just playing thru the "campaign". It is fast most of the time it it can drop severely. I just wish they had left vsync enabled because tearing really sucks. I guess triple buffered w/ vsync wasn't an option for some reason. Maybe they just didn't want to devote memory to it.
Cool. Too bad that list isn't complete. Doesn't have Tony Hawk's Underground 2 on it, which I'm pretty sure runs on the same engine Underground runs on (and it's on the list). Wiki also says Need for Speed Underground 2 is Renderware, but I'm pretty sure that game runs on EAGL like most of the NFS games on PS2. And ET for PS2 isn't on the list, either.Wiki shows 274 games running on Renderware, so depending on the platform it can be as low as 5% (In the case of PS2's library)
This was from when EA purchased Criterion, and Lau-Kee is saying Renderware has a 20-25% market share.According to Criterion boss David Lau-Kee, however, this deal is a natural progression - it's not just Criterion and EA who stand to benefit. "We've been very focused as you know with our mission with technology, with middleware. We've believed for the last 10 years that the games industry needs middleware technology for people working on content, and we've been executing and executing and this is just the natural progression of the position we've found ourselves in," he told us this afternoon.
"One of the really interesting thing is looking at the overlapping synergies with EA: we've got 20-25% market share in terms of external games using RenderWare technology. If you look at the size of the internal middleware within EA, it's phenomenal, it's huge. Think what happens when we put those two pieces of technology together and produce a best of breed. It's a win for everybody who chooses to use it," he continues.
Again this didn't start with Microsoft. You already had companies releasing on multiple systems and pc. Tomb Raider released on Saturn , Playstation and PC. Shadows of the empire was n64 and pc. Developers were already starting to put titles on multiple platforms , heck it happened back in the 8 bit days too and even my intellivsion will strait up play atari games that were never designed for it.
Before their entry in the market, console and PC gaming were more distinct experiences, with many games being exclusive on consoles forever and some finding their way later on PC.
If some games were being ported to multiple consoles back in the 32-64 bit days it is irrelevant.
Overall the console and PC space were more distinct and despite the fact that PC surpassed consoles during the 32 and 63bit era, nothing stopped developers releasing exclusive titles on consoles and not bothering with PC and vise versa for a lot of popular titles. The console space was still owning the gaming market.
Windows CE (Which was barely used for game production on the system mind you) is in support of my argument because that was one of MS's initial efforts. They even approached Sony for the PS2 and were rejected and thats one of the reasonts they made the XBOX. The DC went for Power VR since they didnt have the funds, and yet that was still a state of the art custom hardware. Power VR doesnt exist in either PC or console space.Again the dreamcast shipped with a version of windows on it , it had a pc graphics chip inside of it. It was the first console to do so and it got tons of pc ports of games like unreal and quake. They even ahd their own ISP in the states for the dreamcast.
And how these are relevant in the console and PC gaming space?...... apple and we had samsung and qualcom and power vr making the apple stuff. Its just spread out over my types of components.
Power vr / video logic or whatever they are called now never really stopped making graphics chips they just made them for phones and tablets......
And how these are relevant in the console and PC gaming space?
There are always exceptions. Plus:
Windows CE (Which was barely used for game production on the system mind you) is in support of my argument because that was one of MS's initial efforts. They even approached Sony for the PS2 and were rejected and thats one of the reasonts they made the XBOX. The DC went for Power VR since they didnt have the funds, and yet that was still a state of the art custom hardware. Power VR doesnt exist in either PC or console space.
And how these are relevant in the console and PC gaming space?
