We’s always trekkin down to Cardiff to see FOTL when they play at the Clwb. Tis mucho good night, apart from the midnight tours through random pitch black Welsh countryside trying to find the motorway back to Brum.

KG

(joking, but why not just make the citadel smaller if it was such a problem?)

Not fast enough I suppose..

That’s because your looking at it as a consumer, not a developer. It’s not just graphical aspects that get compromised, it’s the entire underpinning of your games structure from beginning to end. Consider the infamous slow lifts in Mass Effect, a necessary evil forced upon the developers because of the 360s lack of hard drive when it came to level loading.

It’s a much healthier situation than on the PC, where success to a great extent used to build from screenshot appeal (peak graphics quality) times market size (scalability from peak to minimum spec). Hell, that’s still the case – scalability on the PC is an even bigger issue now the top end tech has surged so far beyond what most people actually need for things besides games. The technological limitations consoles introduce perversely reduce the importance of technology and simplify the related problems, not to mention raising the tenable minimum spec for the majority of projects on them for most of a console’s lifetime.

Nvidia and ATi are quite happy selling high-end graphics chips to tens of millions of people through Sony and Microsoft, I think. I imagine these things are far more lucrative than any other single model of video chipset.

Thanks for the acknowledgment. It’s an absolute bitch that MS decided to ship those budget 360s, because the knock on of that sole decision coupled with the consoles first approach that many developers have adopted, means we’ll be lucky to see any AAA gaming titles that actually push the PC technologically in a couple of years. As it is, a reasonable off the shelf PC is quite capable of running pretty much anything ported from a 360 nowadays. Much as I enjoyed Mass Effect, the thing that really struck me as odd was it’s actual lack of graphic options, compared to the wide range of options normally available in a lot of PC only games. I found it slightly foreboding, and if I was Nvidia or Ati I’d be concerned too that much of present game development is tied to a technological model that isn’t going to really push much further beyond it’s present limits.

EDIT: Hmm, are your Warhammer and Starcraft work both graphic? I could have sworn I saw some writey Warhammer fiction somewhere with your name on it…

Edit: Also, between this and the Negativland love you guys have totally validated yourselves as the only blog I ever read.