Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Way back in the year 2000 I had a very brief stint on Dreamcast magazine, DC-UK. I won’t bore you with the details of my quick departure: just imagine the most dramatic escape scene you can, then double it. But while I was there I happened across a preview disc with Half-Life on it. I say preview, the damn thing was nearly complete and I played a tonne of it on that bizarre controller. It was cancelled. As is the way of these things, the code found it’s way onto The Google and now someone’s ported it to the PC.
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There’s never been any doubt that the PC has always been at the forefront of gaming technology. But it comes in waves. There’s a reason why many companies didn’t touch the consoles until the most recent generation, the PC always too far ahead in terms of graphics and tech for their ambitions to be realised elsewhere. Although for quite a few years now it’s become an equal race. Not realistically – the PC has been artificially held back as a consequence of cross-platform development, its current capabilities barely realised by this generation of developers. As has been the case previously, there comes a point where developers start to see the possibilities away from the plastic boxes, and the PC once more has its day. It’s my opinion that that time is coming, and it feels rather validated by Crytek recently telling EDGE that the PC is a generation ahead of the consoles.

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GamesIndustry.biz have an interview up with NCSoft (Guild Wars, City of Heroes) boss Geoff Heath. In it Geoff explains that he believes PC users will end up buying a PS3:

I think there is a difference between PC and console players but there’s overlap as well. Our view long term is that people who have traditionally only played on PC will actually now start transitioning to PS3. Once they figure out what PS3 does, I think that take-up will get greater and greater.

It’s a fair bet – did anyone not own a PS2 at some point?

Geoff is also rather keen on getting more PC gamers playing NCSoft games, hinting that they might not just be bringing out more of that fantasy elf-tweaking stuff:

We’re going to have all sorts of stuff. I’m sure some of them will fail, but we can’t keep recycling the goblins and the swords.

I think that will grow the market. There’s 2 million people playing Guild Wars, but there are 198 million people in Europe with PCs and broadband who aren’t playing Guild Wars. So I say, let’s go get them.

Go get ‘em! Yes.

This editorial over on the PC hardware site PC Perspective considers the age-old issue of why PC gamers stick with their format, rather than opting for the ease of consoles. It covers many tired old routines, such as the flexibility of the PC’s options and scaled resources, as well as the complexity of mouse/keyboard controls systems. One thing it comes up with that I’ve not heard before is this:

While Bethesda was having problems with certain Non-Player Character interactions, one can’t help but wonder if the AI was lobotomized to make it play well on the Xbox 360. If you never saw Bethesda’s pre-release demo videos they displayed at the 2005 E3, you can find them on YouTube. I would suggest the 5th video on which details the complexity of the Radiant AI specifically, as it shows the breadth the original version of the AI would display. If you never played the game, you can see the final implementation in many of the other videos on YouTube, from bizarre domestic violence to the death penalty for stealing bread. One of the most rabid fan bases for a PC game are having a collective convulsions in dread of what Bethesda will do to their favourite franchise. Fallout 3 is going to be released on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 as well as the PC, and will use the Radiant AI system.

Those are their own links in there, and the first link explains what he’s talking about. Anyway, I can’t help thinking that any reduction in AI sophistication must have been about making the game work on more lower-end PCs too, since anything that didn’t work on the 360 wouldn’t work on a whole load of lesser PCs, right? It’s interesting that there is, potentially, a more sophisticated Oblivion AI out there though, and you wonder if an AI mod might serve/break the game in interesting ways.

Ultimately I think we all know why we enjoy PC gaming and don’t really need this kind of editorial to explain it to us. Nevertheless I actually believe a number of cross-platform developments have proven that the process need not result in a “reduced” experience on PC. The different formats are increasingly just serving different tastes and personal gaming habits.

It’s just, well, if only you could lean in Bioshock…