Be Excellent To Each Other

Yeah they do matter, but some are more obsessed with the numbers than others.

I want to see more stuff going on in games in the next gen, the 'living cities' in this current generation are pretty sparse really.

Concisely: "looking pretty is important, but nobody really gives a shit how it does it. If it looks good on the adverts, then people will buy it". I don't especially care which motors are used in my vacuum cleaner, all i want is to get it to clean the floor. Nor do I care about my drill. What I want is the hole in the wall. How it gets there is unimportant.

You're on a role today Malia! Good work.

Of course, new pretties are exciting. However, how many frames per second per teraflop doesn't interest me in the slightest. I can appreciate how some people find this interesting - much in the same way some people find stamp collecting or trainspotting interesting - but it's not for me.

Dunno if you did that on purpose, but you know that the number of people in your sparse cities relies on those numbers, right?

Nor me at least not to that level of detail. But I seem to recall that some people's decision to choose a PS3 over a 360 was influenced by the fact that it was said to be the more powerful machine. Perhaps not unreasonably they concluded that it might have greater potential. If I had to choose between two consoles with a similar-looking launch line up then, other things being equal, I'll choose the one that is more powerful because it might mean that I'll eventually get to play better games on it.

I don't think it would be very good for either company's machine if it was massively less powerful, in terms of numbers, than the other. I think it would harm sales.

Yebbut:

said a man talking about replacing the Duckworth-lewis method of setting a target score when the weather gets in the way. It's still somewhat relevant to this, though.

You can even argue that - as consoles keep pushing for more ROAR POWAAA - publishers are spending on their time on the shiny and not enough time on the "game" bit of the game, so better consoles actually make games worse. For instance, since FF7 the better the game has looked the worse it has been.

I think there's plenty in the current-gen (or last gen, if you're me or TheVision) line-up that would make that a tricky argument, though.

I think there's a limit to the number of things that are games can do. The player has to move around the game world and interact with it in some way. I think the latter is important, and finding new ways to do it is going to be a big challenge. Tying a story around it as well makes games better, and now, it seems, studios are getting better writers on board. The sounds and visuals are only really a small part of it, but do make the biggest impact.

Moving around is going to be done by joypad or motion detect, so that's pretty much a leveller for old and new, as if the system is shite, then it not going to matter what you've got making this happen. interacting with the world is the same thing, most shooters use the same button layout as any other. So, to differentiate, you've got to have a good story, or a distinctive visual and audio style. CoD MW2 is pretty similar to The Darkness if you strip it down to its underpants, so the innovations must rely on audio and visual stylings.

Not always - I find sports games and the like that force you to have a 'career' and sort out advertising and stuff most tedious.


Not really sure what you mean by this - the graphics take up masses of the games production time, and are undeniably important for the finished product.

Yes. I mean, graphics are pretty enough now (textures, polygon count etc), but it would be nice to have better physics, swarms, crowds etc. Dig?

I hadn't considered sports type games. I was more thinking of FPS shooters and third person stuffs. See edit, it's my thoughts in progress.

I agree. My view is that when new tech comes, they tend to increase the polycount of whatever's already on screen rather than the quantity of individual objects.

That's why there weren't ever many more cars on screen at once in GTA IV than there were in GTA: San Andreas. Gameplay concern? Yes, you don't want actual New York traffic jams as you'd never get anyway, but over a decade ago Midtown Madness deliberately did lower-quality AI traffic cars (and pedestrians) so it could display a TON of them on screen. Driving along the freeway especially, with traffic turned up to full, was incredible, picking your way through the horde of cars.

Sure, I totally agree - but you'll need a more powerful console.

Also, I remember saying that "games were pretty enough now" during the GameCube era - turns out I was wrong

What I do think, though, is that games are at high enough resolution now, and people should stop caring about having a stupid amount of pixels on the screen and start thinking more about visual detail. I mean - what looks better, a game running at full HD res, or a TV show on BBC1?

I think whoever blinks first seems to get the best headstart. Look at the PS2 vs Xbox, 360 vs PS3. The PS2 and 360 were actually less powerful than their main competitor, but ended up selling the most.

Yeah, I know that would need a more powerful console Grim... I assume that would be done by th emain processor though rather than a ZOFMG graphics chip.

It's whoever get's the next one out nearest to the £200 mark at Christmas.

Well technically they're not at a high enough resolution yet. CoD, for example isn't even 720p. Most games are just upscaled. I want to see proper 1080p next gen. As well as the sort of improvements Zardoz mentions.

It would need both - remember that more people means more surfaces, and all of them need clipping, texturing, anti-aliasing and lighting.

Yeah, there's that too, but then that's not other things being equal, it goes without saying that people might be more tempted by a console that is available. But numbers do seem to matter to people. To take Mali's analogy about drills and vacuum cleaners lots and lots of them are marketed and differentiated on the basis of numbers which pertain to the power ratings of their motors.

Another good example is megapixels on a digital camera - important, sure, but nowhere near as important as the general public believe.

No, but the sensor performance is far more important. That's an example of the public focussing* on the wrong thing, not an example of numbers not mattering.

*heh.

Actually, WTF am I going on about? I spend £300 when I pop down to Costco these days, I was spending £100 a time to fill up the Beemer and doing that every 4 days, etc...

£300 on a new console? Why the fuck not.

Having played Fable 3 and LA Noire recently I'd like to see consoles run even the current level of 'prettiness' without shitting themselves. Which in itself surely makes the point that the spec of the current gen of consoles is limiting what developers want to do? Even if you profess not to care about the 'numerical metrics for performance' if you want games with more realistic/populated worlds or whatever even with the level of pretty you're already used to then the power of the consoles need to increase.

Consoles will be more powerful and be able to handle more stuffs, for sure. If two consoles are released within 3 months of each other, say, I'd be surprised if there was a significant, or even noticeable, difference in the performance. The success of either will be more down the games available, and a killer app. Even though the PS3 is two years younger (so more powerful in terms of numbers and stuff) than the 360, it's been less successful than the 360 over its lifetime according to Dimrill's graph. So i'm led to conclude that the numbers don't really matter too much.

I think that's a terrible example. For one, I think most people now understand that megapixels aren't everything. For two, even when I was in full effect, the megapixel thing was an example of the a technical product marketed to technically illiterate consumers by representing performance with a single (misleading) figure. Consoles have never been sold like that. MS didn't go on stage at E3 in 2005 and talk about fill rates. Sony didn't fill billboards with GPU architecture diagrams. I'd argue that almost all console marketing has, very reasonably, focused on experience (HD gaming, 3D gaming, motion controls, specific exclusive games) rather than specs.

People don't buy specs (barring a small number of anomalies); they buy experiences. Specs underpin the experience. It's all related.

What? Sony went on about cell architecture plenty when they were releasing the PS3. The intimation that theirs was the more powerful machine was quite clear.

I'm not talking about comparing two consoles of the same generation; I'm talking about whether there's a need for a new generation at all. At which point the numbers do very much matter because the delta between the old and putative new is potentially massive i.e. enough to give you the same or better pretties with no slow-down and with more realistically rendered game worlds. Which everyone here seems to want whether they're expressing that in numbers or in more concrete terms. Indeed it doesn't matter how you express it (despite what seems to be getting implied in this thread for some bizarre reason) it all means the same thing.

Someone upthread mentioned the first-to-market advantage. I think this has been particularly significant in this generation of consoles, as this is when online gaming came of age. If three of your friends all have a 360, you're more likely to choose 360 over PS3 to play with them. Hence early sales have a force multiplier effect down the road. I wonder how much of the 360's later-in-life upswing can be traced to this. It's certainly not down to exclusive games -- the PS3 and Wii have much more substantial roster of exclusives, to my mind.

In tech press -- which we all consume -- they did tech stuff. But in the mainstream marketing, it was mostly "here's our unique chip, which does X Y and Z that no-one else can." It's the X, Y and Z that nongeek civilians focus on. Where they didn't do that, I'd argue it's an example of Sony Doing It Wrong - its PS3 marketing was all over the place, so there are probably counter-examples.

...and how many will stick to Xbox now they've heavily invested in cheezoz, Live Accounts, have MS points still to spend. Microsoft would have to do a proper belmer to fuck things up for themselve at the next stage.

Well, the history of console development has no shortage of massive belmers.

Don't rule out the effect of the god-awful PS3 controller

Tru dat.

They'd have to do a proper Sony though.

Dreamcast vs PS2

The Atari Jaguar stands proudly with it's 64 "bits"

Consoles have never successfully been sold like that.

Will your existing XBLAH games work on a new Xbox console is an interesting question to consider.

Well if they don't MS can fuck off.

Until they show me the shiney.

Very much this!

People have spent a lot of money on arcade games. I think MS will have to support them or face a tremendous backlash.

One which will probably last a day and people will buy the console anyway.

I think they will, but retail games will not work (so they can sell them again to you using Games on Demand).

I think they're probably onto a winner so long as their new console stands a less than one in three chance of melting.

I like those odds. I'll have three!

Xbla being a .net layer means they could in theory build a bytecode translator If the hardware is different enough to prevent normal running, so long as the libraries are still there.

I don't think it being technically possible has ever been in doubt.

Dreamcast might have done ok if they hadn't blown their whole marketing budget on sponsoring a footy team.

The Dreamcast failed for one reason: people waited for the PS2.

Man, that upsets me to this day. I haven't been as excited about a console as I was leading up to the release of the Dreamcast since. And I doubt I ever will.

If the Xbox 720 uses x86, there's already a complete .Net virtual machine for it, for obvious reasons. I think that makes XBLAH games porting trivial, or possibly even reduces it to no porting work required -- Dave could clarify.

The processor architecture will inevitably be different. PowerPC is a dead end; Microsoft can only choose x86 (logical) or ARM (wacky and fairly unlikely). So disk-based games won't work automatically, we may or may not get backwards compatibility based on software patches, as with the 360 and the after-launch PS3s.

That sentence ending with "since" written by me about five minutes ago is the worst sentence ever ever.

Is it not possible they could stick a 360 CPU in there as well? If they did that, could the old games utilise the new graphics chip/RAM without fuss? Or is that a simple-minded suggestion from a belmer?