Be Excellent To Each Other

I do understand what you're getting at but I honestly don't see where you think this new wave of awesomeness is going to come from.

The hardware won't be anything new, and neither will the software.

Earlier on in the 360/PS3 lifecycle it's entirely true that the PC got one shit port after another, and that's still the case to an extent, but over the last 18 months it's been the case again and again that the PC gets the 'full fat' version and the console versions are stripped back, and developers have been talking more and more about how the PC version is 'showing the way forward'.

Take Rockstar and the publicity they've done for the PC version of Max Payne 3, really pushing the angle of how they're pulling all the stops out to make it the definitive version, there's no way they'd have done that to the release of GTAIV.

I've already mentioned Unreal Engine 4 for a kick off...

Crysis 2 is simply more cunning that Crysis. It is far more linear for a start, allowing tricks to be used to make the levels look very big when they're actually not. Crysis was a huge island, and you could basically go to any part of it that you could see in the distance. Crysis 2 is mainly in city centres and walls are put up to make the playfield far smaller than it was in Crysis. If anything they went too far with the original Crysis, and this was shown when Warhead came along with far less going on. Less enemies on screen, less vehicles etc.



It's not so much a lack of ambition. Well, it sort of is. Basically BF3 is heavily limited in certain areas (as I put in my reply to AE). It is linear. If you decide to wander off you are soon greeted with a "GET BACK TO THE PLAY AREA AT ONCE" and scolded. That absolutely sucks, and isn't a step forward by any means. I was hoping that the co op mode would offer more freedom, but tbh it offers less. First level is like a game of SIMON, second level is like a game of Space Invaders (you have to stand rooted to the spot shooting waves of enemies).

The actual fundamental gameplay is an enormous step backwards. We were playing that style of game thirty years or more ago. The next gen won't look like that, that's for sure. It will look more like Skyrim. We want bigger, Skyrim's engine can give us that with better looking visuals than FO3's.



PC games are not so much ports. I mean, the game has to be written and compiled on a PC. However, they are most certainly being held back by the consoles, as no company wants to limit themselves to one audience and the smallest one at that. Every single last one of them has "console" in the back of their mind at every step of the development. Make sure it runs on a console so we can make the till bells ring, then compile a PC version and hope for the best.

A real PC game would not run on a console as it simply wouldn't be possible.

Of course, none of this is made any easier by AMD and Nvidia, who are now releasing new gen GPUs every six fucking months. All it does is give the game creators an excuse to be lazy. All they need to do is make sure their game will run at maximum settings on the fastest GPU available at the time and nothing more. So basically the optimisation process takes weeks instead of months.

It's no secret that what the 360 is doing is nothing short of miraculous. It's a pants old system with what equates to a Geforce 8600 in Radeon terms. Yet, amazingly it's able to actually play the games (even if they do look like turd sausages).

64-player Caspian Border is a very large landscape, so the idea that FBII can't cope with them is a nonsense - and the 64 player maps were exclusive to the PC version, so it's not fair to say they scaled it down to 'fit' on the consoles.

The single player is linear and poo, that's what single player FPS games are these days.

The 64 player large maps are a thing of epic beauty and massive technical achievement.

They looked quite sparse to me. Maybe one day I will reinstall it.

LORD HELP ME MAN have you actually played this game in multiplayer on the large 64 player maps?

You absolutely cannot judge a Battlefield game based on its single player.

Historically Battlefield games didn't even have a single player for god's sake, they only put one in there for the console generation.

Just search for 'Caspian Border 64 player' on YouTube and tell me it's a 'sparse' map

Yes I fucking well can. It HAS a single player. Maybe they would have been better leaving it out, but the fact they left it in there for miserable fuckers like me to play in single player leaves it open to criticism.

That's the part you don't seem to fucking get, dude.

The reason it has single player is because they are greedy asswipes who want to cash in on every single angle possible. It's in there, it sucks. Simple as that.

Maybe they would have been better leaving it out? had they done that I wouldn't have bought it, wouldn't have played it, and wouldn't absolutely hate it.

Just because you found it wankworthy in multi player doesn't mean the other side of it absolutely stinks.

Hurray! Another thread dragged off topic to talk about PC vs console gaming! Because the other five hundred threads that happened to were getting lonely.

That's nothing to do with available power. That's a design choice. If they'd wanted to make Skyrim, they'd have made Skyrim. Because as we know, PCs and consoles can both run the Skyrim engine.

*rubs chin* I think I like this man.

Well at least I paid for it.

And I didn't? if I didn't please explain to me how I was able to play it in co op and multiplayer (briefly) ?

Anyway, my point is! The consoles are now the driving force in video game development. Like it or not. Therefore, PC games will look prettier when console games do, no matter how powerful your PC is*. On the whole at least. Therefore this "PC games have looked next-gen for 18 months" malarky isn't strictly true. Is my point. Point.

Pointy.

*Please, this isn't a slight on PCs. I know they can run things on max settings at high FPS! I'm talking about new graphics engines and tricky graphical techniques and effects that haven't appeared yet.

No actually you are right. I didn't pay for it. I didn't install it, and I didn't add you as a fucking friend through my, you know? fully legit and above board Origin install

And you're completely right. Never mind him. Every time some one mentions BF3 he gets all lovey and defensive.

You argued about something somewhere? I refuse to believe it.

If you lot are all in non-confrontational mode, I have to get my kicks elsewhere!

If you say WOW I'm going to put you in the same class as AE. That bastard went on and on and on about how amazing BF3 was so I bought it and the bastard went back to playing WOW

Well you sort of bought it, you got it free with a graphics card

Wha?!

He said Neogaf.

Well said Throughsilver. Right, now that's all out the way, can we go back to discussing the next generation of consoles?

Do you reckon the next Playstation will STILL use the same controller?

Sort of. It'll have a new plug to make you buy them again at an RRP way in excess of the other brand's controllers. Then it'll not have... phhhhh... the right analogue stick or something and instead have an eyebrow detector in place of it. Then 2 years later they'll reinstate the analogue stick to make you buy the controller again, and instead have a forehead wand attachment (sold separately) with advanced eyebrow detectors built in to it. There'll be two games made for the system before it's phased out as if nothing every happened at all. Queue the entrance of the PS5.

For the first time in about 25 years, i'm not sure i'm going to bother having a "current" console next time round. I have a PS3 that I never turn on and was only ever used for GT5, and an Xbox that only ever gets used for BF3.
The only thing that would make me buy is a new proper good multiplayer FPS, other than that i'm really not fussed.

Good question (about the PS controller). They've got to do something with it for the next gen surely. Will traditional controllers be out and the motion controllers be standard? I doubt it, but just to drum up some controversy I'm going to say: Yes. The traditional controller is dead. Long live the motion detecting trackball of doom.

Somewhat related. GRAPH PRON!



source: eggbox generates $56billion dorral in revenue.

I hope they switch it up. The Dualshock 3 is awful. The triggers are gash, the sticks are too close together and the sticks are too "loose" as well if you ask me. The 360 ones are much tighter and more responsive. Also, fucking convex thumb nubs! It's just a little piece of shit.

I still paid for it man. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Not that it matters. Like the other 200 or so PC games I have it is still legitimate.




Hilariously we are

It's already been confirmed that the Xbox whatever will have an AMD 6000 series GPU. What's happening in the world of computers at the moment is very important for the next gen consoles.

We're now on DX11.1 apparently, though no one has actually explained what it means.

That's probably all of the poor sods who had to buy a new Xbox because they had an RROD

I know that hence the sticky-out tongue smiley, yes you legitimately own the game I'm not disputing that, but it was a sweetener on a graphics card you wanted to buy anyway.



This is the point, the next-gen Microsoft console already exists, it's a mid-range PC built with ENTIRELY MAINSTREAM COMPONENTS - there's nothing special about it. They might do a bit of clever 'last stage trickery' like the 10MB of super-fast RAM they bolted onto the Xenos GPU in the 360 - but basically, the next-gen Microsoft console is a mid-range PC in a small box running DX11, that's it.

You're still absolutely not getting it at all. There's more to "next-gen" than the fucking hardware spec sheet!

It's about the games - the game engines - that come with it. Right now the top-end PCs are sledgehammers and Max Payne 3 is a nut.

NOBODY is disputing that the next Xbox will probably be comparable to a PC you can build now without breaking the bank. Nobody.

What's hilarious is that this new console will have what a PC owner considers pathetic yet put a thousand pound PC to shame.

As soon as a console comes out that can actually do aliasing without falling on its face I'm switching. I bought a Radeon 7970 for £439 and found it completely crap. Sure, it was a fast card, but it did nothing my GTX 470 couldn't do apart from BF3 on ultra and that was due to a lack of vram rather than raw grunt. Then Nvidia release even more stupidly priced (mid range total rip off) cards. All the while it seemed to be forgotten that fuck all games were even coming out.

Wow, Dirt : Showdown. Uses the same sodding engine as Dirt 3 and Dirt 2. Max Payne 3. I am still yet to actually believe anything Rockstar say when they had the gall to release a broken fucked game (GTAIV, probably hit a raw nerve with AE there).

Alan Wake is about the only good game I have played recently (have done the first bit and DLC, now I'm on American Nightmare) and that's a three year old console game

Seriously, it really is that bad at the moment. The only thing that really has me even slightly excited is Bethesda's new game.. Whatsitcalled... Dishonored.

They should put the motion control inside the new controller, and give you some way of controlling it with just your thumbs, like maybe a stick of some kind you can move around.

Having used Onlive, I'll happily say that as long as I live somewhere with a decent (15Mb+) broadband connection, I'll never pay for a gaming-spec PC again. Superb performance, next to no outlay.

Oh god. Craster, you cunt.

This isn't as crazy as it sounds. Motion control that needs only small movements so there's no need for huge gestures and a tactile sense of feedback with small thumb sized sticks. That sounds like the future.

If, and that's a very big IF I get a next generation console, it'll be a couple of years after its release, and then only becuase there's a gmae that I really want to play on it. It was GTA on the PS2, Forza on the XBox, Animal Crossing on the DS. I'd guess that most of the world don't really care about specs, or who makes what part. It's basically "Does it look good?" and "Is it impressive enough to justify the outlay?". There's only about a handful of people that cares about frames per second or screen resolution as a numerical metric for performance.

You've hit the nail on the head, Mali. I wasn't bothered about better graphics or anything like that. It boiled down to the fact that I wanted to play Dead Rising and Forza 2, and this wasn't possible on the original Xbox.

Those talking about specs do have a point though - if most games are developed in parallel across all platforms, or ported from console games, then it would be somewhat irritating to have your technically limitless PC platform limited by a console platform that's locked to a specific middling set of hardware for anything up to 7 years.

Lolsome, you mean.

Yeah, I'll be in no rush to grab a new console either. As mentioned above it's down to the content.

I imagine I'll probably pick up a cheap PS3 before getting a next gen machine.

Definitely do - I've been pleasantly surprised!

When I can get a new unit for £99 I will. It will happen and I'm in no rush.

Yes, I wouldn't recommend preowned, as the bollock pain I had will testify.

I agree with Mali.

Tech specs won’t sell a console as much as a new COD/FIFA game will. That’s what people are interested in... Oh, and apps. People love those apps.

Also... Off topic but I have a wasps nest that I need poking with a big stick. Would anyone like to volunteer? Craster maybe? Fancy it?

I'm in!

I think it's both. I think the sort of people who like COD etc actually are impressed by tech specs and would be deterred from buying say an Xbox if it was common knowledge that the PS4 was much more powerful. I'm impressed by graphics as well, habit of a lifetime from watching them develop over the last thirty odd years. I think there's a lot of posturing about how graphics don't matter when actually they do quite a bit.