Next-next gen consoles, why bother?

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

This attitude was dangerously backward 6 years ago. It's a shameful fossil in two thousand and eleven.

lolwut? Consoles are the shameful fossils.

[lars573]

Wrong.

[Beskar]

Using unfounded generalities are fun! I never knew anyone who had a chipped system. I heard about them of course.

They are not unfounded, it is pretty much fact, especially here and highly responsible for the success of the playstation 1 system. The disks used to be bootlegged at my school for like a £1 each, everyone swapping and sharing, leading to a mass intake of consoles. Even someones father used to make a real killing from chipping consoles for £10, and supplying the latest games onto people.

Infact, I basically knew no one with legitimately owned games, perhaps one or two were legitimate in a collection of 20+.

[lars573]

Your own personal experience with PS1 and piracy=/=the whole story. I never had a single pirated game, nor did I know of anyone whom had a great number of them. Many I knew had a mount of legit games and not a single stolen one.

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

Wrong.

By what standards are you comparing consoles to PCs and coming to the conclusion that PCs as a whole are fossils compared to consoles?

[Beskar]

Your own personal experience with PS1 and piracy=/=the whole story. I never had a single pirated game, nor did I know of anyone whom had a great number of them. Many I knew had a mount of legit games and not a single stolen one.

Well, since you are stating it is just "personal experience", you clearly do not know the situation as well as you are attempting to make us believe.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Wrong.

No you are. The most profitable game in the history of gaming (WoW) is PC based. Steam sales grow higher every year and it doesn't seem like that trend will even slow down in the near future. Modding capabilities drive new gamers to express themselves creatively in ways they could not have done in any other medium.

Consoles are only around because Moore's Law drives the industry to advance faster than people have money to upgrade. Console came about as a cheaper alternative to pesky PC upgrades that were expensive and meant to be simpler than PC gaming. Ironically, now that this generation of consoles has stuck around for so long and will be around for another 3-4 years at minimum, developers are doing more with less hardware wise and the entire point of a console is negated by the fact that my 1 year old casual laptop can run Fallout: New Vegas on ultra high settings perfectly because Gambyro is a 7 year old engine that was not replaced until Skyrim due to the challenges of trying to get something better looking on such old technological hardware.

[Graphic]

^ I think laziness has more to do with Bethesda sticking with Gamebyro than the "challenge" of making something that looks better. The new Fallout games are ugly even by console standards.

PC > Consoles though

[Drunk Clown]

^ I think laziness has more to do with Bethesda sticking with Gamebyro than the "challenge" of making something that looks better. The new Fallout games are ugly even by console standards.

PC > Consoles though

Yeah it's ugly because of the open worlds.

[Mailman653]

Nintendo Boss Admits to Wii U Reveal Mistakes

[Graphic]

Yeah it's ugly because of the open worlds.

Far Cry 2 looked much better, so did Grand Theft Auto 4.

[Drunk Clown]

.... so did Grand Theft Auto 4.

Bull****

[Fragony]

PC > Consoles though

Of course, is and will always be

Anyways, developers comfirmed that the Wii u is insanely powerfull, 50% more so than the ps3. What's the hold-up release the bloody thing already. Got to give it to Nintendo they are really smart, they more than got away with last-gen tech with a gimmick that is/was the Wii, and with the Wii U they can also harvest the graphic-whores for a while without a care in the world, no r&d required, just using already existant hardware

[a completely inoffensive name]

^ I think laziness has more to do with Bethesda sticking with Gamebyro

My knowledge of Bethesda's work ethic tells me the exact opposite. Bethesda makes large open world games that you can spend 300+ hours on if you really wanted to in about 2-2.5 years. How? Because they push their workers to the brink. It's not an uncommon trend in video game companies to really guilt or full on require that employees come in over the weekend and spend 10 hour days, every day until the game is finished.

If Bethesda wanted a new engine for Fallout 3, they would have made it for Fallout 3. Instead they told Obisidian to buy them time with Fallout New Vegas, to make the engine and a new game to go along with it.

[Husar]

By the by, a large open world has not necessarily always to do with a game looking worse, in the case of Bethesda games it seems as though the game always stops and reloads new parts of the open world, so not all of it is loaded at all times. Games like Gothic/Risen and the Operation Flashpoint/ArmA series use engines that stream the world, i. e. they also reload and dump parts of the world but do so constantly in the background so there are no loading breaks when you travel through the world (except in Gothic 3's case as many computers at the time simply weren't fast enough or didn't have the memory required for the task and so the game would stutter a lot while running around).
I definitely prefer the streaming because it's a lot more immersive than to see a "loading 65%..." on screen every once in a while and with multiple cores the background work shouldn't cause too many problems nowadays.

Consoles got a lot of cores as well, my guess is the biggest problem are the graphics cards, which are roughly on the niveau of an NVidia 7950GT because that's what was available when they were first built.
What the next-next gen consoles could offer would be all games in 1080p resolution (at the moment it's almost only 720p or even less, like in GTA IV). That would bring them to a similar niveau of current computers and offer very, very nice graphics, still with some room of improvment but quite close to photorealism I guess. Then imagine that on a huge wallpaper-like OLED screen on your wall that you can roll up when you don't need it and doesn't have the disadvantages of a beamer and that may be where we are heading. I mean there's still room for improvement, the question is how much it will cost and who is willing to spend the money.
Computers will keep their place at the top I suppose, driving the development of console and cellphone hardware which is often just modified computer hardware put into a smaller form etc.
The real problem is that publishers will still expect people to play the same old CoD games on these...

[Graphic]

Bull****

What? Have you played GTA4? The character models leave something to be desired if you look at them close up, but that game features the most detailed city ever in a game.

[Drunk Clown]

What? Have you played GTA4? The character models leave something to be desired if you look at them close up, but that game features the most detailed city ever in a game.

Yes, I have played GTA IV plus all expansions. (Unfortunately, I haven't finished the game due to that annoying "tap-spacebar-to-get-in-the-chopper" glitch)

Okay, I aggree that the city overall looks great in GTA IV and a bit better than Fallout 3, but it's not much better.
And I admit that the character models have heavy impact on my opinions.

For Far Cry 2 I do not know, cos I haven't played it (and don't want to cos I heard it sucks).

[Fragony]

Far Cry 2 doesn't suck until you realise it kinda does, it tries something new and doesn't succeed. But it is an absolute blast to play, it just outstayes it's welcome 3/4 or so. Worth trying at least

[Husar]

I didn't like it, because it's incredibly shallow, and to be honest, because it didn't keep any of the promises that were given.

They promised a believable world where the player decides how to behave, whether to be feared, with dynamic missions, player being able to shift allegiances and/or help or kill civilians.
What they delivered was a world where checkpoint guards respawn once you move far enough away to delete the AI out of memory, a linear campaign where the player had no real choice of who he worked for, no dialogue choices, no nothing, just click a guy to get the next mission. And they forced the player to work for civilians in order to get malaria medicine, not to mention that those civilians were pretty much the only ones in the game, the rest was a country populated by a bunch of goons that would just shoot anyone and two factions that didn't know who of these goons belonged to them or how to control them and tell them not to shoot you while you worked for them.
That wasn't a believable world at all, it was more like Serious Sam with cars and some nice ideas that were ruined by the utter disbelief at the "world" they created for the game.

[Fragony]

Yeah the whole open-world thing failed miserably. But the gameplay mechanics are really good, I hope they get it all right next time. FarCry 2 was just too ambitious for it's own good, but it remains a very good game. If people care about the story of a shooter you at least made them give a crap, that can't be real criticism

[Furunculus]

This attitude was dangerously backward 6 years ago. It's a shameful fossil in two thousand and eleven.

lol, i'll be sticking with my pc too, bakward or otherwise. :p

[Fragony]

Yeah the whole open-world thing failed miserably. But the gameplay mechanics are really good, I hope they get it all right next time. FarCry 2 was just too ambitious for it's own good, but it remains a very good game. If people care about the story of a shooter you at least made them give a crap, that can't be real criticism

Looks like they understand what was wrong with Far Cry 2 http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...-cry-3-preview

A deliberate step back for the greater good, good thinking

[Mailman653]

Rumor: Windows 8 to Bring Xbox 360 Games to PC

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

By the time Win 8 comes out we could probably just play them on emulators without losing much performance...

[Centurion1]

some of my favorite open worlds were the mercenaries series. i thought they were decently made though i would have enjoyed better ai and permanent damage.

like when i led a battle to take an enemy held area (outside of missions) i would like them to extend that to their territory.