Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 23rd Aug 2009 19:17 UTC
PC gamers vs. console gamers. There's this assumption that PC gamers are capable of playing more complex games than console gamers. The games industry itself has picked up on this assumption and generally dumbs down games for the consoles because they assume us poor console gamers are not capable enough, and as the consoles have increasingly become the focal point of the industry, PC games also started suffering from the dumbing down effect. That's why the developers behind Sacred 2 deserve all the more praise for not assuming all gamers on consoles are 13-year-old Halo-addicted kids by releasing a traditional top-down hack and slash game with an incredibly detailed world and intricate character development.
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Member since:
2006-01-10
One nice piece of logic that proves that consoles suck are the prices. I'm not talking about the prices for the consoles themselves, but the games.
Sacred 2 being a perfect example of this. Pretty much everywhere you look, the price of Sacred 2 has dropped recently to 15-20 dollars for the PC. For the Xbox360 and Playstation 3, it is still in the 40-50 dollars.
One thing Consoles will NEVER be as good as is the role-playing games. It's not because they can't handle the graphics or the game play, but it's because they simply don't have the complexity one can attain from having a keyboard.
Not to mention that 99% of all the console role-playing games are Final Fantasy clones. Of course a big part of that is due to most of them being influenced by Ultima 1 and Anime.
Sacred 2 may very well be an 'RPGish' game, but walking around and hacking up monsters and clicking through dialog for quests is not a true role-playing game, and is basically just Nethack with a pretty interface (not that this is necessarily a bad thing!), it's just not in the same class as games like Neverwinter Nights, Alternate Reality, Ultima 4-7(maybe 9), Wizardry, Might and Magic, Elder Scrolls, Fallout / Wasteland, Bard's Tale, etc.
Even running emulators on an original Xbox is painful if it requires the keyboard at all. Gamepads have their place, as do keyboards, flight sticks, mice, touch screens, etc. But they're not very good at playing games that require a lot of variable input, or really FPS games for that matter. A lot will argue with that last statement, but whenever I read a game forum where they talk about the possibility of letting Xbox360/PS3 players connect with PC players, they always say it wouldn't be fair, 'cause the PC players would slaughter them with a keyboard / mouse.
Of course playing a racing game with a keyboard is almost OK, but once you've used a steering wheel, or even a analog game pad, you just don't want to go back to the keyboard.
Oh, and I don't think the Xbox360 or PS3 version of Sacred received the Physx upgrade either.
Consoles have one advantage over PCs. Single development platform. Though in more recent years that hasn't helped, games seem to be more buggy, since they are more complex. It's the same reason why Apple computers are more stable than your typical run of the mill beige box (although on a side note, no one calls them that anymore, since most cases are black or silver or pretty much any color BUT beige.)