PS4 is just a shitty PC, why not join us, the PC gaming master race?

Yes, but those games also tend to be a bit on the easy side.

 

Right, because who could forget such classic games as ZombiU, NSMB Wii U, and Nintendo Land?

Seriously though, I think Nintendo has the right idea with the Wii U, focusing less on graphics and more on fun gameplay. But the hate (and god awful sales) they're receiving right now is totally justified. Unless you REALLY love Nintendo, the Wii U's library currently offers nothing over what's coming out on PS3/360 right now and it doesn't look to be improving much in the coming months (unless Nintendo has some serious surprises in store for us this E3).

I wouldn't get my hopes up if I were you. Next gen will probably be more of the same. And to think this gen started off so well...

That won't do us any good if the JRPGs being released suck ass. But I definitely see what you mean. High demand for graphics = more development costs. The Wii U will likely be the better alternative for most developers.

Totally! I'd much rather play a game from this smart era of FPS games where the gameplay consists of:

1. Shoot people!
2. Walk forward!
3. Watch cutscene!
4. Repeat steps 1-3! Fuck yeah!

Game of the year all years!

Sorry, but I'll take the "dumb" era of first person shooters any day over the current garbage spewing out of the genre. Those games had personality, fun gameplay that required more than shooting everything you see, and overall much more variety. And I say this as someone who wasn't a huge fan of FPS games in general even back then.

Because usually the one's that don't aren't noteworthy or just mediocre in general. The ones that do are everywhere, negatively ruining the development of other games because corporate suits follow what's popular. That's why myself and many others complain. Those games are partially responsible for the terrible games we're getting now, so hell yeah we're going to complain about them. They suck and they make stuff that wouldn't otherwise suck suck even harder.

 

Crysis 3 maxed out at 2560x1600 with a gtx680 really looks like what the next generation of FPS games should look like. And it actually runs okay... although with only 2xMSAA. Not sure if they can make a ps4 port of that.

I guess sony allows programmers to get quite close to metal so with very good optimizations, maybe they can do it. That said, pc does it now.

 

The spec sheet they released says the PS4 uses a "next-generation Radeon" chip. I took that to mean that it uses a graphics chip that hasn't be released yet. So that means - potentially - that it could be more powerful than any current-gen GPU. Potentially. Although what I've seen thus far seems to indicate that it's probably not.

The part that really makes no sense to me is why they would go with an AMD CPU. Intel CPUs are kicking AMD's ass in terms of performance right now. If I had to guess, I'd say AMD must have made them a better deal than Intel. I would also wager that Microsoft is going to go with an Intel CPU, in which case the PS4 might be fucked.

 

it makes sense using an amd cpu and gpu together, im assuming maybe and assuming they'd be custom designed for the ps4 and to work together, this could be a good thing, regardless of intels endeavors.

my next gaming PC will probably also contain an AMD CPU as have my previous systems.

 

why? is a couple of Mhz or floating point calc make such a difference?

let's get back be serious.

 

Oh, I doubt anyone really minds fixes in themselves, it's the fact that games are released untested that is the problem. If the only fixes issued were down to obscure bugs, or balancing issues then fine, but it's when a game is released with bugs that can be spotted in one playing session by anyone, or when a game is released with compatibility problems, that the situation becomes annoying.

Then you're either very good or picked a match full of newbies. Most online games (be it CoD, Unreal Tournament x, Quake x, etc) have *expert* players who have been playing the game for ages and playing them, for the rest of us, is like running into a brick wall.

That is certainly true. The thing is, console FPS are written for joypads, whereas PC FPS are written for mouse, and games for the former tend to be a bit slower, or have auto-aim or sticky-aim. You can play a console FPS just fine with a joypad, even with auto-aim turned off if you're good enough, but try a joypad on a PC FPS (with auto-aim, if any, turned off) and it's quite a bit harder. It doesn't bother me, as I use joypad on a console, and mouse on a PC (though I prefer joypad, like I prefer console gaming to PC) and on a console you're all even as you're all using a joypad, but in a match involving PC and console, then of course the console players (joypad users) are at a disadvantage.

I *love* mods. As you say, they (when done well) can both improve and extend games, and it's my favourite thing about PC gaming. But when you say "always", I wish that were true, but sadly it's not. Yes, many games do have modding communities (including many of the PCs best games, such as the Half-Life series, the Unreal Tournament series, the GTA series, the Doom series, etc), but sadly some games don't have their SDKs released, so mods aren't available. For example, Deus Ex: Invisible War has no mods, which is a real shame since modders could have added all the great features that were inexplicably not included in the sequel to Deus Ex (such as the RPS stats and skills (why were these left out???), more open areas, a better user interface (the UI was fine for consoles, with their joypads, but for a mouse it wasn't ideal), etc). Another example, and the one I personally regret the most, is that neither Bioshock 1 or 2 came with SDKs, as (brilliant though these two games are, and I really love them) these two games could have been massively improved with mods. They are fantastic for what they are, first person shooters, but a world as deep (no pun intended!) and well realised as Rapture deserved a much deeper game, and if the modding tools existed, then surely the Bioshock games (which were hugely popular) would have attracted skilled modders, and hopefully a very talented team would have added the gameplay of Bioshock's spiritual successor, System Shock 2, to rapture. Imagine SS2's gameplay, with it's depth and complexity, taking place in Rapture - to me it might just have been the best game ever. But sadly the SDKs were never released, so modding wasn't an option.

Still, most of my favourite PC games have mods, some of them amazing, so I'm lucky that so few of my favourites aren't moddable.

 

Cave Story is out for the original XBox, though the XBox needs to be modded as it's a homebrew port. I've never played CS, but have heard it's widely praised, what is it like (no spoilers please)? I've heard it's like Super Metroid, which is another game I've yet to play (though I love Metroid Prime).

FPS games nowadays tend to be much dumber than old school FPS games. Yes, the old ones are mostly just find the key and exit the level, but modern ones are mostly just press the button relating to the onscreen prompt. Old FPS didn't hold your hand, they didn't have onscreen prompts showing you where the next objective is, they didn't have rechargeable health, meaning you could take all the risks you liked then duck behind cover for a few seconds to get back to full health, they didn't have checkpoints every few minutes, and they didn't have friendly fire turned off in case you accidentally shot a friendly character.

To see what Doom or Quake would be like had they been made today, have a look at these videos. They are not graphical updates, just someone's attempt to show what is wrong with modern FPSs, and they make their point well.

If you like first person shooters at all, then look at these two videos, they are only short, and very well done.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ZtBCpo0eU&sns=em

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4yIxUOWrtw&sns=em


And look at this



The left one is Doom E1M6, from the days when FPS maps were intricate and didn't lead you through a linear path past endless locked door and knee high obstructions that you can't climb over.

No, people only complain when they are done badly. Half-Life 1 and 2 had scripted events, but did them well. So did Singularity, Bioshock 1 and 2, and the Batman Arkham games, but they did them well so they didn't feel out of place or annoying.

 

One thing modern FPS games absolutely got right is removing the stupid busywork in the form of scouring for keycards, although I wouldn't really credit "modern" FPS games for that since FPS level design was pretty much already perfected with Half-Life 1.
The funny thing about those videos is that Quake 1 had a painfully mediocre single player campaign, especially considering Duke 3D came out the same year and offered much better level design.

 

I always thought that the PS3 lacked exclusives, and the cross platform games looked exactly the same as Xbox 360 games..

 

Fixed that for you. Half-Life wasn't bad, but in my opinion Goldeneye did it much better over a year earlier, and on a cartridge based console no less.

That's what I find funny though. People talk shit about how finding keycards are the sole reason classic FPS games were terrible, but truly, how often did you see that in the genre post 1997? It's not like people were complaining about the change back then either, so the keycards have absolutely nothing to do with it. Modern first person shooters are just bad, plain and simple.

 

I liked collecting my blue, red and yellow key cards. Thanks

 

I didn't mind it either. At least keycards required me to explore my surroundings for secret paths, hidden power-ups, and simply gave me something else to do other than ducking behind cover and shooting at everything, then moving on to the next setpiece.

 

I'd call anything post-1997 not quite modern, but definitely not "classic" FPS games anymore. All the non-Duke Source engines games came out around '97 and were, besides being mediocre, Super Key Search Time.

 

I always thought the trick was to lead the player through a linear path (with some backtracking) but mask the fact that they're getting led around - they think they're exploring and finding things when it's mostly the opposite. Think of it as a way to creatively standardize the gameplay/story experience.

 

Apologies if anyone already said this - couldn't be bothered to read all 7 pages - but I'd say the major argument for a PS4 over a PC is compatibility and standards.

PS4 is stock hardware and ALL games have to be playable on it and conform to certain standards. PC can be anything, and so some PCs will play games better than others. Overclocking will, perhaps, give you a bit of an edge even. That's no fun. I don't want a device that's going to be outdated who knows when and need a new graphics card, then a new motherboard... etc. I'd much rather have the PS4, get my however many years out of it, then get the next console and still have BOTH perfectly playable. Much preferable than having one machine that keeps needing upgrades.

That said, I don't have a PS3, I have no interest in getting a PS3 and neither do I want a PS4.

 

1. 1992-1997 - Most (not all) games in the genre involve searching for keycards and other secrets in a large non-linear area to progress. Overall positive reception then and now.

2. 1997-2008 - Most (not all) games in the genre take a more linear approach and focus more on completing a set mission to progress through the story. Overall positive reception then and now.

3. 2008-2013 - Most (not all) games in the genre take a more linear approach and focus more on completing a set mission to progress through the story. Overall negative reception then and now.

Something happened between 2 and 3. I could list numerous reasons why that is, but I'm sure we've all heard them several times before. Several well received linear and non-linear FPS games have released this gen, but those games are the exception and not the rule, whereas it was previously the other way around.

All it comes down to is: Good games are good, bad games are bad.

I think that is one of the reasons. Goldeneye was actually fairly linear when you think about it, but you didn't get your hand held and you had to find everything yourself to complete the mission. You could even continue the level anyway if you failed a particular mission objective. Compare that with modern FPS games where you have to load a checkpoint if you walk 20ft away from where you're supposed to be. Modern developers just don't give enough of a shit to mask it anymore.

Exactly, which is why games such as Deus Ex: Invisible War ran fine on a Xbox with 64MB of ram, but needed over 512mb to run decently, or 256mb to run at all. There are too many variables with PCs, a console has set and specific specs to develop for.

The cost to constantly update a PC to play all games maxed out 1080P 60FPS is just not worth it in my opinion, and if I'm going to play the games on an outdated PC with the settings at minimum, then I might as well get a console anyway. It would be much cheaper, more convenient, run better, and look better.

 

One thing that happened to FPS games is that they got too fixated on "realistic" settings, which happened around the late 90s with games like Rainbow Six and Counter-Strike, which I always found lame compared to games like Quake II and III. After that, it was a slow slide until almost all the games in the genre were gray, boring and mostly "realistic" military shit.

 

You have keycards in real life don't you?

 

Consoles have been "shitty PCs" since the Gamecube/Xbox launch. Since standard computer architectures are and will be the most economic solution for the foreseeable future that's how it's going to continue to be. There's nothing really wrong with it, games have evolved from being influenced by hardware constraints to largely generic API with various performance constraints. That's progress, even if platforms aren't very nuanced anymore.