The future of PC gaming
- Thread starter Vault101
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Consoles and PCs are likely going to become more and more parallel. At this point a PC can do pretty much everything a console does, and the PC will always be capable of more than the console. The important thing to remember is that the ones who throw the most money at games and gaming goods are not the group that has the seemingly inexhaustible time to play them: it's those of us who have grown up, gotten jobs and families, and can afford nicer things. I think those of us who are older are more likely going to play games on our home PC rig while relegating console gaming to either unique titles or as a means to free up the computer from the kids.
I was going to ignore this "argument from ignorance" thread, until this caught my eye.
That may be true for iOS products, but it's not true of the Android market. The spec may be even directly hidden, but it's still not true to say "without the worry of specs."
You know what's more damaging to the PC as a household gaming device?
Graphics.
You know, back before you were even born, I was playing SimCity on a somewhat dated machine. Then SimEarth came out and I got it new and I could run it. These were for my father's desktop, which was absolutely nothing special.
I can't speak for a generation who grew up after the Simpsons became a household phenomenon, but I spent years being able to play new or pretty new games with little consideration to the hardware.
And nowadays, that's almost the same, really. My four year old rig would run most current games stock except for the graphics card. Or lack of therein. The integrated graphics really won't cut it, except iwth really dated games or retro titles (and even a lot of retro titles require a lot more graphical power than they should, all things considered). Now, you can just slap on a graphics card (and I have), but that still defeats the whole out-of-the-box premise that once existed. One might have to worry about operating system (but is that any different than needing to run android Tutti-Fruity or whatever?) and hardware, but there was a large market out there, a mainstream market, that was unlikely to tax your system.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: graphics whores ruin everything.
No. No. No! No!Vault101 said:
That may be true for iOS products, but it's not true of the Android market. The spec may be even directly hidden, but it's still not true to say "without the worry of specs."
You know what's more damaging to the PC as a household gaming device?
Graphics.
You know, back before you were even born, I was playing SimCity on a somewhat dated machine. Then SimEarth came out and I got it new and I could run it. These were for my father's desktop, which was absolutely nothing special.
I can't speak for a generation who grew up after the Simpsons became a household phenomenon, but I spent years being able to play new or pretty new games with little consideration to the hardware.
And nowadays, that's almost the same, really. My four year old rig would run most current games stock except for the graphics card. Or lack of therein. The integrated graphics really won't cut it, except iwth really dated games or retro titles (and even a lot of retro titles require a lot more graphical power than they should, all things considered). Now, you can just slap on a graphics card (and I have), but that still defeats the whole out-of-the-box premise that once existed. One might have to worry about operating system (but is that any different than needing to run android Tutti-Fruity or whatever?) and hardware, but there was a large market out there, a mainstream market, that was unlikely to tax your system.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: graphics whores ruin everything.
Desktop gaming is already like 6% of the market. That's pretty niche.Luftwaffles said:
I make money sorting people's shit out after they try and fail. Oddly enough, more people seem to THINK they know how to handle it than do.rhizhim said:
Hell, the number of people I've seen put RAM in backwards...And then I googled it, and I find more and more examples.
That's just a mechanical thing! Insert piece so it fits!
My earliest game PC was a Commodore 64
http://oldcomputers.net/c64.html
I used to drink my 2 ltr of coke, smoke a pack of Marlboros and play "Fortress of the Witchking non stop. Ultima 3 % 4 were very good too.
Nowadays, a $600 PC can get games super cheap through Steam and get the use of a full computer.
Consoles are still a great buy. Typically less than a great graphics card.
http://oldcomputers.net/c64.html
I used to drink my 2 ltr of coke, smoke a pack of Marlboros and play "Fortress of the Witchking non stop. Ultima 3 % 4 were very good too.
Nowadays, a $600 PC can get games super cheap through Steam and get the use of a full computer.
Consoles are still a great buy. Typically less than a great graphics card.
You're right - the ignorant masses don't have to care about specs on their shiny shiny but quite shitty fondleslabs. The devs, on the other hand, do. Apple took three or four years to fit decent cameras in their Iphones. They started out in 2007 with the crappiest cameras money could buy - in 2002. And... they got away with it! Imagine that!
I still see people go out buying the cheapest laptop they can get and then rage when they find out it's not capable of running games or HD video at 1080p with all settings maxed out. I still see people with, say, the latest MacBook Pro telling me they just replaced the RAM with more, and faster one, too. We all know Apple has taken to soldering and gluing these things shut, right after they got away with hiding the non-user-replaceable batteries beyond the reach of the average user. I see people who are otherwise smart and knowledgeable rant on about how our web browsers are basically still the same old, same old as twenty years ago and they want more sexy, more convenient ways of accessing teh interwebz.
I still see people playing XBOX and PS3 games on their shiny new TV sets with default settings, thinking their console is faulty, producing choppy video and odd graphical glitches. Well, they'd all be able to fix things by turning off all that crappy video processing in their shiny new TV sets. Magic. You should see their faces when, all of a sudden, everything looks better, is fluid and the idiot TV isn't trying to 'fix' the special effect of light and shadow or that flickering flame it interprets as an 'error', running hot and working overtime to mess up that graphics fidelity you paid for so dearly
I don't think dumbing down is a very smart thing or top notch customer service, it's a crime against humanity. We haven't been shat into this world to remain stupid and have everything convenient and easily understandable. If that was a good plan, we'd have ignorants and complete schmucks decide over the fate of, say, nuclear powerplants or... oh, wait.
The gaming future looks a wee bit brighter now. If the two top console contenders have better specs, I say there's a chance games will no longer be 'optimized' (marketing speak) for anæmic console rigs that feature a total of 512 MB RAM. That shit got old before they even got released.
Yes, I do expect PC gaming to tiptoe back to its former glory, all in the shadow of the locked-down consoles - or, as we call them: experimental DRM boxes. Some of the stuff both Sony and Microsoft got away with is totally not acceptable. Your drive funks out? Forget about being able to easily replace it in a cost efficient manner! Sony took away our - already quite locked down - Linux option, out of fear of their insane behind-the-scenes DRM shenanigans being under constant attack. Apple is riding the gravy train of doom with iOS. The 'i' stands for ignoramus. Android looks a bit same-y and Microsoft now has the idiot's OS perfected: Enter Windows 8 Metro - I absolutely expect this to pop up on the new XBOX, maybe even on the old XBOX. It goes so well with Kinect (hurr).
Everything has to be 3D now, even games that look 2D. Everything is about shaders and DirectX11 and hardware tesselation and raw video computing power. On one hand, it's a huge loss for all of us. On the other hand, we still do get gems every now and then. They're just floating in a sea of shit.
I still see people go out buying the cheapest laptop they can get and then rage when they find out it's not capable of running games or HD video at 1080p with all settings maxed out. I still see people with, say, the latest MacBook Pro telling me they just replaced the RAM with more, and faster one, too. We all know Apple has taken to soldering and gluing these things shut, right after they got away with hiding the non-user-replaceable batteries beyond the reach of the average user. I see people who are otherwise smart and knowledgeable rant on about how our web browsers are basically still the same old, same old as twenty years ago and they want more sexy, more convenient ways of accessing teh interwebz.
I still see people playing XBOX and PS3 games on their shiny new TV sets with default settings, thinking their console is faulty, producing choppy video and odd graphical glitches. Well, they'd all be able to fix things by turning off all that crappy video processing in their shiny new TV sets. Magic. You should see their faces when, all of a sudden, everything looks better, is fluid and the idiot TV isn't trying to 'fix' the special effect of light and shadow or that flickering flame it interprets as an 'error', running hot and working overtime to mess up that graphics fidelity you paid for so dearly
I don't think dumbing down is a very smart thing or top notch customer service, it's a crime against humanity. We haven't been shat into this world to remain stupid and have everything convenient and easily understandable. If that was a good plan, we'd have ignorants and complete schmucks decide over the fate of, say, nuclear powerplants or... oh, wait.
The gaming future looks a wee bit brighter now. If the two top console contenders have better specs, I say there's a chance games will no longer be 'optimized' (marketing speak) for anæmic console rigs that feature a total of 512 MB RAM. That shit got old before they even got released.
Yes, I do expect PC gaming to tiptoe back to its former glory, all in the shadow of the locked-down consoles - or, as we call them: experimental DRM boxes. Some of the stuff both Sony and Microsoft got away with is totally not acceptable. Your drive funks out? Forget about being able to easily replace it in a cost efficient manner! Sony took away our - already quite locked down - Linux option, out of fear of their insane behind-the-scenes DRM shenanigans being under constant attack. Apple is riding the gravy train of doom with iOS. The 'i' stands for ignoramus. Android looks a bit same-y and Microsoft now has the idiot's OS perfected: Enter Windows 8 Metro - I absolutely expect this to pop up on the new XBOX, maybe even on the old XBOX. It goes so well with Kinect (hurr).
Yes... but the main technical gripe I have with it is this: There used to be great diversity in games when you first played Sim City. Hell, I played Sim City on monochrome Ataris, on an Amiga 500 straight from floppy disk, on an A2000 and an A4000, even on an emulated Mac OS, on my first PC, on a Windows 95 laptop that looks well antiquated now... those times are, sadly, gone. The latest Sim City not only requires a well endowed 3D capable gaming rig, it also requires a speedy always-on internet connection and the total absence of self-esteem.Zachary Amaranth said:
Everything has to be 3D now, even games that look 2D. Everything is about shaders and DirectX11 and hardware tesselation and raw video computing power. On one hand, it's a huge loss for all of us. On the other hand, we still do get gems every now and then. They're just floating in a sea of shit.
You're telling me you played Fallout 2 and can't remember its name? Methinks you're talking about Jeremy.VanQ said:
Here's Jeremy the bald ghoul in his natural habitat:
http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110713001618/fallout/images/c/c6/Jeremy.png
Here's Jeremy like you might remember him:
Here's the cover:
http://wpcontent.answcdn.com/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c3/PC_Game_Fallout_2.jpg/256px-PC_Game_Fallout_2.jpg
captcha: kundalini express
We had one of the old "is it a console or is it a computer" computers back in the day, which ran off cassette tapes [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Cassette] (I don't remember exactly what model it was). Computing shows on TV would have machine code playing over the credits, so you'd be able to record new programs from the telly. The first "real computer" we had cost about £1000, and had 4gb of hard disk space and a few hundred MHz processor (can't remember the exact value, I want to say about 500). It could just about run simcity 2000, which came on 2 or 3 (I forget the exact number) 3.5inch floppy disks (which stored 1.44mb of data)
You know, I actually kind of feel bad for modern computers, because most things are in the giga scale nowadays, and... well, say what you will, as far as I'm concerned Mega is a much cooler sounding prefix. Definitely more befitting of the 90s, anyway! Just trying saying it in a 90s voice, it just feels so... right.
You know, I actually kind of feel bad for modern computers, because most things are in the giga scale nowadays, and... well, say what you will, as far as I'm concerned Mega is a much cooler sounding prefix. Definitely more befitting of the 90s, anyway! Just trying saying it in a 90s voice, it just feels so... right.
The first PC I played on was ...I think an IBM PC5150 modified to have a HDD. I had amazing games like
-Bouncing Babies
-Sokoban
-Paratrooper
-Tetris
-Silpheed
And the like...I mean I'm aware the PC was older than I when I was playing it but we didn't really get into PCs till later. After that we had an epson laptop with Windows 3.11 + a dot matrix printer. Don't get me wrong there was access to more powerful PCs, but they were friends and my cousins. I think we finally upgraded just before high school when my brother had help with a friend building a win2000 Pentium3 PC, now there was power!
Either way, you want to know hard to install try getting early dos games to run never the less install, most don't know how to.
Edit: For actual games 99% of the time it was the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, then Playstation and so on till I started making gaming PCs which always is the better option given I work on my PC near constantly.
-Bouncing Babies
-Sokoban
-Paratrooper
-Tetris
-Silpheed
And the like...I mean I'm aware the PC was older than I when I was playing it but we didn't really get into PCs till later. After that we had an epson laptop with Windows 3.11 + a dot matrix printer. Don't get me wrong there was access to more powerful PCs, but they were friends and my cousins. I think we finally upgraded just before high school when my brother had help with a friend building a win2000 Pentium3 PC, now there was power!
Either way, you want to know hard to install try getting early dos games to run never the less install, most don't know how to.
Edit: For actual games 99% of the time it was the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, then Playstation and so on till I started making gaming PCs which always is the better option given I work on my PC near constantly.
When I was 13, my step father gave me his old Dell when my mom bought him a "gaming" computer (she was ripped off. It was a 2.4 single core CPU with 1GB of RAM and Windows Vista. If I knew then what I do now...), and my Dad gave me his stack of old PC games from the early to late 90's. Games like Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, and some kind of Nascar like game where you started with dirt tracks and worked your way up. I loved that racing game actually, and even knowing there was no chance in hell that anyone else was playing this, I played for hours getting my career and cash up...and then I lost it...on the bus with a whole case of new CDs and PC games.
Regardless, the computer ran them really slow...and it had no wireless internet, so I spent my cash on a wireless network card, and it was at this point that I took my first real look at an inside of a computer, and became so curious. Inserting that wireless card was just the start, soon it was buying my own PC and a graphics card to play Crysis (even if it was at 30FPS at 800X600 resolution...).
Today, I'm almost obsessed with building my own PC, something I made, something I made better. My GTX 480 burnt out a few weeks ago, so I'm building a brand new future proof rig this summer anyway. I can't say if PCs as we know them right now will die out, but I hope they don't. There's no feeling to me like building your own PC and knowing that it can handle any game on the market at the absolute max settings on a huge HDTV.
Regardless, the computer ran them really slow...and it had no wireless internet, so I spent my cash on a wireless network card, and it was at this point that I took my first real look at an inside of a computer, and became so curious. Inserting that wireless card was just the start, soon it was buying my own PC and a graphics card to play Crysis (even if it was at 30FPS at 800X600 resolution...).
Today, I'm almost obsessed with building my own PC, something I made, something I made better. My GTX 480 burnt out a few weeks ago, so I'm building a brand new future proof rig this summer anyway. I can't say if PCs as we know them right now will die out, but I hope they don't. There's no feeling to me like building your own PC and knowing that it can handle any game on the market at the absolute max settings on a huge HDTV.
I'm 15, so don't judge me as new to PC gaming, but my first experience was LEGO RACERS 2 (I was what, 6), and I sucked. Buy anyways, back on topic.
OP: I use a laptop for gaming (and it works), and what I would say to others is that you don't need a desktop for gaming. There are many laptops our there that can give you the same as a desktop and has the same price. The only two reasons why you would buy a desktop is either you need a large screen or you never take your laptop outside of your house. So yea, just know that gaming is not limited to desktops.
Also for tablet/smartphone gaming, it is really shallow with the gaming experience. It is hard to find a game that makes the tablets and smartphones worth it as a gaming platform(infinity blade, galaxy on fire 2, and baseball superstars 2012, the silent age etc.). It will not destroy PC gaming or gaming in general, but it will just be a place for people who take gaming very casually and don't care that much about depth.
OP: I use a laptop for gaming (and it works), and what I would say to others is that you don't need a desktop for gaming. There are many laptops our there that can give you the same as a desktop and has the same price. The only two reasons why you would buy a desktop is either you need a large screen or you never take your laptop outside of your house. So yea, just know that gaming is not limited to desktops.
Also for tablet/smartphone gaming, it is really shallow with the gaming experience. It is hard to find a game that makes the tablets and smartphones worth it as a gaming platform(infinity blade, galaxy on fire 2, and baseball superstars 2012, the silent age etc.). It will not destroy PC gaming or gaming in general, but it will just be a place for people who take gaming very casually and don't care that much about depth.
I don't have a first game, more of a recurring package. First game I remember playing was Math Blaster, but I never got very far because basic math sort of escaped me at the time. I think the first "real" game was when I saw my brother playing Age of Empires 1. The first game I seriously got into was Raptor: Call of the Shadows. I'm so glad there's an iOS port of it.
Anyway, I don't think PC gaming will ever really die. It's the only platform that will always be backwards-compatible and the only platform most strategy games can work effectively on.
Anyway, I don't think PC gaming will ever really die. It's the only platform that will always be backwards-compatible and the only platform most strategy games can work effectively on.
Vault101 said:
Yeah, I just don't think tablets/phones will ever really replace the desktop PC. They'll probably replace laptops, but not desktops. Desktops have and will very likely continue to be the mechanism by which all business gets done. But won't they conduct business on their tablets? Well...have you ever been to most offices? Shit, a lot of them are still running Windows XP, with old as hell desktops. It takes them a long time to adapt, and considering how difficult and clunky it is do real work on tablets...yeah, I don't see them replacing desktops any time soon. And I am some one who actually likes tablets/smart phones!
As for whether or not PC gaming will grow: well, we already know it is growing. You also have to consider that the desktops most people buy nowadays can very easily be converted into a fairly decent gaming PC. Take me for example. I've gamed on my PC for quite a while--used to play the original Hitman games, Delta Force Black Hawk Down, Sim City, the Sims, Starcraft/warcraft, Total War, Grand Theft Auto, Empire Earth, etc when I was a kid. At the time though, I didn't have a "gaming PC." Now, what I did eventually was take my family's decent desktop (with an AMD Phenom X4 820), installed some more RAM, got a new video card, and a new power supply. All together, that cost me less than $200 to convert it into a gaming PC. When I installed those components, I literally had no experience with computer tinkering, yet I still managed to do it.
I think that's really the future of PC gaming: kids taking their family's already decent desktop PC and spending their Christmas money to convert it into a gaming PC. It only costs a few hundred dollars (you can buy a GTX 560ti nowadays for like $150, which is insane!) and it's incredibly easy.
WHAT. 1000$? I never ever had a computer for so much money!
At the moment, my PC WITH PERIFERALS is worth like... 300$ for box + 100$ printer + 250 monitor + 100$ speakers + keyboard/mouse/gamepads so that's like 750$ for whole set. And it runs basically everything in a playable and good looking manner (won't say "lol errytin on hi, bros", cause it doesn't handle everything on highest settings... well it would but my screen has native 1920x1080 so it kills performance like hell ).
Wouldn't dish out 1000$ for this. Gotta love how their site gives no info about GPU (only CPU, RAM and storage on [link]http://xi3.com/buy_now-piston.php[/link] ). And unless that's something cool, then I have same rig as that piston thingie.
At the moment, my PC WITH PERIFERALS is worth like... 300$ for box + 100$ printer + 250 monitor + 100$ speakers + keyboard/mouse/gamepads so that's like 750$ for whole set. And it runs basically everything in a playable and good looking manner (won't say "lol errytin on hi, bros", cause it doesn't handle everything on highest settings... well it would but my screen has native 1920x1080 so it kills performance like hell ).
Wouldn't dish out 1000$ for this. Gotta love how their site gives no info about GPU (only CPU, RAM and storage on [link]http://xi3.com/buy_now-piston.php[/link] ). And unless that's something cool, then I have same rig as that piston thingie.