Why are modern consoles bad?

[Arnoxthe1]

Here's the thing. Consoles used to be amazing at two things. Plug-in/pop-in-and-play and splitscreen. Let's analyze both of those for a sec.

Plug-in-and-play: This is now almost gone. Back in the day, you could just pop in a disc/cartridge and get right to playing it, but due to Day 1 patches and mandatory installs, this is now pretty much a thing of the past. Further, with the advent of more and more frequent console hardware releases, it looks like console games will soon be getting system requirements. Wheee!

Splitscreen: Pretty much gone. Gone are the days when you could get your friend(s) over or family members, plug in another controller, and get almost immediately into playing local multiplayer. There is also another functionality too that's since gone missing, and that is LAN play. It is now entirely absent on consoles, so now, the only way to play with somebody else is to play online, which requires a separate console, controller, TV, and game and for both parties to pay for the online service to play.

Honestly though, we let all this happen. We bought it up and accepted it, and now they're probably gone for good until the next major gaming crash, if there will be one at all. And that, boys and girls, is why the modern consoles blow.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Because every promise made was blatantly untrue or has been reneged because it was too hard to implement.
Motion Controls? Out the window.
Improved Graphics? Nope, too hard to program and we need cross-console compatibility so no one version of a game outsells another.
New IP? Nope, endless series of remasters and collector editions.
Improved Loading times? Kiss my dick!
Backwards compatibility? Not on any game worth buying again for full price, and its all buggy Remasters that fuck up the original game code.
Better pricing now that CDs are no longer needed? Nope, $60 each and every day with no decrease over time. Also there are still CDs that simply unlock digital downloads, so you really do need constant internet to play single player games.


Also you know how you paid $60 for the game? Fork over an additional $100 worth of DLC if you want the FULL game, you worthless sheep. And if you're very very very nice and beg us enough, we might release a day-1 patch to fix the fact the game doesn't get passed the Start Menu. But only if we well 6+ million copies in 24hrs.

 

[tippy2k2]

Lucky for me, neither of those things matter to me!!! Wooooo! Go tippy2k2!!!

Well that's not 100% true. I still love my console for the Plug-in-and-Play aspect in the sense that my game will work on my console (and if it doesn't work, that's on me for not looking at reviews and whatnot and not because the Graphics Cards gigloploxxy doesn't mesh with the games flizzleflamble when my power source couldn't handle the zippityzaps that was needed).

If I get a new game, I put the game in and let it do it's thing. Takes ten minutes at the most. Should that irk me more? Maybe but I don't really care all that much.

As a 30 year old man, split screen being gone means nothing to me. I'm sure other people hate it but I haven't had another person use my second Xbox One controller...well....ever now that I think about it.

If anything is going to kill my console love, it's how Sony/Microsoft handle these ".5" systems that they have coming out because I'm not going to buy a new console every 4 years. If I'm stuck in a upgrade cycle like that, I might as well just go to PC.

 

[CritialGaming]

My gaming Laptop is plug and play. I plug it in, and I play. Hell now that I have an SSD, i don't even have to wait for load times!

 

[Lufia Erim]

I'm not so pressed for time i can take a hour max ( i have decent internet ) to download a few gigs to install or whatever. I mean come on, patience is a virtue. Once it's installed in the console it doesn't matter anymore.

As for splitscreen well, it's not something everyone cares for. I mean with the internet what it is, people can still play together without having to be physically there. it just goes to prove that gaming is leaning towards adults. People with lives and obligations that cannot just go over to their friends house like they could when they were kids.

I personally still prefer consoles to PCs despite all of that. i am not tech savvy, i rather install a game for an hour than have to seach for an hour how to get a game to work on my rig. God help me if i bought a game day one on PC and a fix isn't discovered yet. It's the easy of entry for the laymen.

Don't forget that patches are there to improve the game. Which mean gamebreaking bugs get fixed, content gets added and game balances. They aren't done just for fun. To me it seems like a fair trade for an hour of my time every once in a while.

 

[WeepingAngels]

What else can I add that hasn't been said in the first two posts?

Well, atleast Nintendo is not going to require mandatory installs though I suppose there will still be updates. As for digital downloads being the same price as physical copies, I like it but that's because I don't want physical copies to die. I think consumers who buy digital when they have a choice are shooting consumer rights in the foot. When a company decides to pull a game off their server or when they decide to no longer offer all digital games for obsolete consoles you will lose your games. Meanwhile, those who bought physical will still have theirs unless they sold it off or didn't take care of it. Speaking of selling a game off, another thing we will lose if we lose physical games.

Consumers will eventually lose interest in consoles as they are but will it be before too much damage is done, before we lose things we can't easily get back like used game shops?

 

[ScrabbitRabbit]

I'm not so pressed for time i can take a hour max ( i have decent internet ) to download a few gigs to install or whatever. I mean come on, patience is a virtue. Once it's installed in the console it doesn't matter anymore.

That's not quite true. Limited HDD space means I frequently have to uninstall games on my PS4 to install new ones. Most games are pretty quick but some take an absolute age, more than hour, to install before you get to patches. Just Cause 3 took me the better part of two hours to install (and then the game itself wasn't great).

Patches are actually a bigger issue on Steam because it won't even let you launch the fucking game until you download them even if it's already installed. I just got Doom 2016 on PS4 two days ago and I could just play the game while its 22GB (!!) update downloaded. I wanted it for single player so no biggie, really. But the game telling me it was ready to play before springing an installation screen on me was a piss take and having to uninstall Until Dawn to have the space was irritating.

Still, I don't think modern consoles are bad. They're less convenient in many ways than older systems but still generally pretty easy to use and they're convenient in other ways. I hope these problems go away in time, maybe the next generation will bring faster disc drives or a flash memory based medium or something, but I'd rather not lose patches or digital distribution. Maybe certain games could just stop using so much fucking uncompressed audio, that would be a start

I generally prefer PC or handheld gaming, but my PS4 gets a lot of love too. I feel like if these issues were crippling enough I'd have just fucked off to PC entirely.

I really do miss splitscreen though. More PC games have local multiplayer than console games nowadays like, what the hell?

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

I like how 'modern consoles" consist almost entirely of the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One. Or at least, I haven't had either of those problems with the WiiU.

As for the price of games: $60 AAA games are undercosted. If prices changed to count for inflation alone, we'd be paying more than $60, let alone if we accounted for how much money and development time goes into AAA games these days. And I'm not even a big fan of the AAA game space.

 

[WeepingAngels]

I like how 'modern consoles" consist almost entirely of the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One. Or at least, I haven't had either of those problems with the WiiU.

As for the price of games: $60 AAA games are undercosted. If prices changed to count for inflation alone, we'd be paying more than $60, let alone if we accounted for how much money and development time goes into AAA games these days. And I'm not even a big fan of the AAA game space.

Many people are paying more than $60 through DLC, Microtransaction and Collectors Editions.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

I like how 'modern consoles" consist almost entirely of the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One. Or at least, I haven't had either of those problems with the WiiU.

As for the price of games: $60 AAA games are undercosted. If prices changed to count for inflation alone, we'd be paying more than $60, let alone if we accounted for how much money and development time goes into AAA games these days. And I'm not even a big fan of the AAA game space.

Many people are paying more than $60 through DLC, Microtransaction and Collectors Editions.

Agreed. More a possible explanation of why. It'd be equivalent to a $90 game with free DLC. Or a $90 game without sections of said game being taken out and resold.

 

[Saelune]

Because everything that made consoles preferable to PCs is being phased out and now they actually are just becoming inferior PCs.

Even controller support is now standard among most PC games.

 

[Delicious Anathema]

They're not as simple as they used to be. Now we have installs, patches, endless software updates, complex menus, etc.

I actually think the Switch can be a throwback to simpler times, if they manage to make the OS fast, responsive and intuitive.

 

[balladbird]

I don't regard modern consoles as bad... just kinda mediocre. I'll still own one for as long as Japanese devs favor consoles, but even I have to admit that most of the advantages consoles used to have were thrown away for the sake of trying to compete against PCs in a way a console will simply never be able to.

It's like if there was a middleweight boxer who didn't have a lot of punch power, but was fast and flexible to make up for it, decided he wanted to compete against the heavyweight boxers, so he put on forty pounds and wound up flabbing up. Now he still doesn't have a lot of punching power, and he doesn't even have speed anymore.

 

[Cold Shiny]

Split screen is alive and well on Nintendo consoles, which is why Nintendo is 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 times better than is competitors.

Remember why Microsoft is in the gaming industry at all? Split screen Halo. Its gone, never to return, eliminating the only reason to own a Microsoft console.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Plug-in-and-play: This is now almost gone. Back in the day, you could just pop in a disc/cartridge and get right to playing it, but due to Day 1 patches and mandatory installs, this is now pretty much a thing of the past. Further, with the advent of more and more frequent console hardware releases, it looks like console games will soon be getting system requirements. Wheee!

What are you talking about, the PS4 fixed just about everything wrong with the PS3. You put in a PS4 disc and you're playing with at most only a couple minutes of prep time as the vast majority of the game installs while playing. You don't have to download any patches to play and any patches can be downloaded while playing. Whereas with the PS3, you'd have to wait for the entire install to finish to play and if you wanted to download a patch/update, you literally couldn't do anything with your PS3 (not even play music) while you downloaded the update. The PS4 is a much better console than the PS3 ever was. Now, the Xbone is a completely different story. I used to test them at work and you had to update the console (assuming it was new) before doing anything, then some games took forever to be playable as I remember trying to load up a CoD game just to test the controller and it would have to download/install stuff that took forever, I recall Madden being a game that you can play rather quickly.

1. Why do I still have to aim with the tiny radius of my thumb? Why can I still only use two of my five digits? A modern mouse gives you seven inputs (LMB, RMB, roll down and up, MMB, usually two side buttons) while letting you control the camera or cursor with your entire arm, while a controller one really has two good buttons per side. A keyboard, too, gives you so much more control than the left side of a controller. I want more versatile controls, more options for how to maneuver and act in combat or whatever I'm doing. If someone could combine the pros of a mouse and keyboard with 360 degree movement, I'd be happy. But every time a new console comes out, it's the same nineteen year old PlayStation layout again. The stick and D-pad might be inverted, but aside from that, it's the same and has all the same deficiencies. Rather than making things simpler, this ancient layout actually complicates games, with multiple context sensitive options tied to a single button and inefficient radial menus. I wish I could say PC games are free of this, but nowadays they're nearly always made for controllers.

It's quite easy to aim with standard dual-sticks; my clanmates and I always get accused of using aimbots even though they don't even exist on PS3/PS4. Obviously the mouse is better for aiming but I'm not a fan of the keyboard half of the KB/M. I really don't see a way to improve controller controls, the motion stuff only made everything harder to do. A developer can come up with control schemes that don't use context sensitive controls but most devs waste at least 2 buttons on the controller, especially shooters. Look at a game like Metal Gear Solid 4 which had no context sensitive controls yet offered more actions than any other console TPS, you had a whole CQC system, 1st-person toggle and freaking leaning (whereas no TPSs even have those actions). The vast majority of games aren't nearly complex enough to need more buttons than what a controller has.

 

[PurplePonyArcade]

Because everything that made consoles preferable to PCs is being phased out and now they actually are just becoming inferior PCs.

Even controller support is now standard among most PC games.

^
This.

 

[Gordon_4_v1legacy]

6. Places like Gamestop and EB Games and their reliance on the ESRB. Many games on PC aren't even rated, but console manufacturers depend on physical retailers, who won't stock AO rated and unrated games due to the misconception that games are for children. Boxed movies and TV shows are also frequently unrated. I don't want publishers and devs to censor themselves to appease parents who are too lazy to read content descriptions of the games. The age ratings are completely arbitrary, with some children being maturer and better able to handle the content than others. "Rated Teen" and "Mature" aren't even consistent terms. One describes intellect and wisdom, the other age. We're gonna be stuck with awful PG-13 sex scenes, bizarro worlds with no children and tame violence that makes the acts seem insignificant. Stop infantilizing us! Also, because of Gamestop, the used games market is massive and has contributed to many of the sleazy business practices that players love to complain about, like pre-order DLC and games being sold in bits and pieces and as currency. There's something very wrong with Gamestop letting you trade your new game in for almost nothing and then selling it cheaply.

I have no objections to a used market, console based software is the only second hand software market in existence because the whole product has to run as is from the media it's on. They deserve no special protections from the second hand market.

However the bigger point is EB and Gamestop not selling AO rated games. This I don't understand but maybe it's a disconnect between the US rating system and the Australian one. While our classification board is notoriously rigid and at times frankly unreasonable when it comes to games there still exists the R18+ rating for games, functionally the same as AO but the local EB Games sells them no problem, they just ask for ID before the sale to anyone they think isn't of age. That and we've also got JB Hi-Fi as another game outlet, but they're also an outlet for movies and music so games are just a logical extension of that product line.

Why the hell do the US stores refuse a game rated for adults? That's absurd.