The Imagined Future of PC Games

PC Gamer has up a five-part series prognosticating the future of PC gaming. (part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5) Graham Smith, Kieron Gillen, and a few other PC games folks make some big-picture predictions about where console gaming's aging sibling is headed. Some of their predictions are fairly safe ("6. The mouse won't die, and graphics cards will get more powerful."), but others may be a bit contentious: "4. Steam and similar services will crush PC piracy. There's been a lot of talk from developers - old rivals id and Epic chief among them - about piracy making it harder for them to justify developing PC-only games. There's so little profit in it, apparently, that the poor fellows are left with no choice but to stray from their beloved home-platform and develop for consoles too. And yet the only games out there with a zero percent piracy ratio are all PC-only: MMOGs. They have a headstart in the anti-piracy crusade: connecting to a central server is an integral part of the game, so verifying that the user's CD key is unique can be done without much fuss. And no one's going to complain that a MMOG requires an internet connection; that's pretty obvious from the concept itself."

Re:Hopefully...

[CronoCloud]

Which games did you try using a console controller with? Personally I find that the controller works better for those FPS's (and third person shooters) that were designed with the console in mind, and not as well with ports of PC FPS's. For example I have no problem with using a Dual Shock with say SOCOM or Star Wars Battlefront, but with the PSone port of Quake II I couldn't hit the broadside of a barn with it. So I plugged in the PSone mouse. When I play games like Deus Ex or Half-Life on the PS2, I plug in a USB optical wireless mouse. But I still move with the stick. I can't stand keyboard movement in action games, ugh I couldn't stand it back in the 80's and I can't stand it now.. I loathe WASD. Using the dual shock combined with a mouse may seem kludgy but it works well, for me anyway.

As for MMORPG's I played EQOA and FFXI on te PS2 before I quit because I couldn't justify paying the monthly fee for games I couldn't devote the necessary time to.

Serious players of EQOA and FFXI had keyboards. In EQOA the keyboard was used mostly for chat, you could control the game entirely with it but no one did because moving and camera adjusting worked better with the dual shock.

In FFXI, PS2 players mostly used their keyboards for chat and macros and again, movement was easier with the dual shock. Not even the PC players used their mice very much and most of them acknowledged that having a dual shock style controller for the game was a necessity.

Re:Hmm, a serial and a central server . . .

[CronoCloud]

Given that the PS2 memory card only holds 8MB, EQOA can't have had much added content, so it can hardly count.

Shows what you know. The DVD the game came on had tones of unused content, so all they had to do was basically turn it on. Adding new quests and NPC's was also possible. For big stuff, they just released a new DVD, that was EQOA: Frontiers. Which is the version still in use.

As for FFXI, given that the PS2 hasn't supported a hard drive for at least the last three years, I think it's safe to ignore it too.

The game came out in 2004, the full size PS2's were still available. It came out earlier in Japan where it is the preferred platform for playing it. It also can be installed on a PS3 in a partition on the HD setup for PS2 games that support the HD, that's a new feature in the PS3 firmware. Full size PS2's are still available in the used market too, anyone who wants one can get one.

But we can rephrase it to be "name a popular MMORPG". Next-gen consoles might be capable of supporting a full PC-style MMORPG, but it's clear the PS2 gen wasn't.

So, why do you get to decide what to ignore. I pointed out two full PC style MMORPG's on a past generation console (FFXI has a PC version too, all players on all versions play on the same servers) and you say they can be ignored?

the "MMORPG" style games on consoles don't have the subscription and continued updates that the article is suggesting stops piracy.

That was the original quote, and I proved it wrong, both EQOA and FFXI have updates to this day and subscription fees.

Re:Steam-Like Services *WILL* Save PC Gaming

[yoyhed]

I tend to think comments about Steam's "poor execution" reek of 2004, when it actually did suck and was in beta. I just started Steam, and it took all of 5 seconds, and now it's sitting in my tray using 3MB of RAM and 0% CPU.

All you have to do is click the arrow on the upper-right to make it use the "old" interface, which is what I prefer anyway. Then set your Favorite Window to Games in Settings. Voila, every time you start Steam, it'll only go to the old-style games window, which is fast, and as you can see above, not resource intensive.

I will admit every once in a great while it'll do an automatic update or something, which does use CPU. But I wouldn't call it a resource hog, unless you're still on a Pentium II with 256MB of RAM. I'm running an Athlon 64 4000+, which nowadays is in the $90 range on Newegg.