How To Make PC Gaming Better

New submitter RMingin writes "Bruno Ferreira at Tech Report has a number of suggestions that he feels could improve PC gaming. Some are quite thought-provoking. For example: 'When technology advanced [in the '90s], the industry came up with a certification specification to ensure punters didn't miss out—and consequently spent more on better PCs. That spec was called MPC, short for Multimedia Personal Computer. The first version of the MPC spec said, in simple terms: Thy computer shalt be blessed with a sound card and speakers. Thou shalt be provided a CD-ROM drive in which to receive silver discs. Thy processor shalt not be completely crap. At the time, this spec meant a lot—and, to be honest, I think it worked marvelously. We need something like that again. People wanted MPC, everyone sold the better hardware, and everyone was happy. Let the powers that be come up with a new baseline specification. Call it MPC-HD or whatever acronym the marketing Nazgûl want to give it. I'm fine with whatever, as long as it gets the job done.' He also calls for an end to the unintuitive model numbers for GPUs and CPUs, and more consistent driver support."

Stop "Hollywooding" the gaming industry

[Nyder]

Stop thinking every title needs to be a triple AAA title with millions of dollars in cost, that has to sell a large amount of copies to turn a profit.

Stop putting crappy DRM on your software, since that only hurts your customers.

Stop making crappy consoles ports.

And quit fucking blaming everything on piracy.

Re:There's nothing wrong with PC hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad example. The Skyrim engine is a modified version of the engine used in Oblivion, which itself is a (heavily) modified version of the Morrowind engine. It is not a console port. Yes, the UI was clearly desinged with consoles in mind, but under the hood it is the console versions that are the second-rate ports. Just look at how much trouble Bethesda is having trying to get the Dawnguard and Hearthfire DLCs running on the PS3.

All that aside, it's an Elder Scrolls game... if you don't like something about it use a mod, if you don't like the existing mods then mod it yourself. The ability to tinker is, in my opinion, one of the biggest advantages of PC gaming.

There happens to be an excellent (and configurable) UI mod available for Skyrim:
http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1433593-relz-skyui/ [bethsoft.com]
The beta version linked in that thread is solid in my experience.

Re:The main problem

[mikael]

That happened 30 years ago with consoles. Japanese console manufacturers figured they would corner the market if they adopted a standard console system called MSX. It would be extensible enough for the systems to be used as home computers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX [wikipedia.org]

Didn't last simply because each manufacturer used the standard as a base level and added their own custom features - extra sound channels, larger screen resolutions, more cartridge memory, extra peripherals like light pens, light guns.

In the end games designed on one system wouldn't run on others, and the system become forgotten.

Re:How To Make PC Gaming Better

[jjjhs]

Every time I try Linux, even recently, I spend more time trying to get everything to work than actually doing what I want to do. Wireless STILL didn't work. A driver was installed but it wouldn't find any networks. Wired LAN randomly didn't work, and for some reason was dependent upon for booting. Most of the time I end up having to compile a newer kernel to sort some things out. I could go on. Eventually I give up because I'm tired of spending my entire time trying to get things to just work.