Deus Ex Developer Hates Consolization

What do Eido’s Jean-Francois Dugas and PC Gamers have in common? Well, both of them hate consolization! Jean-Francois Dugas, in an Interview with EDGE, has expounded on “dumbing down” features and how they plan to keep the game to it’s roots while still tweaking the gameplay and design.

But he said developer Eidos Montreal would not attempt to dumb down the much-loved RPG-shooter franchise. “At this point we don’t know exactly which platforms we’re going to be out on. The PC, we’ll be there for sure. But for us, console-isation isn’t about dumbing down features. If we’re to go console we will want to keep the complexity alive. We want the menu interface and controller to feel simple without risking any of their potential”

John Carmack on PC Gaming….

With everyone and their grand-mother passing judgment on PC games and gaming, how can the legendary programmer and the man behind DOOM/Wolf3D be left behind? In an interview with Tom’s Hardware, Mr.Carmack took a good amount of shots at PC Gaming, though he was smart enough to present them in a polite way while making some good points across the board. According to Carmack:

Well, it’s hard to second guess exactly what the reasons are. You can say piracy. You can say user migration. But the ground truth is just that the sales numbers on the PC are not what they used to be and are not what they are on the consoles.

That gets a big “No shit”. Comparing 3 platforms to a single one (One that is often orphaned and left to dry) is hardly smart. But anyway, the good news is id Software will continue to release games on PCs and support the platform, though with their uber-cynical rantings, one has to assume the clock is ticking before id goes full consoles and tells the PC platform to fuck-off like so many other devs have.

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction Delayed

Sam Fisher will be late on his latest assignment as Ubisoft’s latest quarterly report has confirmed the rumored (now final) delay of Splinter Cell: Conviction. The game will now be sneaking into your PCs/consoles in 2009/2010. Bad luck, Sam.

− Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, whose release was previously scheduled for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008-09, will now bolster the line-up for fiscal 2009-10.

Microsoft on Games for Windows LIVE

Microsoft’s epic fail of a service; Games of Windows LIVE, got jackshit exposure/mentioning at this year’s E3. Why did that happen and will it actually evolve into a brilliant platform like Steam or die a cold/dry death? Kevin Unagnst has the answers as he tries to explain Microsoft’s ignorance towards pc gamers and pc gaming.

At the end of the day, E3 is the battle of the consoles. We know that’s predominantly what people are interested in, that’s what the air time is about,” said Unangst. “And so, rather than try and raise a volume level that’s five minutes out of an hour and a half keynote, we said ‘you know what, let’s give PC its due.’ We did an event in San Francisco two weeks ago, it had a whole separate rollout, we talked to folks, we showed some of the great new games coming up. And then here tonight we’re having our own dedicated event for the people who truly care about the PC and are tracking it. That was a decision on our part that says the consoles are going to fight it out, I’d rather have a dedicated event where we can talk, where we can showcase the news. There’s going to be even more. We’re talking about it at Gamefest next week. If we did it the other way, you’d be saying why was there only five minutes of Games for Windows during an hour and a half? ‘

Awesome.

PC Gaming is The Future

Valve has been notoriously loud about defending PC gaming and it’s titles, and this time it’s no different. Speaking with Eurogamer, Gabe Newell, the man behind brilliant Half Life franchise has slammed all the false accusations and snarky comments thrown at PC Gaming. According to Valve, PC Gaming is the future. Here are some excerpts from the interview:

Where console platforms have merciless and well-funded PR armies poised to combat any criticism, negative stories about the PC - mostly publishers, or developers like Crtyek, complaining of rampant piracy and flat sales - run unimpeded. Sales data that focuses solely on boxed copies sold at retail appear to back them up. Valve has had enough. “There’s a perception problem”

“I don’t want anyone between me and my customers,” says Walker. “I want to write code today and I want all my customers running it tomorrow.” Possible on the PC - Steam in particular, naturally. Not possible on consoles. For his part, Fitterer added achievements to Audiosurf in a total of two days. This constant iteration creates a feedback loop between developer and customer that, reckons Walker, can only improve the quality of the game. “The more I talk to my customers, the better my decisions will be. Without a system of talking to my customers, I will make bad decisions.”

Make you read the whole article, as it’s, for the lack of a better word; Brilliant.

And VAVLe, we couldn’t agree more!

nVIDIA’s Roy Taylor Speaks on PC Gaming

With everyone shooting their mouth off regarding PC gaming, it’s about time the graphics card giant nVIDIA said something about it:

I think we have to face the facts - the value of consoles is such that no-one is going to make a PC-exclusive game in the future. Why would they? Why would they ignore consoles?

You can read the full interview here.

Crysis Warhead!

Crytek have launched a teaser website for Crysis: Warhead. No more details are available for the moment. This is the supposed project that stopped the developer from supporting their previous title; Crysis. It’s unclear whether this title will be multiplatform or consoles only.

Games Industry transitioning to broadcast model

Alex St. John, the guy who said consoles will be dead in few years and the founder of WildTangent (famous for distributing spyware) is back again with some words of wisdom;

“The internet is allowing the games business - which is a remarkably successful business considering how bad the business model is - into a broadcast model where you see enormous scale of efficiency and very mass market appeal of gaming,”

You can read the full statement here.

Fallout 3 Not “Dumbed down” for consoles

In an interesting interview with Next-Gen, Bethesda Softworks’s Emil Pagliarulo (Fallout 3 lead designer) had a handful of things to say regarding the recent developer spree of dumbing down titles to appeal to a larger audience.

It’s funny. I look at Fallout when I play it every day, and I sometimes think that there’s a lot of old-school hardcore PC stuff in there too, and part of me thinks, “God, is this too inaccessible for console players?” There’s a lot of dialogue to read, a lot of just hacking computers and looking through things like “VAT.” I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s just the opposite. So I don’t feel like we’re dumbing down the franchise.

…I think we’re starting to find that there is a market for [hardcore "PC RPGs" on consoles]. People like myself and some people that work here actually grew up as hardcore PC guys, and now we’re older, we have kids, we don’t have that much time, so we’ve transitioned. We’re console players now.

You can also hear Emil Pagliarulo on the GameTheoryShow.com podcast.

Crytek going multi-platform due to rampant Piracy

In an interview with PCPlay Magazine, CEO of Crytek; Cevat Yerli has revealed that they longer will remain PC exclusive. The rampant piracy of Crysis and the high-development costs have forced the german developer to this decision. Full quote below:

Cevat Yerli: We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable. I believe that’s the core problem of PC Gaming, piracy.  To the degree PC Gamers that pirate games inherently destroy the platform. Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we wont have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future. We are going to support PC, but not exclusive anymore.

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