So basically you only see the PC as the only viable “true” platform along with K+M being the only viable method of control while at the same time sharing the seething burning passion to see consoles (a piece of non sentient hardware that has no feelings) and their respective audiences crash and burn because you think they are the enemy to your obvious platform of choice?.
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I backed it for the console port. Even though my PC is decent, I prefer console gaming.
They represent a low-tech, expansion-less, solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, hyper-inflated software pricing, control methodologies which require UI simplification to the point of removing player input, “service costs” for add-on services that are available free of charge everywhere else and the sharding of the user base in order to play at walled gardens…
Yes. This is all perfectly sensible and should be applauded.
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And that is exactly the Problem. The game will be the same on both. What does that imply? That the Computer Version is dumbed down because a console will never be able to achieve the same quality…
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@WeekendWarrior Errrr… I don’t think that’s how it necessarily works. The concept stage or a prequel (which doesn’t exist for KCD) has to be of higher quality than the final output of this project, so that it can be called “dumbed down”. KCD is developed for PC with the controller in mind, that’s not inherently bad. They will simply design menus to be navigate-able by the controler; somethimes this results in bad, over-simplified menus, but we saw a lot of the Item-menu so far and besides it being a list-menu I didn’t see much that worries me. Are list-inventories really such a horror?
Okay if you look at is as say someone who played Neverwinter Nights 1 or 2, you could say “I don’t have to sort out all the minuscule 1-slot trash, this is dumbed down!” (I really didn’t have a problem with that). But that was never what the devs had in mind, so how can it be a dumbing down?
for reference:
Yes. They are. Our brains are fantastic pattern recognition machines. Pattern matching happens in pico-seconds, which is why icon inventories are so much easier to navigate…
Scrolling through reams of lists is far slower and far more cumbersome. The lists exist because controllers don’t do icon inventories…
Primary gripe with Oblivion/Scrollrim and virtually every other console-centric PC release…
Controllers suck at UI and fine control so we get lists, QTEs and auto-aim. This is abstraction in favour of what? The user? No. The control methodology.
My point is, they can plug the PC release as much as they want, as soon as consoles factor in there will be concessions made.
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Looking at the inventory screen, does anyone else think how few items there are displayed on one single page (looks like a max of 7-8 items per page)?
This was a problem with Fallout and Skyrim’s console based inventory/shop system (rectified on PC with mods). I like the visual appearance of the inventory in KCD and if traders don’t have much stuff to sell I don’t see it as being an issue - Just a thought though…
This is the kind of thing where ‘designed for console’ also comes into play. On PC text can (and should be) much smaller IMO. Not only does it provide more information at a glance, but seeing over-sized text (for TV sofa-playing legibility) looks clumsy when it’s so close to your face and there’s clearly room for much more.
To be clear - I’m not saying that I have any problem with KCDs inventory as it is currently (depending on how many items will be available for sale). I also wouldn’t like to see everything squashed together to get in a few extra lines of text at the cost of a cleaner looking design. But I do think it’s something to think about.
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The next gen consoles right now are as powerful as any pc. It won’t take lomg for pc’s to sprint ahead again but for what? So that developers have to be constantly under pressure to improve graphics and frame rates and reach high definition so high that my eye-balls can pin point a hair on a fly’s arse. I mean why are you never happy with the already amazing graphics etc? Why can’t you relieve developers of the constant pressure of catching up? Maybe we wouldn’t have the stagnation of unique ideas in games if developers could sit back and have time to think about it. So what if the pc version even is “dumbed down” a bit. It needs to slow down. Your constant want and greed is costing us all more and more money by making everything game wise much more. What ever happened to getting a game and taking it home and playing it and just being blown away by the ideas in it. I have been playing games since the ‘pong’ days and it seems to me that nobody is ever satisfied any more. Grow up.
While true-ish, they were behind the game before launch. Wrapping them in shiny marketing and trumpeting “next gen!” doesn’t make it so…
Console graphics, at least on the ported products I’ve played, are generally not all that amazing. And graphics take a back seat to gameplay - which is the PC gamers’ actual issue with console ports. Gameplay.
Stagnation? If anything, a non-expandable console is more of a stagnation driver and limitation than the PC. I must confess to being confused at the assertion that technological advancement leads to stagnation. It is an enabler.
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“Always have” seems like an odd way of describing it when the system has only been out for ~3 months. Anyway, people primarily care because the popularity of consoles has actually done serious damage to a large amount of games already and they often see console gamers being interested in an upcoming game as a threat to it. It’s not altogether unreasonable when you’ve seen dozens of games get methodically simplified and - for the purposes of hardcore PC-gamers - ruined all in the name of mass-market appeal. It’s often far too tempting to cut corners on the PC version and make the game less than it could be when the extra effort wouldn’t be of use to the console version anyway.
Admittedly the developers seem far too engaged in their game to take these shortcuts, but I always get worried when developers announce they’re in the process of making a console version at the same time as a PC version, and I’ll bet a lot of people feel the same way. The last thing we want is to back something like this, hoping for a great game, only to see it slowly but surely be turned from massively promising to mediocre because of “consolitis”.
TL;DR: Consoles get plenty of attention and have games tailored to them all the time, so PC gamers tend to be very protective of the games they perceive to be (or as likely to be) great PC games - there really aren’t that many of them in the grand scheme of things.
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Well personally I just love the concept of the game, having it available on the PS4 is just a bonus for me but even if it wasn’t I would still have played it on my PC.
There is always a better way to express your thoughts than to attempt to pull apart someone’s statement in sections. Technology advancing the way it does opens up possibilities for new and unique ideas but we get left with “this game again with improvements” because the developers/publishers cannot afford to do something out of the box through fear it will flop and they will loose a helluva lot of money because GAMES AINT CHEAP TO MAKE YA KNOW. For the one’s that constantly push developers to do more and moan when they play a game, “oh this is nowhere near as good as I thought”. Take ps2 for example, bloody amazing game that seems to be loosing pc players rapidly, why? Because they constantly moan about not having what they want in the game. Stop whining about everything being dumbed down and how shit it is you have to share a game with console gamers and take the view that the more platforms they release on the more money they make, and so the better for everyone. I for one don’t doubt that this game is going to be amazing. It’s almost like you doubt warhorse and are un-satisfied at the level this game will realise.
Point and counter point is a natural conversational technique. Surely it makes more sense to provide context to a response as opposed to simply re-quoting everything?
So, consumers should simply accept the lack of content and stop suggesting improvements? I put it to you it may be failing because it’s not all that great? Maybe? I don’t know because I have no idea what PS2 is?
…and by inference, the more this discussion will take place… Because concessions made to reach the console market directly impact gameplay for everyone.
I would concur. I have no doubt that the end product will be great. I have some niggles around the impact console support will have on the UI but that would be the entirety of my concerns list for this particular game at this particular time.
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Just because you like a game doesn’t mean everyone else should think it’s amazing. Maybe it’s losing a lot of PC players because there are actually problems and they can just find better games to play? Sure, you can just assume they’re whining for the sake of whining, but frankly, if they’re leaving in droves, that’s almost certainly not the case.
A game that has all the makings of a great game, but is ruined by poor design choices (such as forcing PC gamers to use UIs designed entirely for controllers with no thought as to what it’s like for a mouse and keyboard user) is far more frustrating than a game that’s just shit. It feels like a massively wasted opportunity and it often makes you spend more time trying to get over the issues, which just leads to more time wasted on frustration rather than actually enjoyed.
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Just don’t bother make statements like this. They’re more powerful than most average PCs, sure, and they’re certainly up there with a lot of gaming rigs, but mostly because games made for consoles are optimised harder because there’s such a limited set of hardware. As a piece of hardware they’re way weaker than many gaming rigs and even with optimisations they’re not on par with a high end gaming rig - and they never will be. Part of the beauty of PC gaming is you can pay almost as little as you want to (and play only simple games or on low graphic settings) or as much as you want (you could literally spend 10’s of thousands of dollars on an absolutely top of the line gaming rig). A very high end gaming PC these days could run modern games over multiple 4K displays - trust me, no console would get near that.
Every single console generation people bring out this crap about them being “as good as” or “better” than all PCs and it really has never been true and will never be true. Why would it matter anyway? Your console’s power is completely irrelevant to anyone who isn’t a game developer - they’ll make it work with your hardware anyway, so why would you care?
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Well now this topic has lost it’s way. I could argue my point but I see that’s there is little to no point. The truth is that there is no need to argue. This game will be brilliant. Every game that has a good development team and fair publisher behind it is going to do well. Developers cannot please everyone but it is fair that everyone gets a shot. So stop ripping on consoles because for the sake of the game missing a few marks to give everyone a go of what is still going to be an amazing game I think is good for everyone as the developers can have a bigger pool of revenue.
I enjoy list inventories a lot more than tetris-simulators like Diablo 2 or Torchlight. We may be great at recognizing patterns, but making room for that extra sword still takes time. There’s also the issue of quickly extracting information and comparing stats. In a list inventory, I can see the stats of all the items I want to compare at once. The stats are even lined up, so I can quickly identify what numbers to compare. In a tetris-invenory, I have to hover over every object, and remember all their stats, to compare them. I usually end up going back and forth between items, for an excessive amount of time.
Of course a list should be detailed. A giant interface with only 4 items visible at once is absolutely horrible.
On another note: I must get this out there. The font Warhorse chose for their UI is really really bad. It is great for big beautiful titles, like the one in the stream. I think it was something like “Rattay 1403”. But when you have to quickly extract information from an inventory screen, a font that isn’t clean makes it a lot harder. I get that it fits the time, but I don’t think it is necessary to make the UI look like it’s made by the local blacksmith. I actually liked that Skyrim’s UI was completely clean and easy to read. Of course navigating vanilla inventory sucked, but the visual style was great.
If the font isn’t changed, I will do it myself, at the first chance I get.
@Sivion What the hell is PS2?
I was more thinking about the technical part in General, not sO mich about menu controls. But In was a bit scared When I saw that even thendevelopers playednthengame with a controller. Still I think it will be amazing game, just because there arent many realistic medieval rpgs and iam really looking forward to it, but just dont want it to lack in quality in any Linda way just because it needs to be Ported to a console because of a fast majority of players. But I trust the developers!
The next gen consoles are on the same Hardware level as a mid-end quality PC at the Moment. And if Every developer would have thought like that, we’d probably be playing games on the standard of 2005 right now, which ist Bad gameplaywise, but just from the technical part, and I think you cant deny that…
That’s quite deranged to want to applaud the desire to fuck over other people dude, but then again I know there are people out there like you and hostility will more than likely be warranted.