PC vs Consoles. The battle will rage on but the truth is the two are coming closer together all the time. I've been a PC games for, well forever. I'm only a recent convert to consoles thanks to my kids. And while most of my gaming is still PC it is possible to play both and enjoy both. Wii, PS2, PS3 and two PC's what could be better than variety. I'm looking for a good used 360 now and then there's nothing out there I can't play. I'm looking forward to Revolutions as a worthy addition to the Civ family.:
So, you got to work on Grand Theft Auto IV?!!!
And add Morrowind to that list. Oblivion is too violent for me.
Well people I guess have their own opinions. I mean one of my friends loves open-world RPGs but he hates KotOR (partly because he doesn't like Star Wars).
I like open-world RPGs, but I never really liked any of the Elder Scrolls games -- I haven't played Oblivion yet, but I played Arena, Daggerfall, and Morrowind enough to know that I didn't like them. My main issue with all of those games is that the worlds are too big and too open. You can't take a world of that size and embellish it with all of the details that give it personality (well you *could* if you had 15 years to spend working on the game). The worlds and characters feel bland and repetitive. Ultima VII was a good balance, in my opinion. There were only 250-300 NPCs in the entire world, and even the largest "city" only had about 30 buildings, but it felt big enough. But each of those NPCs had a unique portrait and unique dialogue. And the locations had little touches to give them some personality (given that it was done in 1992, with 320x200 256-color VGA graphics).
For me, when a game stops being fun and starts to feel more like a part-time job, I know that I'm done with it (sometimes I know that right from the start).
It might be so in Yankland, but in Sweden the computer is far from dead.Most people don't really care about PC gaming anymore anyway. I'm not trying to be an ass but it's true. Most of the highly anticipated games are all console games, and generally the only time PCs are refered to in the gaming community now is when talking about RTSs or MMOs or to compare a console game to the same game on a PC and argue which is better. Not saying PC gaming is dead, just that it's golden years are behind it.
If you realy want to see how bad certain PC Gamers can get visit any forum for any Fallout game (I recommend the official forum for Fallout 3), You will be utterly repulsed and ashamed for ever owning a computer, I guarantee it!
Is the official forum for Fallout 3 worse than No Mutants Allowed (or RPGCodex)?
The level of hostility in those forums is insane. I've tried to interact there in a reasonable and friendly manner but there is zero tolerance for anyone who thinks differently than the vocal forum posters. Those places do kind of make me feel ashamed of ever enjoying PC RPGs.
I've never understood platform snobbery -- whether it be PC, Playstation, or whatever -- as I enjoy good games on whatever platform they happen to arrive on. But fans of PC RPGs have to be the most elitist, arrogant, intolerant snobs I've ever encountered. Well, obviously not all of them (or even most of them) are like that, but as fanboys go, they seem to have the biggest chips on their shoulders and the most condescending attitude if you don't share their "intellectual" tastes.
I don't think that the PC as a gaming platform will ever disappear, or that it will ever come to pass that "nobody" will care about it. But I don't see it ever becoming my primary gaming platform again, and I think that will be the trend for a lot of people. PC games seem to have gravitated to two extremes. The short, simple, games like TextTwist, Bejewelled, Scrabulous, and other games that are more of a "diversion" than what many gamers would call a "full game experience" are extremely popular and occupy one end of the spectrum. At the other end we have the deep, complex, time-consuming games that are generally not very approachable to people who aren't already experienced with that type of game: multiplayer FPSes, RTS games, a handful of turn-based strategy titles, and MMORPGs. There's not much in the middle anymore.
I used to enjoy some of those more demanding games, but I don't have anywhere near the time to spend gaming that I used to and accessibility has become a lot more important to me. I can sit down and enjoy a game of Civ IV now and then, but if I hadn't played earlier Civ games when I had a lot more free time, I doubt that I would have been able to pick it up very quickly. Even now, I often get an itch to play a game of Civ, but unless I can finish it in one or two non-marathon sittings, I never finish the game because by the time I come back to it I can't remember what was happening.