Console Version to come soon?

[kaltorak]

Bottom line: take everything they say with a massive pinch of salt.

Like tequila!!

 

[charon2112]

I must disagree with you here. It would be virtually impossible to effectively play a game as complex as Civ V with a few buttons on a gamepad. You won't be seeing this on consoles.

I own a PC and an xbox360.

It's *obvious* that this new "steamlined" UI has been specifically designed with console users in mind.

Look at how the two big info bars sweep in from the left and right. This is going to correspond to left bumper press and right bumper press.

The absurd way of adding new units to the queue. Check button, for add, new window, buttons to move up and down, *no drag and drop*, *no control click*. Ever tried to drag and drop or control click with a console controller? Exactly.

The horrid bright green citizen "check box" icons you must select to move your population around int he city window. Again this has been done to make it easy to do on a controller.

I like the 360, but I feel a bit miffed that this UI is patently designed for console already in mind. I expect they did as much common code as they code. They will then split the code to console and PC versions, with the PC version having slightly more functionality.

I'm running this on a High End PC and the UI totally fails at 1900 by 1200. The tech tree has what I call the "toilet roll" feature, whereby the top 1/3 and bottom 1/3 of the screen is basically black, in the middle is the tiny squashed tech tree. If you run in very high rez you also see this effect on backward websites which seem to think people are still running 4:3 monitors, you get a narrow toilet roll in the center of your screen instead. Did I mention there was a lot of black?

This won't be a problem on the console however, as 720P is considered high def in the console world. Meanwhile in true HD, I can hardly even see the super "Art Deco" icon designs, they are so tiny, they look like meaningless blobs. I thought the UI was supposed to scale? Well it's only a half baked job.

Since the AI is borked anyhow, I think it may be worthwhile waiting to pick this game up when it comes out on the console. It will prolly look at lot prettier and be optimized for the specific platforms.

 

[kaltorak]

I must disagree with you here. It would be virtually impossible to effectively play a game as complex as Civ V with a few buttons on a gamepad. You won't be seeing this on consoles.

I would say the same about DAO, but it's there too. There's even rts on consoles... ouch!

 

[charon2112]

There's even rts on consoles... ouch!

They're horrible to play with a gamepad, though.

 

[Viperace]

I always, always, hated good deep game cross-platform into childish, simplified, console game.

Thank goodness this thread is a smoke.

 

[Mark Havel]

Well well well, RUSE has been ported on the consoles and from what I've heard, it was pretty well done and usable. And keep in mind that the guys behind RUSE have actually developed credible AI, which might not be the least computer intensive task. That should prove that a complex strategy game is doable on a console, even more if the said strategy game happens to be played in real time, thus leaving a far more slim margin of error. And by the way, that doesn't seem to mean the game has been childlishly oversimplified.

There is a common misconception among some PC player that console games are made for simple and stupid people, but go out, play Bayonetta or some typical Japanese musical game such as Project Diva and you'll change your mind right away. There is a trend of casualisation in videogames, but it doesn't comes from the consoles, only from a will to extend the market and following the trail of the Wii, who enlarged the market to new horizons of gamers who might not be willing to play an hardcore game.

So I can't see why it would be impossible for Civilization V to be ported on a console. Since the hardware is fixed and does not evolve, it leaves a considerable room for optimisation. Anyway, most of the current-gen games does not run in 1080p nor in 720p but in some inferior resolution and then take advantage of the good upscalers installed in the consoles to smooth the image.
The main obstacle to this is certainly the lack of skill and experience for doing this at Firaxis, some disappointing sales for CivRev and the disappearance of some important features such as mods, custom maps and all. Oops, it hasn't deterred some typical PC games to appear on consoles. Oh and Microsoft is also said to be pretty annoying when it comes to updates, see the mess with the Left 4 Dead DLC which you have to pay on 360 and are free on PC.

I wouldn't mind either.
So far, it's been 13 years I'm playing exclusively on PC, it's been almost 10 years tech and game pundits predicts the death of PC gaming and it's still there, alive and well, pretty different than 10 years ago, thanks to Steam and a few other guys, but still there...

 

[Nachtwesen]

Im pretty sure this game is designed xbox friendly. At leats civ5 feels not like a game for the pc. It feels like a console port.

 

[tokala]

And has anyone yet given any answer to the big question - how on Earth could a console handle the resource-hog that is civ5 if beefy PCs are struggling as it is?

I tried, but apparently noone paid attention
After a bit more of digging around, it seems even the video chip isn't that bad. For example the xbox360 has a GPU roughly aquivalent to a ATI 2900GT, which is comfortably above the minimum. Memory latency and bandwidth are pretty good, as is the raw CPU power. The only thing problematic is the low amount of 512MB shared memory, but consoles seem to have a few tricks up their sleeves to make that work, and software can be much bettter optimized for a fixed hardware.

 

[Becephalus]

This whole thread is just a font of idiocy, cannot the moderators delete threads like these, they are cluttering up the forum.

Nice try trying to talk some sense into them POM.