More_Badass
Member
Yeah, I had been consoles all my life. Now I'm pretty much all PC, and my PS3 is a glorified Blu-Ray player.
Outside of Bloodborne and Uncharted 4, don't even have a need to get a PS4 since most current-gen titles come to PC too
Are we entering a PC gaming golden age?
- Thread starter Layell
- Start date
Outside of Bloodborne and Uncharted 4, don't even have a need to get a PS4 since most current-gen titles come to PC too
paperspace
Member
No. It doesn't have Final Fantasy XV, shareplay, trophies, Godzilla etc.
edit: / s
edit: / s
I bet it will
Yes it does. You can do family sharing in steam then use steam broadcasting.
Steam, origin, and Uplay all have these.
PC doesn't need godzilla, it's got cthulu in spades.
Thank god.
Nvidia gamestream coop.
Finaika
Member
wat?
Shareplay is the ability to lend someone your license then watch them playing over the internet, like they were in the same room as you and you handed them the controller. A little bit more than just a DVR, but there are plenty of ways to do that on a PC. Hamachi is another tool that can do something similar.
When was PC not in a golden age compared to consoles? With the exception of the last few years where AAA developers were getting away with bad PC ports PC has always had the most things to offer since the mid 80s and with the wonders of near infinite backwards compatability each day is a better day for the PC than the last.... more so now that kickstarter is giving us what AAA determined wasn't worth investing in or playing any more.
What? Unless something suddenly changed in the last decade since it started development Final Fantasy XV doesn't exist outside of demos yet.
What? Unless something suddenly changed in the last decade since it started development Final Fantasy XV doesn't exist outside of demos yet.
Title sounds like something someone without access to a gaming PC for the last decade would say. I've never lacked quality games on my PC.
But I'm glad at least that the prevalent feeling now is that the PC is better than ever. Will only mean more and more people paying attention.
But I'm glad at least that the prevalent feeling now is that the PC is better than ever. Will only mean more and more people paying attention.
No, we already entered the current PC gaming golden age around the end of 2013 and beginning of 2014
And the most important point of it for me is one you don't mention:
- A return to form for classic PC genres such as (above all) CRPGs, but also P&C adventures, space sims, building games, 4x, etc.
Where are you RTS renaissance.
Dark Reign, Dark Colony, KKND, the original Total Annihilation
Send help
Felix Lighter
Member
The variety of games that I have access to right now on PC is completely overwhelming and I have seen in the last few years without a doubt the platform grow rapidly. I see late 90s and early 2000s talk, don't get me wrong the best from those years will be almost impossible to surpass but the sheer volume and diversity in games today, is unmatched at any time in the past, especially on PC. That's ignoring the MASSIVE ease of use improvements over the last decade or so.
charlequin
Banned
2002 - 2008? I'd also argue that while there's plenty of great PC games from the 1990 - 1995 era, the combined 16-bit console library certainly stacks up to it.
I think to make reasonable determinations about this sort of thing one has to have a broad interest in games themselves and an open mind about potentially good content, not just a chip on one's shoulder and an investment in maintaining platform-purity-for-purity's-sake.
SneakyStephan
Banned
Except for japanese dev support on pc you really can't give the PC credit for the bolded.
It's the fact that consoles have become nothing but a poor man's pc that has stopped them from having their own niche.
These days you have patches required to fix/polish/finish games, screentearing everywhere, long install times, regular firmware updates; splitscreen is all but forgotten (except on nintendo consoles), the hardware is really poor value, you're paying for multiplayer because fuck you etc etc
If consoles were still the subsidised splitscreen multiplayer, jrpg , futuristic racing, snowboard/skateboard and other games that fit well on a console machines like in the ps2 days then I would still own one because it would still be worth having alongside my desktop.
But they're not, so ofc the pc platform is going to take their lunch as they can't compete at all once they move out of their niche into pc territory.
Can't give the PC platform credit for sony and MS forgetting what a console is.
dark age lol
You can hold the opinion that 90s were better, but this is far from a "dark age" unless the only genre you like is flight sims I guess.
Of course it stacks up to it. Thats not the point. The 16 bit consoles were glorious. And PC stacked up to it, with a 99% Unique library all of its own.
The point was the pc had a very clear, very strong identity, and it too, was glorious
I would say that we are. The 90's gave us some amazing classics, but we had nowhere near the depth and breadth of games and services and choice that we have now. Nostalgia has a tendency to blind people as to the greatness of today, and everyone who says the mid to late 90's were way better are looking through much too rose tinted glasses.
The 90's were great - now is better still, and things are only looking up.
The 90's were great - now is better still, and things are only looking up.
The perception arises from a lot of old PC developers either folding up or switching to console development, and a number of PC-centric genres drying up. High end RTS, CRPG, space sims, and so on became hard to find. And what was available was a lot lower profile than their predecessors. Even today, RTSes haven't recovered but just about everything else has.
Flight sims are coming back and are about to be better than ever thanks to virtual reality, though.
99% lol
During that era, an enormous number of PC games were Amiga ports.
Really? I considered those some of the best. Frozen Throne/ Dota, FFX1, EVE, Ragnarok, Lineage 2, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, Half Life 2, Portal, TF2, l4d etc... does the fact that they eventually made console ports for some of these games exclude them? These were also good years to be playing games like Counterstrike and Diablo 2 and the like. Older titles but with long online tails. Maybe it was just the age I was at the time but to me those years were when I played PC games to most.
I never really considered the RTS aspect. To me once I started playing AOS/hero wars/ Dota maps I never went back to standard RTS modes and internally I just considered mobas to be an evolution of the genre. I did feel the 4x/ tbs hit though but by that time I was introduced to mmos/ mobas in earnest and forgot about them entirely. I see what you mean though.
Mauricio_Magus
Banned
We've been there for a while.
And now that we're getting Japanese games, I want to rename it the Platinum age or something because it's even better.
And now that we're getting Japanese games, I want to rename it the Platinum age or something because it's even better.
Imp the Dimp
Member
Pretty sure we get this thread every other month lol.
PC Gaming is ridiculously good at the moment. It's not even up for debate.
PC Gaming is ridiculously good at the moment. It's not even up for debate.
nkarafo
Member
In the late 90's/early 00's, there was a place were we could play hundreds of free flash games, most of them were shovelware garbage (Newgrounds). Now, this site still exists but you can find games of similar quality or worse by the thousands on STEAM. I blame mobile games for dropping the quality standards in the gaming industry.
This is the golden age of shovelware.
This is the golden age of shovelware.
Shovel ware lives on the most popular platforms of the time frame
The Hermit
Member
Dont forget about Free/G sync
Tizoc
Member
I always find this opinion so funny. What precisely is the problem with quote shovelware? It seems like a case of "stop liking what I don't like" with a bit of snobbery about "standards."
What you call "shovelware" I call open garden. Open Garden philosophy is terrific - it fosters creativity and reduces barriers of entry. I flat out would not have my career if there wasn't an open garden ecosystem like the one that exists in PC gaming today. While now my resume is good enough to get job offers from Crytek, just a couple (literally) of years ago it wasn't. And the only reason my resume got good enough to get job offers like that is because I was able to stretch my legs on PC.
Are you trying to suggest you seriously have a curation problem? Because it seems easy to figure out which games are suited to my interests, and basically every storefront from Steam to GOG to Origin goes out of their way to let you customize your curation settings.
Most of those that their creators makde KS games in the last 2 years. The new Tex Murphy, new Schafer game, new Jensen game, new Dreamfall game and so forth that didn't set imaginations on fire.
There has always been decent P&C titles coming from Europe and lesser indies. The general impression was that there won't be a really good game that brings the genre close to its 90's heights until those devs pick up the mantle again (partly because the P&C games in that time were written by non-primary English speakers) but my impression is that these KS games were received in divisive ways and no where near to being standout or being compared favorably to the 90's games.
The CRPG KS games did just that. There hasn't been a P&C game in those 2 years that made people stop and and take notice, that brought the genre back to the fore, that served as a reminder why those games were so great back then and how missed they have been. Also from a sales perspective these games aren't breaking through.
(i'm hesitant to include interactive story games in this discussion).
Felix Lighter
Member
Ha , the tag. You bent the topic to take a jab at mobile gaming.
SneakyStephan
Banned
I watched a friend play mgs5 on steam broadcasting last week.
They were playing my mgs5 license on their steam account.
It's pretty funny that steam now has the family sharing that xbox owners were promised in the anti used always online drm reveal.
Point and Click Adventure games are about to under go a renaissance thanks to virtual reality. Slow moving games focused on looking at and interacting with worlds and environments is something VR is very good at, as opposed to typical game design focused on combat and action.
I have backed and been following quite a few VR pnc games like technolust and loading human and they are pretty awesome thus far, even in their early alpha stages.
I actually did the exact same thing the other day. My buddy in Austin is on my family share account. He was playing my MGSV license and I watched him from my desktop, 300 miles away in Houston.
I hope we get a GOOD Godzilla... By Platinum Games.
More_Badass
Member
More Ludum Dare game jam entries alone come out in a single year than the entire Steam library.
You're really exaggerating the quality of flash and freeware games. They've only gotten better and continue to improve. In fact some of the coolest indies in recent years have been expanded versions or spiritual successors of freeware games (Spelunky, Distance, SuperHOT, etc.)
I've been maintaining this thread since last year
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=950962
Do you consider the Amiga a console?
I think you would have been pretty groovy with shareware.
Traditional console and handheld markets are both in decline. They are not growth markets, and all have less output from publishers and developers going to them. This is unlike growing markets such as mobile and PC
I don't consider it a PC. It's an m68k based Machine. Unless you consider something like an Apple IIe a PC or whatever. It shares much more in common with a console than it does a traditional x86 "IBM compatible" PC. No harddrive, boot from disk medium, etc. Just pop in your game, turn on your machine, and you're playing with a joystick. no gui, no text input, no prompt. It just loads and plays.
But to answer your question:
Totally a console. And stuff like Wing Commander was much much better on the CD32 than it was on an IBM PC at the time.
I've been writing software for 23 years now. Shareware didn't advance my career in nearly the same way that Steam has. One trip to Steam Dev Days completely changed my life.
Soon.....
This.
I'll give it a couple of more years but it's certainly shaping up to be one (then again, golden age is a bad term for it because that implies things will get worse again).
Thinking the 90's was better is fair, but how can this ever be called a dark age when the awful early 2000's pre-steam era happened?
Thinking the 90's was better is fair, but how can this ever be called a dark age when the awful early 2000's pre-steam era happened?
More_Badass
Member
I would say Creative Assembly has been pumping out stuff as good as Ensemble in their prime.
