I'm glad I don't have this elitist CRPG/RTS/SIMS only mindset. It's embarrassing. I've been PC gaming since 1989 and this is the best it's ever been.
Are we entering a PC gaming golden age?
- Thread starter Layell
- Start date
I'm glad I don't have this elitist CRPG/RTS/SIMS only mindset. It's embarrassing. I've been PC gaming since 1989 and this is the best it's ever been.
This looks awesome. Does it have the business negotiation aspect that Theme Park had where you could sell your park to fund bigger parks?
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.
Thats quite the answer.
I never really felt I had as firm a grip on the Amigas classifion. Back then it was never so much about the hardware, and the term PC was more about being a personal computer, literally, mostly for the word processor and printer for me. Never had the pleasure of that Amiga system in your pic.
Well, shareware was a lot slower in distrubition and visibility, and seemed sometimes some things... like things just... happened... Luck?
I dont know.
Do you feel you could have made a bigger impact with shareware had you had the general experience under your belt back then that you have now?
More_Badass
Member
I think the bigger loss is that of PC publishers like Broderbund, Interplay, Sierra, and SSI.
It's funny, I was just talking to someone else on this board about this very subject a few hours ago. Bare in mind - I'm born and raised in Houston, Tx and have never been to europe before in my life. So my background is that of a US PC user (although, to be certain, I got into Amiga gaming about 4 years ago in a very big way).
What I remember from the 80's is that PC referred to IBM PC Compatibles, in contrast to Tandy, Apple IIe, and C64. In fact, boxes of the time had the same sort of classification:
This is similar to how it worked in europe at the time, too. Things like the ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, Amiga, Amstrad CPC, etc were referred to as Micros (short for micro computers), where as "PC" referred to "IBM Compatible."
No, I don't think so. What changed my career wasn't so much new skills I've honed or picked up, but rather the open and interconnected nature of the industry today. networking is what changed my fortunes, and the network I traversed is pretty inseparable from modern digital distribution. When I look back late in life, I'm certain I'll see my joining the HL2VR mod team as a pivotal moment in my life. The "anybody and everybody is a creator" aspect of modern PC gaming made it easy for me to jump into an established, big name project and meet like minded individuals.
I actually belonged to a PC users club in the 80's and 90's and would network with fellow developers in Houston in the mid 90's. The pool of people were tiny. Sure, our club (HalPC) had people like Bill Gates and the CEO of Correl come out and give presentations, but they were speaking to crowds of 20-30 people. I received over 300 cards at Steam Dev Days in the first day alone.
Felix Lighter
Member
I think the best of the late 90s, early 2000s resulted in the best games of all time but the diversity was undoubtedly lower and the technical roadblocks were way way higher. People pointing to console ports as a negative seem to be ignoring that the biggest PC centric genres are lifting off again. We have major space sims, real time and turn based sims. RTSes are very much alive but have taken a back seat to another PC centric genre, mobas. The infinity engine style RPGs just had a successful major release from a struggling dev coming back to their roots. Counter Strike is even bigger now than it was in the past. Even the arena FPS is getting some attention again. The console ports are just another group of games added to the uniquely PC games that are growing again. The dark ages were 2005-2010, thats when the PC devs looked to console and shitty console ports was the norm. Not today.
Well, in what way? Which role of the publisher are you speaking about? From a distribution standpoint, I don't think the classical publishing model is really needed anymore. With the current PC landscape, I don't need a company like Ocean or Broderbund to publish my game, because it's not really being sold in stores and I don't need to pass on the cost of printing disks and shipping them onto a publisher, nor do I need their stature in order to get my games in stores. Now that stores are digital and stock can be instantly and freely replaced, that aspect of publishing isn't very useful to me anymore.
Now, publishers in the role of an executive producer? There is always a need for a cash source, but this is why I particularly love crowdfunding because, if you're entrepreneurial enough, you can do it all without a publisher entirely.
From a creative standpoint, not being beholden to a publisher like that is incredibly liberating. There is more assumed risk on the part of the developer, but there are also considerably less restriction (and most importantly, the barrier to entry erodes. It's not just a group of 10 publishers gate keeping all of video games anymore, now anybody can make anything they'd like).
Mobius and pet octopus
Member
I think PC has been in a golden age for like 2-3 years now personally. Probably even longer. One of the things I attribute is ease of access to quality software be it cheaper entry or f2p. And you got less platform loyalty so you can have games like hearthstone play and share accounts cross platform with things like tablets and mobile devices.
Plus some of the biggest hitters are focusing on PC. Blizzard has - sc2 (expansion 3 soon), heroes of the storm, hearthstone, and overwatch. Bethesda is continuing to support modding for fallout 4. XCOM 2 is being developed for PC as the primary platform (later to be ported if I understand right). Just to name a few.
I don't think for PC to thrive, consoles necessarily suffer or anything like that either. We're probably going to continue to see further benefits from PC translate to consoles, like long form beta testing ala steam's early access, PC modding hitting consoles similar to fallout 4.
Plus some of the biggest hitters are focusing on PC. Blizzard has - sc2 (expansion 3 soon), heroes of the storm, hearthstone, and overwatch. Bethesda is continuing to support modding for fallout 4. XCOM 2 is being developed for PC as the primary platform (later to be ported if I understand right). Just to name a few.
I don't think for PC to thrive, consoles necessarily suffer or anything like that either. We're probably going to continue to see further benefits from PC translate to consoles, like long form beta testing ala steam's early access, PC modding hitting consoles similar to fallout 4.
More_Badass
Member
And in addition to that, we have something that was never present in the past: indie-focused publishers like Devolver and Adult Swim, as well as developers with publishing labels like Team 17, Double Fine, and Chucklefish
TerryLee81
Member
I agree. And it's so easy compared to 10-20 years ago. Almost everything just works without a hassle.
Red Blaster
Member
im sure its very good but the theme doesn't do it for me
my issue with shadowrun dragonfall was how cheap and chintzy it felt at times and from what i've read of hong kong this still persists in that one. im hoping they use a new engine for any future games.
heh, team 17 is ancient. So we did see something like them in the past. They were one of the biggest publishing houses for the Amiga.
charlequin
Banned
He said specifically "compared to consoles," so I'd wager it was the point. I'd feel comfortable saying that in the 1997 - 2000 window, the most interesting and long-term influential stuff was happening on PC -- I wouldn't agree with the same claim about the 16-bit era.
2002 - 2008 is one of the least diverse periods in PC gaming -- when old-guard adventures died off; when genres like RPGs and FPSes bent their design towards console limitations; when Microsoft killed off their long history in PC gaming; when EA shut down Bullfrog, Origin and Westwood; when RTSes were good, yes, but also made up a big part of a far too limited set of successful genres.
This is the period where PC game retail died off, but before Steam and later followers arose to take its place. It's after games started needing extensive patches to work well but before there was anything but miserable infrastructure to distribute them. It's also one of the worst periods for cost (after GPUs became important but before there were good entry-level options), for stability (this is the era of constant Windows crashes and driver incompatibilities), and for DRM (after all the publishers discovered it, but before public opinion turned against it enough to push back.) And at the same time, the PC had fewer and worse ports of console games than it does today.
Anytime these lingering, inaccurate ideas about gaming on PC (lol FPSes, RTSes and MMOs! lol sitting in an office chair! lol $3000 systems that crash!) it's people applying exaggerated but broadly accurate observations of that 2002 - 2008 period and trying to apply them to today's very different landscape.
infiniteheteroskdasticity
Member
Only if you like MMOs, MOBAs and online only games. There are notable exceptions but for Single Player story driven games console is still the way to go. Sure, there are PC ports of most 3rd party games but they tend to be late, buggy or badly supported. Nothing comes close to the 90s for PC gaming. The sheer breadth of successful franchises from FPSs, RTSs and space sims will never be matched.
TerryLee81
Member
There's plenty of single player story driven games, from the top of my head, not yet on consoles: Divinity Original Sin, Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity.
Mm, when we say "16 bit era" are we talking PC vs everything else, or what are you defining as "16 bit." Because, from 1992 to 1996 I would say the biggest, most long-term influential stuff happening in video games were not on either PC or consoles, but in the Arcades. The single biggest innovation to come out of that era was the creation of the Texture Mapping Unit from Yu Suzuki and Lockheed Martin. And prior to 1992, I would say the platforms with the biggest, most long-term influence were commodore's and atari's (which I wouldn't really classify as a PC or a console, I'd call them a microcomputer).
To be fair, those actually have good writing. Not something you can easily find in console story driven games. TLOU being one of the few exceptions.
Even if you have a CRPG only mindset, you can still make a pretty good argument that now is the best time ever. I certainly would, and CRPGs are far and away my favourite genre.
You beat me to it. Heh.Perfection.
You don't exactly find good writing easily in PC, either. Law of enormous numbers - there are only a handful of really well written titles on any platform compared to the dreck.
Games like Divinity aren't really the norm. It's an excellent game, though. At the same time, because so many games are released every year, they're also not rare.
alexandros
Banned
One of the great things of the current era of PC gaming is that the number of games being released is massive and the selection is incredibly diverse. Not only that, but almost everything gets released on PC these days, including the overwhelming majority of the non-Nintendo console libraries. Back in the 90s you would miss out on a ton of third-party games if you didn't own at least one console. Now someone can be a PC-only gamer and still enjoy almost all console titles on his PC. This is unprecedented as far as I can remember.
Felix Lighter
Member
This is so bizarre to read because it is so far from my experience in the last 5 years or so. I've gamed on the PC platform since the mid 90s but have always also owned consoles as well. This is the first generation that I haven't been enticed into buying at least one console. I'm offered so little. Bloodborne is the one game I truly regret not having access to. Everything else, just isn't overly appealing or I already have access. I also don't play MMOs or MOBAs.
charlequin
Banned
"I don't consider this one personal computer to be a personal computer. I mean, that would be like considering this OTHER personal computer to be a personal computer!"
I don't think that's quite fair. When people talk about the CRPG renaissance, it's mostly a few really good titles (D:OS, Dragonfall, etc.) taking the lead of a push where many other titles, some old-school in their styling and some new and innovative, are released that might not be all-time classics but are still good.
I'm not sure there's a singular standout quite the same way in adventure games, but there have been plenty of critically acclaimed titles, both more classic (Kentucky Route Zero, some of the Wadjet Eye games, etc.) and further afield (Telltale, Gone Home, Stanley Parable, etc.)
You could make the argument, certainly.
If nothing else, we have several very skilled CRPG devs working today who don't have to be welded to the limitations of the D&D license.
More_Badass
Member
I don't know what PC storefronts or sites you've been looking at/reading, but that isn't true at all
PC is thriving with single player games, story-driven games, games in genres from FPS and arcade racers to strategy and horror
The big advantage that having dedicated publisher support is exposure. Right now, there's a lot of great PC games out there that the greater public knows nothing about because they're not talked up enough in a lot of gaming discussion. It's likely the reason why a lot of the perception of PC gaming is stuck in the 2002-2008 days.
It definately makes sense, Especially once IBM introduced their product NAMED 'personal computer', a line was drawn in the sand, it wasnt a matter of 'is it a personal computer?', as in, is it an affordable general purpose machine I can use in my home, but rather, It was 'Is it PC compatable?'.
And it happened so, so fast. Brillaint, and brutal move on IBM's part, the association is still practically Synonymous to this day.
Networking is absolutely huge. The truth of it is something that will never stop bothering me.... Ironically the more and more it continually proves itself as such the more it irritates deep down.
What I mean is that, even at the time, they were often considered different markets and platforms. It's hardly controversial to consider PC a singular market, as opposed to literally talking about all personal computers, particularly in the past (as things are homogenizing currently).
definitely, and in a way (and I've argued this before) you could call Valve (or EA, or GOG) the publisher. They provide exposure, too, albeit relative to the PC marketplace.
I agree. I should have worded that different because I wasn't trying to say liking those games is wrong... since I like those genres myself.
hersheyfan
Member
I think we are entering a new PC gaming golden age.
The reason I retired from PC gaming back in the day (way back in the day, like '95 or '96) was that it was so un-user friendly.
Like, you take a game home and you had no idea if it'd run well. If it didn't run well, you were hosed - patches were not a common thing because the Internet was still largely dial-up dependent. So then you had to figure out what part of your PC you needed to upgrade to get your fix... Further, PC gaming was almost exclusively supported by American companies, and while I loved my Quake II as much as the next guy, I needed that secret sauce that only Japanese companies could bring.
So I began rolling with Playstation instead and became a Sony fan. Throughout the next 14-odd years, I kept clinging to my old prejudices that PC gaming was too expensive & tedious to maintain. until a friend showed me his gaming PC.
- The games patched themselves.
- Game prices were (generally) cheap.
- There were constant sales.
- Upgrading was still a little pricy, but the rise of indie gaming made this more of a moot point... You can still have a lot of fun without keeping your PC on the bleeding edge, especially compared how things were before.
- Most importantly, there's so much more variety in PC gaming nowadays. All genres are very well-represented, and Japanese devs are thriving on the store.
So I bought a gaming laptop this year... and now my beloved Vita has some stiff competition for the position of "portable sidekick". The thing can play both Witcher AND Ys, you say?
The reason I retired from PC gaming back in the day (way back in the day, like '95 or '96) was that it was so un-user friendly.
Like, you take a game home and you had no idea if it'd run well. If it didn't run well, you were hosed - patches were not a common thing because the Internet was still largely dial-up dependent. So then you had to figure out what part of your PC you needed to upgrade to get your fix... Further, PC gaming was almost exclusively supported by American companies, and while I loved my Quake II as much as the next guy, I needed that secret sauce that only Japanese companies could bring.
So I began rolling with Playstation instead and became a Sony fan. Throughout the next 14-odd years, I kept clinging to my old prejudices that PC gaming was too expensive & tedious to maintain. until a friend showed me his gaming PC.
- The games patched themselves.
- Game prices were (generally) cheap.
- There were constant sales.
- Upgrading was still a little pricy, but the rise of indie gaming made this more of a moot point... You can still have a lot of fun without keeping your PC on the bleeding edge, especially compared how things were before.
- Most importantly, there's so much more variety in PC gaming nowadays. All genres are very well-represented, and Japanese devs are thriving on the store.
So I bought a gaming laptop this year... and now my beloved Vita has some stiff competition for the position of "portable sidekick". The thing can play both Witcher AND Ys, you say?
We should be so far beyond those games. That is the difference between then, and now.
We shoudnt be retreading the same finite state machine 'choice' or sand box style designs with new coats of paint.
By now, with the obscene amount of money and hr poured into this industry we should have something along the lines of a refined dwarf fortress adventure mode backend with a fully 3d graphical representation. But we arent even close.
The problem is that these are marketplaces which aren't invested in the success of any particular game unless they're the developer as well. It was pretty sad listening to the GOTY episode of Gametrailers, and when talk moved onto Pillars of Eternity, nobody on the panel had played it. And only one person there had played Divinity Original Sin the previous year as well. I'm willing to bet that if these games had the backing of a bigger publisher that wouldn't have happened.
SneakyStephan
Banned
LolWelcome
The person you quoted 3 years ago :
I would say 2004 to 2008
The radeon 9700 and 9800 pro launched in 2003 (legendary cards) , you had the athlon cpus (cheap and fast) then and a little bit later athlon 64 cpus.
It was still before the dark days of geforce 5800-6800 or radeon x1800 , hd 2000 series.
I built my second gaming pc in 2003 because the cost had gone down so much compared to the late 90s. Hell it was a little bit cheaper then to build a nice pc than it is today, and a good monitor cost 300-400 euros not 800.
My entire 2003 build including a great 350 euro monitor was 1100 euros and it was beast, less costly than my current build.
It was only after that that gpu prices went kinda crazy until 2008 when the 8800gt launched.
There were also still quite a lot of really good releases in 2003 like bf1942, RTCW:ET and c&c generals. 1998-2001 was ridiculous though for the amount and quality of releases.
The watered down consolised pc games and zero effort port problem (darkest time in pc gaming
) didn't really start till the very end of the ps2 era and the early xbox 360 days.I guess the space sim genre was already mostly dead by 2003 and crpgs too but if you were into pc shooters it was good times still.
I had zero issues with bugs or drivers at that time either, that didn't start till vista released for me (oh god the nightmares of vista compatible drivers... still resent both MS and amd for never releasing compatible drivers for my 9800 pro or nforce 2 motherboard , neither of which was even 3 years old when vista came out).
2004-2008 is definitely the dark age. After Half Life 2, Far Cry 1, and Doom 3 came out (the big technical marvels at the time), gaming just came to a grinding halt. WoW basically destroyed every genre on PC, and console focus was felt hard. Multiplayer games I loved dearly just caved in because everyone I knew was playing WoW. It was a crazy time.
BuffetChamp
Banned
PC all day long for me. Consoles for the exclusives,PC for the better looking 3rd party games and exclusives also. Stuff like Euro Truck Pro Simulator 2 you'll never find on a console,shit like that is why I enjoy the PC so much. Plus I like to be in control of the graphical eye candy in my games,and tone down other aspects I don't care for,such as fucking blur and overuse of bloom. Kill that shit with fire.
Totally. I remember most if not all of the people I used to play competitively with in PC FPS's pretty much all moved over to WoW. Even those who swore off the genre previously, it was insane how many people just migrated over.
Around the same time, the consoles started getting the Call of Duty's, FEAR, MoH, etc. These were all games that people used to play exclusively on the PC previously. Now that I look back I think FEAR was the last few PC FPS's that really had that "old-school" shooter mentality for me. Crysis was just fantastic as well. I remember I had a pretty good rig back then and it still just annihilated my machine at higher settings. But I'll be damned if it didn't look absolutely INCREDIBLE.
Even now I still love building gaming computers but I don't find myself gaming on it nearly as much as I used to because a huge amount of people I used to play with are now all on the PS4/Xbone. This is a $5000+ setup and I pretty much only use it for benchmarking these days :lol
I want to see games really push the PC hardware from the ground up like they used to. I don't care about replaying a game that came out on the consoles 2 years later just for a higher framerate. I agree with those saying that late 90's - early 2000's were the 'golden age'. At least for me.
Hmmm... up until Rome II I would agree, even given the stumble that was Empire, but until they move away from Warscape they'll never escape it's problems and limitations. Rome II was also a huge mess, with some terrible design decisions.
No, but it easily has more well written games than consoles combined. So saying that you couldn't find those experiences on PC is laughae.
Yeah, D:OS loot is a letdown. Great as the game is, BG2 loot is 5 times better. 10 times if you count Lilarcor seperate ;>
Dictator93
Member
eh,,, a 750Ti which privdes ps4 like or better than ps4 settings in multiplatform games is pretty darn cheap IMO. Things only get expensive when you look to go beyond 1080p 60 at far above console settings (980s, Furys, 980tis, new intel core i7s). This of course will change with the next GPU refresh.
I think the barrier for entry to get console like graphics is really reasonable these days.
charlequin
Banned
It's not a PC in the sense that "PC" is synechdoche for "Windows-based x86 computer" but I think it's important to consider how the overall history of "computer gaming" encompasses these platforms (Apple II, C64, Amiga, etc.) That's the distinction I would draw.
What a buggy mess BF1942 was when it came out was actually part of what I was thinking of in going back to 2002, heh.
Teletraan1
Banned
I have been in a PC gaming golden age for well over a decade. Welcome aboard.