Crossplatform Discussion (Moved from UN Peacekeeper)

Funny you should mention that m$ is looking into cross platform games ( ie xbox and pc can play together). I read an article recently that said that they had scrapped the project, because whenever they playtested it, the pc gamers would win EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

I really need to find that article again...

 

duh
only 12 year old preteen teeny bopping fluzies play xbox

 

You mean this one?

Honestly I think the problem is that they tried this experiment on a shooter. I think if they tried on something like this on a turn-based strategy game, or an action RPG you might get fairer results.

 

That article doesnt seem very legit, It might aswell just be a wild guess. Obviously many console gamers will not believe that they would get defeated by PC players, as the general consensus is that FPS on the console is all about reaction time, which in their eyes can be achieved much better with their favourite controller rather than a keyboard and mouse. PC gamers, like myself, will take it for granted that keyboard and mouse is far superior over controllers in FPS; just another pc vs console war, so I'd rather want to hear the truth, rather than some shady article.

Sounds a bit silly to me tbh, cancelling the project based on pheripherals, theres much larger complexities when dealing with combining the online players of PC and consoles.

Personally I think that the possibility should've always been there for developers and for them to decide how the online experience between machines should be dealt with, not for some silly test between "pro" console gamers and "mediocre" pc gamers. How is that even scientific?

 

Worked great in SE ported their MMO over to 360. having an MMO that can be played on every major platform (ps2, 360, ps3, PC) was great, but it really got shanked by the limitations of the ps2. No graphic updates.

Also, PC's don't pay for the online capabilities like you do with the 360. I think dedicated servers are against their market model.

 

thats bullpoo

you can easily hand out graphical updates for pc, and then not have them for play station without needing to separate the players

thing is they made a contract with some of the consoles not to do that because it lures people to pc's

 

Well Final Fantasy XI was a PS2 game to begin with that was ported to the PC a few months later. I'm guessing they couldn't be arsed to update the graphics especially on an MMO that isn't exactly very popular, especially now that Square's next MMO is currently in development.

There is also the risk of isolating some of the current PC subscribers from the game with a forced graphical update.

 

No clue there, but there have been leaks that suggest cross platform gaming of some form - at the very least saved games - will exist between the XBox, Zune and WP7. If this extends to PC...who knows.

And yes, these leaks happened before Valve announced the PS3 steamworks fragmentation of the PS3.

 

Since this got split off, I'll go here:
Be less faggy and say MS. Or MSFT. Or god forbid, Microsoft.

Also, "I read an article that said we NEVER landed on the moon, and that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were faked, that Hitler is alive and all that great stuff" - Doesn't mean it's true. I can write an article about whatever I want. Doesn't make it non-fiction.

Most cross platform (meaning, they are sold for multiple platforms) games today are written on the XBox 360 and then ported to the PS3 and PC. Simply because developing for a console is HARDER than a PC (limited memory, CPU power, GPU power, etc - you have 512MB of RAM to work with, on the Xbox you can determine how much of that goes to the GPU and how much the system - you can give the GPU 256MB or RAM or even 100MB - but you're playing with 512MB TOTAL. A PC has dedicated frame buffer memory and separate system memory greater than 512....and moreover, you have a page file)

Point being, you start on a console. That means you code your graphics to run well on that. You then need to port it to PC, and a direct port means that the game looks underwhelming when compared to games like Metro 2033 that use every last bit of horsepower on PC that they can...some people invest well in ports, some don't.

Mass Effect 1 was well invested in - Bioware handed it off to some other company (cannot remember the name) that redid the control scheme, fixed the texture pop, updated the UE3 version afaik and generally fixed bugs and made it better. That's more than most companies do...

 

Who seriously is so delusional to think that you can perform better with a gamepad if you play fps?!?!? Lets remove the aiming help first guys...

 

Plenty of people who grew up on gamepads disagree. Just because you're so shortsighted that you can only see one side to the arguement doesn't mean the arguement has only one side.

 

Keyboard and mouse are plainly better for most fps games (and likely all online fps games) for one simple reason, with a gamepad you cant flip a 360 in under a second then slowly aim at a penny across the room, not without changing settings between the two movements. A mouse has an infinite plane of movement from left to right, and as such you can move it fast, and you turn fast, or you can move it slow, and you turn slow, this is not only more intuitive, but it allows for a much wider range of movement speeds which results in faster, and higher accuracy.

We speak of technical limitations of an analog stick, its physicaly not possible

 

Why would someone do a 360 degree flip? You mean 180? And sure, I can. It's called binding a button to doing a 180 degree turn. Games actually do that. And fine grained aiming, it's called acceleration. You start aiming slowly. Moreover, you less you push the stick, the slower it moves, the more you push, the more speed.

I know plenty of people who are pretty damned amazing at FPSes on the consoles. Also, mice don't have an infinite plane. They have the mouse pad, then you pick it up and move it. To continue to turn to the right, you must constantly be moving your hand and arm. To constantly turn to the right on a gamepad, you just hold the joystick down, no movement required. Which is a better model there?

I mean, this is like saying a mouse is better than a trackball, yet plenty of people swear by a trackball.

 

Are you seriously think any fps player moves the mouse that much? I never ever move the mouse more than a centimeter in any direction when I play a fps. Theirs something called sensitivity that you can set higher on every game. I know not a single pc gamer that uses more than 2 or 3 centimeters of his mousepad for gameing. Stop trying to win arguments by implying that people use input devices in a way no one ever does it in reality. A analog stick cant accelerate and stop in an instant it doesnt work. Is technicaly impossible and you dont need to have to do a 180 degree flip with a mouse you can do a instaflip to any degree you want with it, almost instantly.

 

And to add to sensitivity, mouses move in the direction you want, while an analog stick, you have to roll it to its position, and if you raised the sensitivity, it just becomes more awkward.

They keyboard is still the best choice over the console controller, there are so many buttons that you could bind, where in console games 1 button can do 5 different actions (you just have to specify which other button your pressing) look at tribes 2, and it's console version, Tribes Aerial Assault. This is an extreme case since tribes 2 is probably one of the most advanced games I've ever played (pretty sweet game too I think it still has a player base of 50 players) if you play this game with a keyboard, it is still tricky knowing where everything is, and it's near impossible to add new binds because almost every single key does something. Now I've played the console version, and you are limited to about 13 buttons (was the ps2 version) and we can put it down to 11 buttons (taking out the analog switch and the start button) and they would either have features out of the game, OR, the buttons would do multiple things. It didn't make the game funner.

 

You had to pay for it though.

 

But its worth the auto-fire and leader board ranking. I can say my e-peen is bigger then yours, significantly bigger. Atleast in the console world...

 

And then your console gets it's live ID banned. Yes, they can detect that. Yes, the bans that came RIGHT as COD MW2 was released included people who used that online. No, you cannot get it unbanned.