PC News and Game Reviews

While chatting to a few friends of mine some very interesting observations where made regarding PC Gaming in general. This blog is born out of an email sent by a friend having played the recent BETA of Dawn of War 2.

The review given by my friend was mostly negative. Most of the elements we enjoyed from the first game seem to have been stripped from this new sleek version of DOW?! The onus now seems to be on controlling smaller groups of men, in an attempt to push the DOW franchise more towards Company of Heroes (Which in our opinion is now a glowing symbol for Real Time Strategy). Now this move alone is not cause for concern, and indeed with the new Tales of Valor their are hints about controlling just one Tiger tank in some of the missions.

There is nothing wrong with trying to drive a genre forward, but I’m afraid all of the above can be viewed from a more cynical point of view. Stripping out base building will annoy people who like base building….like me. I enjoy being able to build defenses and indeed using base building as a game winning tactic (least we forget the Eldar teleport and cloak, build a webway and “appear” in your enemies base). I know I am not alone in my base building fetish. In COH it was great fun to build a structured front line of barbed wire, sandbags….tank traps etc…etc….

Now all this is leading me to this….they are dumbing down PC gaming. It’s blatantly obvious the console market is now bigger than the PC market, so PC gaming and indeed PC game developers are facing “The Console Effect”:

“Can you build a base with an XBOX controller”
- Yes but its very difficult, if not so annoying that its useless
“OK cut it and put more onus on the units”

“Can you select and assign teams for co-ordinated strategic strikes”
- Yes but its very difficult to do
“OK cut down the number of units, and lets introduce Boss fights!!!”

What in the name of christ jebus were you thinking!!!!! Boss fights!!!!! FFS!!!!!!
Why not just put Mario and Sonic in power armour and let us run them around the place picking up gold coins!

My friend made the point that the introduction of a commander who could gain XP, is a concept that was first introduced in Warcraft 3 (6 years ago). He then made a point that the first shooter to crack the console was Halo…..10-15 years after wolfenstein/doom/unreal had created the genre.

It must be really annoying for PC developers who have to dumb down their content and indeed detract from the overall experience to service a larger part of the market who cannot use “wasd”. It’s a very sad time…..”The Console Effect” is a creation the of Sony, Nintendo and MS…..and as we have seen with MS its not about innovation or improvement….its about making things look shiny and stupid, and requiring massive hardware to then run said content!!!!!