E3 2012

[NaturalViolence]

Quote:As for Assassins Creed; I've only played 2 and am working on Brotherhood now on the PC, and so far it's a pretty good port.

I don't know about the sequels but the first one is a clusterfuck of fast porting. They made no attempt to change the UI or control scheme at all making it painfully awkward to play the game with a mouse + keyboard. The UI which lists the controls doesn't change if you change the keybindings. So god help you if you try to change the keybindings to be less awkward. The entire game is divided into small sections with constant load screens (no doubt to get around the consoles memory limitations). Big cities are divided into smaller sections for levels which just feels weird. You have to go through 4 different menu screens to save and quit the game which takes several minutes thanks to loading. Since the game autosaves simply alt +F4ing out of the game may corrupt your save files. And so on......

Still as bad as it is it is not the laziest port I have played by a long shot. That spot belongs to lost planet: EC. Where the devs were so lazy/short on time that they left the xbox 360 controls image in the controls section of the pc version. I'm not kidding. You would hit the controls button in the main menu and see a big picture of an xbox360 controller with the controls mapped to that followed by the thought "you've got to be f*cking kidding me". It also ran like sludge. I had a 7900GS in 2006 and that was considered a high end card. Yet I had to turn the settings down to minimum and the resolution down to something like 320 x 240 just to achieve a playable framerate. Most of these issues were fixed by patches but still, that is unacceptable for a release product.

Second place goes to crysis 2 for keeping the "please do not power off your console" and "press start to continue" messages in the pc version of the game (eventually patched a month later). Also the low resolution console textures were left in the PC version and were replaced by a huge HD texture patch half a year later. Showing that they did actually have the in-studio high resolution textures to begin with. And the map editors and modding tools were released nearly a year later. I didn't care so much about the lack of d3d11 shaders at release since the previous game didn't have it.

I'd rather wait longer for a game to come out or not have it come out at all on my platform of choice then pay money for it only to discover that I just bought a crappy port. Then I think to myself "but then I wouldn't have any games to play since most AAA titles are cross platform these days". But then I look at my games list and quickly realize that most of the games I have liked on all platforms have been exclusives, and I don't think that that's a coincidence. Usually the more minor problems eventually get patched, but the major stuff almost never gets fixed.

Quote:Great story, I agree with most that you say, but I wouldn't give Bethesda a free pass.
They've been too lazy porting the game to the PC.
Ever since they realized that modders will fix their mistakes, they stopped caring and focused on the consoles.
Remember those crappy UV mappings?

I guess they fall into the "take what you can get" category for me. At least they still provide a modding api and toolset.

[Squall Leonhart]

Can we ban NV for a week every time he posts a WOT

[Garteal]

I have Assassins Creed 1 for the PS3, that's why I didn't bother getting it for the PC.
The PS3 version suffers a lot from lag. If what you said is true about the PC version, I'm glad Ubisoft takes more time to polish it up for the PC nowadays.

NV Wrote:Still as bad as it is it is not the laziest port I have played by a long shot. That spot belongs to lost planet: EC.

Haven't tried 1 yet, but I've played 2. And that was TERRIBLE. The mouse controls are so bad, the game is eating dust now.

NV Wrote:Where the devs were so lazy/short on time that they left the xbox 360 controls image in the controls section of the pc version.

Damn, that's very sloppy. Especially for a company as big as Cashcom.

Crysis will never be the same now that it's being developed for the consoles.

NV Wrote:But then I look at my games list and quickly realize that most of the games I have liked on all platforms have been exclusives.

Or crappy. (I'm looking at you Final Fantasy)
QFT.

NV Wrote:At least they still provide a modding api and toolset.

True. DiCE would do the same for Battlefield 3, so users could create their own maps.
But it got cancelled due it being too 'messy'.

Final Fantasy 8 character Wrote:Can we ban NV for a week every time he posts a WOT

Atleast he posts meaningful stuff.

[Runo]

(06-08-2012, 06:44 AM)Squall Leonhart Wrote: Can we ban NV for a week every time he posts a WOT

Lols, I usually enjoy his WoTs

(06-08-2012, 03:48 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote:

Quote:This is downside of exclusives (right now I cant even think of an upside, for the costumers, that is)

You can't!?!?!?

How about not having a library of games filled with crappy ports? That's the upside. As a PC gamer I yearn for the days when most major PC releases were exclusives. When UI, control schemes, and gameplay mechanics were designed with a mouse and keyboard in mind. When the FOV was designed with a monitor in mind. When matchmaking multiplayer was looked upon with utter disgust and modding APIs and map editing tools were common and expected for many games. When graphics engines pushed current hardware to its limits but still scaled well for the low end users. When games used more than a small fraction of the amount of sdram we had. The crappy ports I've had to endure in the last 6 years piss me off far more than the few good console games I can't play.

Like [SS] said, that is developer's fault, if they put teams simultaneously working on the multiple versions of the game, sharing only artistic material (like textures, models, etc) and pseudo code of what needs to be written from scratch, all versions would come out good, because each one would be written from zero according to the frameworks available to each platform.
It is possible to develop to multiple platforms without porting, and I'd even say it's possible to make good ports, but examples are scarce.

[LordVador]

(06-08-2012, 07:08 AM)Runo Wrote:

(06-08-2012, 06:44 AM)Squall Leonhart Wrote: Can we ban NV for a week every time he posts a WOT

Lols, I usually enjoy his WoTs

Everyone usually does

[NaturalViolence]

Quote:Like [SS] said, that is developer's fault, if they put teams simultaneously working on the multiple versions of the game, sharing only artistic material (like textures, models, etc)

This is EXTREMELY difficult to do, even with a large company. A change to one version will often require changes to the other versions. It quickly becomes a mess. This development method has never been popular in the software industry and the industry has always done everything in its power to move away from it (java and C# are examples of this) because it's extremely inefficient and they have budget and time constraints to worry about.

Quote:and pseudo code of what needs to be written from scratch, all versions would come out good,

Except that the pseudocode from one platform may not work well with the others. For example programming the cell processor using vectors and stream processing to offload work from the gpu is totally different than writing a shader for a pc game. The overall structure of the game logic may need to be changed.

Quote:It is possible to develop to multiple platforms without porting, and I'd even say it's possible to make good ports, but examples are scarce.

Extremely scarce. Exclusive platform development usually results in a higher quality product.

Surely you recognize the benefit of exclusive development. It's usually cheaper for the developer, gives them more freedom (not limited to cross platform APIs, libraries, engines, etc.), and results in a higher quality product for the user. To say that there is no benefit is wrong.

As for benefits for cross platform development you have increased customer base, potentially higher revenue per manhour (therefore higher profit), and the users get to enjoy more games.

Garteal Wrote:Atleast he posts meaningful stuff.

Runo Wrote:Lols, I usually enjoy his WoTs

LordVador Wrote:Everyone usually does

I'm feeling this strange emotion all of the sudden......

[Runo]

(06-08-2012, 07:47 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: Surely you recognize the benefit of exclusive development. It's usually cheaper for the developer, gives them more freedom (not limited to cross platform APIs, libraries, engines, etc.), and results in a higher quality product for the user. To say that there is no benefit is wrong.

Quote:This is downside of exclusives (right now I cant even think of an upside, for the costumers, that is)

Of course, for the devs there is plenty of upsides, I just couldn't see an advantage for the user, apart from the higher quality product thing you said later.

And the point is it isn't even hard to make a good port, the problem is since the developer have a product ready for a platform they get lazy to spend money/time on rewriting lot's of stuff for another one, so they only do the basic stuff.
The lazier they are, the worse the port is. Of course there is some structural problems with porting, that only projecting the whole game from scratch for each platform would fix, but I bet laziness is a much bigger obstacle.

[NaturalViolence]

Laziness isn't really the problem.
1. Time constraints are a problem
2. Budget constraints are a problem (technically these are the same thing since you can spend a higher amount of money to hire more people to do something in less time)
3. Management is a problem. They have to keep everything profitable to keep the company afloat.

Since you have a finite budget/time any extra work needed for things like porting means less budget/time for everything else. You either have to reduce content or reduce content polish. And this is a highly competitive industry where companies are reluctant to do either of those things.

The proper way to do it (in my opinion) is the way CD Projekt RED did it. Make it exclusive and develop/release it on one platform. Then spend the time to port it after its release on the primary platform to other platforms. Instead of trying to work on all the version in parallel and release them at the same time. Unfortunately this method is less efficient in utilizing manpower and therefore riskier for managers to employ, which is why most of them don't.

[AnyOldName3]

I say bethesda is no less guilty than anyone else for bad porting. Star Trek: legacy is the worst port I have a copy of. It was developed as an XBox 360 exclusive, then someone decided to port it to PC. I've never played it on a machine on which I didn't expect some lag (which it gives in huge doses), but the main issue is the controls. Every button is in a horrible place, mainly because it looks like everything is in a similar place to an XBox 360 pad put on top of a keyboard. This wouldn't be so bad for those of us with gamepads, except that you can't re-map the controls. The best way is to hook it up with Xpadder, but there's the issue that some things which really need to be analogue are digital, even with a gamepad. Then there's the other issue. No where on bethesda's website do they admit making this game, so no patches, even 7 years after release. A real shame, as, particularly with mods, it would have been a pretty good game. This made me sceptical about the quality of skyrim, but to some extent, they've got their act together.

By the way, I do like some of the features of ported games. I just installed skyrim (and the updates steam forced me to install) and instantly it recognised my 360 pad. I know some people don't care about this, but I am truly awful at gaming with a keyboard and mouse. I can never find the buttons or remember where they are, even if it says in big letters PRESS W. I can navigate a keyboard while typing, but not while concentrating on the big, angry looking dragon which is trying to rip my throat out.

[Garteal]

I like Nintendo.

Mr. Iwata's Last E3 Meeting with Mr. Miyamoto and Reggie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx38Q2nEJBk