Genuinely excited by PC gaming for the first time in years

Hades

Hades

Hades

Man of Honour
Joined
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Location
Surrey
First off I'll explain that I have been into computers since around 1981 when I got my Vic 20, then moved onto the C64 (Elite!!!), then the Amiga (some fantastic years with Populous, Syndicate, Hired Guns, Dungeon Master, Eye of The Beholder, Alien Breed, Gods, Chaos Engine, Carrier Command, and many other exciting, groundbreaking titles!) and eventually onto PC's where I experienced the birth of games like Quake and Command and Conquer. I saw the rise of hardware 3D cards with early Power VR, 3Dfx and something new called a "GeForce" ;) and the advent of quality audio including 3D panoramic sound. I remember the excitement of travelling to the other side of London one day after work to buy a 56k dial up modem and bring it home excitedly on the train to get online for the first time in 1997. Through dial-up, ISDN and then ADSL I avidly lost hours of my life every night to multiplayer online gaming where no-one really knew how to host a match until we learned what worked and what didn't.

In recent years, partly due to me being older and partly due to having less time through work and being married with children I lost interest in gaming. Most titles just seemed to be the same old "meh" with better graphics. My PC now is made up of very old parts and won't really run modern games. I couldn't justify the cost.

But in the last few months, especially in the last few weeks, I've become genuinely excited about gaming again. Graphics card prices on the outgoing AMD GPU's have crashed temporarily due to the tech refresh (so I grabbed one). An octocore CPU can be had for about £110 - maybe it's not the fastest in the world but honestly that's just crazy good value.

But other things have happened recently too; AMD's new tech looks great on paper. Mantle, while it's yet to be seen, genuinely may just be a big shake-up. The Steambox is coming. And lastly something that will shift games production irrevocably - crowdfunding of games via sites like Kickstarter. After years of the same old "meh" there are some exciting games being made again. Games that wouldn't be made if the big studios were left to their own safe paths; Godus and Elite Dangerous to name a couple I'm looking forward to (I backed Elite).

Genuinely I feel these are exciting times again for PC gaming. I don't know how long PC gaming has left before it innevitibly shifts to other media but right now it feels like there is something in the air :)
 
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Jarrastafari said:
Wow, thats some history!

Mine is half that and it only seems to get better so far. :)
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Another fascinating birth in the PC era was decent cases and watercooling. The Globalwin 802 was one of the earliest decent cases which I owned. Before that cases were just awful. And I recall early Insomnia LAN parties where people would turn up with domestic heating radiators fixed to the side of their case and pond waterpumps inside the case. When they turned them on everyones CRT monitors nearby started pulsing :D
 
Can't say I am tbh nearly every game I pre-order ends up being a disappointment.
I think sleeping dogs was the last game I bought and didn't regret and it was only £20-25
 
same, for me to be excited about pc gaming again would take massive transparency by developers to ensure that the game they promise is up to promo standards (here's looking at you Rome II, Aliens: Colonial Marines, CoD, BF3, BioShock etc.)

Kickstarter is a pain too, developers get massively greedy when they see the $$$ roll in before they've even started on the game
 
whiteshadow said:
The good old days when developers actually finished games before they released them and none of us even new what DLC was .....

I miss them. :p
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and those 'finished' games would chugg along at 25-30 FPS on the latest hardware, with bugs all over the shop.

Whilst originality is lacking in modern games, performance wise they are more efficient and slicker running than ever.
 
Crowdfunding has the potential to backfire massively. Games with a specific amount of funding that end up over reaching, too many devices and games have been released in a half arsed way in pretty much beta state. Ultimately crowd funding seems to often go for classic games that are hyping up peoples expectations massively. If a few of the biggest funded games fail or come out in a beta state, run out of money and don't then go on to sell well.... rather than prove to the bigger studios the demand for such games are there it could reinforce their decisions to steer clear of some of these games.

Unfortunately as usually happens with games is overrun, problems and needing more funding to get finished.


As for good value cpus/gpus in general, yes and no. While you can get good prices, you could get pretty much top end performance you can get today over two years ago. So while prices have come down a bit performance wise it all feels a bit stagnated.

However new consoles bring the excitement you seem to be feeling to me. Not because I love consoles(I'd kill to have played gta 5 on a PC with decent AI and actually good aiming rather than "easy mode" aiming on consoles), nor will I buy either console anywhere near launch. But games really pushing for closer to if not 1080p, maybe one of the biggest things, MASSIVELY higher texture quality will translate to PC games so well. Current gen consoles are leaving so many multiplatform games looking very dated.

Also the AMD angle, consoles all with new and very close to PC hardware, optimisation and Mantle are all extremely exciting prospects. Think about games being on 2-4 year cycles (excluding yearly sports crap). Gaming Evolved has done loads for pushing AMD performance forwards and it has only got into swing big time in the past 12-24 months. Most developed towards consoles still, on VERY old and different hardware, vastly different cpu's. The games to launch in the next 2 years will all have been AMD/gaming evolved games basically from the start of development, all being optimised from day one towards GCN hardware..... I think the next two years will bring some amazing stuff in gaming.
 
Ah the first part of your first post got me nostalgic for Quake and even Quake 2 (actually Q2 is more my thing) nothing before or since has got me as excited.
 
I gotta admit im super excited too. PC gaming is shifting in a new direction and i think its exactly what it needs.
 
MatTheCat said:
and those 'finished' games would chugg along at 25-30 FPS on the latest hardware, with bugs all over the shop.

Whilst originality is lacking in modern games, performance wise they are more efficient and slicker running than ever.
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I don't know how old you are but games from the generation he's describing had hardly any bugs compared to today's games, partly because they were less ambitious in scope but in many ways because games development wasn't big business in those days in the same way it is now. Publishers force many developers to release games before they would do if left to their own devices. That was never a problem to the extent that it is today. Many games were produced by a handful of coders, sometimes less.

Games may performer better today but much of that is due to improvements in hardware rather than game design or coding efficiency. Software developers don't code as efficiently as they used to because the hardware improvements let them get away with not having to.

You're right about performance improvements but totally wrong about the amount of bugs in games. Modern games contain far more bugs than most of the games from the 80's, 90's.
 
Skyrim / bf3 / witcher 2 / tomb raider etc games never stopped been interesting.

:)

whitshadow there were games from the early days that never even worked lol never mind needed patching. Rose tinted glasses i think. Also they learnt to code on the systems as they were closed systems ie zx48 or amiga giving them more time to learn how to get the most from the tech. PC's still, even now evolve before we ever see what could be achieved, so good and bad.
 
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Hades said:
First off I'll explain that I have been into computers since around 1981 when I got my Vic 20, then moved onto the C64 (Elite!!!), then the Amiga (some fantastic years with Populous, Syndicate, Hired Guns, Dungeon Master, Eye of The Beholder, Alien Breed, Gods, Chaos Engine, Carrier Command, and many other exciting, groundbreaking titles!) and eventually onto PC's where I experienced the birth of games like Quake and Command and Conquer. I saw the rise of hardware 3D cards with early Power VR, 3Dfx and something new called a "GeForce" ;) and the advent of quality audio including 3D panoramic sound. I remember the excitement of travelling to the other side of London one day after work to buy a 56k dial up modem and bring it home excitedly on the train to get online for the first time in 1997. Through dial-up, ISDN and then ADSL I avidly lost hours of my life every night to multiplayer online gaming where no-one really knew how to host a match until we learned what worked and what didn't.

In recent years, partly due to me being older and partly due to having less time through work and being married with children I lost interest in gaming. Most titles just seemed to be the same old "meh" with better graphics. My PC now is made up of very old parts and won't really run modern games. I couldn't justify the cost.

But in the last few months, especially in the last few weeks, I've become genuinely excited about gaming again. Graphics card prices on the outgoing AMD GPU's have crashed temporarily due to the tech refresh (so I grabbed one). An octocore CPU can be had for about £110 - maybe it's not the fastest in the world but honestly that's just crazy good value.

But other things have happened recently too; AMD's new tech looks great on paper. Mantle, while it's yet to be seen, genuinely may just be a big shake-up. The Steam box is coming. And lastly something that will shift games production irrevocably - crowd funding of games via sites like Kick starter. After years of the same old "meh" there are some exciting games being made again. Games that wouldn't be made if the big studios were left to their own safe paths; Godus and Elite Dangerous to name a couple I'm looking forward to (I backed Elite).

Genuinely I feel these are exciting times again for PC gaming. I don't know how long PC gaming has left before it inevitably shifts to other media but right now it feels like there is something in the air :)
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WTF? are you my doppelganger? that how it has been for me:)
 
Ah, the good old days, I still remember snagging a copy of PC Gamer with Doom on it...3D graphics!!!
 
Division is coming out for PC. There's something to be happy about!

Graphics of the quality Division has though won't be running very well on strong PC hardware like 7950/670 or above though sadly, optimisation will probably be worse next gen then it is now. I guess that doesn't outweigh the cons though.

Go and look at what Ubisoft are doing (granted they are on console too so it's not required to be a PC gamer) but it's enough to make any proper gamer happy!
 
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