MMO's - PC's saving?

Soldato
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I read a comment in a thread here the other day, I'm sure it was related to a poor port or the game being released on a console first. This has happened so many times, the console is getting priority and a lot of PC action game fans are feeling left out.

Someone asked what does PC actually have thats ahead of consoles - with someones answer being flight simulators.

Thinking about it, I cant recall a truly successful MMORPG on a console, yet isnt WoW the most popular game? I know a lot of the MMO audience is from Asia, but a considerable number of Westeners also must play with that genre.

Im not sure why MMO games arent popular on consoles, but my question for discussion is - how important are they for PC gaming?
 
To be honest I'm sick of this whole 'pc gaming is dying' debate, it's been done to death

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18030500&highlight=killed+gaming

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18030629&highlight=killed+gaming

Your comment could have easily been put in one of these two topics.
Sorry if I seem snippy, it's just getting old coming on here to be told daily how gaming on the pc is dying even though I have so many damn pc games right now I can't get round to playing them all.
Empire total war
dead space
call of juarez 2 being the latest 3 I bought >.>
 
It is fairly complicated.

mmo's are popualr with devs as it gives the ma constant stream of revenue and is very well guarded against piracy, on the other hand if you dotn like mmo's then it is just tragic to see them dominate so much.
 
Im not sure why MMO games arent popular on consoles, but my question for discussion is - how important are they for PC gaming?

MMO's are rather geeky, and you tend to get more geeks gaming on PCs than on consoles.

That's not, of course, to say that all PC gamers are geeks and all console owners are not.
 
There have been popular MMO's on consoles, that Final Fantasy one and Phantasy Star Online spring to mind. There are several big ones in development as well.
 
I agree with Slambo on the discussion why MMO's are not important on consoles.

Personally, I believe that the main reason for the PC still the major player with MMOs is due to time. MMOs like WoW have been around for many years in some form - Ultima, Everquest, etc. Warcraft introduced the mass public to MMOs with its cutsey graphics and simple interface. Like most modern MMOs, WoW was buggy but over time it evolved into this massive life-sapping creation.

Equally we can argue the same about Eve Online. Eve was a logistic nightmare initially, but with successive patches it has evolved into a stable space MMO and continues to grow.

If you take the 4+ year period that the PC MMOs have had to mature and sell it to the consoles, a console running that particular MMO would become outdated. We are seeing consoles today, supplied with peripherals such as hard drives and WI-FI as standard.

Ask yourself, are we seeing the consoles changing to a PC?
 
To be honest I'm sick of this whole 'pc gaming is dying' debate, it's been done to death

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18030500&highlight=killed+gaming

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18030629&highlight=killed+gaming

Your comment could have easily been put in one of these two topics.
Sorry if I seem snippy, it's just getting old coming on here to be told daily how gaming on the pc is dying even though I have so many damn pc games right now I can't get round to playing them all.
Empire total war
dead space
call of juarez 2 being the latest 3 I bought >.>

Well, I wasnt trying to say it was 'dying' or even becoming unpopular - Im talking in terms of the games and quality, not exclusively the actual numbers playing them.

Like I said PC gaming isnt dying because there are so many MMO's.

Interesting comment about being geeks - it does seem consoles are so much more mainstream now. During the original playstation years it seemed to be only teenagers and young adult males you were the target audience, now lots of the games in the charts are family/kids games.
 
consoles are more used by 14 year old kids and 20 year old students with no much else to do in their time but repeat the same levels in online play, take COD as an example... my girlfriends youngest brother spends hour shooting zombies with other randoms on the internet. Obviously there will be exceptions to the rule

MMO's for PC's tend to have the ability to be more sophisticated - the amount of inputs available for WoW are insane (from what i've observed) - but if you take EVE (i play this) you couldnt get this to work properly on a console... there arnt enough buttons on a typical control pad.

Single player PC gaming is certainly not dead... but i think MMO's have progressed further on the PC than any other gaming device.
 
consoles are more used by 14 year old kids and 20 year old students with no much else to do in their time but repeat the same levels in online play, take COD as an example... my girlfriends youngest brother spends hour shooting zombies with other randoms on the internet. Obviously there will be exceptions to the rule

What a ridiculous statement to make. If your girlfriends youngest brother plays consoles then it MUST be true.
 
What a ridiculous statement to make. If your girlfriends youngest brother plays consoles then it MUST be true.

until a few months ago i was a 20 something student... its a sweeping statement but as mentioned there are exceptions to the generalisation. my point is that consoles cant cope with WoW and EVE type games. Consoles are more point and shoot and replay the map all over again... something that most people without a huge amount of free time (younger children and students have this) would quickly tire of, GENERALLY.
 
MMO's for PC's tend to have the ability to be more sophisticated - the amount of inputs available for WoW are insane (from what i've observed) - but if you take EVE (i play this) you couldnt get this to work properly on a console... there arnt enough buttons on a typical control pad.

You could say that about any PC game, but if you're talking about interface alone, I find it hard to find much merit to that.

You have to first know that most people playing any game for any platform aren't very good at them, the majority of gamers fall firmly into the low skill / casual demographic.

In terms of an MMO like WoW in which you have your 500 abilities. However most of it's playerbase use the default UI and control almost everything from clicking about that UI with their mouse. That isn't very sophisticated nor a particularly demanding role for a gamepad to fill. For those not only desperate enough to be playing WoW on a console instead of a PC but also desperate enough to want their 30+ key binds I'm sure will happily take care of themselves in the KB+M dept.

Onto MMO's being the saving grace of PCs? well sure, WoW does indeed bring massive amounts of revenue into 'team PC' ... but Blizzard aren't exactly spending it on the PC as a gaming platform are they? sure they're developing multiple, highly anticipated PC games... but every platform have developers making those up and coming 'must have' games for them, funnily enough that's what developers strive to do.

Unlike consoles who have their multi-gagillionaire backers who go out their way to make sure their platform is viewed #1 for gaming by the button mashing masses, ensuring that an idiot can throw their disc in and be sitting in the middle of a noob tossing flame war before they know it. PCs do not.

Sure, PCs have their people making the games, their people making the new fancy graphics cards, their few providers letting you get the games digitally, their spectacular modding scene. But none of them have stepped forward to eliminate the one true coup de grâce consoles have over that giant word processor. Ease of use.

However sophisticated and knowledgeable about PCs we in OcUK land think we are, almost nobody using them can claim this... infact merely installing a PC game for some can be an ordeal which leaves them on hotlines to tech support or just giving up entirely... not to mention having to make sure you have the latest DirectX distributable, drivers for your graphics cards, motherboards, sound devices updated and configured.

When they get the game installed? do you really think they can tell a shader version from a anisotropic filterinator? those ingame options may as well be chinese and if they weren't detected properly then they aren't going to have the best experience possible for their PC... and heaven forbid there might be a patch they have to go trawling through the internet for or some vague .cfg tweak they need to perform.

My own brother had CoD4 for several months before declaring "it's crap, can never find any decent servers to play on" ... to my horror on inspecting his PC one evening spent around his place to see he not only was playing it in 1024x768 on a widescreen monitor but hadn't patched it at all.

As an avid PC elitist so and so, this is pretty disheartening, I love my platform, I love what it can do and what I can do with it. But the real people with any power over it's direction, the developers, publishers, hardware manufacturers and OS bestowers aren't exactly making it easy for me to stand my ground when someone needs a PhD in tinkering with windows to get a game setup properly. They are all happily throwing their assorted products into an intimidating and very confusing cloud of undiscovered installations and menus of gibberish and hoping somewhere from that falls a happy gamer.

So what PC games now usually have atleast something informing you a patch is available as standard? and who cares digital distributors like Steam or Impulse have their snazzy automatic updates without much fuss?... it just isn't coming close to the ease of use of a console.

PCs will not die as a platform. Well maybe if some unforeseen global catastrophe occurs, but we can't exactly blame that on the pirates can we? But for them to remain a realistic choice for developers to flagship their titles upon, raw horsepower just won't be enough anymore.
 
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Exclusives are rare and not very lucrative. Poor ports aren't that common either. The "PC gaming is dying" thing are only ever spouted by out of touch console gamers and over zealous PC gamers, both are pretty annoying, either for or against the notion.

Also, PC gaming and MMOs are not mutually exclusive. MMOs are not, and could not keep PC gaming afloat.

As for MMOs on consoles, there are a lot of technical hurdles to tackle. Plus devs are hesitant to take a slightly more "hardcore" concept of gaming over to the other side. It's just not a very juicy sounding proposition to any hungry developer.
 
This topic is getting quite interesting - Developers take note!

From what we are discussing, the major downfall of the PC is it's technical structure. Someone is happy to have a console because they can simply switch it on, insert DVD and away they go playing GenericAlienShooter2099.

With the PC, we install the game, update our drivers, update our game patch, tweak the settings and configure our controls.

Is this something that we, the PC user, continue to tolerate or would we like our software to auto-detect optimum settings? Do we want consistencey with our game graphics or do we want to unlock every trible-buffering feature and other options that push our systems?

To me, the biggest downfall is the inaccessibility of the PC, its cost, its stability and its abuse (piracy - but consoles are not protected from this).

A recent magazine article described PopCap games having the standard of keeping game specs down and the gameplay addictive. Look at the many indie games appearing today that are simple to play, simple to view and simple costs to enjoy. So, how many of us enjoy Peggle more than Farcry2?
 
consoles are more used by 14 year old kids and 20 year old students

That's just such a rediculously sweeping generalisation.
Every single person I know that owns a console is >25. Two are in their 50's, two are in their 30's.

If I had the time, I'd probably own a console alongside my PCs, and I'm neither 14 nor a student.

Can we please keep any PC elitism out of here?
 
my point is that consoles cant cope with WoW and EVE type games. Consoles are more point and shoot and replay the map all over again...

Can't say I've ever done that on my 360. I have played FFXI online though, it copes with it quite nicely. Took a bit of time for me to get used to the change in control method, but it's quite capable of hosting an mmo.
 
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