Augury

As I’ve been following Shamus’ posts lately on piracy in computer games, I was linked to this post by Brad Wardell of Stardock talking about piracy and the games industry in general. Since Stardock is primarily a vendor of software other than games, Brad talks about how he’s learned from experiences there to target the largest possible userbase and ignore the plethora of pirates. He then goes on to relate this to the games Stardock has been involved in developing recently and how little attention they’ve received in the game news media.

Reading this, I can’t help but think of my experiences with Galactic Civilizations 2. I bought GalCiv2, played it intensely for the first weekend, played a bit through the first week, and by the time the second weekend rolled around I’d pretty much stopped playing the game (granted, I did get involved on the forums agitating for game update patches). I liked GalCiv2 well enough, but the reason my interest in the game was so short lived is that it was, as Brad Wardell says, targeted for a broad consumer base. The strategy involved in the game was too simple (Obvious example: Attackers attack first, therefore if you build a fleet of ships with all weapons and no defensive capability, you’ll win as long as you’ve got enough firepower to annihilate the enemy in the first turn) to scratch the itch of someone like myself who desired a true sequel to Master of Orion 2.

Anyway, while Brad’s thoughts were interesting in and of themselves, what I actually wanted to write about is in the comments. For starters,

Speaking as a person with a relatively new $15K rig on my right side and an older (3 years) $10K rig on my left, I think I easily qualify as the definitive hardcore gamer and I must say I have not felt like games have been targeting me. This is of course for a number of reasons. The first and foremost is that I have one utterly frustrating time getting all the stuff to work as a system without anything going other then the OS and drivers. Then getting support for the hardware and OS is a major bitch to say the least.

A $15,000 computer? Lets assume for a moment that this isn’t a mistake or a lie. How exactly do you make a computer that expensive?

I paid a visit to the Alienware website to see what the most expensive machine I could possibly build would be. The specs:

Acoustic Dampening Case
1000 Watt PSU
Triple SLI 768MB 8800 GT
Intel C2E 3.0 GHz (w/ OCed FSB)
4GB 800MHz RAM
nForce 680i Motherboard
Vista Ultimate
2 64GB SATA Solid State Drives
2 1TB 7200rpm HDs
4x Dual Layer Blu Ray Drive
30″ Monitor and a 20″ Monitor
Surround Speaker System

So what does this run us? Just barely squeaking in over $11,000. Granted, that’s an obscene amount of money to be paying for a computer and you’re already paying a hefty premium for every piece and the dubious honor of owning an Alienware computer, but even that doesn’t hit $15k. What exactly could one add on that would add another four thousand dollars to the pricetag? A couple more monitors, a gold-plated case?

Aside from being completely preposterous and more likely than not totally untrue, what I find objectionable about this is that it reinforces the false notion that computer gaming requires these huge expenses. Follow the conversation spurred by Brad’s post and you’ll see several people who take for granted that running modern games requires a multi-thousand dollar computer. No game on the market today requires that. Crysis is the single game that might not be able to be run at highest settings with a thousand dollar computer, and even that is questionable.

As much as I may be, at times, the kind of person who complains about excessive pursuit of graphics in games (when in lieu of things like story and gameplay), it’s time to stop complaining about hardware costs. It’s just not valid to claim you need a $3000 computer to run the latest PC games, or a $400 graphics card that you upgrade every six months. These assumptions have become so mythical that they’re taken for granted. It’s time to put a stop to that. Today’s Triple-A computer games are probably the least demanding of high end computer hardware of any that I can remember. Maybe if there weren’t so much misinformation flying about people would be able to make more informed purchasing decisions.

I ran across this article a couple of days ago, which is essentially musings on the state of PC gaming, lending a bit of a skeptical eye towards the claims that PC gaming is dying off in the face of consoles.

This is a topic of relevance to me, since I do pretty much all my gaming via the computer, and I don’t have a heck of a lot of interest in consoles. In particular, I’m a bit concerned because one of the games I’m big on at the moment, Unreal Tournament 3, hasn’t been doing quite so well on the PC side of things. And naturally, people like Mark Rein or the bean-counters at Epic can say that PC gaming is dying, and that it’s piracy, and this and that, but looking at Unreal Tournament 3 — The menus in that game are clearly designed to be used on the console. Literally thousands of complaints have been made about the menus of the game, and I can’t say that I’m particularly surprised. You only have one chance to make a first impression, and when that first impression is horrible, then you’re going to turn people off.

Even though I think the game itself is excellent, and overall the best Unreal Tournament to date, there’s absolutely no excuse for shipping a computer game with a user interface that bad. In many ways, this experience sort of confirms the skepticism of the article’s author — He suggests that game developers are pushing for the death of gaming on the PC, because gaming on the PC is freedom compared to the locked-down force-fed consumeristic model that modern gaming consoles have become. Yes, you’ll probably have hardware problems at some point, but at least you can usually do something about it.

But it’s not PCs that will have died, and it’s not consoles that will have won. Consoles are just the tool most convenient for the purpose - locked down systems that can prevent outside innovation without significant initial investment. It’s gaming that will have died, and a single corporate monolith that won. The same rehashed game sold eight different ways - that will be consumer “choice.”

Now that is a scary vision. And it’s one that we can glimpse on the horizon too if things don’t change. With ever-increasing budgets for games to support ever-more crazy graphics, putting A-list titles above the reach of indie developers, a relative lack of improvement in development tools, and movement towards these locked-in console systems, or ridiculous garbage like Microsoft Live… It’s hard to see where else things can go except towards more centralization, which in turn means more ability to exert influence to encourage people to give up their gaming freedoms, starting a snowball effect right to hell.

Two days ago half the gamers in the world were expecting the Second Coming, but by now a huge number of them are realizing they’ll have to wait it out on Earth. I talked to no less than five of my friends two evenings ago, and all of whom reported that they’d downloaded the BioShock demo … only to find out that it only runs on cards that support Shader Model 3. Whoops.

I haven’t been following BioShock too closely, but my general expectations have been along the lines of, “This game is going to be amazing. Too bad my computer won’t be able to handle it until I upgrade.” By then everyone who cares what games I’m playing will have stopped caring about BioShock and be obsessed with the latest game du jour and I’ll be content to play a game that’s a little old, as usual.

Anyway, I only know one person who’s managed to get it working. On their XBox360. I actually had a lengthy conversation with one of my friends as he browsed the developer’s website looking for information on the required specifications for the game and failed to find them entirely. He had to resort to going to an online retailer to find the recommended specifications.

It’s kind of disappointing to me not to be able to play the game right now, but I’m patient. I wonder how many of the game’s impulsive, game-of-the-moment fans are going to bother with it now after realizing their cards can’t even run the game? And what was Irrational Games thinking only supporting Shader Model 3? Sure, the graphics are a draw. But the gameplay and story are what should be taking precedence. Right now, the bar for the graphics is just so high that many people can’t even get to that.