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Next-Gen, Next-Gen, Next-Gen, are you tired of that phrase yet?? I am, but not due to the liberal use of it to describe everything from the lastest Washing Machine or the latest in HDTV, to the new stereo in a Volvo, but because it used constantly for consoles which very rarely live up to the name.
The Xbox360 has been out for 4 months now (in the UK) and I am still waiting for the real next-gen console to show up! To give you a little background, I am a PC gamer first and foremost and I always have a pretty much top-spec machine to really enjoy the visceral elements of a game. My consoles (Xbox360, Xbox, Playstation, Saturn, Megadrive, in reverse chronological order) have always taken second place. If there are no decent PC games around (which is pretty true at the moment) then I start to use my console. If a couple of good games come out on the PC then the console will pretty much gather dust for a few months! I have played just about any decent PC game in history and a load of crappy ones too! So I think I have a decent perspective of what I would expect from next-gen games from which to launch this criticism?.
Next-gen obviously indicates something ?better than before? so let?s summarise a baseline from which to define next-gen by looking at what has been done in the ?Last-Gen?. Here is a brief list of leaders in the FPS genre:
Half-life 2 / Counterstrike:Source - Incredible graphics, amazing effects, HDR, physics in the environment, ear-splittingly crisp and realistic sound, realistically shattering glass!!!!
Joint Operations - Vehicles galore, massive environments (like 60-70km) per map, 150 players per map! Voice Comms, Squads
Battlefield 2 - As Joint Operations but on a smaller scale.
Farcry - amazing detail, very realistic and ?intelligent? AI
Farcry is probably 2 years old, Half life is a year or so old, BF2 almost as old and Joint Ops is about 18 months old. So by that definition alone they are most definitely ?Last Gen? as far as the gaming world?s hyperfast advancements go! But they represent still the best of breed in the PC gamer?s (well OK ?my?) mind. So I think it would be reasonable to expect that the next-gen consoles would be able to produce games at least of an equivalant value (bearing in mind the Xbox 360 hasn?t been in developer?s hands for that long), and that as the longer-in-development games come out over the next few months that they would raise the bar?
Pah!! Far from it!! For the console so far we have had the re-hash of Call of Duty 2, which to be frank I wasn?t impressed with even on the PC. It?s pretty in places but it?s graphics (smoke effects aside) are not as good as Half Life 2, and it?s environments are infinitely smaller than Joint Ops, and significantly smaller than BF2 or even Farcry?s. It struggles to handle 16 players online on the PC, and the lag problems are well documented everywhere on the 360 with anymore than 4 players sending into a jerky epilepsy. Barely last-gen never mind next-gen.
Project Dark Zero - Tight confined maps, nice cutscenes when you use a ropeslide, graphical quality about the same as an anti-aliased Halo 1.
Then we have the one big hope of the early adopters? Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. Pathetic to be honest. Sure it has a few more spanglies, some of the heat/haze effects are nice but the environments are still tight cramped affairs, but perhaps worst of all is the fact EVERYTHING IS MADE OF CARDBOARD!!!
Seriously, go shoot a window in GRAW? go on do it now and then come back? Great now tell me what happened. Did it smash? Did it shatter in a realistic way? Could you look through the window? What did it sound like when you shot it? Its freakin awful! First the windows are NOT transparent, they are not even windows. They are ?A.N.Other? bit of environment painted to look like a window? not very next gen huh? Well OK then what about when you shot the window? You mean to tell me this next-gen FPS didn?t have windows that shatter? In fact they didnt even get a bullethole in them? What?!!!??? it sounds like your bullet hit a lump of wet wood? Piss poor if you ask me!
So poor environment, slightly improved graphics, what about the AI? Surely all those spare CPU cycles are being used for something! Well sadly, no they are not :/
This is one of those really awfully programmed games when it comes to AI. Let me give an example. Crawling up behind a concrete block, there are a bunch of 3 enemy fighters about 50-60m in front of it. I am lying down behind the block and they obviously haven?t seen me. It?s also dark and whilst I have all my incredible night vision equipment they have just a trusty AK47. I lie there for a moment or two, reloading, checking my map and generally thinking about my assault. It seems the simplest and most effective method would be a grenade from my current position. If well aimed it will take out all three of them, if mis-aimed it might take 1 of them and cause a distraction so I can pop out of my cover and finish the other two. I can then stay in my current covered position and wait to see if any friends of theirs turn up. Plan formulated and now to the execution.
I take a grenade out of my belt (still lying in the same spot behind the concrete block), I pull the pin (still lying in the same spot behind the concrete block), my arm pulls back to launch the grenade (still lying in the same spot behind the concrete block), THEN THE VERY INSTANT THE GRENADE LEAVES MY LAST FINGERTIP (still lying in the same spot behind the concrete block), they are all shooting at me. They instantly know exactly where I am despite the fact they can?t see me, they can?t hear me and they in fact shouldn?t know I was ever in existence until the moment the grenade landed next to them, or even exploded. Lazy awful programming. Throughout the game you will get so many instances of this kind of rubbish. A guy in a bandana who ?spots? me, on the other side of a miniforest, in the dark, from 400m when I can?t see him with the help of both thermal and night vision plus a freakin drone!
In fact there is not one FPS out for the Xbox 360 so far that can match any of the 12-18 month old PC games on even one of the brief highlights I mentioned above.
I could take a look at other genres? but there is only the sports genre (I include fighting & racing games as sport) as an alternative. There are no RTS?s or MMORPGs (unless you include that awful pile of dung FFO which is a 3 year old crap PS2 Game) on the 360 yet. The sports games have mostly dissapointed even on the shallowest measurement of graphical quality. Tiger Woods looks the same on both the 360 and the Xbox except for a higher resolution and FSAA. PGR3 is the exception with its super slick graphics and incredible detailed tracks? hats off to them that felt a bit next gen. But looking at NFS:Most Wanted I thought I was playing any other NFS game of the last 4 years.
Next Gen My Arse! Taking the FPS genre alone, I want destructible environments, huge swathes of land to battle of over, with dozens if not hundreds of teammates, THAT feels like WAR, that feels like a BATTLE, thats what I have been doing on the PC for the last 3-4 years!!! Running around the confines of a painted carboard box like GRAW is 2001 standards of gaming and to call it next-gen is just a flat-out lie!
P.S. This is not a criticism of the Xbox 360 per se, more of the developers and publishers pumping out crap with no ambition. I really look forward to Oblivion this Friday to see if it makes this rant redundant, I hope it does!
GRAW Sucks - Next Gen My Ass
