Anyway, I'll throw my two cents into the hat and say that publishers are the problem. I practically avoid AAA titles these days because of how crap they've been. The only things that interest me in the near future are from indie devs.
The video game industry has devolved into the same drudgery as the movie industry. That's what the problem is, really.
Agreed. I could afford a £500 GPU every year if need be to keep up with the AAA rat-race. But here I am looking more forward to Pillars of Eternity 2, Divinity Original Sin 2, Talos Principle 2 and Syberia 3 more than Call of Duty 576 vs Tomb Raider 379 vs Assassins Creed 216 vs Battlefield 17 vs FIFA 34 vs Far Cry 3 Retexture Pack 5, etc, with annually recycled overly formulaic, "tickbox development" "IP extension" obsessed franchises that have grown stale as hell. You expect some "sequelization", but they've way overcompensated from "playing it safe" into the realms of "hire nobody who possesses any ounce of creativity whatsoever". I think it was the dev of Life is Strange who said only one AAA publisher out of several approached
didn't want to change the lead char into male (and entire plot)
"because that's what we think gamers want" chirruped like one giant hive mindset...
The developers are not in any way obligated to make a console game "on par" with the PC and are not hindered from using the full capabilities available to PC hardware.
Devs are regularly hindered on PC ports and obligated to "keep it simple" by "platform parity" obsessed publishers who simply won't let them create "two tier" games at greater expense / time for 10-15% of buyers on PC or out of fear of 'offending' gamers on the weaker platforms that form +85% of sales. That's why they've been pushing pre-orders, review embargoes and "IP extension" so hard - if they can habituate "gamers" into making uninformed purchase decisions solely on the back of franchise reboot marketing, over-hype and E3 "bullshots", they can shovel anything out. So for devs who don't self-publish (most of them), even the ones that aren't lazy are absolutely constrained for the lowest common denominator by "publisher politics". Dragon Age Origins (2009) was probably the last AAA cross-platform RPG where the devs actually put in a serious effort to make the PC version's UI stand out as a primary platform (eg, hotbar with 40x quickslots optimised for mouse). But that was pre-EA acquisition Bioware. Since then,
Bioware's EA's "direction" has been
consistently and
repeatedly made quite clear...
Even today the PC "Ultra enhancements" offered are largely BS placebo settings aimed at stroking tech forum
"I want this to run badly on purpose to give me an excuse to upgrade or whine about someone else's brand of hardware" epeen rather than actually looking or playing better. Mirror's Edge "Hyper" being the most obvious. A game
whose wall textures look like something that stepped out of 2001 runs 15fps on a GTX 970 due to a "need" for 6GB VRAM? Meanwhile
0.5GB VRAM 2004 games managed walls that look like this whilst running +90fps on a 750Ti... A lot of this recent PC VRAM bloat isn't about making the PC versions look or play better, it's a side effect of the way consoles see their memory as one flat "chunk" vs PC's separate RAM vs VRAM. And again, even the few devs that do want to optimize and port to PC properly are regularly limited by allocated publisher resources (primarily meeting ever shorter deadlines).
Because I'm not assuming. I have about 15 years experience developing for consoles. You're not paying attention. You can turn up rendering settings, but there are certain core design elements that are constrained by the lowest common denominator you want to run on.
^ This. You can add higher resolutions, better textures & longer view distances, etc. But you only have to take a look as far back as Deus Ex Invisible War or Thief Deadly Shadows to see the 75% smaller levels (vs original games) were a direct result of trying to "fit" the game into the XBox's 64MB memory limit. Complex multi-option dialogue trees in "RPG's" have been dumbed down into yes/no/sarcastic "wheel" responses partly because that "fits" controllers better (no direct select numerical keys). No F5/F9 quick save / load means checkpoint only for everyone (because it's "unfair" if PC gamers can have a feature which doesn't "fit" well on consoles). RPG's that came with the same full blown toolkits as the devs used are now barely moddable at all (because most titles sold are console versions and they won't use it). FPS gunplay itself has been hugely nerfed more often than not. Eg, one design trick to slow the pace of the game down is fewer but more bullet spongy enemies and cover based gameplay vs 30-odd coming at you and "speed is defense" to try and reduce the number of fast successive turns which previously crippled controllers. Even today, a 180 degree turn speed is still 0.2-0.3s via mouse wrist-flick vs 0.6-1.0s via controller thumb scrolling, and the many "tweaks" used and level design changes required to try and hide that gap are very obvious if you know what to look for.
Auto-aim Aim-bot cheats on consoles are there for a reason. In fact, many FPS's aren't even "shooters", just the same homogenized first-person pseudo action-adventure with RPG-lite "unlock grind" mechanics tacked on to fake "depth". This stuff (and many more) has been going on 10-15 years, and anyone pretending consoles have never held PC gaming back through required cross-platform compromises in level design / gameplay / input controls is just being dishonest...
Really the blame lies all round. Developers are lazy and regularly have "visions" that are beyond their competence level to deliver. AAA publishers are greedy, even lazier and openly boast
"we'll never make unique games, only milked to death marketing fuel". Although the Indie scene is healthier than it was (though still variable), the entire AAA gaming industry is trying to out-Hollywood Hollywood down to and including a universal industry-wide creativity brain drain and blowing more on marketing & fabricated trailer over-hype than making a decent end product. Most gamers are still console gamers and that's what games will continue to be designed down to (cross platform compromises included). And whilst many PC gamers whine like hell over yet another broken / sh*tty port / tedious remake / reboot, they keep on lapping up that over-hype and pre-ordering with zero sense of cause & effect or self discipline. With that combination, it's not really surprising AAA is where it is.
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