Saying that one prefer gameplay over graphics isn't the same as saying that better graphics means worse gameplay. There's a big difference between those two statements.

Question then...

Have you ever read a novel that matched a movie for the visuals that it inspires? I once had a talk with a classmate from school (chance met on the bus one day ~a decade later). He asked me how the film Jurassic Park was; I told him it was fantastic ~but that the book was better. He was shocked with disbelief, and I didn't catch it at first, but what shocked him was the mere notion that a book could ever be better than a movie.

I can enjoy a good game with elements of graphics flair, good gameplay, and good interactive fiction, but those elements ranked in order... are Gameplay, Fiction, visuals; and a game whose strength was in the visuals (and audio) alone, would lose to any game with better gameplay or interactive fiction; And it if came down to it... I'd pick the game with a cheesy tale, and excellent mechanics, over an 'artsy' / original tale with crap mechanics ~any day.

But would you say that its reasonable that a game's graphics overhead can sometimes be crippling to gameplay?

(:laugh:, and that though possible in theory... the reverse is not usually true.)

Which people also say a lot. That they don't want to sacrifice gameplay to get better graphics. As if you can't have both.

two posts above your post is an example of someone saying that if you work on graphics then gameplay must suffer. i see it all the time.

Yeah now that that polish game has failed PC gamers totally I am now 10x more annoyed at skyrim for catering to the console market

Which polish game are you referring to?

That qualifies as an understatement. This is something that was learned by the shooter crowd, to an extent, a few years ago; kickin eyecandy does not make up for bad game design and balance. And at that time, gamers were as annoyed at the FPS babies as we are now at the console kiddies. Sure, shooters launched the GPU cold war......at the cost of gameplay. Daggerfall came in for a bunch of nonsense then; it didn't use a Monster Card. Not worth the time for that burgeoning crowd. I mean, who makes a game that's supposed to be 3D and -not- use that shiny Monster accelerator (and yes, those of us there -did- try and explain that as DF was a DOS 2.5D-3D hybrid game thrown into the opening stages of Windows dominance, and the fact that it had been in development long before Monster broke wind, it made sense). It took a paradigm breaker like the original Half Life (Shooter with an honest to god interesting storyline) to make the idea sink back in that if you make the pretty pictures =mean= something, you'll go a lot farther (Doom III did this, as well. Yes, the gameplay was the same as Doom I & II......but in 3, you had a -reason- for being there, and doing what you were doing. That added so much to the gameplay.

Game system resources are such that it takes and incredibly incompetent coder or set of coders (or those hamstrung by directives from above) to create a system that can't give both. Lord knows it happens, as the plethora of dreck out there proves. But the reasons rarely have to do with lack of systems power, and more the human elements involved.

The consoles are not being held up because they are the scourge of humanity; anyone who's gamed since the days of DOS knows that they are just the latest in a long line of business choices and design faux pa's that have hindered or outright blocked advancement or adoption of technologies and practices that would push PC gaming along to the next level....

chapter 3 of witcher 2. gizmo said it was pretty bad but im finding out myself how unfinished it is. its a shame cause i loved the first game and the first 2 chapters of witcher 2 were pretty good.

Of course chapter 3 is bad, it doesn't use DX11.

So you would need to upgrade it after three years. You're not arguing with me, you're agreeing with me.

What was bad with it? It could have depended on his choices throughout the game...
I mean, the game has 16 different endings.

Anyway, according to the reviews out there, Witcher 2 rocks as a whole.
http://www.vg247.com/2011/05/17/the-witcher-2-reviews-start-hitting-get-rounded-up/

overall its a great game. but ive just started chapter 3 and can tell already that its rushed. the number of npcs dropped alot which is weird considering the importance of the setting. level design is.......odd. you have to take wierd paths to get to areas when the only think blocking you is a delapitated old wall. dont get me wrong i still go my moneys worth and hopefully the DLCs will flesh out the last chapter a bit more but there is definitely a difference in quality. i think they just ran out of time and planned on addit later in DLC form......at least i hope so.

You need to upgrade, of course, IF you want to keep playing at both the highest graphical settings and resolutions the game can offer. Which is basically REAL (not scaled) 1920x1080 (minimum), and graphics' quality far superior than any console.

Besides, you've to be very poor not to be able to afford 150 euros every 3 years

inb4 Old PC's are holding New PC's back.

inb4 platform war

inb4 lock.

ect.







Legit comment now. The game is graphically developed for the Xbox360, and really, as long as the UI for the PC is given the care it deserves, not making it a slap in the face to PC owners like the Coloring-Book style Oblivion Interface, I think that should be enough.

If Graphics are that important to your experience, wait until a year before TES6 comes out, and download a still-beta-version of a Skyrim Graphics Extender to get a few extra shaders in there.

I agree for the most part. The UI is going to be the biggest thing to me.

But next up on my list is the closed-off cities. I hate those with a passion. And I'm sure there must be a way to work around it for consoles by using something like occlusion-culling perhaps.

I would put to you this then...

Imagine a text based game that used the GPU mostly for non-graphics related calculations. Imagine if the RPG pre-generated the world terrain when you installed it ~or even every time you started a new character.

Imagine that this RPG cached a gig database instead of a gig of textures, and used a chatbot with a list of personality traits for every NPC in the game ~and adjusted any dialog to match their mannerisms, as well as drew upon a dynamic (and ever increasing) collection of events that have transpired in the game, and witnessed by whom; to better simulate an abstract description of the world's reaction to the player's PC.

An RPG where your mage casts a fireball at entrenched bandits ~and damages the bridge... and it slows /or halts trade to the towns beyond it; or if it were a dam that broke, would flood the towns further down river.

This game could allow the PC to decide to tunnel under a siege wall, and collapse the corner ~and need not have been something the developers anticipated (though not likely ); Just that the wall collapsed because it was tunneled under, and that meant that the wall could be passed via the collapsed spot. This would not require graphics to depict the collapsing wall, just a very detailed collection of potential (and reusable) results to actions performed on an object.

Quests that could spring up from player action (or inaction)... Say the PC set bear traps in a cave ~and left them. Then happened to come back weeks later in the game, to find out that a few locals got stuck in the traps (the game may determine that one died, and so a funeral is commencing... and the town sheriff might even hire the PC to find the culprit :laugh:). Quite a hell of a lot of gameplay freedom opens up when you don't have to depict it all in realtime animation.

A PC that improves their strength tremendously could then be influencing others due to their appearance, or they could get a magical disease and look emaciated and half dead ~with no need to illustrate it, thus no limitations on what they could look like. ~and yes I'm serious.

Now there is no reason such a game could not include graphics, whether still frame images, or abstract archetypal imagery ~or even more detailed animation... but the the thing to consider is that the more they illustrate visually, the more they take away from the freedom they have to describe virtually anything ~and a good description can provoke imagery in the player's imagination that is personal to them ~and possibly better and more affecting that what their artists could have dreamed up as animation. :shrug:

Do PC gamers typically get framerate issues, too? :glare:

Yes.

You can fix them? Yes.

Easily and for free? Mostly yes. Unless your system is clearly overloaded by the game. It's time for an upgrade then.

it varies heavily from game to game, but yes, framerate issues are a pretty big thing for PC gaming, too. arguably moreso, as while the framerate on a console would generally dip to maybe 20 at the lowest, it's possible for certain hardware configurations to get literally unplayable framerates in some games while other, more technically demanding games run beautifully.

You can fix them by turning down some graphical effects. The only PS3 game I've ever played that lets me do that is BioShock, and I didn't need to do it for BioShock. If developers aren't going to design games with my platform in mind, at the very least, I don't understand why they don't allow us to turn down the graphical settings of the games.

PC games ship with a minimum & maximum spec printed on the box. If your PC is the maximum spec (or better), then frame rate issues should not be a problem. For those with minimum spec machines... the game won't run [playable] at maxed settings, but should be playable at lower (graphics) settings.

You could do that, but it didn't look very good.

The thing is, Skyrim will ship with the settings "turned down" so that it can run smoothly on consoles, with no way to turn the detail up on a high-end PC. The mountains and rocks won't use hardware tesselation because the XBox doesn't do that. You can see it in some of the screenshots. Rocks are pointy and poorly detailed, like a PC game from 2005. Textures are low resolution even though even mid-range cards come with 1GB of RAM these days. Qarls textures for Oblivion look more detailed. Still no shadows for objects from what I can tell. A feature that has been standard in PC games for a couple of years now.

Of course, there will be mods for the PC, but there are some things (like hardware tesselation and shadows) that you can't just mod into the game since it sits so deep at the core of the rendering engine.

Because it makes no sense?

Console hardware is fixed and non-changeable or modular. PC's are totally the opposite. That's why we PC users have those options, while console users don't...they're not needed at all. In fact, I don't understand why BioShock allows you to do that. Not at all. What exactly are the "options" you can modify?



I keep hoping that somehow the engine will be DX11-enabled, and that modders will be able to include DX11 stuff (shaders, tessellated models...) easily. Maybe I hope too much...but hoping is free

They are needed, in some cases... or I 'd rather just prefer it, in some cases. BioShock merely allowed me to check an "unlock framerate" option that increased the framerate at the cost of some graphical detail. They don't need to allow a wide variety of options for me to be happy, but simply allowing me to do anything to get a higher framerate would make me happy. Why is it so difficult to do such a thing?

Do I feel that optimized for consoles means not optimized for PC?



Yes, 512MB memory