Blog FeedConsolification: myth or thing that isn’t a myth?
I used to be a PC centric gamer. Sure, it seems like nowadays I spend more time blathering on about consoles and portables, but PC gaming is where I cut my teeth. Fuck, it’s where it used to be at. When Doom hit, and not long afterwards, when CD-Roms hit, the PC was *the* gaming platform. With Doom, PCs finally had a title that not only looked better than anything consoles had been doing, but that consoles couldn’t do. It didn’t just get people to take the PC seriously as a gaming platform, it told people that it was where gaming was at. Online gaming, networked gaming, masses of space to store audio and video compared to anything else…
Of course, PCs didn’t keep that advantage. Usually, with the start of each console cycle, PC games are left looking rather shabby next to what the new consoles are offering. It takes a couple of years for enough people to have more powerful hardware in the PC world, and for developers to actually give a crap about fancy stuff graphics cards can do. Right now we’re unquestionably at the time where PC games are better looking than console titles… and it’s unquestionably not going to last.
You see, while a top of the range PC could easily produce a game, right now, that looks at least as good as what the x-box 360 can do, it’s not financially viable to make a game that only 100 people can play. And yet, somehow, there exists a belief in the PC gaming world. The notion is this:
If a game is made for both a PC and a console, the PC version is neutered in order to support the console. The PC version has been consolified. Dumbed down. Held back. Neutered. There are examples… Deus Ex 2, for example. The maps were made smaller to fit into the X-Box’s memory. The game was overly streamlined. The mouse didn’t work properly in the menus, which still made reference to rumble mode…
…but of course I think the whole notion is a bunch of baloney. Here though are some examples of people using the terms to show you what the people out there take ‘consolified’ to mean.
On Deus Ex: Invisible War
Deus Ex 2:IW was consolified. That is why it sucked. PC games are too complex to play on consoles, that is why they are on PCs.
On Serious Sam 2
Consolified it is… Small levels for the crappy Xbox. Once again PC gamers have their beloved franchise gang raped by the Xbox suits
On Brothers in Arms
Gearbox said the PC version wasn’t a mere port of the XBOX version, but, alas, it is.
It’s a consolified FPS with small, closed levels, washed out textures and many other stuff you can read at the game official forum.I want huge, Far Cryian levels! Now, back to Darwinia and Mount & Blade…
On Tribes Vengeance
Lets hope Irrational acts more like passionate gamers and NOT once more like the rest of the industry - trying to appease the masses with “consolified” dumbed-down “profit-running” games whose only objective is to make everyone happy but in doing so loses itself in being quite generic with little or no personality.
On Half Life 2
Well…if Half Life 2 is CONSOLIFIED, not only will the graphics be a bit “dumbed down” but the level design MAY have to be altered. Lets face it, a controller can not even compete against and a keyboard and mouse.
On Thief 3
The Bad: Consolified. Things ‘Glow’ and have an arrow overhead when they can be picked up. Kinda ruines the mood. And when you do pick up a box, you dont’ see it in your hands. And when you throw it, it just flys out of your body like you’re some sort of Jedi. The crashing(though I don’t hold that against it, unless its in the retail game too) Seems that you can sneak insanely close to people and not be noticed.
It’s apparent from the above quotes (which I found simply by googling ‘consolified’) that people who use it, never use it in a good way. Nobody praises F.E.A.R. for being ‘consolified’ thanks to the addition of insta grenades and limited weapon sets, things that were borne on Halo due to the limitations of the joypad.
The problem with ‘consolification’ is squarly linked to the developer. Are there games that are hindered by co-developing for a console? There are certainly examples that appear to have been… but there are plenty of examples that weren’t too. Morrowind is certainly a deep and massive RPG on both PC and console. The PC version of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is one of the first games to use bleeding edge graphics features such as PS3.0 and HDR.
Consolification is nothing but lazy developing. People can talk about games being ‘dumbed down’ for console gamers all they like, but most of the recent highly praised RPGs were either born on consoles, or co developed for them. If the controls, or menus or interface are streamlined to appeal to a ‘wider audience’ it’s just that. It’s not merely to appeal to a ‘console audience’, and it amuses me that DX: Hidden War is often cited as the best example of consolification.
The PC version of the original game, was highly praised, but didn’t sell particularly well. They ported it to PS2… and in doing so removed none of the depth. The skill system remained in place. The locational damage. The different ammo types. The reloading. The augmentation system. The interface was a bit streamlined, but none of the gameplay depth was taken away. Again it didn’t sell as hoped.
So the sequel turns up ‘dumbed down’. That’s nothing to do with it being co-developed for X-Box and everything to do with the sales of both the previous PC and console versions of the original.
So the levels are smaller and the textures are only at ‘X-Box’ resolution… that only tells you the developers couldn’t be bothered to include two sets of textures, or attempt to work around the limitations of the console hardware. If you ever see a texture artist in action on a console title, you’ll see they originally draw the textures at high resolution and then scale that down. It’s easier to work that way, and the end result is better.
Of course, this means that there’s a high resolution version of the texture… that Ion Storm either didn’t keep or decided not to implement. Maybe they didn’t want the versions to look different… whatever the reason it’s entirely their doing.
True, console developers don’t work within the limitations of a system, but around them, and this isn’t something you see from PC developers. The PS2 has time and time again achieved things that it wasn’t designed originally to do. Progressive scan apparently couldn’t be done… but it was. HD quality graphics couldn’t be done. But they were. Ingame DTS couldn’t be done… but again… it was.
Dozens of console titles of this generation have used streaming and cacheing to the X-Box’s hard drive to get around the memory limits of the hardware.
Ion Storm simply looked at how much memory the X-Box had and decided there and then that levels couldn’t be above a certain size. They never tried to make it work. Again, all their doing.
The limitations of consoles has lead to some wonderful changes to gaming in the current generation. Games with no perceptible loading times just wouldn’t have happened on the PC if not for the consoles. Every PC game that does it right now is a port, and loading times on many AAA PC titles are horrendous. It’s not the only thing that consoles have helped with either.
As people come to realise that true gamers don’t care what platform they play a game on, and what other platform that game is on, they’ll come to realise great things. If you’re a PC owner that doesn’t have a decent joypad, go out and buy one, to sample some of the brilliant console ports we’ve seen over the last couple of years, instead of complaining that the controls and camera suck and that PC should have been the lead platform.
Very soon, consoles games are going to look more impressive than PC games again. If you change your attitude now, you’ll save face in the coming months… and if you have a top of the range, super swanky PC, you’ll benefit from ports of next gen games taking advantage of features on your graphics card that would probably have not been supported by PC developers until they became the norm.
PC gaming isn’t better than console gaming… or vice versa. One doesn’t make the other worse. Lazy developing when it comes to cross platform games is the problem, and it’s not limited to ‘consolification’. Many X-Box ports of PC games suffer from the games not being tailored properly to the X-box version. The controls may suck, the menus may not be very well supported on a pad. X-Box live mightn’t be properly implemented.
Then PS2 owners suffer games ported to their system that just don’t run as well, or look as good as games designed specifically for the PS2. GameCube and X-Box owners often complain about getting games with PS2 level graphics, again, due to lazy porting or cross platform developement. What should we call that? PlayStationication? DS owners have had to suffer lazy ports of GBA games.
Consolification is a misleading term, an insult to console owning gamers, and it diverts the blame from the people that it should be fully aimed at. The developers.
1st October | Reply
It bears noting that Deus Ex made a small profit and Invisible War was a financial disaster. The original PC game made a profit for Eidos, and was the one nice thing about the financial disaster that was Ion Storm. Why? It didn’t cost a ton and it sold very well to hardcore gamers–so it did turn a profit.
And therein lies the real trouble is everyone is out chasing Grand Theft Auto type numbers. Basically nobody knows how to develop console games and make a profit on most they’re a few million dollars up front and wait 3 years and you’ll either get a Deus Ex Invisible war or a Halo 2. Their is a two week sales window on a lot of games, don’t sell in that window and very often you’ve died. So games are pushed towards that console market as publishers need mega hits to make their numbers look good and everything that was once profitable and small needs to be huge and raking in tons of cash. Their are examples of how this effects PC gaming negatively all over the place. Wargames are probably the best example. Wargames were profitable even up to their dying days. They only needed to sell a few thousand copies to do so–but Take 2 pretty much killed them when they acquired publishers like Talonsoft. PC gamers who’d been loyal fans of companies like SSI and Talonsoft were sent more and more garbage while publishers chased big multimillion selling titles.
So is consolification real? Well sort of–perhaps mass marketization is a better term, that is that a lot of games are sort of eviscerated for the mass market audience and the hardcore audience does undoubtedly get less than they’d like. So who is to blame for this phenomena, well developers have some blame, as you get at, the mass market gamer has some blame to bear for being a dumbass and buying millions of copies of Enter the Matrix because it’s all they know, of course publishers and retailers bear a huge chunk of the blame for creating a system where the only way to be considered successful is to sell hundereds of thousands or millions of copies of your games.
And PC gamers well we do suffer more of this because well a lot of our favorite titles are being eviscerated while everyone chases the big dollars instead of being happy with what you have. Sometimes, to quote a russian proverb the best is the enemy of good enough, and in chasing after these insane profits they create games that are clearly designed for a console and have a sort of mass produced feel to them when you could have turned a modest profit with a nice hand crafted tool.
1st October | Reply
rare for me to agree with you… but i suspected you’d be with me on this one. i don’t like what people mislabel as ‘consolisation’, i just think peoples understanding of why it happens and who to blame is wrong. publishers deserve a lot of the blame too, but in the case of Deus Ex… i just don’t see that team being forced one way or another by publishers… i don’t doubt it happens elsewhere though.
ubisoft have been doing a great job of late at multiplatform titles… giving each something special, pandering to the strengths of each system and polishing the heck out of their games, which are less generic than most of the mass market stuff you other studios of that sort of size putting out there. the PC hardcore though, need to realise that they’re not the big source of revenue any more. they’re a niche now, and they’re certainly a big enough niche that it’s profitable to make a game aimed at them… that’s always going to be true and they’re always going to get games aimed at them, blaming any watering down of their beloved franchises on consoles though, is the sort of format war stupidity that makes you look stupid to anyone but your fellow devotees.
1st October | Reply
I can’t really agree with all that plagiarize says. Sure console games have brought good things to PC gaming and PC gaming good things to consoles. Gaming as a whole just moves forward (although Halo inventing the ‘hold only 2 weapons’ feature is bull, many PC games had that before halo).
However, do not chalk up crappy ports entirely to developers being lazy. Essentially the publishers are at fault here. It is not because console gamers are dumber or cannot handle more advanced titles. It is all about money, much like Vermouth has hit on. Developers have a budget and a timelimit. It is just not feasible to create a game that will run on 4 platforms and be perfectly tailored to each. The end result is, to stay within budget and time constraints, make the game for the lowest common denominator then with extra time/money try to beef up the other versions.
Fable is a perfect example of the ideal situation for a developer working on a multiplatform game. With Fable: The Lost Chapters development never stopped. With the pull molyneux has in the industry he could give his team almost an entire year extra to bring the game the the PC and fully tailor it to the PCs needs and strengths. The game can look better, run at higher resolutions, the control scheme has been suited to the PC and the combat system tweaked. The extra harddrive space (and ability to permanently store game data there) allows the PC to increase the overall size of the game. Sure they probably could have released Fable as a 2 disc Xbox game but how well would Xbox Fable sell right now with Xbox 360 so close?
Releasing a stellar game for the old console at the release of a new console is not necessarily a great marketing technique. Remember Vectorman for the Sega Genesis?
Generally developers just do not have the time or money to properly port. The only exceptions you will find are ridiculously high profile games like Fable, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and the like. Marketing powerhouses that are guarenteed to bring in the cash so the risk of extra money spent on the PC or Xbox (in the case of PS2) is worth it.
The real tragedy of “consolification” that PC gamers worry about is games like Halo. Games that were stolen from their PC roots, totally rearranged and released on a console. Halo was never supposed to be a generic first person shooter. Halo was originally a PC and Mac bound squad based game. This was before squad based games were common. Halo was going to be a risky PC title. The game looked amazing for the time and I was quite excited for it. The form, after a 2 year delay, that Halo was finally released in is why PC gamers have a general distaste for it. We do not dislike Halo because it is a popular Xbox FPS. It is what never was that leaves the scar.
Rainbow Six is becoming another example. Rainbow Six’s allure was the planning stage. Rainbow Six was not a “squad based first person shooter”. A victory in rainbow six was about thinking ahead. Planning out complex multi-squad assault plans. The franchise is now a shadow of its former self. It is a squad based action game with tactical elements. Gone is 50% of the actual “game”. You no longer create complex plans before even stepping into the boots of a counter-terrorist. Rainbow Six was the only game of its type. Now it looks as though we will never have another. The game itself was never “consoilified”. They did not try to bring Raven Shield to the Consoles or Lockdown to the PC. They took the ideal and concept of the game and bastardized it so it would sell like crazy. I am sure Lockdown is a damned fine squad based tactical action game, but it is not Rainbow Six anymore.
1st October | Reply
Absolutely, look at Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy); for consoles: for this Myst-Clone game the controls were not so much confusing as they were unnecessarily thumstickified. The whole time I just wanted to press “4″ and get it over with but one had to make a “gesture” in the direction of the wanted selection.
On the flipside, I do prefer FPS games on a console; not for the control standard, but rather for the stability.
1st October | Reply
Hell yeah. Unreal Championship was an absolute joke. Playing with 4 players and a couple of bots meant the game ran at a healthy 5-10 frames per second. Controls were awful, and it really did feel like they just ripped the game out of a PC and crammed it into an Xbox, trying to make it fit. Of course, Unreal Championship 2 seems to have fixed all that, but really, UC2 should have been the first Unreal game on the Xbox, not the second.
I would have to agree that it’s not just the developers we can blame - many of them are just victims of the industry’s structure, and if they have too many time and money constraints, there’s not much they can do about it. They have legal obligations to fulfil as far as getting games to the publishers goes.
Naturally this doesn’t apply to developers like Blizzard, but then it makes me wonder why the guys at Epic didn’t bring out a properly done port for Unreal Championship… surely they’d have enough weight to ensure they have enough time? I mean, it’s Epic.
2nd October | Reply
epic got all the flack they deserved for UC… and reacted properly with UC2. Ion Storm got greedy if what vermouth says is true about the first one making a proift, went for a bigger audience and lost money… maybe that was the publishers fault, maybe not… however stuff like ‘make sure the mouse works in the menus’ isn’t exactly weeks of implementation is it? for example then, even if the publishers are pushing for an x-box version to be made concurrantly, most of the things that people complain about are either simple fixes or things that would have worked on the x-box as well.
fahrenheit/indigo prophecy, controlled pretty damn well on a pad, though character movement was sucky compared to a lot pad driven games. i have no idea how it’d play on a mouse and keyboard, but joypad control doesn’t equal ‘consolified’. a lot of genres naturally play better on a joypad… for example, a game with a fixed camera system like Fahrenheit, they’ve always been better off on a pad, regardless of platform. same with platformers, racing games, and others.