Rift Archives - Page 32 of 43 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Microsoft’s Turn to Troll

July 2, 2013 by Belghast

Last night ended up nothing like I had expected. Since it was extremely nice out here in Oklahoma, we ended up batching up a bunch of errands we needed running. As a result I did not end up getting home until well after 8 pm, and when I did get home… I was too out of it to really get into much of anything. I seem to have acquired a need for sleep over the last few days. For now I am indulging this insane fancy and going to bed at a decent hour.

Dendrome

I am well behind the curve content wise in Rift, as last night was the first night I really spent roaming around the Dendrome. I have had this vision quest of sorts and have been hell bent on finishing leveling fishing. At this point I am around 340 and the rest of the journey is extremely slow and painful. I have been setting my goal on completing the fish exchange in Tulan each day… which ends up giving me several levels in the process of fishing up 12 rare fish. Unfortunately I do not yet have the patterns, for the lures that speed up each variety of rare fish.

I have to say I really like Dendrome so far. It reminds me a lot of Ember Isle… but far less brutal for players to break into. Everywhere I look there is another piece of a quest, so it feels like it would take me ages just to reach a point where I felt like I could do dailies here. Once I start a carnage quest… I tend to get distracted and have to complete it while I am in the area. I would not want to try and do the repeatable quests until I had cleared a good deal of these shiny objects from my view.

While I was out in the zone, I managed to get in on an Air Invasion. The first stages went by so quickly that I cannot even tell you what the objectives were… but I managed to make it to the final boss fight when it was around 80% health. It was one of the nastier zone bosses I have encountered… in that it spawned 3 of those flashing red bubbles that have become so ubiquitous with instant death in Rift. These bubbles then proceeded to path randomly through the group knocking players back and dealing large amounts of damage.

I actually got insta-gibbed as I rolled up on the fight as not all of the effects had loaded in for me yet. The completely insane part was that for killing one zone boss I managed to get 330 Infinity Stones. Granted at this point I am struggling to find things to spend them on, and I would have far rather had Empyreal Slayers Marks… it was cool nonetheless and would help out someone needing gear badly. So far I think I am going to like Dendrome as a whole, and I look forward to exploring it in time.

Microsoft’s Turn to Troll

Yesterday one of the big stories that caught my attention is that Microsoft Announced the first months title for the XBox Gold free games program. In the conference that I have linked above… Microsoft said… to kick off that program I’d like to share just two of the titles we’re going to offer over the next few months – Assassin’s Creed 2, and Halo 3. So obviously… players… media outlets.. essentially everyone was expecting the title announced to be well… either Assassins Creed 2 or Halo 3. Instead they dropped the bomb on us that it would be Defense Grid: The Awakening.

This is the equivalent of saying you get a .99 app store title for free. No offense meant to the makers of the game, I am sure it is a perfectly fine title. Tower Defense games however are a dime a dozen, they are the new Bejeweled… everyone and their brother has created a “priced to own” clone. So there is absolutely nothing exciting about this announcement. Even if you like Tower Defense titles, which I do not… no one in their right mind can put this title in the league of Assassins Creed 2 and Halo 3 as far as player appeal.

What I don’t really understand… is how Microsoft can not think these are bad moves. They keep doing it over and over again… and then doing the equivalent of standing there with a shocked face as people rage around them. I am just flabbergasted as to how they could ever think most of the calls they have been making would play well with the gamers. Essentially Microsoft Gold is a horrible deal… it has always been a horrible deal… and giving away appstore titles is not going to change the fact that it will likely always be a horrible deal.

If Microsoft Gold existed in a vacuum it might be considered a good thing… but when you compare it against Playstation+ it is a phenomenally bad deal. Gold costs roughly $60 per year and Plus costs roughly $50, so pretty comparable what you get there. However with Plus you end up getting instantly a dozen ps3 titles ready for download… and they cycle in new titles and cycle out old ones on a monthly basis. Additionally you get the ability to demo the full version of any game in the PS3 library… that means if you purchase it.. your save games still apply. Additionally you get a significant discount on any games you purchase through PlayStation plus, and they are currently running some crazy steam like sales. In the first year… they gave away 64 titles through the PlayStation plus subscription.

So as I sit back and look at this… I cannot fathom how Microsoft feels like Gold is a deal… and that they are somehow sweetening the pot by giving away a single game a month. All the service really does is give you access to features that should have been included in the console in the first place… like Netflix. The whole bait and switch over talking about AAA titles and giving players an AppStore title instead only serves to make the deal even worse. I feel like Microsoft needs to re-evaluate their entire stance on gaming… and collectively “pull their heads out” for lack of a better term. Feinting ignorance only works as long as you are willing to stop doing stupid things… at this point they need to completely rethink their strategy.

Wrapping Up

Well today is trash day and I need to finish gathering it. I hope you all have a great day… and I hope my tone has not been too ranty lately. I’ve just had various things that I feel passionate about on my mind. When I start talking about them… I tend to come out a bit more harsh than I intend to. I am sure that lately I have come off as a PlayStation fanboy… but I am just supporting what I feel like is the better deal. I own both an Xbox and a PS3 and have games I play on both regularly.

Ten MMO Must Haves

July 1, 2013 by Belghast

This morning I got up roughly 15 minutes before the alarm went off… and decided to that rather than be groggy later… I would go ahead and get up and around. Right now I am kind of questioning that decision, since the bed seems like a really amazing idea. I had a really spastic yesterday as I never could really decide on a game to play. Since Final Fantasy beta was closed by the time I got up and around I ended up cycling through Everquest, Rift, Vanguard, and Defiance never quite sticking in any of them. As a result I don’t have much excitement to talk about… and I am nowhere near finished with my second part of How To Rift… so I am going off in a completely different direction.

Ten MMO Must Haves

Basically over the years I have noticed several features that I expect most MMOs to have, and when they are not there it greatly harms my enjoyment for the long run. I keep cycling back to the ones that do have most of the list. Granted this is in no way a complete list, as I am sure there are things I have omitted for the sake of a clean number, but these are definitely all things I would prefer to see in an upcoming title. These are not necessarily in order of importance… but more the order in which I thought of them.

1 – Random Events

Nothing breaks up the monotony of questing and killing mobs like a random army invading the countryside. I have always liked when random things happen in games, I even like random loot so long as it is not something I need to progress forwards. In the post Rift MMO world, I feel like random things happening in your world is an absolute must have. When it is missing, the game feels extremely stale to me. When it is done well, you forget what you are doing and follow along the flow of what is happening in a specific zone. This should be events chosen from a long list of potential ones… not the same event happening over and over like in Guild Wars 2. Their implementation did not serve to make the world feel alive, but instead made it feel even more like a carnival ride resetting itself every so often.

2 – Passive Grouping

I should be able to help other players out, and they help me without having to worry about whether or not I tagged the mob first. Grouping should be something you do to hang out with people, not something you feel obligated to do constantly just to get through game content. I feel as though simply touching a mob should give me credit for whatever that mob is required for. Rift and Guild Wars definitely do this extremely well… but when I go back to a game that does not have it… I become a kill stealing asshole. I just forget that mob tagging is an actual thing that is still in games. If you do not have passive mob tagging… you are bad and should feel bad.

3 – Puzzles and Collectibles

I have the tendencies in me to power level myself to the cap and then get bored feeling there is nothing left to do. If your game has little puzzles and collectible bits it helps to make me stop and smell the roses. I feel for other players this becomes a meta game all in itself. These systems all seem relatively simple to implement, but it seems like there is a greater return on investment as far as gluing a player to your game. Rift and GW2 both have amazing examples of puzzles, and EQ2 has probably the most extensive collection system I have seen in a game. I greatly prefer there to be something for me to always be on the lookout for, that offers interesting gameplay and forces me to stop quest grinding.

4 – Moveable UI Elements

This one is huge to me. Essentially I will if given the option set my UI to look the same from game to game. I like certain windows in certain locations because it helps me not have to think about where things are. When you play lots of different MMOs this becomes something extremely important. Additionally I find myself setting up all my hotbars the same… 0 is the interrupt key, 7 is my combo point dump, 5 is charge/deathgrip, etc. As a result I really hate your game when you force me to play with your idea of how the UI should look. No matter how much research you have put into your UI, it is not ideal for everyone… and as a result you should never force players into your chosen UI design box. Make the windows unlock able and moveable either through the default UI like Rift or through Addons like WoW.

5 – Map with User Defined Waypoints

This is another big one for me. Navigating your world should be easy for the players. I should be able to open my map, click a point that I want to travel to and then get some kind of directions as to how to get there. This can be as simple as an Icon on the edge of the mini-map showing you the direction of your destination, or as complex as some sort of golden path or arrow pointing the way. Additionally it would be really amazing if your system allowed player defined permanent waypoints. That way we could actively mark whenever we found something cool in your world. TSW does an amazing job of this.. and I have tons of little markers scattered through all my maps pointing to nifty things I found. This is definitely something all games should emulate.

6 – Sortable/Searchable Bank and Inventory

First off let me say.. that the concept of physical bags with limited storage is something no one should ever do again. I greatly prefer one big inventory space because usually with that comes the ability to sort, filter, and search the contents of your inventory. Rift does an interesting hybrid model, in that they still have physical bags, but they have a sort and search functionality that makes up for the fact of having to juggle multiple containers rather than just one. Trying to find things in your bags should not be considered a meta game… and you should help players out so they have to spend as little time doing this as possible. There have been times I have logged into EQ2… looked at the state of my bags and logged out immediately because I did not want to spend the next 30 minutes clearing them out. That game is the worst case scenario… but I have had similar happen in many other games as well. Make your inventory system help the player rather than hinder them.

7 – Sell All Junk Button

If your game drops junk items from mobs aka “Greys” and you do not have a sell all junk button… you are a horrible person and should be drug out into the street and shot. Nothing is more frustrating than going through your inventory and having to manually sell a bunch of trash items that have no real purpose for existing other than to give you some cash. Better yet, don’t even drop the trash items and give us additional gold instead. I think the running theme of the last two should be that Inventory Maintenance is not a fun meta game. No one enjoys it, and all it does is make the player feel like they have just completely wasted their time. I am completely fine with getting additional cash in lieu of junk, but if you do have junk… for the love of god make a sell all crap button.

8 – AOE Looting

Thank you Rift for creating this construct… and thank you modern MMO developers for having the common sense to say “damn, why didn’t we have this” and adding it to your games. Nothing is more annoying than trying to select that one corpse from a pile of corpses that still has loot on it. My OCD will not let me go without searching all the bodies… it is like I knew that if I missed one… that would be the one that dropped some rare epic item. Again this is a cousin of the whole inventory maintenance is not a fun meta game… neither is looting. Better yet… all corpse interactions should be AOE as well… where the hell is my AOE skinning. The first company to give me AOE skinning, herbing, and mining of corpses… will be a god in my eyes.

9 – Full Character Appearance System

Now when I say this… I am not talking about Transmogrification. I could go on an hour long rant about how horrible that system is and how it is a half assed version of the good appearance systems. What I am talking about is additional sets of character doll slots that allow you to directly override the appearance of an item with another item. Rift has probably the best implementation overall right now, since you can have something like 12 wardrobe slots with ready to switch to outfits on the fly. The only gotcha there is due to their own constraints they had to implement a shitty “transmog” like system for doing the weapons. Players should never have to run back to a vendor to change their appearance… stop making them do busy work. I would love to see developers emulate the way the system works in EQ2, because you can literally change your appearance to anything in the game… no class restrictions.

10 – Facial Hair

I had a few other items I considered putting on the list… but honestly to me personally this one has to be here. If your game does not have the ability for me to give my character a nice beard, especially a moustache and goatee combo… I will hate your character creator and likely not play your game. I have no clue why this is so important to me… but it is. Namely I have seen the lack of facial hair in the Asian MMOs… but I struggled to find a look I could stomach in Guild Wars 2 as well. Additionally I cannot stand the “pretty boy” appearance that some games have… but I won’t go into that right now. Please for the love of god when you design your character creator… make Facial Hair a slider… not something that is attached to another attribute like hairstyle.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it… my ten must haves for a modern MMO. Like I said, I am sure that it is not a complete list at all… and as soon as I post this… I will think of another 10 things that should have been on the list. These however are the things that immediately came to mind when being frustrated with MMOs that do not have them. I would be curious to hear about what your list is, and whether or not I have hit your key frustration points. I hope you all have a great day, and I hope I manage to stay fully conscious all day long since I got up so early.

How To Rift – Character Creation

June 27, 2013 by Belghast

Since the release of the Rift free to play conversion, I have had a large number of friends coming back to the game. Previously I did posted targeting the features that have been added into the game since release. This time around I will be targeting this series towards players just starting out in the game. I am going to try and assume as little prior games expertise as I can. Rift is a game full of extremely rich and complex systems, and this series of posts is an attempt to ease a new player into it.

Choosing a Faction

Rift at its core is a game about a world torn asunder by the violent planar tears opening across the continent and causing all manner of nasty things to spill into the world. You play the role of an ascended, essentially a being with a number of souls merged into one. The two primary factions of the game represent the struggle between religion and technology.

The Defiant chose to rely on themselves and their technology to contend with the planar upheaval. The Guardians on the other hand chose to rely on faith in the old pantheon of gods that have been long dormant. Once the decision of your faction dictated everything you did from that point on. However prior to the launch of Storm Legion Trion released a “Faction As Fiction” patch. This meant that both Guardian and Defiant players could group together freely, and be members of the same guilds.

This has made it so much easier for players to play whatever suits them the best, but still be able to play with their friends that chose the other faction. This also makes the first choice you have to make during character creation completely dependant on which ever race you want to play.

Choosing a Race

Essentially there are three Guardian Races and three Defiant. For the Guardians you have to choose from Dwarf, High Elf, and Mathosian. On the Defiant side you have the air elemental descended Bahmi, the Eth and the Kelari. Each has a very unique look to them, and dictates which character creation options you have. Also each has a unique set of racial abilities. Each has a racial elemental resistance, but it is such an insignificant amount that it is ultimately meaningless. However the active racial is extremely useful, however some of them sadly are far better than others. I will give you a quick rundown of each.

Dwarf Racial

Dwarven Breakfast – this is an extremely good health and mana heal. It causes the dwarf to regenerate 8% mana and health per second for 13 seconds. This has a 10 minute recast time, so while extremely useful it is a panic cooldown.

High Elf Racial

Angelic Flight – This ability essentially lets you target a spot on the ground and your character performs around dramatic flying lean with angel wings spread towards the target. If you are an explorer, this ability will allow you to get some places that will be much harder for others without the ability.

Mathosian Racial

Motivational Roar – This ability is one of the more interesting ones. Essentially it increases the run speed of the caster and his party by 30% for 10 seconds. It has a 2 minute cooldown and represents the only racial group ability.

Bahmi Racial

Mighty Leap – This is probably my favorite racial, and the reason why I have several Bahmi. It is a targeted flying leap that works essentially the same as the High Elf racial minus the wings animation. Excellent for getting to places that are hard to get to. I’ve used this so many times to explore new areas.

Eth Racial

Agility – This ability increases the casters movement speed by 50% for 15 seconds. The recast time is 2 minutes and essentially gives the player a burst sprint ability, or if your class already provides one a second sprint. This seems to be extremely popular among PVP types.

Kelari Racial

Camouflage – This is another one of those extremely unique abilities. When cast it turns the Kelari into a fox for 30 seconds. While in fox form it greatly lowers the Kelari’s aggro radius allowing them to slip past many mobs unnoticed. Recast time is 2 minutes, and it has the side effect of despawning your pets.

None of the racials are so overpowered that you will be forever harmed if you do not pick a specific one. My personal preference is for Mighty Leap or Angelic Flight… since it adds a lot of utility for getting to hard to reach places. If you are a serious raider type, I could see Dwarven Breakfast coming in extremely handy as it provides a fast health and mana regen that could be used mid fight. For PVP players it seems like Eth is the natural choice since being able to move quickly on demand… always seems to be the right answer. Unfortunately while the Mathosian racial is interesting, it seems horribly gimped when compared to the Eth one. Sure it is group wide, but the time is 5 seconds shorter and the total speed increase is 20% less.

Choosing a Calling

Calling represents what most other games all your Class, but I can see why they chose a new name. Rift as a whole has a much more flexible class system if you view it from a traditional standpoint. There are literally hundreds of combinations of classes all dependant on which set of souls you choose. However I will get into this later. The Calling is essentially choosing between playing a Warrior, Rogue, Mage and Cleric. Each has its own sets of souls and with them special combinations and benefits. I will give a quick rundown of each of the Callings.

The Warrior is your traditional plate wielding beat-em-up class. They specialize in melee combat and the class has the most melee damage and tanking configurations of any of the callings. If you want to be that big guy in even bigger armor this is likely the calling for you. Deviating from the traditional Warrior role, they have a soul called the Beast master that lets you be a plate wearing pet wielding melee class. If you pay for the Storm Legion souls, it also adds the ability to do significant range dps with the Tempest. It has just been leaked that in Rift 3.0 they will be adding a true healing class to the warrior with the Liberator soul.

The Cleric is a chain wearing warrior priest, and represents the class with the most healing options. Additionally they can be extremely potent tanks and both ranged and melee dps. It is a mana based class, and comes with all the constraints of having a limited pool of resources. However almost each soul gives you some way of regenerating this resource. As a Shaman you have the unique ability to giving splash healing to the allies around you while dealing significant amounts of damage. If you are the player that always plays a healer, and only really cares about playing a healer… then this is likely the class for you… as you will have the maximum number of potential healing configurations.

The rogue is your traditional leather armored scout class. They are a jack of all trades and probably support the most drastically varried playstyles. A Ranger/Marksman build can give you something very similar to a hunter or ranger pet class. The Riftstalker gives the class extremely potent tanking potential, and the Bard is the king of battlefield support. If you are the type of player that likes to do something different each time you play, then this calling might cure your altism. Additionally it has two of the most interesting classes I have played. Saboteur is essentially a mad bomber, in that you plant charges on your target and then with the use of a finish cause them to blow up. Often times a mob can go from full health to dead within seconds. If you choose to buy the Storm Legion souls it gives you the Tactician, which is an AOE support class that heals and damages enemies with its flamethrower.

The mage is your traditional cloth wearing glass canon with a few tweaks. They have the most options for pure casters of all the callings. However they have a few tricks up their sleeve. The chloromancer is an extremely potent main healer, and the Archon is an extremely powerful support soul. The Necromancer gives you amazing soloing power by adding in a series of typed pets covering all of the callings. With the addition of storm legion souls, you gain the Harbinger which is an unheard of Melee Mage… using powerful magic to conjure weapons and armor. It has been leaked that Rift 3.0 will add another role to the class allowing it to tank by using the Arbiter soul.

Choosing a Purpose

While the calling represents the general direction of your class, your purpose is essentially a template that represents what your class does. You are presented a screen with a number of preset purposes to choose from. Two things to remember… firstly the list shown on this screen is just a fragment of the total number of presets available and generally represent the easiest to play. Once you get into game, you can open your soul tree window and see other available purposes.

The second thing to remember.. this is just a suggestion… these are not fixed boundaries. You can literally mix any combination of three souls together. These combinations do not always work out, in fact certain souls work extremely poorly together. These purposes give you a few guaranteed to be good recipes you can work from. Each time you get points to spend, a blinking arrow will show you where to spend the points to keep following the purpose. At any point you can deviate from the plan if you so choose.

However if you are new to the game it is generally a good idea to follow one of the predetermined paths until you understand how the soul tree system works. The short list provided generally gives you a mixture of what has been determined are the most successful souls. For leveling I tend to stick to a purpose that gives me a pet like the Necromancer or Ranger… or a tanking purpose as these tend to give you the best survival. Melee DPS tends to be a bit squishy, and Ranged DPS generally involves a good deal of kiting around.

Choosing your Features

The last step before you are ready to get into the game is to choose your features and name your character. You can see above that Rift gives you a significant number of personalization choices. You can choose face shape, height, hair style and color, facial hair and markings. For the most part each race has mostly unique options for appearance so they end up looking distinct out on the battlefield. One thing to remember while you are picking your choices that they can almost all be changed inside of the game by going to the stylist.

In the past players have felt obligated to get everything 100% perfect the first time. This lead to spending an exorbitant amount of time on character creation, because you knew that once you hit create… you could never go back and tweak things. However with the addition of the free to play gem shop, you can even go so far as to change your race and gender in game with an extremely simple to use stylist interface. While I would not suggest changing your look on a whim, because it could get extremely expensive, extremely quickly… you are never completely chained to your original choices.

You’ve Created Your First Character!

There you go, now you have walked through all the decisions involved with creating your first character in Rift. Now the fun actually begins as you are teleported into the battle as either a Defiant or Guardian. I had initially intended to cover the user interface basics, but this post has ended up far larger than I thought it could possibly be. As a result I am going to cut things off here. In the coming days I will post a thorough rundown of the features of the user interface, including customization options. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed the run down, if you make it in game, look me up on Belghast@Deepwood.

Console Advantage

June 27, 2013 by Belghast

Getting to the pc to write my morning blog post a little late this morning. I have a fairly significant meeting at lunch, and as such had to do a bit more pruning of my beard this morning to make myself presentable. I normally wouldn’t care much, but all the big wigs will be in this one.. and quite honestly I am more than a little nervous. While I am not the focus of the meeting… the focus is something that I feel is overly misguided. Only time will tell how successful the meeting will go, but when you get a technical person talking to a bunch of non-technical people… cognitive dissonance arises.

Coming Soon

I have been desperately trying to get new folks to try Rift… namely some of my staunch WoW friends that have tunnel vision surrounding that game. As a result I started kicking around the idea of a series of posts taking things from a very basic level. Last night I began work on a Character Creation and Default Interface post, but did not get nearly as far as I had hoped before cutting into a scheduled event. My hope is that I can finish it up this evening and post it tomorrow. Essentially my idea is to go through some of the most basic concepts and thoroughly explain them. I am not 100% sure how success the series will be, but I seemed to get a lot of interest from twitter.

When Rift first launched, I did the “Why You Should Be Playing Rift” series, and likely this one will be similar in focus. I want to highlight all the cool things about the game, because as friends have started playing there have been a lot of these items that are not adequately messaged in the game but provide amazing functionality. I am sure there are many players that do not realize they can auto sort their bags, or search them.. because it is never really explained. Additionally one of my friends had no clue there was a “sell all greys” button, because again it is there… but not really singled out to the player.

Stalwarts

My work on the How To post was cut short when I noticed the time. I posted a few weeks back about trying to get some of my longtime Guildies into Rift and having Mon/Weds event nights. Since I announced the concept Monday… it was too soon to really do much of anything at all. However last night we had a handful of people online and in the Stalwart@Deepwood channel. We had a player that was afk and another that was PVPing so it took awhile to finally organize. Ultimately we decided we really did not have the makeup for a dungeon group, but luckily there are several options to do in those situations.

We ended up with a 22 bard, 51 necrolock, and me a 60 psuedo tanky warrior. The absolute best fit for a mixed group like that was Instant Adventures, so we end up random queuing for one. We all got mentored down to level 14 and got assigned to Freemarch, and we basically ran around there all evening. I had forgotten just how active Freemarch is, because during the time we played there were three zone wide invasions that we also participated in. It was essentially two hours of roaming around following whatever objective we were given.

I can’t speak for the others but I definitely enjoyed myself until it just got too late for me to be conscious. Honestly the concept was that it didn’t really matter what we did, so long as we did something as a group. The instant adventure thing seemed to work for that, and all of us were rewarded large amounts of whatever the currency is for our individual level ranges. I managed to get 2 planar advancement levels while we were out there, so the xp is definitely still valid for a capped player. Hopefully in coming weeks we can get a better mix of classes and actually delve into a few dungeons. I know Atonal had a quest in Iron Tombs that I would not mind running the place for.

Console Advantage

One of the things I have been thinking about over the last few months since we got the game loft set up, is what exactly made me fall out of love with console gaming. I think ultimately it is that console games at some point stopped providing me sufficient improvement over my PC to make playing the games worthwhile. Prepare for a nostalgic trip down memory lane. If you look at the above shots… this essentially represents the state of gaming in 1992.

I have a good friend that is completely fanatical about Commander Keen so I will try and do this without any disrespect to the game. However the image on the far left represents the closest we had to “console action” in the PC Gaming world with “Commander Keen in Goodbye, Galaxy!”. The color palette was extremely limited, the sprites were very flat feeling. The controls were a bit wonky, because the only thing we really had to play on was the Gravis Gamepad… which was not even close to the quality and responsiveness of the Super Nintendo game pad.

If you look at the middle picture, Super Mario World… it just looks and feels better. The game was extremely responsive filled with large colorful sprites and tons of them on screen at a time. At this time PC Gaming was really enjoyable, especially for the deep simulation and roleplaying games available for it… but it was not at all a direct replacement for the console experience. If you jump over to the far right image… you see the infamous Mortal Kombat. The game looked amazing for the time, and hopefully stacked up against all these images you can see that as well. Mortal Kombat had higher resolution than the console games, and featured really cool photorealistic digitized graphics. Essentially all I am trying to show is that while there was a huge gulf between PC and Console gaming… there was an equally huge gulf between console and the arcade.

Paradigm Shift

Catacombs and Wolfenstein were early games in the 3d Shooter genre, but it really was not until the release of Doom in 1993 that the world stood up and took notice of PC Gaming as being a serious force. What happened was really curious. Instead of trying to out do the console action experience, developers started building new kinds of action games that played to the strengths of the PC. Processing large volumes of information and building 3D maps was something that was really beyond the Super Nintendo or any of the 16 bit genre… their systems were simply not designed for something like that.

I continued to play console games, but I shifted more heavily into playing the new crop of “post doom” shooters, like the amazing Lucasarts Dark Forces. Once again the arcade was still offering a much better experience than the console gaming. It was around this time that I was regularly visiting my arcade to throw coins into Killer Instinct, Samurai Showdown, and Dungeons and Dragons Tower of Doom. The paradigm shifted yet again in college, when I played my very first OpenGL games… and bought a Voodoo 2 3D Graphics card to attach to my diamond stealth 2D graphics card.

While the gaming experience started to pull ahead on the PC, it still lacked the titles I wanted to be playing. So when the Nintendo 64 came out, I was completely amped to be playing Mario 64. It was still an experience that I could not get anywhere else. But within a year of this being released… the PC genre leapt forward again and by the time Quake 2 came out it completely demolished the graphical quality of the 64. The same thing happened when the PlayStation was released. Ultimately the graphical fidelity of consoles will always be trumped by PC gaming, as it is a fixed target set at the release of the console… whereas PC gaming is a moving target always evolving each time a new manufacturer releases a new graphics card chipset.

However still during the PlayStation era… they were providing a unique experience I could not have on my PC. In the last decade this concept is all but gone. The games coming out for the PC are the same games coming out for the console systems. They have essentially destroyed console gaming as this unique expeirence that you could not replicate elsewhere. When I look at the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Xbox One, and Playstation 4…. I simply see PC gaming with a controller. The experience overall is not really different than what I have had on my PC for awhile, and sadly in almost every case the PC game will look better.

The Realization

I don’t mean this to be some love song for PC gaming, but it took me awhile to realize why I have been so lackluster towards the console gaming market for so long. They have stopped giving me something unique that I can’t get anywhere else. Sure each console still has a handful of exclusive franchises that you can only play on their hardware… but those seem to be fewer and further between. As I have tried to get back into the console gaming world, I have noticed that most of the “blockbusters” were games I long considered “PC Games”. I cannot fathom people playing Fallout, Dragon Age, Skyrim, and Mass Effect series on consoles. Yet each of those is considered a major blockbuster for the console genre.

That if nothing else was my biggest take away from the E3 show… just how few games there were that I was interested in playing… that were not also coming out on the PC. I guess the tables have turned to some extent… in the beginning I played console games because they provided an experience that I just could not get anywhere else. Today it feels like PC gaming does a really good job of providing the exact same experience that is available through the consoles… all you really have to do is hook up a USB Xbox 360 controller. In addition to that however it also provides an experience that I cannot really get in the same way on consoles… those games that really are not joystick friendly. So today it feels like PC gaming provides me that unique experience.

Wrapping Up

I need to wrap things up, because I am running out of time. Essentially I now realize why the console genre no longer excites me the way it used to. It stopped providing something I could not get elsewhere. For most players it will be a choice of buy a gaming machine or buy a console… but for me it never has been. I will always have a gaming PC, because it supports the MMO gaming that I don’t want to give up. The question will always be, weather or not consoles provide me enough of something that I cannot also get on the PC.

The Playstation 4 looks like it might, it has a few games that are exclusive and something I also care about. However in the case of the PS4 and Xbone… both machine are already out of date before they have even released. I give it less than a year before the PC is regularly producing a far better looking experience than either of those consoles. Anyways… like I said I need to head on in to work. I feel like todays post is extremely rambly and contorted. Hopefully it makes a bit of sense. I hope you all have a great day.