There is a long tradition of mods, fixes and enhancements in PC gaming. The PC version often ends up being much better than the console version. The privacy and DRM issues with current consoles are bad, but this article demonstrates my favorite reason to just buy a decent video card for your existing PC, rather than buy a console.
My favorite reason is that games from 10 years ago still run, and as a last resort I can fire up a VM, on a modern computer. My N64 cartridges, meanwhile, stopped working in new machines as soon as the Gamecube came out. And if the console ever dies, they get harder and harder to find.
I got a Windows 8.1 laptop a few days ago, and was delighted to find that a game I first played 13 years ago worked out of the box (though I fear I may need to find install a mod to take advantage of modern screen resolutions). It was even usable, if not without its quirks, on a touch screen! For all the hate that Microsoft gets, their backwards compatibility is absolutely insane.
fwiw most emulators now are pretty "plug 'n play". No settings to fiddle, rarely even controller button assignments, and the number of bugs continually shrinks.
You can fiddle, and get 1080p out of your N64 emulator, but that's usually not required, in at least the past few years. Further back (possibly significantly) yeah, they were pretty awful for everyday users.
>> The PC version often ends up being much better than the console version.
Assuming there is a PC version of the game in question.
In the age since the first XBox, consoles have brought a lot of PC-style gaming to the masses (mainly FPS games), but there are also a ton of non-FPS gaming genres that don't have a very large presence on PC.
I used to be a big console guy and would love to move to a PC-centric gaming environment -- but because I don't do FPS or MMORGs, my gaming options are much more limited -- I'm into fighting and rhythm games.
Hopefully the emergence of things like the Steam Machines will change this situation and big named publishers start producing more PC-based ports of their console hits.
I am routinely amazed at the improvements the modding community makes even for games that are designed to be unfriendly to mods.
Take Mass Effect 3 for example. The game ships with Origin, which is EA's wannabe Steam online-store/community/DRM. The me3 executable is validated when origin starts up in an attempt to ensure that there's no way to play a modified version of the executable. Modders found a way around this that basically involves playing musical chairs with executable files, and proceeded to mod the heck out of the game from there. The game is not terribly friendly to mods so there's nothing like what you'll see for a game where a toolset has been released, but basic things like texture upgrades (and changes), unlocking and repurposing game assets, modifying weapons, unlocking the in-game console, etc.. (I'm a particular fan of enabling the flycam so you can fly around levels and see how they're built, dynamically loaded, and how they achieve optical effects).
Other games are more mod-friendly. Bethesda's games are one of the standard bearers, and stepping back into one of their games after a year or two can be a completely different experience with the right mods! There are mods that completely rework combat mechanics, add entirely new spell systems, total interface overhauls, you name it! If there's something you don't like about a Bethesda game, odds are you can completely replace it! This raises the replay value of their games tremendously, and all they have to do is release a devkit and be a little bit friendly!
Every once in a while, a botched and buggy game with tremendous potential will be buffed and polished by an obsessed modding community, revealing a classic that the developers were never given time to realize. Games like Troika's Vampire: Bloodlines or Obsidian Entertainment's KOTOR2 are still evolving online. I've been holding off replaying KOTOR2 for years because I know it just keeps getting closer to the game it was meant to be every year.
I'm rambling, but I really respect and love the PC modding community. It truly is something special, and I wish more game companies (EA, I'm looking at you!) would give it the respect (and cooperation) it deserves!
> Every once in a while, a botched and buggy game with tremendous potential will be buffed and polished by an obsessed modding community, revealing a classic that the developers were never given time to realize. Games like Troika's Vampire: Bloodlines or Obsidian Entertainment's KOTOR2 are still evolving online. I've been holding off replaying KOTOR2 for years because I know it just keeps getting closer to the game it was meant to be every year.
A game that is worth mentioning here is Falcon 4. More than 10 years after its initial release people have (and are still ?) modding it. More info at https://sites.google.com/site/falcon4history/
I was addicted to falcon 4 only a few years ago. Its a wonderful sim that even ran great on my laptop. Learning all the radar modes really increases the feeling of realism.
Also there's a strange online community. The everyone is middle aged and some real pilots too.
I am glad it's about a computer scientist (hacker) that performed an action that wasn't subjective and not some 'game designer ux product idea ui designer visual artist ux' snake oil who wants their game idea implemented.
Because obviously someone's title declares what he is capable of or likes doing. Because someone with a title that isn't 'hacker' instantly discredits his ability to hack. Obviously. Because people who didn't study CS can't be hackers, obviously. Because someone who does UI or UX can't hack backend things, obviously.
No because hen actually performed something that isn't subjective. The person in question fixed the software. It wasn't "Do this game idea I have".
Not sure were you're getting at but I didn't study/finish CS.
I wasn't referring to the title, I was referring to the skillset and action performed. But whatever.
I understand where you are coming from, or at least I think I do. You feel that has comments relegate UX designers to some time type of "second seat" in the software development food chain. And, perhaps as a designer yourself, that to be rather insulting.
But I'm going to put this out there and say your are misinterpreting his comment.
There is a whole lot of "rockstar" talk when it comes to software now; "amazing" engineers or designers that will change your world(TM). It would seem that revolutionaries and visionaries are a dime a dozen now. However, more often then _I_(and I'd argue the parent as well) would like, the whole thing turns out to be nothing more than smoke and mirrors. That type of behaviour bring the whole community down. Its not that UX designers or agile engineers or whatever are bad, they are clearly some of the most valuable and hardest working members of the technical community. Its just that when I see a piece on the next great mind in software, I get this knee-jerk reaction to think "hypppppppe."
Which is what I thought when I clicked the link. But this article plays counterpoint to that world. Here you got a guy, unkept, on his way to being a computer scientist, probably never meet a VC in his life, who is also a hacker. And instead of talk, he is putting forward some rather boring, technically difficult to implement, but useful, stuff. What's more, he is not trying to be like, "I'm better than this company," instead he's got a real grasp on the scale, penetration, and limitations of his work. Its just refreshing.
Perhaps the parent could have worded things better, but I'm not sure he intended to be insulting.
Tell that to anyone who has actually tried to implement a fix for a broken game design. I'm not even talking about programmers. Game design is not trivial. That's why so many games these days are either Mario clones or Doom clones. We know those are a safe bet.
Funny enough, when I was playing around with Game Maker ages ago, almost everything that got submitted to the forums was a Mario clone. Gameplay mechanics-wise I suppose it's as simple as you can get for a platformer.
Well, okay. I'll give you that. I never played Castlevania or Metroid much, so I didn't think of those. But, you're right what we see now are more about shooting/ short range attacking than jumping on stuff.
> some people made up long reasons for why such a lock could be in place, I was irked. Someone was wrong on the internet, and it fell to me to set them straight.
The lock was in place because one reason: Their developers did not know how to do this in a short amount of time. Their estimate may have been 2-3 months (because they would need to learn how to do it properly), and management decided against the effort.
This shows how valuable a well-rounded team of developers can be "as an asset". If you only have one or two developers for very specific languages or platforms, their skillset is going to be very limited, and you're going to miss out on big opportunities.
> Their developers did not know how to do this in a short amount of time. Their estimate may have been 2-3 months (because they would need to learn how to do it properly)
Eh, what? They're not idiots, they know how to change resolution. They just figured it wasn't possible to do a proper job in the time/budget for something low on the priority list, so they didn't do it. Game devs like to get paid for their work, too.
Not that it's worth going on about ad infinitum, but no, I don't agree with "Their developers did not know how to do this [...]" and "they would need to learn how to do it properly".
In fact I assume the opposite - their developers knew EXACTLY how to do this in a short amount of time (i.e. massive overtime), and they would NOT need to learn how to do it properly, AT ALL, because they know what they're doing.
If they knew exactly what they were doing then it seems very unlikely that they would decide against doing it, because Peter Thoman's method only took about 2 weeks of his own time. The method the developers were considering may have been an internal one that required some kind of refactoring, and they were either unaware of any other way to do it, or they were aware but didn't know how long it would take because they've never done it before.
Not every game developer has an extensive understanding of how to manipulate DirectX, considering that you can put together a pretty decent game by just using a game engine and ignoring the underlying graphics altogether. I can see them failing to hire someone who has experience with the lower-level stuff on PC, when the game wasn't for PC to begin with...
But Peter's method, as he himself said, isn't good enough for software that would be released by a company for people to use:
> Thoman says the difference between his fixes and official patches are primarily an issue of quality assurance. “When I write and program something, I make sure I didn’t make any obvious errors, and then I just release it,” Thoman told WIRED. “If it works for 90 percent of people, I already consider that a success.”
> From there, Thoman starts working for that other 10 percent, but he says that there’s probably one percent of people that he will never be able to help. If he were in charge of a commercial product rather than a fan-made patch, he’d have a responsibility to make sure whatever he released worked for everyone and didn’t break anything.
What's wrong with having having a checkbox to "Enable experimental renderer" and let people tweak the settings there? Certainly that's better than restricting your entire customer base because some of them don't have the right setup.
From a product management perspective: it adds complexity, and it adds other things for people to complain about your product.
People might complain that your car's top speed is 60mph, and that the acceleration is crap, and that is bad for your car and company's reputation.
It would be much worse if there was a switch a driver could flip that would double the speed and acceleration, but would soimetimes eject the windshield, exhaust pipe, and door handles.
Aw, come on, I'm sorry, but you simply don't know what you're talking about. Durante has some awesome skills and he sure as hell Gets Things Done, but this was much simpler for the original devs to do, and mostly a dreary slog of creating art assets, getting it to work reliably on all configs and running it through QA umpteen times. All that is very boring and just takes time and money.
Those fixes just change a few constant here and there. Any game programmer (or any programmer really) can do that with her eyes closed.
The real problem is QA, user interface elements and internationalization. QA will have to do a complete walkthrough for every resolution * language * FSAA * videocard combination possible. This is very long and expensive. There will be bugs and they will need to get fixed.
At the end they decided it was not worth it. Another company with different priorities might decide otherwise. But what I can certainly tell you is this was not due to limited knowledge from the staff.
I remember his fix from the Dark Souls PC release. The creators, From Software, basically announced "we have no experience in PC, this will be a direct port, and the quality is an unknown". They were quite up-front about it.
This bloke had a prediction about what was needed to fix the issue, and said he did a few hours prep work. Dark Souls was released, he confirmed that his prediction was correct, and it was only half an hour (from memory) between DS being released and Durante posting the first version of his fix. He continued to roll updates for a few weeks afterwards.
One bizarre thing was that all the art in the game was already hi-res. Nothing suffered for turning on the hi-res ability. It seems odd to me that art for console-locked resolutions would be made in hi-res and then displayed in low-res, rather than being designed for the target resolution in the first place.
I've personally stopped buying any game that is a port just because of past experiences lol. Also it's probably us PC gamers who have certain standards that are more demanding than consoles. An example is the feel of an FPS (half life and the like set that bar)... or just as in the article, the graphics settings.
I've actually been a bit sad lately, because I think the industry has changed so much in the last 10 years. The '95 to '05 run of PC games was awesome [1]... small to mid-sized companies churning out great stuff (especially in some of my favorite genres, like strategy). Then around 2004, I got engulfed in HL2 (+ mods) and WoW, and emerged a few years later to find quite a different PC games market. To me, it was basically now only Blizzard/Valve, with everyone else gone... or making the 'cool' games for console (I guess console gfx finally caught up). Good to see indie/kickstarter stuff lately though!
I miss the days when I would go into a random games store and find gems in the PC games aisle (and I'm not even that old). Last time I tried that it was basically all ports of console games and then the 25 WoW expansions lol.
[1] Some of my favorites from that time: Age of Empires/Mythology, NOLF, Blizz games, Unreal Tournament, Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Valve games, Battlefield, Dungeon Siege, Far Cry, Call of Duty 1, The Sims, Baldur's Gate, Quake... can't remember any more haha.
There are mods that fix some broken things, like all those mods that add widescreen support to older games, and it was skyUI that fixed the broken HUD of the shitty skyrim console-port.
Anyhow it is frustrating to see what the PC as a gaming platform has become, you have unoptimized, un-customizable, just awful console ports. Where the industry constantly rambles about the pirates, but at the same time are unwilling to invest in more quality assurance, that you need because of the wide variety of hardware configurations, instead they _just complain_ about the variety of pc hardware configurations (even carmack did it!), do nothing, ship broken buggy console ports that, on top of that, also include their borderline-rootkit DRM crap. Gee I wonder why people pirate their games?
Not that I particulary miss anything the big companies produce, stuff like <60fps/health-regenerating/gamepad-autoaim-controls/ etc.
So yes there mods that add higher resolutions to crappy console ports, whoop-dee-fucking-doo!
“My primary motivation,” Thoman said, “is because I don’t like playing games at low resolution.”
I thought that quote was great. The modding community always amazes me for their frequent dedication without any kind of financial reward or recognition.
He might not feel like doing this full time, but surely there is a market for this. i.e. A team that doesn't nothing but PC ports. I'd imagine similar issues would crop up every time so specialization might be possible.
Companies hiring other companies to do ports is commonplace in the industry. Such companies aren't usually limited to doing only PC ports (sometimes it will be a company that also releases its own original games as well).
Very cool. Tough, as often times it's a question of cost-benefit analysis and it's definitely possible the developer didn't feel it was a high priority enough issue (against other bugs, against shipping by a certain date, against other projects), so it's awesome that someone from the community could choose to fix the issue in their stead. Obviously not ideal, but very cool nevertheless.
I don't play games much and when I do it's on a really shitty 14" standard def TV, so is 720p really that bad? I usually watch videos at that and it looks just fine.
Compared to 14" standard resolution no, it will not look any worse. You would definitely notice on a larger, higher resolution screen the minute you had something to compare it to though.
I thought this would be about a fan (mechanical air-blowing device)... like, so effective that you could wildly overclock your machine or something. Disappointed.
Not only does GTA IV run perfectly smoothly, but there are community patches to make it look jaw-droppingly gorgeous. Very similar story there to this one, actually.
Definitely when it first came out, but didn't it get patched? I remember a friend of mine getting it when it first came out and it ran terribly. He tried it a year or so later and it was improved.
