According to this, the typical mentality of a console gamer is to eat up whatever developers throw at them and like it?
Fact is, a massive portion of PC games supports multiple control schemes. So its not that difficult to do. It only illustrates a developer team's incompetence if they try to hide the lack of flexibility in the design of their game with transparent argumentation such as the one you stated above.



If the developer is making such a narrow-minded, set-piece game that using a different control scheme "destroys the immersion", then the developer is not making a good game, period. No, they are not obliged to make a good game. But neither can they hide that fact behind ye olde "its not a bug/poor design, its a feature" argument.
And frankly, until you haven't played a lightsaber duel (multiplayer) with a keyboard and mouse, you haven't played a lightsaber duel at all. 3 seconds to line up a shot? Must be funny to watch. Wii version sounds interesting though, but not enough to warrant buying the platform.

And last but not least - when it comes to controls, game design can go much further than just making enemies slow, dumb, taking cover a lot and thus making every battle generally feel like a set-piece, non-replayable thing (Gears of War). Take Assassin's Creed. Since that game is all about melee, the smart thing, and not only for console gamers, was to include the lock-on option. It makes duels much more realistic, it makes the game much easier to play and generally is a mark od good design. Why? Because with that single feature you practically elliminated variation between how console and PC versions play, though due to the responsiveness of a keyboard I would still prefer the PC scheme.
There. One doesn't have to make "a dozen different games". Only a single well designed one.

No, it is to evaluate a product based on what the developer gives them, not what they think they are entitled to. If it's crap, it's crap. If it uses the controller poorly, then it does. End of story.

There's no, "Well, if I had the right controller" nonsense. The game expects you to have input device X and is built around a human being's ability to manipulate input device X. Not X, Y, Z, maybe W and T. Just X.

If you don't like it, that's your prerogative, but it doesn't mean that the game is bad.



Playing Tie Fighter with a mouse&keyboard is not the same game as playing it with a joystick. The latter is one of the best flight-sim shooters ever; the former is a bunch of tedious crap. Tie Fighter is most certainly a great game, so your conclusion is invalid.

There are innumerable games and entire genres that work substantially better with the right interface and substantially worse with the wrong one. Even something as simple as Super Mario Bros. has this. Playing it with a joystick is a much worse experience than with a proper gamepad. And while you can play it with a keyboard, it's not nearly as good or responsive as having a live gamepad in your hands.



Wait a second. You think lock-on is in Assassin's Creed because it eliminates the variation between the PC and console versions? That's errant nonsense.

Lock-on has existed in the console world for near on a decade, since The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time pioneered it. And Zelda has never been on a PC, and it never will; a PC version of Zelda was not even thought of. Lock-on exists to solve a fundamental problem with melee combat in a 3D game, period. It has nothing to do with wanting PC and console versions to play similarly.

They included lock-on for Assassin's Creed because it is the best way to make melee combat work, period.

I don't think the point of this thread was "my toy is better than your toy, so if you don't have my toy, just go home."

I don't care whether you believe that consoles are better gaming platforms than PCs; obviously, we know what Alphonse and SanChonino's opinions are on that point.

I reiterate: I think it's lame that LucasArts chose to ignore a large installed base of devices fully capable of running their game because it couldn't be bothered to make a compatible version. If it had not made this decision, it would undoubtedly have sold many more units of the finished product. And, yes, I think it's lame in no small part because I don't own any consoles, so it's personal for me, because I have enjoyed previous LA titles, most of which were available on PCs.

These "why PC gaming is dying" and "pirating PC games is so easy a two-year-old can do it" threads just get on my damn nerves.

If companies want to stop making games for the PC market, of course, that is their right. It's also my right to bitch about it if it makes me unhappy, so I will. And if you want to call me names for expressing my opinion, I guess that's your prerogative too. But that kind of activity doesn't make me look like a dick.

That's just flat out untrue.

Yeah, because, you know, the evil pirates would crack the game and nobody would buy a single copy! *rolleyes

And this:




Is a classic example of logical error. Namely, the assumption that just because *you* find the joystick solution agreeable and the keyboard&mouse tedious does not mean *everyone* does, and certainly does not prove my conclusion invalid. I, for example, played Tie Fighter by keyboard alone if I am not mistaken, and liked it very much. X-wing too before that.
Can't aim worth a damn with joysticks. Turns a game into a bunch of tedious crap as far as I am concerned.
Not that I will judge it so... as long as the brilliant developers don't force me to eat excrement in the name of their laziness masked as "vision". In which case they can take their vision and cram it up their rectal sphincters.

Why are you putting words in my mouth? I have said nothing to suggest that I think that piracy would be the reason that the game does not sell "many more units" on the PC. I simply don't see the market for the game on the PC. It would certainly sell some units, but if TFU across all non-PC platforms sold 6 million, adding the PC would not bump that number up to 8 million. Or even 7 million. 6.6 is about what I'd expect.

600,000 is not an irrelevant number, but is it really worth hiring a studio to develop another version, or hiring on the additional personnel it would take to port the 360/PS3 version to the PC?

What I object to is the idea that the PC version would sell many more units. Some more, certainly. But "many"? No.



The fatal flaw in your reasoning is this: aircraft use joysticks, not keyboards. Modern aircraft are sufficiently computerized and powered that you could use keyboards to fly them. But they continue to use joysticks.

While you personally may have found the game more playable with a keyboard, that doesn't mean it was more playable in an objective sense.

A joystick is an analog input device. A keyboard is a digital input device. A joystick allows the player to communicate to the game in very tiny increments; a keyboard only has on or off for each individual key. Tie Fighter, being a flight simulator-based game, can accept and reward incremental movement. Therefore, so long as the game rewards incremental movement, the joystick will be the more effective input device. That is, the player will be able to more accurately communicate his intensions to the game.



I believe in the purity of the videogaming art form. I believe that the developer should have the freedom to explore their vision, and that the consumers of that vision can accept or reject it on that basis.

wow, has this turned into a PC vs Console war of some sort? getting confusing now.

I don't think Lucasarts got where they are by being stupid or lazy. They're in this to make money, and if they thought they could make sufficient profits from porting FU I'm willing to bet they would.

They're also concerned about brand integrity: if most users have to scale down FU to a point where Lucasarts feels the presentation is substandard, that hurts their brand image. Lucasarts' major asset is the power of their brand image (its friggin Star Wars we're talking about here), I imagine they're very reluctant to do anything to diminish their brand appeal. Star Wars has been enshrined in western culture right next to apple pie, mediocre beer and Jesus.

As for the console market: they don't have to worry about piracy or DRM crap: whether or not piracy actually results in many lost sales, the prevalence of piracy definitely is scaring developers away from the PC market. Look at Rockstar, with GTA:SA they said they wouldn't even release it on PC, and they did release it a year later- after they'd sold as many copies on the console as they could. ♠

Getting the game to work on a wide variety of systems is definitely doable, but it is an extra expense, especially when you factor in after-market support. PC games are prone to bugs for a reason: its a rare coincidence for any two people to have exactly the same hardware and software setup.

I think a lot of developers just prefer to concentrate on the more lucrative console market, especially for sports, FF-style RPGs, and FPSs to a degree. There's a much large customer base, they're more accessible, and delivery is less complicated. Its also easier to generate a lot of media hype with a larger target audience.

I want my force powers as much as the next geek, but I don't blame developers at all for producing games for a more profitable and less complicated market. It's business.

Yea, My bad.
Maybe I shouldn't of posted the topic, its kinda turning into a flame war. Lighten the tone please, there is nothing wrong with debating but some posts are just asking the other side to start flaming...

Topics like this one lead to flame wars very often.

I noticed...
Sorry mods, if you mods think its getting out of hand could you guys just lock it. Thanks

lol, actually, its quite amusing , don't think i saw any flaming, mostly debating.

guess what, i played the demo the other day and it rules, sucks to be those that cant play it, get a console that can.

Give me the money and I won't complain.

 

I'm also of the opinion that the excuse is bollocks. I'm really not going to lose any sleep over The Force Unleased  non-appearance, however. It's been some years since I bought a LucasArts game, (though I've had the misfortune to play Empire At War) and a very long time since LucasArts on the box was a guarantee of quality.

 There's more decent PC games out there than I've got time to play anyway.

 

Simply put , they know that their game wouldn't appeal to PC gamers, who like better games, not shovelware.

 

(BTW, I do own a 360, but it's only for a very few games that aren't on PC, and wouldn't do well on PC)

 

 

I know a few people who will rent this, and thats how I will get to play it, all in all its just a big single player game, with VERY limited replay value after the 2nd go-thru.

Yarrrr.  We be tradin' in these games while goin' out on raids.  Planet lubbers be damned!

And that's why PC gaming is dying.

 

Heres why this game couldn't be scaled down(i think most of you didn't understand this because you're not familier with euphoria). The physics are simulated on the fly, and all of the animations are created off of that simulation. You cannot scale down the game without altering the actual gameplay because the animations would not be simulated correctly. The main point of this guy suey saying that they couldn't scale the game wasn't involving such things as graphics and sound resolution, but it was involving the actual gameplay that results from the euphoria physics simulation.

With Fallout 3, Far Cry 2 (so much about "it's too demanding for it to run smoothly on a PC" argument) and GTA IV (hey, look at that, its using Euphoria motion engine too!) coming to PC, I'm not really shedding tears over the laters sabertastic extravaganza from Lucasarts, especially since it seems it is going to be a game of "I-pwn-yoo-arse-with-meh-lightning-boltz" which admittedly is fun - for the first ten minutes.

So on one hand you've got Far Cry 2 with its ultra-crisp graphics and detailed physics simulation to the point of having the player character subjected to a physics simulation of broken limbs if one is careless enough to, say, crash a speeding jeep through a wooden shack full of bad guys; and also GTA IV using the same lauded Euphoria engine as the Force Unleashed - and on the other end you've got Lucasarts saying they didn't make a PC version because of  those exact same things making it impossible to play the game on a PC.

Interesting.

After SWG, I will not support Lucas Arts or Sony again. No more SW movies, games, or anything else from Lucas and no PSX of any variety (not that I've ever owned a PS anyway), but no more sony products of any sort.

But anyway, my moderate, $1400, year old laptop can run things like Oblivion, CnC3, and various other graphically and CPU intensive games at near max settings. From what i've seen, FU is not even near Oblivion in the graphics department or CPU intense as most other FPS or RTS games. Most moderate PCs can rival the PS3 or 360 while including antialiasing. Its pretty pathetic how certain companies view PC games and gamers.

The real reason they didnt port to PC is that PC games get hacked and they believe that the profits wont be high enough to justify porting to a different platform. Plus they would have to actually support the game against shoddy programming that becomes abundantly clear on PCs vs the static gaming platforms. Anyway, it doesnt really even look like that great of a game (like most LA games), so I'm not disappointed. Afterall, us PC gamers get Spore (even if the DRM is draconian) which LA and Sony are a long time (if ever) of having similar technology.

Such is life. Take care all!

I think it is lame, but I don't think it's laziness:"I just don't FEEL like porting it over..."<scratches behind>

It's just Cost VS Sales, they stand only to gain from the numerous console sales. With the numerous fantastic games that have been available to both PC's and consoles, I don't buy the scalability excuse-I can't play Bioshock on my PC at max settings, but it's still a beautiful blast of gaming awesomeness.

Beyond all that... As a tabletop roleplayer, what has irritated me the most about this mess is the delay of TFU sourcebook due to delays of the game, in a desire to not spoil the "plot" of the game. The books have been literally sitting in storage for months waiting for the stupid game to come out. Spoilers? C'mon... Anyone with even a modicum of common sense can avoid any information they might find to "spoil" the highly intricate plot of the game.

I barely have an interest in the game itself, which has swollen like an untreated boil, in the light of all this cross-platform, "yeah, it's coming out on the DS but it's way too awesome for your year-old computer", HYPE.

It might be a fantastic game, or it might be an amped-up Daikatana with Crysis-esque system requirements, leaving gamers shrugging WTF was that all about?

You can build a comp as powerful as a console for $500.

 

I've never heard of a $4000 computer except for those ones tools buy because they're too stupid to realise you can build the same thing for $1000-$1500, or at least within 10%.