Are we done with ''current gen consoles are trash'' talk?

I'm buying a PS4 in November but until then I'm not looking foward to even more reminders on just how I'm having a HORRIBLE experience playing all my games on 360. I mean, there isn't any big PC/console releases between now and the next gen so we should be clear, right?.

MISTAKEN

Batman Arkham Origins

We'll never be done.

@blu3v3nom07 said:

I'm only half-joking when I say that I fully expect Batman Arkham Origins Armored Edition to hit next-gen consoles by mid-2014.

@chaser324: You better fucking bring GTA V with you then too!. We had a deal..

BF4 is going to suck ass on consoles too...

I'm sorry but it's just the truth, current gen consoles are shit period.

I just hope GTA5 PC release won't be that far off this time so I don't have to buy it for ancient hardware...

@blu3v3nom07: Yeah, I think there's a pretty good chance that GTA V hits PC and next-gen at some point next year. Kinda doesn't matter to me though because there's no way in hell I can wait that long.

Elitism never dies.

@bigjeffrey: I'm trusting Rockstar with GTA5 on consoles and we won't have a way to make a PC comparison until at least next year so I expect whinning for a PC port instead of the usual ''current gen consoles are shit'' talk.

Buying BF4 on PS4 so I don't care.

Also, different definition of shit for different people. My definition: having to wait months or years for a port of one of the most anticipated games of the generation.

@zeik said:

It will die down a bit in the next 5 to 7 years at least.

I prefer gameplay over graphics, substance over style, you know?

@chaser324: Well then, I would like to know though: What do you think will get announced first? The DLC or the next-Gen release? I would think the DLC wouldn't sell as much on current-Gen if the next-Gen get announced.

@maccyd: Yeah, but the last few console games that I have played have frame rates below 30fps. The Saints Row 4 quick look is a great example of shit consoles impacting the gameplay.

@blu3v3nom07: I would think next-gen first, especially if they're going to do longer form DLC like they did with IV.

I think you mean that latter two the other way around, yeah?

@onarum

: you have to accept people like me who have GTX660 (Not TI) versions are trying to run games as they went for the cheaper option. Not to mention im not even running a ivy bridge, let alone haswell CPU means that im dragging all of you behind the times.

Don't thank me guys as my inbox is already full.

To be fair Im aiming to progress already with a motherbaord/CPU/GPU combo at this point so I would assume most people in my position would be aiming to do so.

On topic I think we can be done with that talk as that game is only coming out on consoles so it would be a "gone home" experience where you avoid spoilers. In that same regard you could consider the Vita this same console generation and tearaway is looking like one of the best games to come out for that platform. equally I had no clue Mario and luigi dream team came out in july in EU but that looks pretty damn good as well (why did it have such a delay in NA)

EDIT: my discussion is in regards to the PC aspect only. While most games coming out would probably look better on the PC we still have Beyond 2 souls as well as that rain game which looks really interesting ( my console aspects may be biased to PS due to this post) coming out pretty soon as well as brothers on XBLA so there are reasons for buying consoles at this point

People really get upset about this sort of stuff? Wimps.

@greggd: Yeah, crap, edited. So used to saying the other one :P

@maccyd: Gameplay over graphics is a false dichotomy when the game's own graphics engine isn't optimized to the hardware.

@maccyd: Gameplay over graphics is a false dichotomy when the game's own graphics engine isn't optimized to the hardware.

GTA V, Burial at Sea, Persona 5, The Walking Dead Season 2, and that's just off the top of my head. I've still got reasons not to sell my PS3.

EDIT: Also P4A: Climax

@maccyd: Easy mistake

@pyrodactyl:

I meant to say "BF4 will suck ass on CURRENT gen consoles" because, well, you know it will, also it will be out on PC (I'm not even considering current gen consoles on this one) first so those without a decent PC will be the ones doing the waiting in that case at least.

And yeah I'll only get GTA5 on PC if the release date for it is not that far off (could happen), otherwise I'll be forced to get it for my PS3... which is a shame because I really wanted to play a game of that magnitude on a platform that can deliver it's full potential, instead of it being hindered by ancient hardware...

Next gen games will be shit, I guess having a good framerate makes up for shitty launch titles? Meanwhile, Dark Souls 2 is coming out in March.

@veektarius: It usually still retains the same basic gameplay. A game with brilliant graphic, frame rate etc. but with bad gameplay is still a bad game.

You might not realise just how much time you will have spent on loading screens and bs intro videos this console generation. Quality games at the start and finish, with a sea of trash in the middle.

@maccyd: A game with horrible graphics, frame rate etc. but with good gameplay is still a bad game.

Example: Saints Row IV for consoles.

@donutfever: Okay so you're saying Crash Bandicoot, Super Mario 64, Banjo Kazooie, Metal Gear Solid etc are bad games just casue their graphics aren't good compared to modern times? If I wanted good graphics, I'd watch cgi, gameplay is a essential part of games hence the "game"play.

No it won't, this conversation will occur:

"the animations and graphics on this PS4 game are amazing!"

"yeah but it runs so much better on my PC, has more anti-aliasing and physX shit."

Top-end PCs will always be better than a console, even a new one, and you can't shut up elitists.

I've been quietly enjoying my smug superiority since the 8800GTX launched :P

The consoles have been behind for 6 years now provided you were willing to spend the money, and with this new gen appearing to only be playing catch up in performance rather than leap frogging the PC I would fully expect the same discussion to kick off again in a broader sense even sooner than this time around.

They're not trash, but they're definitely getting a little long in the tooth.

They self designate at least partially as consumer reporters so its not wrong of them to bring up when one version of a game is significantly worse than another. Sorry if facts burn your ass, doesn't change the facts. Plenty of game sites don't bring this stuff up, use PC footage in their video review then mention the consoles first when talking about platforms. If being misled and misinformed comforts you there are plenty of places to turn.

I feel like most of you probably shit on the Wii for its graphics in the past so reading this shit is a laugh and a half.

Consoles earn their trash talk when they've held games back for so long. People who don't understand computers assume everything runs on magic. Look at all this games coming out on next gen that aren't coming out on old hardware. Stuff like The Division and Destiny as well as Battlefield with 64 players (I recall that had a lot to do with network limits too, though.) simply couldn't be done on old hardware, no matter how much you lower the graphics. Remember when you dropped an axe and watched it slide down a hill in Oblivion instead of floating there where you dropped it? How about all those zombies in Dead Rising? Older hardware can't do certain things. People who haven't seen tomorrow keep assuming its going to be exactly like the day before, then tomorrow comes and you get a free jetpack. I keep hearing how graphics can't look any better and that's just horse nonsense. It goes the same for new gameplay ideas.

If graphics and processing power doesn't matter why aren't we playing Battlefield 3 on an SNES, it should be just as good since computing power doesn't matter right guys?

@chaser324: it wont and Rockstar confirmed its gona be ps3/360 only so yea..

They are trash. It's amazing developers are able to get these games running on such limited RAM.

It's detrimental to games that they have stayed around this long, it has been the longest generation ever, no? They have halted games moving forward because of their limited tech, the PC is capable of the same/more than the next generation consoles but developers having to make their game as profitable as possible means making sure they run on the old tech too.

Mostly I just want better AI though, nicer graphics are well, nice, but AI in games is still pretty terrible.

Edit: and I say they are trash in comparison to the standards today, the consoles have always looked worse than PC, but the gap has been pretty gigantic for too long this generation.

If you think back to previous generations, console games weren't actually that bad in comparison to PC. The original Xbox compared well until around 2004 when Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 came out, and the Dreamcast looked better than PC games at the time. Probably the first console to do that ever.

Nope it never will. I'm bout to go die and go back to hell now..

Developers are pushing these 5-6 year old platforms too far with games like Far Cry 3 and Saints Row 4. They should really be scaling back draw distances and detail a lot more to hit at least 30FPS. I'm glad they are pushing the limits and allowing the more true experiences on PC though.

@maccyd: Do you prefer graphics over playability? The issue isn't limited to visuals and effects and object details, it's resolution/clarity and framerate. Framerate has a direct effect on the playability and control of most games that aren't turn based or menu driven.

When the consoles start having games that run under 30 frames per second like Far Cry 3, Saints Row 4, Last of Us, and probably GTA5, it's a problem.

And the reason is developers trying to push better effects and details so that their games look better in demos and screenshots while sacrificing playability. The systems have their limits, and something has to give.

Even late gen games from last gen like Doom 3, Chaos Theory, and Half Life 2 on xbox were very playable, and games like God of War 2 and Burnout Revenge had good framerates and pushed the systems hard as well.

End of thread. This is why the nextgen still has a long way to go.

I'm sorry, in terms of value and quality, current-gen consoles are trash when compared to a modern PC. This is a fact; you can verify it by comparing the graphics, and the game libraries, of a current-gen console to a PC.. How old are the consoles again, 7-ish years? Even at their launch a decent PC was almost certainly more powerful, and PC's have grown over the years. Something important to keep in mind is that consoles are a closed box: you're stuck with the same hardware for a whole generation. Whereas on a PC the hardware evolves over time; you don't have to always buy a new PC, you can simple upgrade particular parts.

At launch of the PS4 and xbone other PC's launched around the same time will be more powerful and that gap will widen a great deal within the next 1-2 years, and keep on widening until the console gen after that.

Something else to think about is selection of games. When you buy a new console you can play all of its own, and maybe some older games from the previous console emulated on it (we're not really getting true backwards compatibility anymore). This console will get a bigger library over time but at the end of the generation it's done. When you buy a new PC, you have all the current games, PLUS practically every game ever made for a home computer available (with some work, for older games, anyway). To say nothing of emulating past console generations! Not to mention that thanks to excellent digital distribution of games on PC (via Steam, Amazon and such), games are typically far cheaper on PC than on console a few months after a given game's release. When you buy a new console you do spend less money up-front for the machine; say $400 instead of like $1000. However over time with a PC you'll make that difference back via Steam sales and such.

Even without a powerful PC, it's still probably a better choice than a console atm. I'm using a 4 year old laptop, and even that is leaps and bounds above a 360/PS3 in terms of power, and games library. I can play many modern PC games on "low" settings but they'll still look better than on consoles. When the PS4 comes out it'll be more powerful than my laptop, but I am considering buying a new PC (a desktop so I can upgrade it), which will be more powerful than the PS4. I'll have my Steam library available (you won't immediately get your old PS3 games available on your PS4 now will you?), and they'll all look much much nicer (and run much more smoothly at a nice 60 fps).

I'm not trying to be elitist; though whenever someone speaks up in support of PC gaming you immediately see that person called an elitist. I just can't see how you can prefer a console to a PC right now. You could get away with a console after the PS4/xbone come out for a couple of years, but after that the gap between them and a PC will be really noticeable again. Sure you can say "but I'm after the gameplay!" but don't forget that you can achieve the same quality of gameplay on a PC, looking sharper, with more going on thanks to better hardware (such as more players on a multiplayer battlefield).

Hey now let's not start any dumb rumors, there is nothing to suggest GTA5 will run bad, especially with Rockstar's excellent track record and the that they're primarily a console developer with a lot of experience.

Though I can't believe how bad some games have been lately, some developers just don't seem to acknowledge or care about the problems, and it's not all to do with the hardware, most of these cases seem more like the priorities are just fucked.

@sooty: Very well said. Technology has advanced a lot in the 8 years since the 360 came out. I wish you console gamers could experience the glory of taking that leap from the couch to the monitor (or to the couch, if you prefer). The difference IS that severe. A 360 has 512 Megabytes of RAM. 512 MEGABYTES. Your phone probably has more RAM than that. Games are technology, and without new technology, games stagnate.

We've seen now that it's important to set a fire under Microsoft and Sony about these things. 8 fucking years before upgrading your hardware is absurd, and they probably would have stretched it out even further if they could. Imagine having an 8 year old PC, or an 8 year old cell phone. And you're STILL paying 200 dollars for them, plus a ridiculous fee to go online (and other basic functionality) so you can get ads sold to you. What?

Honestly, make the switch. There's nothing a console can do that a PC can't. You can play on a TV or a monitor, you can use a 360 controller or a keyboard, and you can choose whether to prioritize frame rate or pretty graphics. And it's not as expensive as you think, especially since you can buy it one or two pieces at a time. The money you save from Xbox Live could easily buy you 10-15 games in a single Steam Sale.

Make the common sense choice.

@viciousreiven: Ah, I wouldn't be so sure about that track record. GTA IV ran like crap on the 360--I'm actually fairly sure that's why so many people hated the driving. It was really quite good, if the game ran fast enough for everything to feel fluid.

The issue is, no one realised that until a couple of years after release, because the PC version of GTA IV was so poorly optimised that, even for people with pretty beastly systems at launch, it had some major smoothness issues. Going back and playing it on a decent PC put together after 2009, you realise just how cruddy the console version felt by comparison. I was watching a friend play it on an Xbox recently: I asked him, "Why's it lagging so much?". He just said, "It isn't". Seriously, it's like night and day.

I'm really looking forward to V, but I'm worried about a repeat of IV in performance. It'll be kind of a bummer, but eh, still probably gonna be a great game.

I hate to break it to you, but PC's are vastly more powerful and vastly more flexible. This means that games are held to a higher standard - 1080p, 60 frames is a minimum, not a barely out of reach maximum - and both of those things lead to a smoother gameplay experience. As for flexibility, by that I mean that you can get your games from several different platforms (Steam, GOG, Origin) and all of them are competing with each other, so the consumer gets games for cheap. And then there are the mods, which add to games, alter the game's mechanics, or just do some fun, humorous, and weird things to games.

Sorry, that's simply truth. It's not "preference" or "opinion", it's fact. Bragging about it is elitist, but stating it is not. Here's another fact - 720p, 30 frames per second is a perfectly acceptable way to play games. I may not have even moved to PC gaming if consoles had stuck to that, but with a tiny handful of exceptions no AAA game released in the past few years have been able to even keep up with that standard. Even Gears of War 3 was 540p or something weird like that, and it couldn't quite keep 30 through some parts. This is painful. This is not the way that games should be played.

Current-gen consoles have none of these things. Their advantage is convenience, but frankly it doesn't take much work to maintain a good gaming PC. And convenience kind slipped away this generation, what with the extremely slow PSN downloads and the changes to the Xbox dashboard that made it slower and clunkier.

@yinstarrunner said:

Yeah hopefully Sony and Microsoft don't start another war over a "longest life cycle" marketing bulletpoint that nobody but the associated defense forces really cared about anyways.

I understand this, but remember that it's not just graphics that are getting a bump. More power allows developers to do more things. Mass Effect, Crysis, Red Dead Redemption, and Skyrim all have gameplay elements that could not be done with a PS2.

Like I said in my post above this one, though, a smoother framerate makes for a more enjoyable experience, gameplay included. We're not just getting heavily updated graphics laid on top of old ideas. Well, we are at first - mostly - but at some point, games are going to come along that take advantage of what the PS4 and the Xbox One can do and no console before them could. Note that with your mentality, we might still be stuck with the power of an Atari, or maybe stuck with the polygon count of a PS1. Certainly Crash Bandicoot 1-3 were great, and still are, but why not push power forward so we can do new and better things with games?

For the record, I've been playing 3DS and PS2 games, and I played the original Half-Life again over the summer. Super Metroid is the greatest game of all time, and Metroid Prime is pretty close. I am no stranger to placing an importance on gameplay and substance.

@spudbug: People mostly don't see/care about the difference in frame rate. The thing is still goddamn playable, why do you think those games still sell better on consoles?

@maccyd said:

Good appeal to popularity. That's about the flimsiest argument in the book.

Yes, people can and do see differences in framerate, even between 30 and 60 FPS. There's a reason the Call of Duty developers will sacrifice anything to achieve a consistent 60 frames in their games. It's a subtle thing that adds a lot to the feel and flow of the game. It's one of the myriad reasons why that game is so enormously popular on consoles, even though a lot of the gamers who play those games so much probably wouldn't be able to tell you that. Yes, it's that important. Here's a video of CoD as an example, by the way.