The last couple posts are entirely off-topic, but I'll indulge you guys in a moment. The removal of dedicated servers and replacing it with P2P hosting is a HUGE deal. They're essentially destroying entire communities consisting of thousands of people. The competitive scene that past products in the CoD franchise has automatically been killed off, because having your own server is a massive part of PC gaming and clan culture. A potential player could just go onto a server and get to know the regular players of that server, the atmosphere instilled, etc.
Dedicated servers are used by clans for many reasons as:-
- Most importantly - A social gathering point.
- Setting up an environment with highly controlled conditions/preferences - that can used for training, recruiting, amongst many other things.
- With IWnet and its P2P hosting, Infinity Ward have taken control away from the user.
- No modding, they charge for DLC (including map packs) and there's no competition from the user.
- They can shut off the multiplayer functionality of the game altogether whenever they please. Eg This recently happened with Halo 2 for Xbox.
Modding increases the longevity of a product. you often get lots of people who buy games specifically to play the mods available for it, having no intention of touching the vanilla product ever. Eg Counter-Strike for Half-Life 1, Bethesda RPGs (Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3).
The performance and reliability difference between dedi and P2P is
huge. There's no comparison. If a large group of people who're used to one thing one that's very good, you aren't going to take kindly with it being replaced with a wholly inferior solution.
thelostdragon wrote:However, I have made far better experiences with the accuracy of Nintendo Wii and it is becoming even more accurate with Wii Motion Plus now.
You don't understand how the Wii works at all. The motion sensoring has absolutely
nothing to do with camera, which is the important part when it comes to aiming. The wii camera had always had 1:1 accuracy, it's always been very good. In regards to shooting, there's absolutely no benefit gained with the MotionPlus attachment.
A mousepad might be an advantage over a PS3 or 360 control pad when it comes to first person shooters.Games like the "Metroid"-series or "The Conduit" play very well with the Wiimote and so so in online mode as well.
Yeah no. Wiimote ain't got shit on mouse for accuracy and speed.
The pointer only tracks when it's aimed directly at the screen. Given the nature of FPSes (and over-the-shoulder fixed perspective 3PS), it's easy accidently to track off the screen. No such limitation exists with mouse movement. Both the Metroid Prime 3 and The Conduit are victim of this limitation.
Moving just your palm is a lot faster than having to use your arm up to the elbow. If you're having to drag your mouse right across a surface in long strokes then you're using cheap low DPI hardware. Also learn how to properly overclock USB polling rates.
The fact of the matter is, traditional games that are aimed at the "core gaming audience" have been failures on the Wii. The likes of MadWorld, House of the Dead: Overkill and The Conduit have sold very poorly on the platform. Why do you think very few traditional genre games are produced for the Wii? It has little to do with them not being adaptable for the new control scheme (a good developer can solve this problem quickly and easily), the fact is the audience for those products is largely elsewhere.
Speaking of The Conduit, it's a piss poor game, bettered by several FPSes, that are several years old, on other platforms.
And regarding your statement that it looks far less, you might be right. I don't know as I haven't seen a direct comparison. However, I could imagine that you need trice the money to keep playing the latest games on a home PC due to all the hardware updates.
The costs amounts for console gradually amount, games usually are much more expensive due to publishers having licensing fees to the platform hardware manufacturers. Xbox Live costs like ~$50-60 USD per year, the service of PSN isn't as good (they've been slowly catching up though). You don't have a HDTV you have to invest in one of those. If you want to get the most of the online experience with console games, you have to pay for map packs - you're cut off from a significant chunk of the online playerbase otherwise.
First off, arguments along the lines of "having to update the hardware every 6 months" are incredibly ignorant. Do your research properly and you can easily have a build that will last you at least 2.5 years. Computer parts are cheaper than they've ever been and it's easy to build a PC with a high performance to cost ratio on a budget. RAM is really cheap (the speed doesn't really matter much either) and CPUs generally have long life spans.
Also the eras of constant PC game graphics engine arms races are pretty much over. Publishers know that consoles are the big earners, so these days most blockbuster games are multi-platform and the lowest common denominator hardware is usually the base platform.
They are all great to have. If I had the money I'd keep upgrading my PC as well. However, for gamng I like to spend money on a console every few years and just buy games and play them right away, without having to install them and without having to look for patches and all that stuff.
Oh wow, you're behind the times. Console games these days actively receive patches, if you have to patch your games to the latest versions otherwise you can't play online. A lot of PS3 games require Hard Drive installation, to compensate for the Blu-ray read times being quite slow compared to those of DVD.
I used to do that when I had more time on my hands, but these days I just wanna pop in a game and just play.
This argument is highly outdated. The PC environment has changed a lot over the years. With Steam being mandatory in a lot of today's popular games, auto-patching is fast becoming the standard. Hardware is far more standardised now that it used to be. The point is the experience of getting up and running has become much quicker and far less pain free on PC than it used to be. Whereas as I demonstrated, things have become a lot more complicated for consoles.
This of course is redundant with consoles. And from my experience, I even think that many console games look far better than their respective PC versions and all that without any framedrops at a constant rate of 60 fps. On PCs it yet again depends on your hardware.
Not many games actually run at a constant 60fps, 30fps is far more common. Due to the dated hardware (2005) developers have to make sacrifices graphically to achieve a constant 60fps. With mass market consumer generally being incredibly fickle individuals, who like their eye candy, developers more often than not target 30fps in order for higher graphical quality.
Oh yeah and your opinion is largely inaccurate. A properly optimised PC game will run very well, whilst looking a lot better on modest budgeted, no longer cutting edge PC hardware. Case in point Call of Duty 4, CoD: World at War.
You're not restricted to having to use mouse and keyboard at all. It's an open platform, you can use practically any accessory to control as you please. Most AAA released since 2007 have full blown native support for the 360 controller out of the box, rumble and all. When a 360 pad is detected by a game, they're often to switch all of the on-screen prompts for keys to the equivalent 360 buttons.