The Future of PC Gaming .

[Lizard]

I've been hanging out on a few generalised gaming forums just recently and there seems to be a growing resentment towards the mainstream PC gaming industry, a lot of this seems to be fueled by unpopular stuff such as restrictive DRM, the growing number of straight ports of console games which many PC gamers often find to be dumbed down and undemanding - especially shooters, and the fact that many top titles are being released in such an unfinished state they are virtually unplayable for many players - the current controversy surrounding Empire: total war being a prime example of this.


I can't help but feel we are starting to see a growing backlash against many of the big developers, as a result EA has apparently already decided to stop using DRM in it's future titles. It seems that many many more players are turning to the indie market to find their gaming fix and there have already been a few notable successes, I personally haven't seen a single mainstream game that interests me since STALKER : Clear Sky was released at the end of last year, and even that was a bug ridden mess that needed a whole heap of patches before it was playable .


maybe this the dawn of a golden age for smalltime indie developers, I certainly hope so, with any luck the big boys will continue to shoot themselves in the foot in the way they have been doing for the last couple of years. 

[BS-er]

The PC just may become more of a platform for indie games than for mainstream games.  The indie market is still not an easy ride.  However it is the sort of market where you can be rewarded more for investing TLC than for investing in cutting edge graphics.

[off topic]
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. looked quite interesting to me.  I'll have to try the demo soon.  They used deferred lighting, which is all the buzz these days, and is the way of the future.  Some Ogre fans are in the planning stages of adding deferred lighting support to Ogre, but it will take quite a bit of work.
[/off topic]

[Lizard]

STALKER and the standalone expansion Clear Sky are both well worth getting, they are incredibly atmospheric games , two of the best shooters I've played in a very long and actually played through more than once. I should warn you though that you'll need to patch them both and they will still have some minor issues, I don't think they are that much of a big deal and they didn't spoil the game for me .


I'd say that Clear Sky has the most refined gameplay but the orginal game is by far the most atmospheric, there were several graphical and AI refinements in Clear Sky aswell as it uses an updated version of the game engine.


I think the STALKER games and the original Dawn Of War series have been my favourite games since battlezone.

[Dataanti]

I think its cause people are get smarter and more tech savvy each generation and its getting easier to understand stuff and how to make games, since its easier more people are doing it now and successfully. <-- MY THEORY OWNS ALL OTHERS

[Lizard]

actually something that might be of interest to you is that the developers of STALKER released an early build of the game for free, it was to show off a load of stuff that they were later forced to compromise on, here's a link to it on ausgamers :


http://www.ausgamers.com/files/details/html/43042