Apparently, the XBox 360 (with its 6 year old 3 core CPU and 5 year old graphics) is here to stay for a while.

I had read it would be replaced in 2012. However, that rumor was "wishful thinking". Now, 2015 is an unlikely rumor. Anyhow, its the "far future", computerwise.

This means many mainstream games will continue to be DX9 ports (or parallel developments) from way out of date XBox hardware. Almost ANY cheap CPU and cheap GPU can handle DX9 XBox ports.

Thus, big improvements in game-graphics might be slow to come. Rather, gaming computer enthusiasts might have to go to 3+ monitors and 3D to make good use of their hardware.

Update:

XBox and PS3 in 2014?

Many cross platform games are DX11 now, but since sims are almost never on consoles, it shouldn't have any effect on them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_DirectX_11_support

Upcoming and current pc games, cross platform, with DX11:
Battlefield 3
Deus Ex
HAWX 2
Metro 2033
Medal of Honor
Lost Planet 2 [
Homefront
F1 2010
Dragon Age II
Dirt 2
Battlefield: Bad Company 2
Aliens vs. Predator (not that it shows)

I wouldn't worry about it. Regardless, graphical ability isn't the shortcoming of the consoles, it's the cookie-cutter game offerings that are disappointing 90% of the time.

I know my feelings might not be shared by all here, but - I like that idea.

Some of the best games I currently have on the PC (visually brilliant games, like Just Cause 2, F1 2010, NFS Shift...) are also on the Xbox. The wireless controller is the best thing ever for casual PC games, and it's nice to know I will be able to buy a replacement in as much as five years. And all those games run at almost 60FPS on my 4890 at 1920x1200 and 4xFSAA.

It's true that GFX development might be held back at little by this - but for me personally, I actually like the fact I can spend less on the hardware chase. I'm quite satisfied with the way the "top titles" look today.

Also, couldn't it simple mean that programmers will have to find more efficient ways of doing things, like in the days of old? The console limits might just act as a limitation on their squandering of memory and CPU time, forcing them to make clever use of ressource-saving methods.

However, it's already happening that some Xbox titles get limited to 720p and 30FPS to make up their lack of performance compared to the console version. Certainly in the future it could become a true problem for the consoles themself to run the same kind of games the PCs will run.

Actually, I was just reading today that MS was putting out want ads for people to work on the next-gen console, but that doesn't really say when it will happen.
The upshot is console development is expensive and early ones are sold at a loss. They want to just sit back and make profit for awhile now that they've driven the costs down.



The Jedi MAster

It's also a chance for devs to catch their collective breaths. Retarding the progressive march of tech means the software devs can keep going with current invested techniques and hardware kits.

It's also good news for the PC world though, because now the PC is able to affordably outclass the counsols. As the graphic disparity increases between the Xbox/PS3, the value argument for said PC goes up with it.

Plus, the people who are complaining about bad graphics on the Xbox are usually the same hardcore audience that is willing to devote $1200 worth of income to a gaming rig anyway. The casual folk are fine with the graphics, and the dirt cheap hardware costs of a 360.

As a side note, Sony said they were planing a 10 year life span for the PS3 from the start, so this move from MS doesn't surprise me too much.

The worst part is Windows Live will have the NXE in windows for DirectX Games.... Queue W.G.E.

The Chinese will have a commissioned stealth fighter in service before MS releases another console

Agreed, this is a major benefit to pc gaming from the success of consoles and cross platform games. Devs have had to learn to optimize games for limited hardware, but while still pushing the envelope graphically.
The result? Decent low/mid level pc hardware blows away the consoles and performs extremely well due to the games being well optimized. A few years ago, the race for the most demanding games was ridiculous---Far Cry and then Crysis---and they simply demanded HUGE rigs to force everything out of them. If they were released with today's standards, I bet they could've performed just as well and with much less high end hardware. It was unrealistic back then, I'm glad that race has let up now. Hardware has longer life these days too. My card is basically 5-6 years old, just the newest version of the old 7800/8800/9800 line. Older card, still runs most games at max or close enough that it just doesn't matter. Mainly thanks to devs learning to optimize console games. The way it used to be, they'd just say "guess you need to spend $500-1000 again to run this one!" Glad that's over, pc gaming is just about cheaper than console gaming now. *That* is how pc gaming can get back to the forefront.

Crysis was originally a PC title.

Sure, it was hard on equipment. But, it pioneered use of DX10 and had fabulous graphics and a fabulous almost "sandbox-like" environment. One of my favorite games -- ever.

Now, Crysis 2 is out. Made first for Consoles, but with a PC version. DX9 only (so they say, I don't own it). Dramatically reduced graphical quality. A simpler environment (a city takes a lot less pixels). Poorer physics.

So, Crysis moving from PC only to Console-plus-PC has suffered graphically (if the review I read was true).

Thing is, the developers themselves (during a moment of frustration and honesty) "warned" this would happen a couple years ago.

Anyhow, I was looking forward to it. But, now I won't buy it.



Dragon Age 2 -- ditto from the review I read. Cheapened in every way important to an RPG player. Dragon Age 1 was developed for PC only and was shifted to consoles late in development. DA2 was console from the beginning and shifted to PCs. I won't be buying that one either.

Crysis seemed like just another directed shooter to me, no real freedom. It sure did look good, but I'd rather have a better balance of gameplay along with a nice looking game. Seemed more like a show off for the engine than a real game attempt.
Not worried about Crysis 2.

IMO, consoles are really screwing PC game development. Look at a game like TES V: Skyrim. Its predecessor (Oblivion) is 5 years old, and in the PC version easily runs into memory limitations on a 32 bit executable. But will Skyrim feature a 64 bit executable to avoid those issues? Will it use the massive leaps in processor power, GPU power, and memory availability over the last 5 years to enhance graphics quality, draw distance, and etc?

No, of course not. Because it has to cater to those same damned outdated consoles with their ancient processors and 512 MB of memory.



No, no, NO!

Those hacks and optimizations work on consoles because they're fixed hardware. They don't really do jack for the PC. And if they did try to do that on PC, you wouldn't like the results. You'd start seeing labels like "requires Core i7 and nVidia 5XX card". Targetting specific hardware with low level optimizations is a lot of work. They're only going to pick a few of the most popular product lines to support if they did it.

And, of course, no amount of optimization will get around fundamental limitations of memory and processor power.

I did not read the whole thread, but I feel this is bad and good in certain ways.

Bad:
- Games are being made for consoles, then ported over. Console are limited by their hardware. However, they are trying to keep the graphics nice or improved. This means they are not advancing forward in terms of map size, sophisticated AI, weapon ballistics and whatnot.

A recent examples is Crysis 2. It most likely moved to a city environment as it is easier on hardware. The SP is not as open, or so I've heard. The MP is now a joke with claustrophobic maps.

Good:
- We don't need a new video card every year.


I wouldn't mind if graphics only advanced slowly... only if games advanced in other areas that would improve gameplay. Instead, games seem to be getting dumber and more CoD like - smaller and less sophisticated. To top it off, the stories they product for action games are extremely lame. Something simple like Ace Combat 04's story was great. It also had a nice life like world. Now the new Ace Combat no longer has a briefing, takes place in the real world, and is another "USA gets invaded by an evil bad guy" plot.

Sadly, I think games have been going downhill these past few years.

I honestly don't get how they can spend multimillions on a game like CoD:MW. There aren't that many maps or levels!

In films they have a saying for a big budget film done right: "The money is on the screen." Whether in grand locations, lavish sets, fantastic effects, whatever. Then you have the opposite, the failures. Waterworld comes to mind. How did they spend $200m on a film that spent most of its time on a couple of tiny boats? Granted the loss of the primary set was expensive, but it can hardly be said the film would've cost only 1/2 as much if not for that. In other words, a lot of money was spent and it looks like they spent barely 1/2 to film it...it was done wrong.

A lot of these so-called AAA title games now are starting to become Waterworlds. They spend tons to develop it, sure it makes a lot of money, but did it need to? Did they spend 2/3 of their budget and time on just polishing off details? It certainly wasn't placed into content.



The Jedi Master

You know, now that you mention it ...

Maybe its all going into "overhead" these days. Most game developers are members of "conglomerates" now -- cogs in a "big wheel" that has to be paid for.

I followed Bioware very closely (daily) for several years.

10 years ago, Bioware was privately owned, virtually independent and made very good games with tons of content. 5 years (or so) ago (while Dragon Age was in development), they were sold for $300M to a group of investors (not game developers) -- wow, we figured they needed to double their income just to give the "investors" a "return on investment". Some of us predicted that would mean "cheapening" the titles to leave more money for investors. Of course, Bioware said no to that -- they said they would have more money to spend.

But, it gets worse, Bioware's investors sold Bioware again (to new investors) for roughly $800M. No way could Bioware pay back that investment with the games they were making. Their games took too long to develop and had too small a customer base.

Dragon Age 1 was the last of the old-style high content, high quality games (even though it too was cheapened significantly). Now, Bioware games have devolved so much I am no longer interested.

I think for every $100M spent on a typical Bioware game, $30M is for actual development (a pure guess) and $70M is for management and investor "overhead" -- only way to pay back managers and investors for their $800M investment.

So, "cheap to make" but "high priced" console games may be a permanent "feature" of the industry working to pay back investors (who maybe paid too much).

Considering half these games are Evolution Sequels (ie CoD4:MW, CoD4:MW2, BFBC, BFBC2, FM2, FM3, Etc etc.)

All they are doing is
Revising an Already Made Engine To Add Features and Fix Bugs (GFX, Sound, AI, Physics)
Revising / Refreshing the Menu’s and Game Art (Loading Screens, Menu Screens Etc)
Importing new Content into the Game (3d models, Textures, Sounds).
Re-Compile the updated/new Game Content implement the new features into the engines and compile the new code to a XBE Image.
Run From a DevKit Disk for Alpha, Beta.
Press/Burn a Few DVDs for Closed testing.
Publish

All the Hard work in actually building the GFX Engine from Scratch, Sound Engine, Physics Engine, A.I. from scratch is already done. Since all the engines that drive the code are in place, all the devs have to do is import content, and tailor the engines to their content and compile/test/bugcheck/test/publish.

Which is why Devs love the Xbox 360, the XB360 Devkit comes with pre-built engines.

The average AAA title today is probably worked on by a team of 100+ for 1-2 years. Assuming that the salary average is 50000 (experienced developers, artists, etc will command more than that, not to mention all the managerial types) you're looking at 10 million just in salaries. Then with the cinematic trailers, TV commercials, etc there's probably a couple million more dropped into marketing. So you're up now to probably 12-15 million, and you still haven't touched the costs of things like facilities, lawyers, voice actors, dozens of other things...

I think in large part games have just followed the typical business model. 10-15 years ago most game devs were working in smaller independent studios, understaffed and overworked guys who didn't make all that much unless they delivered a smash hit. Now, it's all about minimizing risk and maximizing profit.




Basically no one designs that stuff from scratch today on console or PC, unless they're a company like Id or Crytek who're mainly interested in licensing the engine after they finish it.

WTF do they have 100 people working on a game like CoD for? I'd expect the game to be done in 9 months with that level of staffing.



The Jedi Master

Well, first off, they have to make two games: Single player and Multiplayer. Also, they do release a new title every two years (the yearly release of CoD is due to two different dev studios working on the title). I don't see any of the major sims seeing that kind of launch window. Plus, Call of Duty games tend to be relatively glitch free, at least compared to titles like the just released Cliffs of Dover, which is a mess and a half. We're pretty much used to PC games launching in beta, and being fixed on the fly, where as most console patches are to fix MP balance issues that only present themselves post-launch.

Also, call of duty isn't as "simple" under the hood as you think. It's actually a lot of work behind the scenes to make a simple playing game. Games like DCS:Warthog are arguably more simple in design. They don't use multi-core very well, are poorly optimized compared to they're main-stream counter parts, and feature very very very rough-cut user interfaces. Plus, look how "dumb" the AI is in a lot of the sim games, vs Call of Duty.

Now lets look at the other things that go a long way toward making a game immersive. Animations, for example. Look at Arma II vs. call of duty re-loading animations. Arma's aren't fully modeled, your character moves his hands in a type of re-loading animation, but that's about it. Call of duty features the full re-loading sequence from clip eject to slide pull. Then there's mission structure. I've seen Arma II bug out and cause me to loose a mission because something didn't trigger right, or the AI doesn't do it's job. These happenings are far more rare in Call of Duty, which has a pretty well polished, albeit freedom limiting, mission structure.


Now, it may sound like I'm playing the role of console fan boy above, but here's the thing: I play my PC sims more than I do my console. I like the open community of Arma, the depth of FSX, and when it gets patched up to a decent bit of software; the authenticity of cliffs of dover.

The point I'm getting at, is that a lot of work goes into a game whether it's a sim or a main-stream console launch.

Sims also have SP and MP, so they get no pass on that. The glitch thing is relative. ALL games have glitches, the question is what type? Crashes? Graphical? AI? MP exploits?

These "FPS" (I use quotes because I don't put the CoD or MoH franchises into the same category as, say, the old CoD1 and MOH:AA!!) reuse a ton of code like animations, have "stories" no better than the average sim campaign, and play the same as the previous entries! There's no difference in how you play CoD4 and Black Ops SP, for the big 4 hrs you play them.
As for their MP, it's tired. Silly things like arty or airstrike "perks" make them no more than glorified UT mods with military models.

I won't even talk about CoD, that makes little sense to me. They spent years of time to make something that doesn't appear much improved over Il-2 and has tons of glitches to boot. If it was spent on the FMs and DMs, that's nice, but you shouldn't break or omit things that worked before (like FFB) to get that improvement. Maybe developers need a Hippocratic oath when developing a sequel, real or just a successor, that says "first do no harm to the old code."

How many films that cost under $50 million have you enjoyed? How many over $200m? Does a film need to spend $200m to be better or more enjoyable? No, in fact in can often be a negative slope with bigger budgets = more flash, less substance.

I prefer a game with substance (taking more than 10hrs for SP with a good story and setting, more than just variations of DM and CTF for MP) over flash (a WOW level that lasts 10 mins, nice animations and textures on endlessly-respawning-until-you-pass-that-line enemies, MP that is just twitchy-blasty-runny).



The Jedi Master

UPDATE:

Now both Micrsoft and Sony are hinting at 2014 for the new versions of their consoles.

XBox & PS3 in 2014?

As someone who is officially out of the hardware chase, this is a good thing.

Better be some damn good games coming on one system or the other to get me to buy another one. No more of this cookie cutter game crap. Not to mention I don't want to start over at some high price again.
If the next MS product doesn't support pc peripherals this time, forget it. Maybe Sony next time, if anything. Or just another round of pc upgrades in a few years. LOL