No replies? I'm surprised.

Console games are dumb games. Historically, there is almost no PC game that wasn't neutered, dumbed-down, and stripped for the 'console crowd'. The only one I can recall would be the Orange Box, which was not without its share of stripping. There are also just as few console games that actually had some relevant depth to them.

Standards as a whole have dropped significantly. Bioshock is praised as the best FPS game ever made, and yet to anyone with gaming experience, it was extremely mediocre. The FPS part was boring and really didn't do anything new or exciting. The story was great until the halfway point where it disappeared completely. It didn't redefine the FPS like was promised. The 'Little Sisters' part was ridiculously stupid, and had none of the depth that we were told inspired the game. The game was an FPS with a decent story for the first half, and just an FPS on the second. System Shock 2, it wasn't even 15% as good as.

Were Oblivion to have been released a good six years ago +, it'd have flopped as an embarrassing RPG. Now it's set the standard of RPGs, a standard that is so low it's offensive. There was not one redeeming quality of that game, but it contained elements of "RPG" as the casual, philistine gamer sees it, enough to make them think it WAS an RPG. Again, this game alone shits on everything that came before, from Fallout to even Deus Ex.

Like it or not, stereotype or not, PC gamers tend to be both more vocal about their games, and expect a LOT more out of their games. Franchise games do extremely well on consoles, because they're easy - you can simply copy the last game. Franchises that do this don't fare as well on the PC.

To me, it's like an art gallery. The PC section is (or was) where you'd find the Monets and the Rembrandts. Sure there was the occasional crappy sculpture, but whatever. Then the console wing was for the kids who thought art was 'gay' and 'boring', and it just plays Dave Matthews over the speakers and has TVs and skateboards lying around.

In short - developers need to stop 'mainstreaming' games. Damn near 90% of PC games are shitty, stupid Xbox games copy-pasted to the PC. We don't want your crap. This is probably the real reason developers don't want to develop PC games, using piracy as a scapegoat - it's simply harder to make PC games, because you can't just hurl flashy graphics, explosions, blood, and whatever the latest fad in gaming is at us.

Couple things:

1) Crysis wasn't a bad game. It could've done a lot more to be better, but I personally enjoyed it more than Bioshock.

2) I wouldn't even go so far as to say 'screw Crysis-like games', because it was SUPPOSED to push the limits. Everyone SHOULD have games made for them, and if someone (like me) has a really kick-ass computer, why SHOULDN'T I get to play a game every now and then that really lets me see what modern technology can do?

If you don't like RTS games, don't play RTS games and then bitch that it needs less RTS elements. Crysis WAS its immersion. Anyone who thought otherwise is a fucking idiot. Anyone who saw the back of the box or the screenshots and thought "MY RADEON 9800 BETTER RUN THIS OR ILL BE PISSED" is also a fucking idiot.

The entire POINT of Crysis was hyper-reality. One of the most underrated parts of the game was the audio quality. Compared to a game like Call of Duty 4, which was an aural ABORTION (I've heard better sounds out of my N64), if you turn the sound (and you have a great speaker system) way up, Crysis becomes ridiculously immersive.

3) Crysis probably wouldn't have been as fun or interesting without the high degree of immersion present in it. It *WAS* the game. Just because you can't enjoy that doesn't mean it was a bad game.

Not every game should require such bleeding-edge technology that they do, especially games like COD4 where there really isn't that much meat to it. But to say "THIS GAME SUCKS BALLS BECAUSE THIS DELL I BOUGHT 5 YEARS AGO CANT RUN IT" makes you sound like a fucking twat.

Everyone enjoys better graphics, even if you say you don't (which makes you a liar). If you could get better quality out of your game with no performance hit, you would do it. However, if every game was chasing sales numbers and refused to push the limits like they do in terms of content, the industry would stagnate.

There needs to be a happy medium. If every game looked like WoW, which, to be honest, looks like it fell out of 2002, well, it would get boring quick.

They are many games worse looking than WOW. Look at the casual game market with very simplistic graphics. I guarantee you that the number of sales from casual games will make several big name publishers jealous.

Different people have different views, but you look at Crysis and expect to find a very well crafted fps. And it is well crafted, but not how you think. Crysis is not meant to make you go "Wow, this gameplay kicks ass!" (Although it is very good) It's meant for you to go, "HEY GUYS, I CAN RUN THIS FUCKIN GAME ON VERY HIGH, HOW COOL IS THAT!!!" In fact, Crysis is more of an interactive 3DMark than a full blown fps. Its the game by which all computers are judged. Don't bitch about Crysis sucking just cause you can't run it on your piece-of-shit computer.

I found the first half of Crysis to be very entertaining. The sandbox gameplay was well executed, and the nanosuit gave me options at both a high and low level. It was rather fun playing through the game like Splinter Cell.

Mate i'm running sins on a notebook comp from 03 and it runs great with no stutters with medium graphics....
(on huge maps allso)

Cheers
Warder

Actually he states exactly that. Don't just read the headline and skip what he has to say.

Games that scale down are the way of the future which a lot of companies need to accept. This is why games like Sins, team fortress, WoW, etc... do so well because many different consumers from different PC stand points can play and enjoy those games. Wth the exponential growth of computer technology and limited resources from consumers the gap will only widen between PC generations.

But the guy is dead on for the most part. What if when sins released we were waiting for 1.03 for it just to be playable out of the box? That is the level the PC gaming industry is at right now.....just push a product out the door asap and hope it gains profit, regardless of how well it plays.