PC Gaming Panorama: The Best and Worst of the PC Scene Today

Written by Jason Cisarano  on November 15, 2007

Editorial: I'm only critical because I love

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УIt was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness...Ф Dickens may not have known nForce from StarForce, but what he said could easily apply to this season's PC games. The hardware out there these days is nothing short of amazing. From Intel's Core 2 Extreme processor to Ageia PhysX to Creative Technology's X-Fi, PC builders have more power at their fingertips than ever before. Even mainstream companies like Dell are putting together beefy gaming rigs complete with factory overclocked processors, dual 768 MB Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX video cards and water cooling systems. Along with the latest video cards, DX10 is finally hitting gamesЧand it is good. The visual details in games like BioShock, Call of Duty 4, and Crysis are head-turners capable of selling the game without any help from little things like gameplay or story. After what seemed like a long drought, PC gamers are being overwhelmed by too many blockbuster releases back to back: there just isn't enough time to play them all.

A flood of titles is hitting the shelves this fall. Hellgate: London and Half-Life 2: The Orange Box released last month, while Unreal Tournament III is slated for a late November release. But besides the undeniable hardware improvements, what are all of these blockbusters really doing for the PC platform? It would be too easy to buy into the stereotype and say that PC gaming is dead compared to the consoles. But that fall lineup makes that theory look a lot like Swiss cheese. Still, only a dedicated fanboy wearing blinders in the dark during heavy fog would be able to deny that even with all these games to choose from, the scene is somewhat less than perfect. It's time to take stock of the good, the bad, and the ugly of PC gaming today.

Sequelitis: It's no secret that the game production world is sequel-driven. Players want more of the great game they played last year and developers are happy to minimize risk and capitalize on a ready-made audience. Three of the titles mentioned above are direct sequels, with a spiritual sequel or two thrown in for good measure, and Unreal Tournament III is probably the most egregious example of this Уsequelitis.Ф The recently released demo of the online play feels like nothing but a rehash of the successful Unreal Tournament 2004. Sure, the new game has different maps and prettier models, but all the essentials are identical to its predecessor. With one or two exceptions, the weapon loadout looks and behaves the same as always. The gametypes for online play are so standardized across all shooters that they could be called УtraditionalФ by now. The usual suspects are all here: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag and a terrain/control point capture game thrown in for good measure. You can bet your life savings that the online play in Call of Duty 4, Crysis, and Team Fortress 2 will all have some variation on most (if not all) of these gametypes. Team Fortress 2 comes the closest to innovation by wearing its cartoonish nature on its sleeve, so to speak. It makes fun of itself and the conventions of the Deathmatch and feels like a breath of fresh air. The only game that looks like it will come close to rewriting PC multiplayer is next year's Left 4 Dead from Turtle Rock Studios. It promises an asymmetrical zombie vs. human co-op play, and doesn't sound like anything that's on the market right now.



Modding rocks: The one exciting thing about the upcoming Unreal release is that it will serve as the foundation for a host of other, potentially interesting, games. Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, Elveon, Huxley, and American McGee's Grimm will be all built on the Unreal Engine 3.0. Of course, Unreal equals modding, and the deluxe edition of UTIII will ship with 10 hours of instructional video. The PC modding community has always had a punk rock, garage-band kind of feel to it, where a bunch of guys get together and decide to make a level or a mod, but like the great punk rockers of times past, they often have zero experience. They figure it out as they go, they jam, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. No other gaming community offers the chance to jump in and build games with so little overhead, and the mod scene is peppered with great success stories: Gary's Mod, Red Orchestra, Thief 2X, Counter StrikeЧthe list goes on and on. With UT2K4, Epic gave modders all the tools they needed: the Unreal Editor for building levels, plus a free plugin to use with a free version of the 3D modeling program MayaЧpractically a whole development pipeline right there. The new UnrealEd promises to be more user-friendly than ever, especially in the way it streamlines scripting. The game isn't even out yet, and eager modders are already planning their projects.

Stagnation: Look at current and upcoming PC releases and you'll see that they all fall into the tried and true categories: FPS, RTS, and RPG are all familiar acronyms on the PC platform. The huge Hellgate: London plays like a revamped Diablo with guns and a metro. And forget about global warmingЧhow many more MMOs can the world bear before a complete meltdown? It might just be a case of Уthe grass is greener on the other side,Ф but consoles and handhelds seem to have the edge here. Katamari Damacy, Exit and Cooking Mama have enough imagination and innovation in their little fingers to fuel the next dozen UT installments.

The closest equivalent on PC is the multitude of games strewn across the Internet, most of which are free. Kingdom of Loathing isn't new, but it is a great example of what a sense of humor, some stick figures, and a little PHP can accomplish. And then there's PoxNora, a free-to-play, pay-for-stuff online game that combines collectible cards with RTS-style tactics. Sweet.

To be fair to the big guys, there are some games out there that don't seem to be getting a whole lot of play, but really shouldn't be missed. If you haven't given the wry humor of Dungeon Runners a spin, well, it's another free-to-play game, and its satire gives a kick in the teeth to all the RPGs you've ever played. Portal, of course, is fun and unusual, even though it's something of a one-trick pony. And this summer's Overlord is more fun than a barrel of minions. The situation isn't as bleak as it looks at first glanceЧgood games exist, it's just that players aren't waiting in line overnight to get at them.

Consolification: What in the world was Valve thinking when they added Achievements to Half-Life 2: Episode Two? First of all, most of them aren't worthy of the name, since playing the game means also completing most of the Achievements. Second, wasn't Half-Life supposed to be a bit of serious storytelling, with a plot to make you think and characters you could get to know? Achievements make perfect sense in the brilliantly goofy Team Fortress 2 while practically destroying the immersion in Episode Two. This sort of УconsolificationФ has got to be the most depressing trend in PC gaming today. Why was one of the first Vista-only, Games For Windows Live releases a three-year-old mediocre console port? At the same time, blockbuster PC originals like Company of Heroes water down their genre, turning the RTS into a glorified cartoon. Maybe control point capturing and resource hoarding made sense in the sci-fi fantasy setting of Dawn of War, but adding it to WWII is just demeaning. For a demanding, true-to-life military simulation, Battlefront.com is just about the only place to go for an RTS. Their Theatre of War has realistic ballistics and engagement ranges, meaning that tanks and artillery reach out and touch their targets at distances of several kilometers. With the PC hardware currently available, why do we continue to settle for dice-rolling and gameplay abstractions that seem far more suited to the tabletop than the computer screen?

It's only a game... but it could be much more: Half-Life 2: The Orange Box, perhaps the most famous failure of episodic gaming, has lost that Valve edge. Once upon a time, Half-Life was a model for good storytelling. They eliminated the cutscenes and found ways to tell the stories of Black Mesa and City 17 through the gameplay. In the first few minutes of Half-Life 2, it was clear that this was the story of an oppressive city-state where Combine troops jab citizens with electric cattle prods and line them up against walls for interrogation. But what happened in the expansions? They turned Alyx into a giddy schoolgirl, nothing but a sidekick who backs Gordon up in the shootouts and makes eyes at him in the downtime. The edginess of the earlier games is gone. Unfortunately, most games seem to water down the reality of their messages in order to avoid offending anyone. A few years back Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter switched its setting from the Middle East to Mexico to avoid any possible connection with current conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan. And none of the many popular World War II games reference the Holocaust in any wayЧalmost as if they're denying it ever happened. If games are ever going to gain the cultural relevancy and respect that the cinema enjoys, they need to start taking themselves seriously.

The market has no excuse for making games that don't challenge the intellect. Over the years, the movie industry has produced hits like Company of Men, Fight Club, and Three Kings that take themselves seriously, have something (controversial) to say about the world, and make plenty of money in the process. Game developers hobble themselves with their attempt to please all audiences. At the recent Game Developers Conference in Austin, one of the recurring themes was Уmetrics,Ф that is, the ways that developers can measure players' enjoyment of a game. In theory it's great, since it allows designers to pinpoint the parts of games that players don't like and fix them to make a more enjoyable experience. In practice, focus groups are all wrong for artistic projects. It's the kind of thing that adds mediocre voiceover narration to movies like Blade Runner in order to explain the tough bits. If Leonardo had been bound to a focus group's decision, we'd know why the Mona Lisa wears that sly little grin. Or, more likely, someone would have decided that her smile is too vague and confusing, and asked the master to turn it into a nice smile, the sort every mother wants in every class portrait. Metrics and focus groups result in games that only aim at the bland middle, entirely forgettable, utterly uninteresting, and pleasing only to the least common denominator.

Final Thoughts
So the rest of that Dickens quote goes something like this:

"It was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way."

What to do when something you love fails to live up to its potential? The fall releases this year are so very ambitious, but collectively they accomplish so very little. The blockbuster titles are hard to ignoreЧthe marketing is insidious and they sure do look good. They're a whole lot like watching Michael Bay's Transformers movie. All those explosions are entertaining, but it's hard to forget that it's a completely empty experience. When was the last time you played a game that changed the way you understand gaming? That clearly did something to reinvent the gaming experience? I'm hoping that game is out there already and I just haven't found it yet.