Those AREN'T good examples though. How can you compare how different games do different things? SS2 and Bioshock aren't even the same SERIES, let alone the same type of games.
I would say they are, in that Bioshock was made as a spiritual successor to SystemShock 2, and they play very alike, and use the same mechanics in their gameplay.
But ok, how would you classify them as different? as in, so different they should not be compared? i am unsure why you would feel this way.
Once you leave the same game or the same series of games, you can't compare anymore because there is no telling what they might have added were they to release the game on PC if they are console exclusive and vice versa. That's like telling me that Bioshock has bad gameplay because it's not the same as UT or that Quake sucks because it's no Tribes. These "common trends" you constantly talk about can't possibly exist under the conditions that you've stipulated.
I would disagree, i feel we can make some apt comparisons as long as we are talking about similar games, for instance, we could compare UT99 to Quake3, thease are very similar games when looking at the big picture, fast paced sci-fi arena shooters with a similar premise, but they chose some different ways of doing things, and that can be discussed, and we can draw some conclutions from that.
Ofcourse, that is not a good example in this debate as they are both PC games, we could instead choose to compare something like.. GTA3 and Mafia, again thease are two games with a very similar premise, the theme is ofcourse different, thus there is no comparisons to be made there, but we can certainly make some comparisons about how they chose to handle similar aspects of the games.
Lets compare the PC-port of GTA3 to Mafia, since thease are the clousest, we can certainly draw some conclutions here, take something like controls for instance, both try to simulate a world where we can do many of the same things, you are a thug who needs to roam about a city and engage in criminal activity both on foot and in cars, and one thing we can conclude is that Mafia does have more options for controls, there are more possible functions, and the control methods of the PC are better supported in Mafia, the PC-port of GTA3 could certainly have had such things, but Rockstar chose not to include them.
That alone could just be a fluke though, but if you see something like that often, a visible pattern emerges, a trend, and that is what i am seeing.
But it seems we do agree on some level however, when you say "because there is no telling what they might have added were they to release the game on PC if they are console exclusive and vice versa" are you not agreeing that there is a noticeable difference between PC and console games? because that is at the very heart of this discussion, if there is infact a difference (and i would say there is), then can we not also say that some games can be "colsolized" or "PCified" when we see thease differences cross the border and end up in games on the other platform?
As for comparing Bioshock and UT, no, that would not make sense, that is why i have stressed that one should compare similar games, such as i did with GTA and Mafia, they need to be along the same lines before we can conclude anything meaningfull, that is a given.
And your results won't either. Additionally, you have yet to describe what these differences are in any way at all. You've single handedly written off the settings/options menus in your previous posts. So what is it about these other areas of the game that are lacking in choice on consoles?
I
have offered examples though, like the inventory system from SS2 beeing abscent in Bioshock, that is a common example actually, it is exactly the sort of feature that often does not end up in console games, because of restrictions on avalible buttons, infact, controls as a whole is a prominent theme here because of the difference in avalibillity, i am sure you could think of some examples yourself.
But i'll gladly add more, for instance, up untill quite recently, the dashboard view was often abscent in console racing titles, even in titles where it would make alot of sense to have this more realist camera angle, whereas they have often been standard in similar PC titles, even sometimes in the PC port of the titles, or part of the same series, apparently this was often omitted because consoles had a hard time rendering thease extra polygons, and later it became more of an institution that console racers where driven from behind the car or the bumper, and this institution seems to be alive and well to this day.
We can also look at multiplayer support, this is fairly standard in PC games, allways have been, even in singleplayer games there is often a small MP component you can play, look for instance at FEAR or STALKER, both are SP games but the MP is there anyway, maybe mostly because it is tradition and expected, the same was not true for older consoles though, as they lacked internet access, but again this became somewhat an institution, or tradition, that singleplayer games on the console did not need MP support, and to this day many of them do not have it (ofcourse we could argue if this is a good or bad thing, but that is besides the point), and alot of thease new cross platform SP games do not have it either.
This is running rather long though, wall of text long, so i'll let it rest here for now
WRONG. Out and out wrong. Entirely wrong. Not even close to right, it's so wrong. From what I've been able to gather, the entire UI for UT3 (for ALL platforms) was redone less than three months before the demo came out. And Epic has only said that they threw the UI together quickly, not that the PC UI was made to match the console versions. They were all designed the same. And the design isn't even being discussed here (graphically) anyway. The console versions of the game don't have nearly as many options as the PC version does.
Ahh, but then we do actually agree!
Looky here: "They were all designed the same.", my point exactly! this is what i am saying, what we got was a "one size fits all" UI, that worked on both versions of the game, what would have been better was two different designs that where optimized for their intended platform.
And: "The console versions of the game don't have nearly as many options as the PC version does.", indeed! and that's pretty typical would you not agree?
If I'm talking about something different than you, it's because you have not made a coherent statement about what your point actually is. You keep saying that the differences are obvious, but the only point you've been able to make about the UT3 UI is the fisheye effect on the text, which, as far as I am concerned, is a bad design on any platform and has nothing to do with consolitis.
So maybe you can start by giving me something more than "the effects of consolitis are obvious" and tell me something that is NOT wholesale subjective for what makes the UT3 menu more consolized than any other game? Even Uwindows could work on a controller, for pete's sake.
I have certainly tried to give you examples, such as SS2 and Bioshock, but the honest truth is that a term as broad as "consolitis" is so broad it is very hard to define and explain, it is not a techical term that we can analyse like a scientific law of nature, it is by its very nature subjective, and has more to do with established institutions than anything else really, but i think we can start with what you say here: "Uwindows could work on a controller, for pete's sake.".
That seems to be where we miss eachother in the translation, because the issue of "consolitis" is not if it works on the platform, but if it works well and lives up the expectations, because both systems have long running institutions and traditions that sepperate them.
Lets just take Uwindows then, it is true that you could opperate it on a console, but would it be good? no, it would be awefull and fidgety, if you like most people have the TV at distance from where you sit and play it would be very hard to see what you where doing, and the small menu items would be hard to select with the analog, it would be a real PITA, a classic example of "PCitis" you could say.
Likewise, we can look at the PC menu for UT3 and say "is it good for this platform? does it work well with my HID's and my screen?", and to that i would have to say no, there is much wasted space here, since i and most PC users sit no more than an arms leangth from my screen, and it runs with a clearer picture than a TV, i could easilly process more items per menu screen than what i get here, and they could be even smaller to allow space for more options, and that would mean browsing fewer menu's which would be good, and likewise with the mouse in hand, it would be no problem for me to manipulate more items on screen, since it is so easy to accurately select them.
But this type of menu works well on a console, for the reverse reasons i just listed, and thus i am left with the feeling that it is a console menu, it is better optimized for the console than it is the PC.
That is fairly understandable i should hope?
But to clouse, i will adress this:
Sir_Brizz said:
So far, though, for the most part I've found that "consolization" simply means "we don't like this menu design so it's obviously made for consoles".
Since this seems to be your take on the term "consolitis" we need to dispell this before we can move on.
The term should certainly not be used to describe something you feel is "bad", i have played some pretty bad PC-exclusive games in my time, and i will referr to them only as "bad", not as "consolized", bad is just plain bad on any platform.
The term comes into play with cross-platform games, when you come across something and say to yourself "Meh, this would have been done different/better if the game had been PC-exclusive", that is where you can apply the word "consolized".
The term is often used in a negative way, but really, the feature in question does not have to be "bad", it just has to make the user feel that the feature in question is not properly optimized for the platform he is playing on.
It is an entirely subjective term, this is true, and therefor it is very hard to describe, but the above probably sums it up best, "consolitis" or "PCitis" is when something does not feel like it was properly optimized for your platform, when you feel that compromises was made to make it work on both platforms at the same time, or that the feature was not made for your platform in the first place.
And that is why i feel consolitis comes into play with the UT3 menu, it feels like a compromise, not as something tailor made for the PC.
