Mike Capps Upset About Lower Gears PC Scores

[QAPete]

Play a high-end console game: $60 for the game, $500 for the game machine, $500 for an HD flatscreen. Total cost: just over a grand.

The present and future of computer gaming is on the console, not the PC. Capps should know this, he's a bright fellow. So a big WAAAAAAAAH to Dr. Capps regarding why nobody cares about GoW for the PC.

[Anuban]

Originally Posted by Soggy_Popcorn

Oh, well, then I guess Halo and Counter-Strike are better games than UT.... No.

Actually the general consensus among shooters is they are ... sorry but once again real world market conditions are what dictate which product is the superior one in its segment. I didn't make the rules folks I'm just letting you know how it is. You can have your own opinions of course and that is the NOT the issue here at all. The issue is the majority and the markets rule and if these shooters have a greater market share and a greater fanbase and more capital has been spent on them as product purchases than UT well yeah then the market and majority have indeed declared which is the better product. Now you and I may disagree since we like UT and its offspring better for whatever reasons but that is not the point in this particular instance.

[[GU]elmur_fud]

Originally Posted by QAPete

Play a high-end console game: $60 for the game, $500 for the game machine, $500 for an HD flatscreen. Total cost: just over a grand.

The present and future of computer gaming is on the console, not the PC. Capps should know this, he's a bright fellow. So a big WAAAAAAAAH to Dr. Capps regarding why nobody cares about GoW for the PC.

This sort of sentament annoys me. PC gaming isn't dead the only reason it is in any sort of questionable status is because xbox by policy gobles up PC titles and makes them xbox exclusives to promote console sales.

(and then it claims it gonna try and Help make PC gaming stronger )

Nintendo and playstation have there own niches in the gaming market xbox just tries to steal from all the others. MS failed to steal from Nintendo by buying out rareware (makers of Donkey Kong) even though they did get the Conker IP out of the deal () I know they tried the same tactic against sony but I don't remember to what degree of success.

So failing in those areas some brilliant chap at MS said "hey lets just pull from the PC market we already have a chokehold there" ... Morale of story xbox is bad for PC gaming.

Since xbox relies on it though it is shooting itself in the foot.

[elmuerte]

Erm... maybe I should have been a bit more clear, action games with non stop action that actually have a story to present...

Originally Posted by -=WolverinE=-

Breed, all Doom Games, all Duke Nukem games, Halo, Heavy Metal F.A.K.K. 2, Unreal series.... Should I add more?

Anyway, Halo, FAKK 2, Unreal, ... there are not non-stop action. The action is stopped quite often. For example in Unreal 1. No action until the second level (wasn't a bad thing, even a good thing because it build up quite some tension, but there were a lot of other places where nothing really happened or where the player was stopped in his track).

Originally Posted by EXE-973

All three Serious Sam games just to start with. I could come up with a lot more but I think I'll just stick with what you asked.
Why are you sticking to the gaming years prior to 1995. You do realize that this is not proving your point as you seem to be ignoring the 13 years that came after. You know, that time frame the completely disproves your point

SS also had quite some places where nothing happened at all.

I was sticking to the 1990-1995 period because the point of the person I replied to was that PC gaming has originally 1st person oriented. In that time frame the shape PC gaming was formed into a more definitive state.

[elmuerte]

Originally Posted by QAPete

Play a high-end console game: $60 for the game, $500 for the game machine, $500 for an HD flatscreen. Total cost: just over a grand.

Pas $50 for a game, $1000 for a game machine. Total cost: just $10 below a console. Of course you could also spend $1500 on a PC. But there are also people that spend $60 on an Iron Man game.

But there is a point about the console lasting for 6 years where for the PC you need to upgrade 2-3 times to be able to play the latest and the greatest games (then again, console games can never be much more powerful than the games initially released, this also begs the question why all that processing power is really needed (e.g. crysis... c'mon)).

[LMN8R]

Originally Posted by Kantham

So you're saying that Stalker/Crysis is better than Gears of War on the PC?
Name me one incredible shooter recently, other than CoD4.

Absolutely I am. STALKER is one of my favorite games of 2007, and Crysis is terribly underrated by the kiddies who love to post here. Both have issues, but neither has issues nearly as terrible as the technical problems Gears had, and still has, and both have gameplay far superior to the repetitive stop-and-pop in Gears.

STALKER is an incredible, open-ended experience with gunplay that no other game has surpassed. A very realistic ballistics model, weapons that feel fantastic and get better as you go on, the most intense atmosphere that any game has ever achieved, and great combat AI that easily rivals that of FEAR.

Crysis is a mindblowing experience, especially when you get to levels like Assault and those immediately following it. People cast it aside as nothing but a pretty, generic game, and those people tend to be those judging it without playing it or playing nothing but the demo. The demo is an incomplete representation of the entire game, and doesn't even come close to the FPS nirvana of the previously mentioned levels. It does die off somewhat for the last third, which sucks, but the first 2/3 of the game more than makes up for it.



Gears? Crappy story and dialog, repetitive gameplay, awful GFW Live implementation (no dedicated servers, features split between silver/gold, etc.), unforgivable hour-long installation, and more.

Don't even mention Call of Duty 4 in the same post as those games as if it holds a candle to them. The multiplayer is a hell of a lot of fun, no doubt, but the single player is as overrated as Crysis is underrated. Endlessly respawning enemies, characters I don't care about, and more. As for other games, did you forget about Orange Box? Especially Team Fortress 2, considering that the console version of that game doesn't even come close to the PC version.

[elmuerte]

Originally Posted by LMN8R

Absolutely I am. STALKER is one of my favorite games of 2007, and Crysis is terribly underrated by the kiddies who love to post here. Both have issues, but neither has issues nearly as terrible as the technical problems Gears had, and still has, and both have gameplay far superior to the repetitive stop-and-pop in Gears.

STALKER is an incredible, open-ended experience with gunplay that no other game has surpassed. A very realistic ballistics model, weapons that feel fantastic and get better as you go on, the most intense atmosphere that any game has ever achieved, and great combat AI that easily rivals that of FEAR.

I stopped playing stalker after about 2-3 hours or something.
The gameplay, story but mostly the game world were quite boring.
Was there anything else besides the usual fetch and retrieve missions, which usually came down to travel to X and kill everybody.

[Anuban]

Originally Posted by LMN8R

Gears? Crappy story and dialog, repetitive gameplay, awful GFW Live implementation (no dedicated servers, features split between silver/gold, etc.), unforgivable hour-long installation, and more.

Don't even mention Call of Duty 4 in the same post as those games as if it holds a candle to them. The multiplayer is a hell of a lot of fun, no doubt, but the single player is as overrated as Crysis is underrated. Endlessly respawning enemies, characters I don't care about, and more.

You are of course more than entitled to your own opinion but millions of gamers and the market would say otherwise. FTR I also enjoyed Stalker and Crysis ... I liked Gears a bit more than Stalker because of the fantastic Cinematic nature and the weapons feel more solid imo and the graphics of course completely destroy Stalkers ... the animation in Stalker is not all that great and the AI is good but I think Gears is a bit better; Crysis though I feel was superior to Gears in almost every way except the ending but yeah I did like that game much more than Gears although I still think overall Gears has the better and more consistently great graphics.

[KaiserWarrior]

Originally Posted by Anuban

Oh and to those of you who don't like Gears ... tough. You lose on this one. The market has spoken and nearly 5 million copies sold says Gears is a winner ... period.

Market numbers do not validate or invalidate an opinion. If you don't like gears, nobody can argue that, because it's true.

Market share, particularly in the video game sector, does not dictate which product is superior. It dictates which one appeals to a larger base. Halo is nowhere near the quality of UT, not even close. But it was released on a console that was very aggressively marketed to a very large audience that would not play PC games but would play console games (college frats, mostly). The XBox was more convenient for more people than PC was, and less expensive most of the time, so it reached a larger base. And console gamers who had never seen a good shooter before thought Halo was the best thing ever, and so it sold more than UT which existed in a considerably more niche market. Consider, for example, that at one time the primary market for gameboys was middle-aged women. Consider the size of that market, and then consider the amount of market share PCs have in that particular market. If a game is available to more people, of course it will sell more, and not because of it being a superior game.

Gears ran fine on my system, and it's not exactly top of the line. Yeah, there are issues, but that's the case with every PC game ever released -- remember the problems Steam had with HL2's launch? The audio stuttering issue and things like that? And yet they're still wildly successful.

Gears just doesn't hold up to most PC games that it directly competes with. It's not a bad game by any means, but it's fairly monotonous when you get right down to it, and the boss fights are really the only things that stood out about it. The standard level play, which is 90% of the game, was boring after the first couple of scenes. PC gamers expect more than that, and so it received a lower score for the PC. But this is nothing new; console games generally tend to be a lot less complex and engaging than PC games simply because of the limits of console platforms. You would never find the original Mechwarrior games on a console, for example (Mechassault was a very pared-down version of Mech4), or any of the great space sims of their day. It's just not what consoles do best.

[LMN8R]

Originally Posted by elmuerte

I stopped playing stalker after about 2-3 hours or something.
The gameplay, story but mostly the game world were quite boring.
Was there anything else besides the usual fetch and retrieve missions, which usually came down to travel to X and kill everybody.

Once you reach the bar, the game opens up giving you far more options and more stuff to do. Playing for 2-3 hours, there's a hell of a lot more than fetch and retrieve missions. Did you miss the co-operative attacks on bunkers with AI buddies? Helping defend a weakened stalker from an incoming hoard of mutants? Raiding an underground lair with some of the creepiest atmosphere any game has ever presented?

After all that, there are even more co-operative gameplay segments, labs that somehow manage to be even creepier than the first bunker, crazy nuclear blow-outs, and even psychological machines messing with you. The game world is anything but boring. Clear Sky is obviously one of my most anticipated games of 2008, as a result.

[LMN8R]

Originally Posted by Anuban

You are of course more than entitled to your own opinion but millions of gamers and the market would say otherwise. FTR I also enjoyed Stalker and Crysis ... I liked Gears a bit more than Stalker because of the fantastic Cinematic nature and the weapons feel more solid imo and the graphics of course completely destroy Stalkers ... the animation in Stalker is not all that great and the AI is good but I think Gears is a bit better; Crysis though I feel was superior to Gears in almost every way except the ending but yeah I did like that game much more than Gears although I still think overall Gears has the better and more consistently great graphics.

As you are yours. I should have clarified - I don't think Gears is a terrible game. I've played it on both 360 and PC, and the co-op is definitely a lot of fun. I just disagree, and felt that my two playthroughs of STALKER were some of the most enjoyable 50+ hours of shooter gameplay I've ever experienced, while Gears was more popcorn B/C-movie, dumb entertainment.

I think bringing up the market at all is quite silly, however, as the market would tell you that Britney Spears is one of the best artists of all time, and Titanic the best movie of all time. STALKER was extremely successful for a foreign, Ukrainian-developed, unknown, inaccessible game with next to no marketing whatsoever - it went on to sell nearly 2 million copies worldwide.

[Anuban]

Originally Posted by KaiserWarrior

Market numbers do not validate or invalidate an opinion. If you don't like gears, nobody can argue that, because it's true.

Market share, particularly in the video game sector, does not dictate which product is superior. It dictates which one appeals to a larger base. Halo is nowhere near the quality of UT, not even close. But it was released on a console that was very aggressively marketed to a very large audience that would not play PC games but would play console games (college frats, mostly). The XBox was more convenient for more people than PC was, and less expensive most of the time, so it reached a larger base. And console gamers who had never seen a good shooter before thought Halo was the best thing ever, and so it sold more than UT which existed in a considerably more niche market. Consider, for example, that at one time the primary market for gameboys was middle-aged women. Consider the size of that market, and then consider the amount of market share PCs have in that particular market. If a game is available to more people, of course it will sell more, and not because of it being a superior game.

Gears ran fine on my system, and it's not exactly top of the line. Yeah, there are issues, but that's the case with every PC game ever released -- remember the problems Steam had with HL2's launch? The audio stuttering issue and things like that? And yet they're still wildly successful.

Gears just doesn't hold up to most PC games that it directly competes with. It's not a bad game by any means, but it's fairly monotonous when you get right down to it, and the boss fights are really the only things that stood out about it. The standard level play, which is 90% of the game, was boring after the first couple of scenes. PC gamers expect more than that, and so it received a lower score for the PC. But this is nothing new; console games generally tend to be a lot less complex and engaging than PC games simply because of the limits of console platforms. You would never find the original Mechwarrior games on a console, for example (Mechassault was a very pared-down version of Mech4), or any of the great space sims of their day. It's just not what consoles do best.

I don't agree with your observations and I have already stated why but whatever ... in the end my numbers say that Gears is a great console game and that as a PC game it was shunned by gamers. That's a fact ... argue it all you want but it changes nothing. And console gamers had every chance to play UT and would have if they found it appealing enough ... again Human nature shows this time and time again. If people like and want something enough they find a way to make it happen. But people didn't obviously. However, people did obviously like Halo and ate it up. Once again the market proved which one was superior to the consumers (gamers in this instance). So say what you will but in this world its all about sales and market share and also continuing sales as in people are still buying Gears of War 360 in respectable numbers.

[Armagon917]

On the whole sales figures for Gears. Call of Duty 4 has sold much more by hitting all 3 platforms. It just didn't have this giant PR machine from Microsoft to make it seem big. In 10 weeks COD4 got around 6.28 mil in 10 weeks while Gears made 5.19 total for a 10 week window.

Just wanted to clear that up that Gears while a big seller isn't beating all the games out there in sales. But something tells me COD4 will continue selling on PC long after Gears on 360 sales start to dry up.

Did anyone think Gearbox did a great job with the Halo port? Well I did. Everything was transferred over very well. After the first patch it was rock solid and fealt as close to a true PC game as I think was possible. CTF was huge for that on PC. So people will be receptive to ports as long as they're done well. Like I stated earlier on PC gamers can tell a game hasn't been given care in the first 15 minutes or so. Halo even showed your PING! whoo.

After EPIC's suprise about the success of Gears multiplayer on 360 you think they would have made sure that trnslated well over to PC. But no they didn't and they wonder why the game gets lower scores. Multiplayer wasn't near as fun as it was on 360.

Oh and its interesting to see how well COD4 is doing on 360 and its kicking *** on PC as well. EPIC true multiplatform releases please.

Xbox 360 Top Live Titles


1 - Halo 3
2 - Call of Duty 4
3 - GTA IV
4 - Gears of War
5 - Guitar Hero III
6 - Rock Band
7 - Battlefield: Bad Company
8 - Too Human Demo
9 - Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2
10 - NCAA Football 09

I am pointing to COD4 because its the perfect example of how games should be released. Each build works great for its platform. You can see huge numbers on PC as well. Gears could have easily been a great multiplayer game along side COD4 but lets face it, EPIC chose to get it out the door as quickly as possible neglecting it for Gears 2, which is also why UT3 is lacking in areas. If EPIC keeps throwing PC scraps then their reviews and sales will suffer. I really wanted to make content for that game but with no audience...

[elmuerte]

Originally Posted by LMN8R

Once you reach the bar, the game opens up giving you far more options and more stuff to do. Playing for 2-3 hours, there's a hell of a lot more than fetch and retrieve missions. Did you miss the co-operative attacks on bunkers with AI buddies? Helping defend a weakened stalker from an incoming hoard of mutants? Raiding an underground lair with some of the creepiest atmosphere any game has ever presented?

After all that, there are even more co-operative gameplay segments, labs that somehow manage to be even creepier than the first bunker, crazy nuclear blow-outs, and even psychological machines messing with you. The game world is anything but boring. Clear Sky is obviously one of my most anticipated games of 2008, as a result.

The first mission can be a co-op attack. But I found the AI support, as usual, down right crap. I didn't get very far, as I said, it just didn't appeal to me.

But it could be worse. It could have been a "Lost Planet"... now that was a crap game.

[LMN8R]

Originally Posted by Armagon917

I am pointing to COD4 because its the perfect example of how games should be released. Each build works great for its platform. You can see huge numbers on PC as well. Gears could have easily been a great multiplayer game along side COD4 but lets face it, EPIC chose to get it out the door as quickly as possible neglecting it for Gears 2, which is also why UT3 is lacking in areas. If EPIC keeps throwing PC scraps then their reviews and sales will suffer. I really wanted to make content for that game but with no audience...

Too true. Call of Duty 4 sold fantastic even on PC alone. I mean, just look at the facts:

-Crysis sold 1.5 million copies
-Call of Duty 4 on PC out-sold Crysis in every NPD chart
-Call of Duty 4 on PC out-sold Crysis in every European sales chart
-Call of Duty 4 is one of the top-selling games on Steam while Crysis is not even on there.

Put it all together and Call of Duty 4 easily sold millions of copies on PC alone. Activision/Infinity Ward did a great job with their simultaneous release of the game.

[Anuban]

I'm much more impressed with Gears numbers considering it is basically a single platform game (I don't believe the PC version generated any significant numbers) ... CoD4 is like GTA IV ... having two platforms to sale on. But just look at straight 360 sales ... Gears dominates all other games other than Halo 3. Its a fact and one that just validates my points that opinions aside Gears is a winner.

[hal]

Woohoo! Two QAPete posts in under a week! Come back, Pete!

[Kantham]

Yeah Pete, we want you around man.

Originally Posted by elmuerte

"Lost Planet"... now that was a crap game.

It came free with my XFX 8800 GTS. I uninstalled it as soon as I installed it.

[Ogs]

The stuttering issue ruined it for me (jeezus im still banging on about it, i really should move on), no help from Epic on it either. It ran at an uber smooth 60+ FPS but constantly kept jittering away as i played, yet UT3 had none of these problems. Anyhoo, have there been any games out there that came out a year after the original and got the same review scores ? Only one i can think of is Resident Evil 4 when it came to PS2.

[Sir_Brizz]

Originally Posted by LMN8R

Too true. Call of Duty 4 sold fantastic even on PC alone. I mean, just look at the facts:

-Crysis sold 1.5 million copies
-Call of Duty 4 on PC out-sold Crysis in every NPD chart
-Call of Duty 4 on PC out-sold Crysis in every European sales chart
-Call of Duty 4 is one of the top-selling games on Steam while Crysis is not even on there.

Put it all together and Call of Duty 4 easily sold millions of copies on PC alone. Activision/Infinity Ward did a great job with their simultaneous release of the game.

Call of Duty 4 can't even be compared to the games we are talking about. It's not sci-fi, it's not third person, it's not entirely action oriented. It's a tactical realism shooter. If there is one thing we've learned from Counter Strike, it's that hundreds of thousands and more people are willing to gobble those up like nobody's business.

Let's be honest, though, Call of Duty 4 is simply an extremely polished and fun game. However, not everyone likes it (even if they bought it). That's kind of what this thread is getting at. Not everyone likes every game, regardless of it's success. But frankly, the only way to judge how "good" a game is will be by the number of people who buy it along with the number of people who play it consistently.

I think Gears has done surprisingly well considering that sci-fi shooters in general (other than Halo) are pretty much shunned by the general gaming community, typically based on minor details that don't affect the game at all. This is a stark contrast to a decade ago when sci-fi was all the buzz. I guess Counter Strike effectively killed that.

And honestly I think there's a bit of "anti-hype" going on in this thread (aka "I don't like this game because it was successful and popular.").