Uh, so...am I the only one thrilled by this, considering the complete lack of additional content for Modern Warfare after the first map pack?

Oh no! THERE WILL BE CONTENT! WHATEVER WILL WE DO!

Frankly, I want more content. What I'm more interested in isn't whether or not there will be content, it's whether or not they'll a) pull what a growing amount of developers are doing at the behest of their terrible publishers and not bothering with said content on the PC, and b) if it gets a PC release, will they do the other awful thing and charge for it now?

When someone reports on that, I'll get all thbthbthbthbthbthbthbthb about Activision/Corporate America.

The v sync 'bug' (there's some reports it was intentional) only hit for me if I used the in game v sync. If I left that unticked and used my control panel's v sync everything ran smooth and with no tearing.

I'm pretty sure it was intentional. When some people reported problems with the controls, EA's initial answer was outright confusion, because they intended the PC version to be identical to the console versions, so no graphical enhancements and V-sync with a 30fps cap. Turning off V-sync somehow turned the cap off as well, which may or may not have been intentional, but the game's lightning engine was used to such great effect that tearing was really obvious and totally immersion-breaking, so the only real way to make the game "ideal" was to force it to raise the FPS cap.

Problems aside, one reason I loved Dead Space is that it's a prime example of what you can do with intelligent design. The graphics aren't fantastic, there are no fancy features or anything, but what they did with it is sensational, the environment is far more immersive, atmospheric and alive than Far Cry 2 or Crysis.

Used D3DOverrider to lock the framerate at 60 with V-sync. Bit of a hoop to jump through, but once that was done, the game was damn near perfect, certainly superior to the console versions running it at 30fps.

I never did experience the "lag" half the people here seemed to bitch about at release, either on the controller or mouse/keyboard, with or without V-sync.

Definitely a stand-out title; everything good about Resident Evil 4/5 turned up to eleven, with plenty of refinements added to the formula (like some actual horror. And walking while aiming, which, while not at all realistic for shooting with perfect accuracy, is really a must-have gaming mechanic.)

This comment was edited on Sep 30, 2009, 15:57.

You want consoles on the cheap, hit an anime or similar nerdy convention and get into the dealer's room as soon as possible. Got myself a Wii brand new for a hundred bucks at Otakon, the same dealer had 360s and PS3s for fifty bucks less than retail, and this was all before the recent price drops. Another dealer had 360s and PS3s for even cheaper than that once the last day of the con hit and everyone was trying to sell as much as possible.

Although he also has imported PSPs for $75 more than retail; why anyone would care about the color of their handheld, let alone enough to pay more for it, is beyond me.

There's.. ONE THING.. I can.. SAY.. the VOICE.. acting is.. MUCH BETTER.. at 3 o'clock!

That's at least half the reason I'm giving this a purchase over ARMA2. Holy crap, that was one of the most obnoxious things in the history of gaming. Not the most, but certainly in the top twenty.

What's really hilarious is checking Youtube vids of Arma and seeing people defend the ridiculous Microsoft Sam because there's so much to the game it's impossible to do dynamic squad chatter with interchangeable phrases instead of individual words. Done by different voices. With different inflections. Because men with their boots on the ground in a combat zone apparently deliberately say their information in more complicated ways just because the map area of operations is bigger than in other games warzones, instead of being as simplistic and easy to understand as possible.

Blood for the blood god! Thrones for the throne skull!

...hmmm, something not quite right about it.

Oblivion and Fallout.

.....I'm actually not the only one that liked singleplayer?

I guess I'm still the only one that liked the plot.

I'm not going to touch it simply because it wasn't all that fun for me on the PS3, but it's nice to see A-list titles still getting some effort put into their ports.

I don't think Internet service is really at a point yet where it can handle this without noticeable problems and/or at the scale they're pitching it at...still, if it's at all functional, I can see it gaining enough of a following to at least stick around for awhile instead of flopping in the first year.

I was sold on this five minutes in. Astounding presentaion with detail, atmospherics and really getting that comic book feel, plus Mark Hamil as icing on the cake. Solid gameplay to match. A few things are overly gimmicky, but it's a pretty minor problem; I notice Unreal Engine 3's lack of AA a lot more. For that matter, this is probably the first UE3 game that actually looks better than Mass Effect. Definitely looking forward to sending Gamefly their copy back and plunking down for the PC version.

I think I'll just keep quietly hoping against hope that Mass Effect 2's gay romance option won't hurl terrible Brokeback Mountain-esque cliches at me until I cry, rather than get fired up over one of the less-relevant homophobes around.

But I don't see how that has anything to do with a videogame ever-so-slightly based off his work. I mean, a lot of people love Battlefield Earth, but that doesn't make them scientologists.

.....wat.

Pffft, dual-weilding DEagles is kiddy play. Where's the perk that lets you go akimbo with a pair of two-forty-nine SAWs?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWf96kxJiYw

Its not nostalgia, as so many ignorants try to call it. Its fact that many, many game that are 10 years old have far more content, more challenging gameplay and still the same (if not better) gameplay than modern games.

That is not, at all, a fact.

Mass Effect was an extremely dumbed down RPG and very justified called a typical console port.

So, wait. The game looks better running on a reasonable machine, load times are drastically reduced, the typical Unreal Engine 3 texture streaming effect shows much less, and they reworked the interface to take advantage of mouse/keyboard input.

So what does a game have to do to not be a "typical" console port? Because I was under the impression that most console ports don't have any effort put into them at all. Have I just been missing some magical pile of well-done ports lately?

If more people would criticize those points they would actually be fixed. But as along as there are people who swallow everything as shallow as a puddle, as long as it has a Blizzard, Bioware or Crytek tag, it will only get worse.

Criticisms for Crysis included low relevance on different nanosuit modes since armor gave you the biggest survivability, and Xen Syndrome after the spire opens because the alien exosuits are even dumber bricks than the Koreans, oftentimes just jumping at you and sitting on ledges for awhile. Added to the fact that that's basically all the game is anymore after that point.

Flash forward to Crysis Warhead; the point the spire opens is not the last time you face human enemies, and the aliens' AI is much better; they stick more to the ground where their speed gives them an actual advantage, and they work in teams, actually better than the Koreans do. The normal running speed is slower so now there's an actual reason to think about whether or not you want to be in armor or speed mode.

Nope, didn't listen and fix the problems anyone had at all.

Strip away the pretty graphics and take a real look at Crysis. What do you get? A pile of steaming shit. Nothing more nothing less.

And yet, plenty of us in this very thread are talking about how we enjoyed the gameplay. Seriously, how many of us could even play the game with the pretty graphics when it first came out? I'd say it's a safe bet that most of the people who like the game aren't in it just for the graphics.

It was aiming for "realism" with a nano-tech Ninja Warrior suit and aliens. Uhuh.

It's not aiming for realism, it's aiming for a realistic presentation. There is a difference, and a realistic presentation is what we really want. Realism means anything, in just about any genre, is boring work. Notice how real flight simulators are barely a niche anymore?

There's nothing wrong with throwing a little speculative sillyness into a realistic presentation, sci-fi or otherwise. Look at Guns of the Patriots; yes, it's batshit insane in that...shall we say "special" way Hideo Kojima likes, but the presentation is astounding in its detail; amidst the walking, mooing tanks and the bisexual flamenco-dancing vampire, you've got guns being handled like actual professionals would be handling them, soldiers moving about in appropriate-looking squad structures, squad leaders directing their men with hand signals, small-scale milita-men having a room in their HQ where their wounded are bleeding and looking damned wretched, some of which will die as you watch if you linger long enough. Hell, even the way Snake slits throats is a point for this; it's not perfect, but it's a slightly more practical motion than the silly "ear to ear" cut always done in movies.

The point being, while the gameplay may be the farthest thing from realistic, the presentation pays attention to many small details that help towards suspension of disbelief. If anything, Crysis actually doesn't do as good a job here. The foliage being brushed aside as you walk through it and the level of destructability in the environments are great, but the aforementioned sub-par AI breaks the illusion when the soldiers don't react to gunshots the way soldiers should. The biggest offender is actually the way gun cutomization works; why can't the soldiers see my laser sight? Why are the soldiers stupid enough to walk around with flashlights and laser sights in pitch-black night when these things will act like flares?

But like StingingVelvet said, flaws don't mean a game is bad, and none of those were deal-breakers for me.

The first KOTOR is the best Star Wars movie.

Fixed.

Believe it or not, some people like Crysis and Mass Effect, because we don't feel the need to crucify everything solely because it's a console port or because it doesn't meet some nostalgia-filter-colored bias about how much better gaming supposedly was X number of years ago.

Who cares? Why do some people seem to think an open beta is some sort of required part of the end-user experience or, worse, act like an open beta is an early demo?

For that matter, why does everyone care about demos? Considering the amount of exposure to a game a demo gives you, you can easily form the same impressions by watching a few Youtube clips. Why so many people are unable to make a reasonable guess about a gameplay experience is bizarre to me, when exposure these days is tenfold more than it used to be in the dark ages of closely examining every screenshot, feature preview and review in EGM and Gamepro, hoping against hope that they were accurately depicting the end experience for you, the individual reader.

To which I say, as little as six, seven years ago, I bought games for 50 dollars that were 20-30 hours in length. Nowadays I buy a game for 50 dollars, and I'm lucky if it lasts five.

So you'll forgive me for not blinking away a tear for those poor devs who created a FIFTH of the content and still sell it for the same price, and now try to sell it for ten bucks more.

This would be a valid point if not for the fact that the "less amount" of content you're talking about wasn't done with the same amount of effort and spending. It's the same amount of content, it's just that graphics and presentation have taken priority. There are genuine instances of, gasp, innovation happening that wasn't possible in older generations, too. Much of this is nostalgia; games six years ago stood just as much a chance of being complete turds, plenty of them were only ridiculously long because they were stretched out into boring repetition fests. Padding is not a new thing.

Funding for games has not increased at a rate that keeps up with the effort needed to develop them. Do you seriously think any developer can take the same amount of money they had six years ago and make a game using the current development technologies without cutting corners?

Well, I'm sure you do, actually. The answer here will probably be something about how developers can't be anything but deliberately malicious, because game development and anything that makes gamers unhappy can't possibly ever be caused by other factors like economics.

In any case, now that I'm not buying MW2, I'll buy Guerilla : Red Faction instead, which costs 40 dollars, which is a far more pleasing price point to my wallet.

I certainly hope you have more fun with it than I did, I rented it and sent it back after two hours, and it's terrible gameplay and boring progression certainly aren't things that will be fixed by being on the PC. Oh, Volition, how disappointing you've become. In the end, I'd rather pay ten dollars more for a game I'll get enjoyment out of rather than a slightly cheaper price for a game that's terrible. It all depends on the individual title; I still play Modern Warfare every day, I'd say even if I'd paid sixty instead of fifty bucks for it, I'd have my money's worth.

This comment was edited on Aug 19, 2009, 17:35.

........nah, it just feels wrong. I'm not sorry we experimented, but it's just not for me. I'm definitely an ASCIIsexual.

Having the game on Steam is enough of a bonus for me, though I'm rather disappointed that the PC version doesn't get any of the pre-order bling at all. Having different sets of in-game gear to match different playstyles as a bonus seemed like something to actually care about for once.

This comment was edited on Aug 19, 2009, 03:27.