What a load, gameplay is the most important feature. People don't play games if they aren't having fun.

It's not about what people play, it's about what people buy. On the console, it's all about hype and graphics. Killzone 2, Gears of War, Halo, etc... all mediocre titles that console gamers ate up due to hype and graphics. The same doesn't really apply to the PC, where Crysis, the prettiest game ever, sold only decently and the best-selling games usually don't have cutting-edge graphics.

I can't remember the last decent FPS I played since Deus Ex.

No One Lives Forever 2 was pretty awesome. Unfortunately, the genre as a whole started going downhill when consoles became the lead platforms.

Oh yeah, that Gameplayer page was pretty worthless.

This comment was edited on Apr 27, 2009, 22:44.

Creston, my intent was to make forward-looking statements. My point is that physics WILL end up being a feature that you'll buy a game just to "experience", just like fantastic graphics have been in the past. NVIDIA especially, but ATI and Intel also, are making sure of it.

Ed Borden : I would think AGEIA would have shown that physics really aren't all that important yet to gamers. Eye candy draws people, always have and always will.

That said, I personally like physics and if Devs start integrating it more and more (either through use of multi-core CPUs or through Nvidia's cards), that's just cake.

But physics will never be important enough to me to ever warrant a separate investment in it.

Creston

Didn't you know, on consoles, gameplay is the least important and always has been. Having sweet Graphix and uber Phyix is what counts.

What a load, gameplay is the most important feature. People don't play games if they aren't having fun. PC gamers don't exactly have many complex games to brag about either by the way. I can't remember the last decent FPS I played since Deus Ex.

And since when is Physics the future? For me, as a PC gamer, it's the past. We've had games with very solid physics for half a dozen years now. But then again, I suppose it is something that is relatively unexplored or used on console games.

no it is the future, as in totally destructible environments, all objects reacting as real materials, physics based movement for all objects, etc. etc. .. its going to be a standard feature at some point, and that will require maturation of middleware techs like havok and physx, etc.

the other "next wave" tech is AI.. emergent gameplay, etc.

both of these technologies are in their infancy, maybe pre-school level compared to gfx technology

"Didn't you know, on consoles, gameplay is the least important and always has been. Having sweet Graphix and uber Phyix is what counts."

Yeah, I guess that's why you can buy an entire console for less than the cost of a good video card.

Didn't you know, on consoles, gameplay is the least important and always has been. Having sweet Graphix and uber Phyix is what counts.

And since when is Physics the future? For me, as a PC gamer, it's the past. We've had games with very solid physics for half a dozen years now. But then again, I suppose it is something that is relatively unexplored or used on console games.

I don't know why Blue posts this guys 'blogs' as news. His writeups are always full of shit, and his gaming experience starts with Halo and ends with Fallout 3.

This comment was edited on Apr 27, 2009, 12:07.

Was that Gameplayer article supposed to be funny or something? "Hey lets write up a load of cliches that have been floating around since the dawn of the internet and pretend we're clever" Are there really that many rabid fanboys still around anyway? Most people I know who are into gaming have a pc and at least a couple of consoles and buy the games that go best on each platform.

All one needs is a website plus an opinion and suddenly your a pro journalist or industry specialist. I don't know why this passes for news when it's forum quality material.

Top-10 lists also fall under the same guideline. Top 10 according to who? The author of the article? 10 million people in a meticulously done poll?

The idea that Crysis is photo-realistic is a joke. The lack of detail present in such small screenshots makes any comparison worthless. Physics are certainly an important direction for the future but they are only one aspect of a larger direction - realism. That means immersion, interactivity, visual fidelity, audio fidelity and placement, lip-sync, facial expressions, body gestures, AI, physics, input, output, plot development, character development, etc. The idea that physics is basically all that's need to make a decent game is patently absurd. The physics implementation in Half-Life 2 was not the primary factor in it being a decent game, merely part of the overall picture.

It really seems recently we've had a surge in gutter journalism. I guess with advertising revenue dropping sites are having to stoop to new lows to generate hits.