I loved computer games back then. I wasn't necessarily any good at them, but I sure did love a good computer game, particularly a good computer-based role playing game. I'm not sure where I found time to play them (honestly, mostly, I didn't... I missed a lot of the really good ones of the era), but technology had come along to where games were well beyond anything we'd ever seen before. Sound cards allowed real voices, VGA graphics finally allowed us PC folks to enjoy the sorts of visuals that Amiga owners had been enjoying all along-- and graphics accelerators made 'em even better, renderable in real-time. Possibly most importantly, the CD-ROM allowed more detail to be placed in larger worlds without having to ship a paper crate full of floppy disks. And the games were great fun.
About ten years ago, games changed again: Consoles caught up with what a decent gaming computer could do. The relatively low resolution of a television screen meant they could build a console that could push around enough polygons to keep up with a mid-range PC for the same price as just the PC's graphics card. CPUs had advanced to where even the cheapest CPU could handle just about any game if the heavy lifting was handed off to the graphics processor. Computer game manufacturers saw a new market for their wares, and soon, most PC games were designed to be ported to consoles. Many of the biggest titles were cross-platform, available both on your desk at the computer and in your living room on the console.
Consoles had a huge benefit: Since the whole console cost about what just a decent graphics card on the PC might run you, they're much, much more common. They're cheap and ubiquitous, and they made the market for these titles much, much bigger, easily justifying the expense of making a game portable to them. They brought gaming to a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't have spent the money on a computer. They kept the computer gaming world afloat; the rising budgets involved with making huge detailed worlds was offset by the much, much larger number of units that you can sell.
[Warning: Digression begins here.]
| A three-headed PC with dedicated racing hardware |
Consoles, however, have a few major differences compared to a gaming PC. I've already mentioned one-- they're relatively low-resolution compared to what you can do with a dedicated gaming PC. Most modern televisions top out at 1920x1080. Common computer monitors are in that neighborhood, but they're available in 2560x1440 and larger. What's more, you can plug more than one of those monitors into a PC, where consoles stick you with just one. Consoles also are generally viewed from across the room, instead of a few feet away on the desk, so what resolution you have isn't as useful.
An example of how this is important is the relatively recent game Dragon Age: Origins. Text displayed on the screen was in a nice, calligraphy looking font. It looked like something you might find a scribe illuminating in a medieval text, which fit in quite well with the swords-and-sorcery setting. This was a problem on a console: Gamers couldn't read the font with all its serifs from across the room-- and there was a lot of it. The game world had a large amount of historical detail presented as if you were reading about it in a book or on a scroll. In the sequel, all text was in Helvetica, and there was much less of it. Don't get me wrong-- I like Helvetica. It's fine for my blog, for example. It doesn't, however, fit so well with the game world. The inability to easily read text also removed much of the history from the game world, which left the game feeling much less epic and sweeping and world-changing than the original.
Now, I don't want this to sound like an anti-console rant. Consoles brought huge money to computer games-- and probably kept them alive. Without the ability to sell games to hordes of gamers who couldn't (or simply didn't want to!) buy a gaming PC, only a select few companies would have survived-- and even with that ability, many didn't. Consoles are important, and there's a reason they've relegated PC-only gaming to something of a niche market.
[End digression. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog post, already in progress.]
It turns out that many game developers missed the PC model of development, but any time they pitched a PC game that couldn't be done on a console for whatever reason, the idea was shot down-- it costs millions of dollars to make an A-list title, and if you can't sell it on consoles, it's a lot tougher to feel like that multi-million dollar bet is a reasonable investment.
And then along came crowd-sourced funding mechanisms like Kickstarter. The idea is to go to the community and basically ask for money to complete the game in advance. They also have higher levels of funding for more perks-- perhaps you'll get a digital copy of the basic game for $30, but $45 would get you a soundtrack CD, $100 might get you the sorts of trinkets that would come in the "Collector's Edition" of the game.
With this sort of mechanism, they can go further-- they can set up things like if you want to spend $1000, you can get your name in the game or perhaps your face in the game as a character. Sometimes they go nuts with five-figure backing levels that might get the backer a chance to meet the development team.
The most fascinating thing about it to me, though, is the view into the game development process. Periodically, all the backers get an email with what's going on-- how the art is created, how level design happens, how characters are created. You see over time how concept art from early stages gets modified into what's closer to what will be in the game. From my perspective, this stuff is really, really cool.
I'm pretty geeked about what those developers are planning.
I recently downloaded the first technology demo of Star Citizen, and I was surprised: They didn't just render the outside of the ship. The inside is also designed such that instead of clicking on something and poof, you're magically now inside the ship, in the demo you click something and the hatch opens, and you move into and about the ship as if you'd move into and about any other environment-- no cut-scene, no loading screen to transport you to a new zone within the game. It seems like such a small thing, to be able to step inside your starship that you're about to fly, to walk up to the cockpit, and sit down, but I don't think anybody's ever managed to do it before.
The good news is that there's not that many people wanting to make the sorts of games I loved 20-25 years ago. I'm already so far behind on games I want to play I'll probably not actually get around to playing these four before the decade is out...
