Shawn

Console gamers acting as journalists, Chris Grant to be more specific, that don't understand nor care about great PC franchises = fucking up names like Fallout 4.

It's no wonder Bethesda is abandoning Fallout fans in favor of an FPS for the masses.

I couldn't imagine ever playing Baldur's Gate on a TV. Dark Alliance was a mere beaten down shadow of the PC versions of Baldur's Gate, and if Bioware says there going back to their roots, this will be just like Neverwinter Nights and BG1/2, a CRPG all the way with a kick ass interface for m/k. It might look nice on the big screen, but with a toolset coming out with this as well with free downloadable modules, the PC version is a no brainer. Also, I can't see many 360 users getting into Dragon Age, I think the community, like Neverwinter, would rather play this type of game on PC. As a PC and Console gamer, I leave my consoles for Rock Band and LittleBigPlanet and Gears.

On another note, I played through ME on 360, beat it, sold it, and I'm enjoying it even more on my laptop with a mouse. The game's PC interface is so much better, aiming is better, and the mako controls so much more refined with the changes they made, not to mention using the mouse as a camera when in vehicle.

yeah, I'm with ya on being a PC gamer to the core, but we DON'T want STEAM turning into anything like EA Link/Download(or whatever it's called now). The EA EULA prohibits gamers from downloading a purchased game a year after purchase. Meaning, you buy Crysis, you download it, you want to play it again a year later after getting a new PC, too bad, you're out of luck. With STEAM, you can download that game to any computer for however long you want.

This makes me very very nervous. I use STEAM for it's flexibility, beyond just the great catalouge and the great community features. Being able to have peace of mind that a game I buy will be there( and I do trust Valve to be there) to download anytime I want is a great feeling.

If EA's download policy and EULA has changed in anyway recently, please let me know, but the last I've read and heard is that it still restricts downloads, which is a no no in my eyes. If EA were to adopt STEAM's policies, I would be onboard in a second. Until then, I remain a healthy skeptic.

Also, I've been getting into Impulse lately, Stardocks new DD service. So far it's got everything you would want for a community, and all that's needed now is more games. With Demigod on the way, and the ability to download anytime, anywhere, as long as you want was a major selling point to me preordering Demigod, not to mention the beta is starting soon :)

Zerocorpse, give me a break. Every fantasy game can be brought back to D&D and Tolkien. There was no other loot based ACTION RPG game before Diablo, or anything even like it. If there was, people wouldn't be saying the word "Diablo Clone" in the industry. There were dungeon crawling concepts in very basic and bad games, but Diablo is known and is credited by just about everyone except yourself as the Father of the ARPG, period. At the time, Blizzard took a lot of heat for it's action styled combat over top of an RPG. The founders often talk about it(there are numerous videos over at GS with interviews discussing just this). Switching genres, If you want to go back, when it comes to Starcraft, alot of people will say SC was unique to RTS gaming for the way it conducted it's gameplay, true, but the lore was done long before with Warhammer and the races, etc..etc.. You can then say, Halo is almost a carbon copy of Starcraft, which then leads to Warhammer. But who wants to be lame about it? There's something to be said about revolutions in genres, and Blizzard takes a lot of unnecessary heat and not enough credit as far as I'm concerned, as for CRPG's in general.
I lived all through the 80's, so it's not like I've lived under a cave here, and I think you can at least admit that the word "Diablo Clone", which is used a lot for a reason, has a meaning and a legitimate reason. It was fresh, new, and bucked the trend and created a new sub genre in the RPG genre, the ARPG. We can go back to Pen and Paper all we want but that's just the roots that RPG's took when they made the transition to 0's and 1's. Lastly, I never said Diablo created RPG gaming, just ARPG gaming, and did it the best like no other. I would certainly agree with you about Pen and Paper, it's owed everything as the root to all of this.

There's a huge following, and most of you were probably in diapers when the first came out. It's far more fun then 99 percent of the junk put out there, especially for consoles. Gears 1? lol...that community is nothing compared to Diablo's. To put it simply, you can dislike a game all you want, but you and others look like fools for at least not respecting the fact that it basically started the ARPG genre, which is HUGE. Are you intersted in Too Human? Ask Dyack what games are the biggest inspiration? Don't bother, he's said it many times, it's Diablo. Diablo is a loot game, very deep loot game, and if you go back now and play D2, if you can manage to look past the dated but playable graphics, you would see that. That is, if you're a hardcore gamer. If you're a casual console gamer, like you sound, than don't bother.

DICE had them in BF2 in 2005, the first meaningful achievements that actually affected gameplay, not the BS MS started like "get 10 headshots" for a certain achievement, which is a step back, and is a real pain in the ass when you're on a team of kids that "want that certain achievement so they only play a certain way" type BS. SP achievements are fine, but MP achievements needs to be done carefully, sorta like what Epic is doing in Gears 2 by straddling MP achievements per session so that people can't spam them.

I like what STEAM is doing with them, and gametap, and hopefully whenever Sony get's around to actually making them available to more then a game or two. MS definitely mainstreamed it though, but didn't start it.

just think how many PS3's they will need for a fully fledged game running at 1080P, with everything going crazy. That was 3 PS3's just to show light on a single car with nothing going on in the background. I wonder what the new GPU's from Nvidia/ATI plus Intel's new chips would be able to accomplish now.

Wow, that pic is amazing, finally something that makes Crysis look dated :)

I wonder, since it's heavily rumored that Intel is getting into the high end GPU business, this could be what they're working on more then we think. I don't know much about Raytracing, but the biggest problem to me seems like it's going to be a power consumption issue. That's probably a major problem with all of this, trying to figure out how to achieve this with what is considered a "practical" amount of energy.

For programmers, is Raytracing more convenient or does it take more man-hours to achieve the same effect we have today? Bottom line, is it worth it over the current path we are on right now in heavy game development?

can't wait...i know what i'm doing tomorrow at work :)

and there's another delay..