I was watching LGR’s Unreal Tournament 2004 video and in terms of amount of available content and the sheer size and scale of the maps, it makes the multiplayer of every single Halo game on the 360 look quaint by comparison, and UT2k4 came out a year before the console even launched.
LGR complained that Unreal Tournament 2003 from the year before only had 37 maps, which is crazy considering most multiplayer shooters on the 360 had maybe 10 maps with additional map pack DLC costing like 20 bucks for 3 maps
Genuinely for like a decade PC gamers watched as the games that were popular on console dragged the whole fukken industry down. Valve was infamously forced by Microsoft to charge money on 360 for a map pack that was free on PC, games went from letting the user simply drag and drop files into a “mods” folder to being locked down and all the code obfuscated to prevent mod development, and the games themselves got shorter and shallower chasing the trends that AAA devs pioneered in their race to get money from dudebros who only played Halo and Call of Duty.
Yes all of this was capitalism doing its thing but consoles were undoubtedly at the forefront of all of the enshittification happening at that time which is why people like me came to absolutely loathe them the way that mobile games are loathed for pioneering shitty practices now.
For eight fucking years every game had to be built with 512mb of RAM in mind
My text editor uses more than that lmfao
thief 3 and deus ex invisible war built with with consoles in mind and it dragged them down so hard, along with oblivion having the cities gated off instead of a great big open map like morrowind
Hell, there are long standing historically PC only game series that are being held down by consoles (design, and playerbase wise) right now. Look at Mechwarrior, the most recent entry (MW5:Clans) has a whole heap of core mechanic changes that seem to be intentionally designed in such a way that feels very dumbed down, yet feels like it’s just rubbing it the core’s faces that we’ll never really get a good title ever again.
Though right now MW5:Mercs is okay at best because it’s kinda the skyrim of mechwarrior right now with all the mods made to cover up Russ Bullock’s bad ideas.
there’s also generally generous aim assist for console controls and its really fun when a game is crossplay i tell you hwut
I remember there was a (dying even on release) wh40k game (eternal crusade maybe?) that had crossplay that I used to play with aim assist. A lot of players hated the aim assist because they CLAIMED it ruined their chances at stuff like headshots; in reality, it was giving us controller users far too much help. I remember making a thread to let the devs know I wanted them to keep the aim assist and people jumped down my throat, claiming the thread was unnecessary, even though if you read the forums you would only think people hated it.
even though if you read the forums you would only think people hated it
perfect summation of the forums for any game, product, or service
Not the game you’re talking about but reminded me how surprisingly good Space Marine was. Came out of nowhere, played tight, was slightly cheaper than most AAAs at the time (I remember anyways), and that was it.
Wonder if the sequel was any good.
the first game was a fun and campy space ork beat em up that was brisk, slightly jank, funny, had bloody mark strong as the protagonist, and didn’t overstay it’s welcome. a nice capstone on the dawn of war 1-2 era of 40k
the second game was a dour and desaturated affair that took itself too seriously, cost seventy dollars, and genuinely had me going “damn I could be playing gears of war instead of this more boring version of gears of war” the entire time
so I did I just quit and played through gears again lmao love me some bloody gears yup still the goat ☺️👐
The sequel was pretty fun, but felt like it didn’t respect player’s time - there were like a dozen different in game currencies lol
In Gears of War, it’s reversed and it’s the Xbox gamers who feel at a disadvantage
That one UT2k4 map where you’re flying a spaceship and shooting each other down was the coolest.
But, yeah, PC games were way ahead of console games. HL mod universe was popping at the time too
I do remember UT2004 and the maps were definitely gigantic; enough space to create any type of gigantic terrain you could ever want. Heck, even the original UT99 had gigantic, fantastic maps.
PC games have always had much bigger player counts too. In Halo, 8v8 is considered a “Big Team Battle”
I remember back in like 2002/2003 playing 32vs32 team objective mode in Return to Castle Wolfenstein, BF1942 modded servers could go as high as 64vs64
You’d also have PlanetSide that did hundreds of players and PlanetSide 2 that did about a thousand in ~2012
A few people still play Wolfenstein Enemy Territory too
WW2 online (mmo fps) had 1000 player servers in 2001 I think. I remember trying to play it and having an awful experience though. Planetside 2 on the other hand was quite fun.
Half Life Counter Strike and later CS 1.6 custom maps were the absolute JAM. i remember some dude made a map modeled after his bedroom where everything was scaled enormous the players were basically tiny mice running around killing each other.
shit ruled
I remember de_rats. AWPfest (also, I was bad at FPS)
Before I even read your description I was going to say de_rats was the shit, console gamers would be amazed at the glory of it
csde_gimlirats was a great map in the rats tradition, and probably my favorite map. The helms deep one was fun too, and the surf maps were fuckin wild.
can you imagine playing a FPS with a controller? the insanity
I play single-player FPS with controllers to save my wrist, it gets enough mouse fatigue at work
trick your job into buying a trackball or one of those ergonomic “vertical mouse” things?
Would love to if I weren’t an “independent contractor”
They even have vertical mice with a trackball!
vertical mice are a lie… i bought one because my hand was getting sore from being on a computer all day and while it helped with that i found it was pretty hard to not click and drag shit constantly by accident… clicking in the lateral direction often caused the mouse to move slightly too and would click/drag when i didn’t want to do that
How are they a lie? They take some getting used to, that’s all. I’ve been using them for years and they genuinely saved my wrist. Now any non-ergonomic mouse feels uncomfortable.
it’s a lie because you can’t use it like a normal mouse… it causes so much more work
Getting a gameball literally changed my life. They’re fukken pricey tho i would try to find a decent used trackball now (or buy arcade machine components and make one myself maybe) if I needed one.
gah, even worse
leaning to play with a gyro is hard at first, and you can of course be limited by having a low-quality gyro in your controller, but cross the threshold and it’s better than a joystick by miles.
not as good as a mouse or even a trackball tho
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
The depth of content and mod support in 90s and 00s PC games was astounding. Only really popular modern games get similar levels of mod support. I think a big reason for that is that assets were more simple, and so it took less effort to produce everything, and amateur hobbyists could create mod content that rivaled or exceeded the base game’s art. The XB360/PS3 era was when all AAA games really started getting overproduced, and it had the ironic consequence of making the games smaller experiences. There’s a reason that they started adding Achievements in that era, as it was a way to artificially pad out the game for players who played the shit out of it.
The XB360/PS3 era was when all AAA games really started getting overproduced
I consider that the beginning of modern gaming. It was also around the time Bethesda peddled the infamous horse armor DLC.
Supposedly, and I’d love to know if this is false, Bethesda didn’t want to charge for it and were simply mass testing the DLC system. Microsoft were the bastards.
You mean the Microsoft that pioneered subscription fees for online play and stubbornly stuck to proprietary wireless protocols and separate Windows-compatible wired versions of their controllers as well as incredibly expensive proprietary hard drives and memory cards in the same generation where Sony just used Bluetooth, USB and regular SATA drives??? That Microsoft???
And the same Microsoft that in the previous generation required you to buy a separate DVD remote and dongle combo to enable the DVD playback the base console was already capable of. Microsoft really tried to ape Nintendo hard when it came to overpriced bullshit peripherals
yeah that was $35 that could’ve gone up my nose or bought a used game
Don’t forget bullshit multiplayer XP systems to add an additional skinner box to the proceedings
Assetto corsa on pc with its insane community mods which you could pick up for 5 dollars with all dlcs on sale vs console with just the base game.
PC has been getting a lot of console games ported over which is nice. I got onimusha (cracked steam copy) sitting on my desktop I’ve yet to play.
and you have emulators too. I haven’t played onimusha but it looks fun. I was thinking about playing the shenmue port.
Yeah my pc is kind of busted when it comes to PS2 emulation so I can only play a few titles, but native pc ports of ps2 games play fine.
Yeah my pc is kind of busted when it comes to PS2 emulation so I can only play a few titles
Same so ports are definitely nice but then again I am mostly just emulating consoles before ps2 and some arcade machines.
Goldeneye blew the mind out of console gamers while PC gamers who already played Doom and Quake thought that game sucked.
I recently revisited TimeSplitters 2, which has essentially the exact same controls as GoldenEye, just with two sticks. As much fun as the multiplayer was back when I was a kid, the awful, awful controls made it almost unplayable. TimeSplitters 3 on the other hand was still fun to play since by then Free Radical had realised they should just copy Halo’s controls
you can do some hacky shit and play TS2 inside of a copy of homefront the revolution with full mouse and keyboard support.
there’s also supposedly a set of good mouse hacks for timesplitters 1 on epsxepp 2 or whatever the fucking ps2 emulator is called but i couldn’t figure out which one was the good one
I think those hacks might’ve been for Dolphin, the GameCube emulator. I tried playing TS2 with PCSX2 but ended up switching to the GameCube versions for TS2 and TS3 because those games do not upscale well at all with PCSX2
has to be ps2 doesn’t it? timesplitters 1 was exclusive
I didn’t notice the 1 after TimeSplitters. You might be right, but I seem to recall there were mouse patches for Dolphin for the other games
Goldeneye unshackled from the N64’s limitations (ie on an emulator with 60 fps, max draw distance, and mouse controls) is so good.
