Seriously, Console Wars Are Pointless

[Darklink82]

What everyone seems to be forgetting is that Yahtzee is describing an alternate reality where console makers aren't selfish twats who force people to buy a specific console just to play whatever exclusive games are on the console.

I for one have an Xbox because I enjoy the Halo series as well as many of the other exclusives. However, I would love to play resistance 3 or little big planet on my Xbox, but I can't because Sony got to the developers first. If there was just one game format then I would be able to get those games without paying for a PS3 on top of the Xbox I already own. Just having one game format with various control schemes makes a lot of sense. If you want to play an FPS, get the keyboard and mouse, racing game, get the wheel, platformer, get the controller.

But this will most likely not happen unless Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and Valve(They basically run the PC exclusive game market)work together to make a standardized console that can play any game. And so far, only Valve seems even slightly interested in that concept.

 

[Bad Jim]

Actually I think it can be done. While technology marches on and games get more and more demanding, the vast majority of games are only demanding in terms of graphics. The internal game state is usually very simple.

The solution would therefore be to put the graphics hardware in charge of deciding how to render a scene. The game would only be able to define the art assets, describe the game world and tell it to render. The hardware would then have the freedom to decide the screen resolution, lighting models, texture quality, etc. There are algorithms that can generate low poly meshes from more complex ones (hard to do well but possible) or the hardware could convert meshes to voxels and optionally scale the voxels down.

So basically a weak piece of hardware would be able to render a graphically demanding game by just scaling everything down. And we would not depend on the developers writing lots of clever code for this, because we know they won't, but on the manufacturers, who have a huge incentive to. The graphical power would depend on how much you were willing to spend, while the rest would be standardised hardware.

 

[Flunk]

If Sony and Microsoft do massively disappoint me and bring out a new generation PlayStation and Xbox, what really haunts me is the thought that they'll completely bugger up the backwards compatibility, like they did last time, and that'll be another generation of games, classics and space-fillers alike, thrown to the furnace.

They will and they will bugger up the backwards compatibility. It will take a massive paradigm shift to change this and we're not quite there yet. The current generation of consoles did very, very well. If the next generation sells poorly, then maybe we'll see something better. Right now it's going to be same old, same old.

P.S. The Wii U sucks and has no real reason for being. Nintendo needs to do what Sega did, I've actually bought some of their games like Sonic Generations multiple times to have them on different systems.

 

[wintercoat]

Disregarding handheld systems, what was the first backwards compatible system? As far as I know, it was the PS2, wasn't it? The Wii was the first Nintendo backwards compatible console, and as far as I remember, none of Sega's systems were, though I might be wrong on that point. If it was the PS2, doesn't that mean that backwards compatibility is a relatively new thing, found on only a handful of systems(the PS2+3, Wii, and 360)?

 

[Trippeh]

Disregarding handheld systems, what was the first backwards compatible system? As far as I know, it was the PS2, wasn't it? The Wii was the first Nintendo backwards compatible console, and as far as I remember, none of Sega's systems were, though I might be wrong on that point. If it was the PS2, doesn't that mean that backwards compatibility is a relatively new thing, found on only a handful of systems(the PS2+3, Wii, and 360)?

the first backward compatible console (without an adapter) was the Atari 7800.

 

[diab0l]

You just don't get it.

Technology has to advance. Marketing has to advance. Monetization has to advance.
Society has to advance.

Everything has to move forward, so we can one day finally arrive at our final destination: The shitty singularity

That is why there's meaningless new consoles which have better graphics, so they still look good in ridiculous resolutions, which our TVs have because people spend more money on new stimulation than on old stimulation and are conditioned to generalize this to everything old and new and I don't really want to continue this sentence.

There's so much to rant about, but it's not really worth it.

It's unstoppable, so we might as well add some fuel