I am not disagreing with you here! I do see the PC as very succesfull platform. I am talking about a marketing point of view. When it comes to the family zone the console is simple superior in marketing here. The PC has also a certain stigma on it that you won't find as much on consoles - the technical nerd. It is also much easier to play with several people using a consoles and TV. Be it with your family, on a party, just a few friends and some beer. The console is a play-and-forget station, plug 4 controllers in, get some mario cart and off you go! The PC is really more something for one person.
I think that the console as a family machine more or less died when Sega left the market and Microsoft entered. Nintendo definitely makes family machines and markets them as such but Microsoft and Sony seem to advertise more toward teens and young adults. I feel like a bro culture developed around the XBox in particular and has stuck around but that's mostly anecdotal.
On that note, I do think that consoles are marketed as social systems and rightly so. Until USB controllers became standard, simultaneous multiplayer games on PC were difficult, I played a number three and four player ones and it always required two people on the keyboard, one on a joystick, and one on the mouse. I do think that this aspect does influence the creation of a lot of quick to pickup (casual) party games but there are also plenty of competitive ones too (see fighting games).
Anyway yes, I agree that they have more potential as a family platform than PC but I would argue that tablets have won the family market at this point, odd as that sounds. I've noticed that it's becoming increasingly normal for people to be on different devices while spending time in the same room and calling that family time. It's an odd shift...
I also enjoyed the Arkham games a lot, even though the first game was so far the best one in my opinion particularly because it was in such a small place. I never felt like Batman was a character that works that well with open world games on the scale of a whole town. Things can get to big sometimes. But that's preference and opinion.
Definitely. I think that Arkham Asylum benefited a lot from being focused. It had collectibles but they were scattered throughout the game as you played it and didn't involve going out of the way too much more than just exploring the area did, with some notable hidden ones. I did dislike that it had you in X-Ray mode for most of the game.
I've only played the first two but Arkham City demonstrated the problem of making a game open world for the sake of being open world. It diluted and distracted from the experience and the plot. It's a good illustration of the damage that happens when you take a linear game, shove it in an open world, and add a bunch of distractions. Don't get me wrong, it's still a fun game but Arkham Asylum made revisiting areas a different and more interesting experience whereas it was more of an annoyance in Arkham City.
That doesn't change the fact that the most complicated games available are primarily for PC. That is why PC got Civilization 5 while the consoles and tablets got Civilization Revolution.
Until recently games like Wasteland 2 would have been unheard of on a console. Crusader Kings 2 would sell under 100,000 copies on consoles I wager. There are anomalies. Shadowrun Returns/Dragonfall was on tablets, but it clearly shows that.
Agreed, mouse and keyboard being standard with computers gives it far more flexibility with control and allows for more complicated controls without necessarily bogging down the gameplay. The RTS genre, and games with RTS elements, doesn't work nearly as well on any other platform for this very reason. I will note that TRPGs are old hat on consoles and I feel like turn-based strategy games used to be much more common. I'd also note that arcade-like games tended to be predominantly for consoles through the early 2000's due to controllers being less common on PCs, so there was more separation in expected experiences.
Look at the infamous Quest Marker as example number one of streamlined console catering. Let me be clear here: console gamers don't need shit "streamlined" to this extent. They can handle it if it is portrayed correctly. The developers let people know that dying is normal with Dark Souls and it caught on.
I wouldn't say that the quest marker is inherently bad but it does eliminate a type of exploration gameplay for fans of it. I also think that it eliminates the detailed directions that some games used to offer, which could be interesting dialogue. Fallout was more forgiving of general directions than Morrowind was, so the impact also depends on the game. Dark Souls is an odd beast, especially in this aspect. I would argue that Dark Souls isn't about less hand-holding but about gamers being able to enjoy truly difficult and punishing gameplay.
It really comes down to marketing in a number of ways. You won't see games like Europa Universalis on PS4 anytime soon i wager.
A week ago I would have agreed with you completely but I saw my roommate playing Tropico on his 360 the other day, so I'm leaving room for the possibility. I think that you're dead on about it coming down to marketing.
Might and Magic only had three ports to the consoles back then. The first three I believe. That was in the generation when gamers used graph paper, read instruction manuals, and had no internet. Back when console games weren't simplified beyond recognition. Difficulty wasn't an issue back then. Actually you could argue some of it was too hard depending on what game you are talking about.
My point is just that, it's less to do with the capabilities of the systems and more to do with what developers are making for those systems. My argument is that consoles are not the reason for simpler, easier games but rather the target audience is the cause. When computers became something in most houses that everyone used, casual games really exploded for them. Shortly after that, tablets and smart phones hit it big and largely stole that audience. Consoles became a way to entertain multiple kids with a single game system and TV but now it's not uncommon for houses to have many TVs and many game capable devices and I'd argue that multiplayer console games have suffered for it, though that may have more to do with my personal taste.
I have a Planescape Torment in box but sadly the manuals are all in Dutch. Not that I would resell it but that does hurt its value.
I kick myself on a regular basis for not buying that when it was first released. I remember reading about it in some gaming magazine and drooling over it but I never got around to playing it for years and years. I don't know what it is about the old boxes that was so cool but they just are.
