Patrick Bach, from DICE, the developers of the Battlefield series, certainly knows the way to a PC gamer’s heart: tell them that, for once, the PC version of a game won’t be a crummy port, but will be the glorious, lead platform.
In an “interview” with Nvidia, Bach is asked – without any self interest at all, of course – by the graphics card manufacturer whether console games are holding PC games back. And Bach lets fly.
“Yes, absolutely”, he says. “That’s the biggest problem we have today. Most games are actually still based on the same core idea that the consoles are your focus, the superior platform or something. I don’t know why. That was the truth 5 years ago, but the world has moved on.”
“PCs are way more powerful than the consoles today and there are actually almost zero games out there that actually use the benefits of this. So for our target of what we want to hit, we are now using the more powerful platform to try and prove what we see gaming being in the future rather than using the lowest common denominator, instead of developing it for the consoles and then just adding higher resolution textures and anti-aliasing for the PC version.”
“We’re [doing]it the other way around, we start with the highest-end technology that we can come up with and then scale it back to the consoles.”
That’ll sound a little snooty to console owners, but then, for once they can take a back seat. PC owners have been getting the shaft for years now when it comes to ports of major console games, whether it be poor customisation options, a lack of DLC, delayed release dates or no release dates at all. And all that on a machine which can generally run rings around a PS3 or 360.
It’s nice to see the shoe on the other foot for once, even if it is only one shoe on one person for one game.
Leave a Reply