Wednesday, 27 July 2011 21:08

Console games are getting shorter and shorter?

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84If anyone has ever really thought that console gaming is better than the PC then here is one to put a nice monkey wrench into that thought machine. As we see the installers for PC games getting larger and extending into more DVDs we find that the console gamers are hitting something of a wall. You see even with Bluray you have a finite amount of space to stuff everything in.  This means that as graphics and other objects in a game grow you lose out in many other ways. Bulky AI code gets slimmed down, expansive maps get trimmed.

If you do not believe me just take a look at what is happening with Dice’s Battlefield 3. According to Dice they are reducing the size of the maps between 20-25% to “maintain game pace”. I am not sure what this means exactly but to my way of thinking it means that you are getting loss of a game for the same amount of money. Some will argue that this is nothing new in the console world and that most gamers will be happier with the smaller maps. However, this is not completely true. Yes, if you have always played on a console then you do not know what you are missing from gaming on a PC. This means that you will not know or care about the reduction in size. But, if you are a PC gamer who also uses a console then you are likely to notice and to feel a little ripped off.

Either way this reduction in the size of the maps will not bring any savings to the buyer but it will bring a development and per game disk savings to Dice and the distributors. I do hope that this is not a move that we will see start up in the PC market. After all the last few games I have played were a little shorter than usual because they were console ports… which sadly is becoming a more and more common trend (again due to money).

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Read 2670 times Last modified on Wednesday, 27 July 2011 21:16

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