| I have worked on console games since the 360/PS3 era, (which was 10 years ago, so my info is probably a little rusty) > the PC port is deliberately gimped due to being developed for console. If you want to have a mature discussion on the topic don't start out with this attitude. Timelines are finite, and plans change. Remember that the games you're talking about existed before licensing ue4/unity was the default option for AAA games. The games were likely only ever planned to exist on console and the request for PC cones in way later, however at that time the game just barely runs on PC (it doesn't need to be performant or representative, just play), and relies on an engine architecture based on having cell SPEs or an (almost) unified memory architecture. The game is likely unplayable for anything other than "test you can do X and Y" on PC, and all development of the look and feel is done on the console itself. Naturally as consoles have moved towards x86 these differences have been reduced, and now it's common to develop the game on PC and test occasionally on console. The differences do still exist though; PS5 having hardware decompression, dualsense controllers, both consoles having raytracung hardware and super fast SSDs as a guarantee. > Between this effect, subscription MMORPGs and the inevitability of microtransactions I lost interest around that time. You've missed 2 decades of excellent games that don't suffer from this, don't have subscritions and don't have microtransaction by doing that! |
Please do not take my opinion as a personal affront to your career, and I sympathise with the difficulties in the industry.
Don't worry about my missing out, I had plenty of other things to do during that time. I have since regained a temporary interest and caught up on the offline single player PC games of interest to me over the course of lockdown restrictions, but console games are not for me. Invisible-War stands out as an abomination, prompting my comment.
The Ion storm games I mention ran poorly on an unreal 2 engine compared to their predecessors and the GTA ones were developed in parallel, there was no change of plan, it's a statement of fact in those cases rather than an attitude.