BC Modding Has Gone Beyond Third Party Companies

[intrepid90]

Imagine if the Excal team worked on the next commercial ST game? They have a passion and skill for it and imagine if they were getting paid full time. The quality of the ships would be outstanding.

Their financier would want results, and would put time restrictions on them.

Their financier would also want the game to run on as many PCs as possible, hence the generally low level of details of stock ships in pretty much all the Trek games - the more PCs can run the game, the more people who might buy it.

dont think so that it has to do with the requirements. look at all the games out there...
many of them require HG Computers and they are successful though

[SimRex]

Their financier would also want the game to run on as many PCs as possible, hence the generally low level of details of stock ships in pretty much all the Trek games - the more PCs can run the game, the more people who might buy it.

dont think so that it has to do with the requirements. look at all the games out there...
many of them require HG Computers and they are successful though

It's generally acknowledged that the PC games market is struggling at the moment because so many cheap PCs are being sold which just do not have the power to run modern games.  UT3 and Crysis have both suffered "disappointing" sales because they don't scale well to older hardware, or to lower-end hardware (ie laptops).  People have tried the demo, seen that it either runs like a slideshow or not at all, and decided not to bother.

Compare this to the most successful PC game around at the moment, WoW, which runs on some really clunky hardware but is still topping the sales charts above these shiny new games and has been for several years now!

At the end of the day, if you're looking to really make some money from the PC gaming market (and that's what the investors are intending, after all!) you need to get your minimum requirements as low as possible, and that's why we're seeing a proliferation of "casual" games which will run on pretty much anything.

[Aeries]

I think it's also note-worthy to mention that a lot of the low-end games have had some of the best game play around, whilst a lot of newer games lack story line, or simply poor game play. Graphics is secondary, all things considered... you can have an amazing game graphics-wise, and the play quality teh suckage, or you can have poorer graphics with wonderful game play (FFVII, for example). Halo is one of the only examples I can think of that had a balance of both, for it's time. Hence, all the hype about that series... though I could be mistaken. The game is, after all, Microsoft's model for the Xbox series of platforms... and naturally would have a heck of a lot more publicity.

All of this is debatable, I suppose. I was/am a halo fan, while others aren't. All depends on your taste, I suppose.

This has been another note from the peanut gallery.
-Aeries.

[El]

Hmm, I think it'll all even out.

Graphics cards are too expensive (for the high end cards at least) for a lot of people to be able to afford.
Once prices start to come down (sometime this year with new chipset realeases etc), the high end games market will pick up, as more people can afford the hardware to run them.

People will demand better quality games for their cards, and up the ante.

THe games quality will then outpace the performance of the 'reasonably priced video card' and the whole cycle starts again.

[Aeries]

Quite the cycle, isn't it?
I know where I work, a lot of motherboards with on-board VGA/DVI support have rather impressive chipsets, and can run most games rather well, provided the systems have a decent compliment of ram, and enough of that ram is allocated. Granted, it's not as good as having an actual graphics card, but with the right set up, it can make a nice suppliment.

Oh, and higher-end CPUs are a must, but that's just obvious.

[Starforce2]

you don't need fancy ships to havea  good game. BC got it right atleast in part. Controls were simple (maybe a tad too muhc so) and missions were hard to customised but the actual conversion process and hardpointing isn'yt terribly difficult. If a game could capture that, plus make modding right off the presses alot easier (in some ways like armada) where you don't need fancy programs like BCMP to crop up just to make ship instalation idiot proof, and the game itself is decent, then the ships can suck like there's no tomarrow becausre it will build a huge modder base and the modders will toss all the ships. But that would make too much sense nad basicly require the game companies to almost openly admit that the players can make the game better than they can.

[captain_obvious]

Imagine if the Excal team worked on the next commercial ST game? They have a passion and skill for it and imagine if they were getting paid full time. The quality of the ships would be outstanding.

Their financier would want results, and would put time restrictions on them.

Their financier would also want the game to run on as many PCs as possible, hence the generally low level of details of stock ships in pretty much all the Trek games - the more PCs can run the game, the more people who might buy it.

tell that to the guys who made crysis ;)

[ChronowerX_GT]

Imagine if the Excal team worked on the next commercial ST game? They have a passion and skill for it and imagine if they were getting paid full time. The quality of the ships would be outstanding.

Their financier would want results, and would put time restrictions on them.

Their financier would also want the game to run on as many PCs as possible, hence the generally low level of details of stock ships in pretty much all the Trek games - the more PCs can run the game, the more people who might buy it.

tell that to the guys who made crysis ;)

Ooo, imagine a ST game made by Crytek

[MLeo]

It's marketed as future proof.

Meaning that maybe you can't run it now, but did you see our collection of computers that can run it, and no, it's only an optical illusion that they seem to be rather overpriced if you compare them to other systems, and no, they can't run crysis, and no, they do not contain the same, ours contain some pixie dust.