The end of last year saw the launch of two new PC shooter games: Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3. Both were heavily marketed, both received great reviews from the gaming press, and both bombed in sales terms. The reason? They required ludicrously powerful PCs to run. The inability of developers to write code to the capabilities of customers’ machines, rather than expect customers to upgrade their machine every ten days to suit their games, is the reason why so many people are deserting PC gaming for the consoles.
It isn’t that newer graphics and better games can’t be done on a set hardware specification - just compare the graphics on late PS2 games to games launched with the console. Hell, even compare 360 games now to 360 launch games. Assassin’s Creed > all, and PGR4 has substantially improved graphics over its predecessor. As I say, it isn’t that better games can’t be produced without increasing hardware requirements, it’s just that the upgradability of PCs makes developers too lazy to actually bother to do it.
Which makes the subject of this post all the more surprising. EA, normally considered the Barad-dur of the churn-em-out gaming sector, has come up with something truly original. Take the well known and (at least until the last spyware-ridden outing) loved Battlefield series, give it simple cartoon graphics and a game engine that will run on just about any computer. Give it away for free, and make money by selling purely cosmetic (ie no gameplay effect) customisations for characters and putting ads in the menu screen like Xbox Live does. A Fifa version of the concept has apparently made them million, so now they’re trying the concept on us violent Westerners.
The official site is up but is little more than a placeholder at the moment because they’ve sold the unveiling to the March issue of Games for Windows (out February 12th in the US, I don’t have a UK date for it yet). Roll on the summer!