As I was watching the Battlefield 3 demo at E3 this year I needed a bucket to catch the drool running from my dropped jaw. The lighting, the atmosphere, the sounds; everything about this game made me want to run to the nearest mountain top and scream out that I was pre-ordering this sexy beast. Then I hoped onto the live stream of EA’s Battlefield 3 event and watched two hours of multiplayer madness; I was thrilled. That is until I snapped back to the reality of being a console gamer caught in the late life of my machines.
The Battlefield series made its name on the PC and DICE has finally returned to its home platform with PC gamers laying down palm leaves and singing “Hosanna”. This is tremendous news for PC gamers, but is quickly becoming the bane of the console gamer’s existence. Earlier this year DICE had mentioned that the console versions were currently set at 24 players, but that number was not yet set in stone. Go into any forum that has anything to do with Battlefield 3 and you will see countless PC trolls claiming that consoles just can’t handle the full version of this game. While their smugness reeks beyond anything I’ve seen in the console wars, they’re right to some extent. Could the consoles handle 32 player battles? Yes, and I think that’s what we’ll see, but that’s not the big picture here. Those of us on consoles need a way to keep up with PC gamers which brings me down memory lane to the wonderful Nintendo 64 Expansion Pak. This bad boy allowed N64 users to increase their systems RAM from 4MB to a whopping 8MB. All you had to do was slide this on the console and BAM! you’re ready to play Majora’s Mask. It amazes me that I haven’t seen anything like it since. Sony and Microsoft need to look back on this and see the potential to vastly improve the lifetime and quality of their own consoles. How great would it be to simply slide an adapter onto your Playstation or Xbox and be able to compete with high end PC’s five years into your consoles life?
This far into our console’s life cycle we are simply at the mercy of their limitations. Sure developers will continue to find ways to squeeze out better visuals and performance, but sacrifices will continue to have to be made. The way I see it Sony and Microsoft need to ensure that no developer runs into limitations during a consoles life cycle. They need to truly future proof our consoles so we can enjoy bar raising games and not have to settle for what is possible. I expect DICE to announce 32 player battles on the consoles, but that’s still a far cry from 64. Hopefully when Battlefield 4 comes around we’ll be able to simply complain about the number of classes with our fellow PC gamers instead of the number of players.
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Soulmask is another indie survival-crafter looking to wear the genre's increasingly contested crown, but its player numbers are no joke.
Like the competition, I just hope there's enough to go around. Seems to be alot of survival games already this year.
This one does look cool. Reminds me of Zeno Clash
They dont need to be future proof. They just need to release new consoles every 5 years and support the consoles for 5 years after they release the new console.
Only way they can be future proof is if they go the way that onlive has gone. Cloud Based.