The Ten Commandments Of PC Gaming

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While I was expecting this "Ten Commandments of PC Gaming" list to be terrible, it turns out that it isn't half bad. Your thoughts?

5. Thou Shalt Not Screw Over Owners Of One Brand Of Graphics Card

For while we agreeth that unique graphical enhancements like TXAA and TressFX are neat, we art much more interested in playing video games at a stable frame-rate, regardless of who manufactured our PC's graphics processing unit. If thou art making special deals with Nvidia or AMD to use their tech for nifty custom graphics, thou shalt treat those options as a bonus, and make thine first priority getting the game to run well on any card, regardless of brand.
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I have no issues with AMD or Nvidia paying a company so that their game gets optimized on that brand of video card. The only problem I have is when a game is intentionally crippled to work worse on the competitors card than yours.
 
I wholeheartedly agree with most of those. As a PC MMO player, I have little use for "quick save" though. As an admin in a software test lab, I definitely sympathize with #3. Nobody should release untested or broken software. Test it and fix it BEFORE releasing it.
 
The problem with the author's naïve view is that IQ features he's referring to are often put into games with the help of developer relations of large graphics card vendors. It's usually not a choice of making particular features work on any card first, then adding vendor specific gravy on top. Without the vendor help and support it may not be deemed cost effective to code complex effects from scratch.

Vendors often want to showcase new features and this is a good way to accomplish it. The fallback reference paths are likely made to work on previous cards from the same vendor which lack new whiz-bang feature, and other cards can also run that fallback code. Obviously this won't make a competitors card look as great in IQ or performance, but the company spending money to showcase its own new features is under no obligation to make its competition look good.

It's actually a good thing that game developers put in new features and popularize it. While in the short term whiny babies will complain about it, it will almost certainly help the direction of future video cards. I can think of a dozen major GPU improvements caused by AMD or Nvidia adding or optimizing particular new functions. This is a good thing, so stop being so short-sighted. :p
 
I like the one that was in the comments

"11. Thou shalt not require an internet connection to play a single player game."
 
I owned Dead Space 1 for over a year without playing it because I couldn't change my controls the way I wanted. Then I discovered GlovePie. I installed Dead Space again and after 15 minutes of goofing around with my controls I was satisfied and actually enjoyed the game.

If it wasn't for GlovePie, I would never even have played it, let alone played it through. It was 'almost' physically impossible for me to be forced into a wasd/mouse2 alt fire configuration under 'scary pressure situations'. If I couldn't have inverted my mouse I would have busted the DVD in 10,000 pieces, lit it on fire and blasted it out of the cannon I don't actually have. ... Anyway....

Controls is a big one to me, as they don't say "requires WASD keyboard/mouse2 alt attack" on the box.
 
ManofGod said:
I have no issues with AMD or Nvidia paying a company so that their game gets optimized on that brand of video card. The only problem I have is when a game is intentionally crippled to work worse on the competitors card than yours.
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Well AMD publicly accused Nvidia of doing exactly that. Afterall, there are REASONS they pay game companies sometimes millions of dollars to help "optimize"
 
Please, sirs, is it necessary to download and run the runtimes for DirectX and other libraries every time I run a game, then leave those files on the computer even though they are run only ONCE. How often have I run CCleaner with CCEnhancer to remove those files after install and first run?
 
The funny thing is for #5 that is how they started out. Personally I'm noticing AMD going the route or screwing with the raster and using special ARB vs ARRB paths in a couple of recent games, but I'm sure Nvidia is doing something similar...don't own an AMD card to test and don't really have the time with my new job :)

This comes up every time the venders hit a wall with hardware and get creative with the software. I just hate the un-rendered characters, pink screens where the frame buffer is holding old data and the card has crashed and other things that would be nice to have as extras once the game plays without issues...

fun fun fun
 
Thou shalt take the specified number of servers required on day of release from the infrastructure team with a pinch of salt and at least double the number.
 
tetris42 said:
Well AMD publicly accused Nvidia of doing exactly that. Afterall, there are REASONS they pay game companies sometimes millions of dollars to help "optimize"
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Maybe its time to release red and green box versions of games? Best of either world.
 
c@Nc3r said:
I like the one that was in the comments

"11. Thou shalt not require an internet connection to play a single player game."
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One could argue that the no DRM request covers that but putting it on for good measure wouldn't hurt.
 
Magnus said:
This is more of a forlorn wish list than ten commandments.
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Pretty much. While they would all be nice, I think companies are likely to take to heart... none of them? MAYBE #10, but it's a big maybe.

In fairness though, I think #4 and #7 are a bit whiny. Quicksaves aren't always a good thing for something like a horror game, it raises the stakes and tension. As for not having to restart, it depends on the engine. I'd rather devs focus on real problems instead of just small conveniences like that.
 
ManofGod said:
I have no issues with AMD or Nvidia paying a company so that their game gets optimized on that brand of video card. The only problem I have is when a game is intentionally crippled to work worse on the competitors card than yours.
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Not sure that isn't the same thing. Out of the gate, they probably run like crap on both, and if they only optimize one more than the other, the effect is crippling the other.
 
jpm100 said:
Not sure that isn't the same thing. Out of the gate, they probably run like crap on both, and if they only optimize one more than the other, the effect is crippling the other.
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Well AMD gave a few examples where they "optimization" actually LOWERED performance for both parties, but it was done in a way that hurt AMD more. Tessellation has never been AMD's strong point, so Nvidia has pushed it to levels that are imperceivable visually, but can hit the other side hard. If you want specific examples, here are a few that have been mentioned before:

Crysis 2:
The tessellation patch caused the water under the map to be tessellated (even though this is not seen at all)

Call of Duty Ghosts:
The dog hair had tessellation to the tune of 500,000 hairs for the dog I believe. Remove the dog and the performance rocketed back up to about equal.

Batman Arkham Asylum:
I forgot what the numbers were, but apparently Batman's cape was tessellated way WAY beyond what was even visually perceivable.

And before you go "that's the developer's choice" the point is these were cases where they were locked in to Gameworks via a contract with Nvidia and in some cases involved closed source DLLs for the developer that they were contractually obligated to use.

What you're describing is true in many cases no doubt (probably most), but the crippling of the software to hurt other vendors is a real battle that's going on as well.
 
tetris42 said:
Quicksaves aren't always a good thing for something like a horror game, it raises the stakes and tension.
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Yes, If you're using quicksave that often that going to save on the menu is a major inconvenience, you're doing-it-wrong.

A similar complaint that I have, though, is games that only let you save at checkpoints. I hate when I need to stop playing and have to worry about where I last hit a checkpoint, or if I'm going to forget to redo something if I quit now, and impatiently replay this section.

I can see the point of trying to prevent people from save-stepping all the way through a game, but in those cases there should simply be a save-on-exit, resume-on-start functionality, so at least I won't have to replay sections of the game just to get back to where I left off.
 
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