Possible Decline of PC Gaming, Was There A Golden Age of PC Gaming

Half Life ( '98 )
Starsiege: Tribes ( '98 )
Fallout ( '97 )
Baldur's Gate ( '98 )
Ultima Online ( '98 )
Diablo ( '96 )
StarCraft ( '98 )
Age of Empires ( '97 )

sircyrus

I consider myself a fairly die-hard PC gamer. Do all my gaming on the PC, including sports games, etc, don't own any consoles and not interested in one either.

However, that is definitely not what I'd consider the golden age of PC gaming, I care for only one of those games, which just happens to be a phenomenal game though (Half-Life).

The golden age for gamers like myself would definitely be from 1999 or so going forward (System Shock 2, Deus Ex, No One Lives Forever, Half-Life 2, etc there are so, so many). And this year looks absolutely fantastic as well!

Result? You like the early years, some people prefer the later years; bottom line - PC gaming is still rocking the house!

the death/rise/fall/decline of pc gaming is a myth. as of crysis, the pc once again surpasses the console's.

There was a level of depth we lost in gaming once video cards could start making things look pretty. They had to make up for crap graphics in the past with awesome story-telling and superior game play. Games with great depth and game play are still being made, but they are the exception to the rule. weirjf

And as for story telling, games these days are better on average than those in the past, with TV quality scripts, pro voice actors, and a license to cutscene. Aside from Planescape: Torment and a few adventure games, modern games got 'em beat.

And to those who wish to add Baldur's Gate to the "Greatest Story Ever" list, let me give you some advice: get a library card and go to rehab. I mean, where did Bioware get that crap? A Powerpoint presentation in a comp lit lecture?

Gaming has already died for true gamers, its just a bunch of garbage for ADHD 12 year olds now. Master of Orion? Baldurs Gate stlye RPGs? Tactical Strategy (x-com)? CRPGs? Lucasarts Style adventure games? Space Sims? All dead genres only released by small companies with a very small if not unnoticed released. The big companies is all action garbage, so gaming is dead for me.

Thank god I buy 3rd party however which is still good, soon all these idiots will leave for console games and PC games will be for gamers once again.Kanaric

As for games becoming more action-oriented, what's wrong with that? Bioshock is as much puzzle solving as it is shooting, and World in Conflict is as deep as a turn-based war game. They're just leaner and faster.

And it's not just "ADHD 12 year olds" that are buying action games. The hardcore gamers of the 1990's are getting jobs and wives and just don't have the luxury of the six-hour-straight gaming sessions that the older strategy games demanded.

That's a great list by AFBrat77, I'm amazed by the fact that I remember more or less each of those titles fondly. I agree that the period presented us with some of the best gaming that the PC's ever seen.However, no I dont think PC Gaming in a decline, and I think today just might be as golden an age as any. The list bellow is not meant as a criticism of AFBrat77, but meant to show that PC Gaming today can stand up to the best history has to offer and hold its own very well indeed. Note that none of the game on my list are MMO's in spite of this being one of the biggest and most intesting areas in PC Gaming today with incredible block busters like WoW to creative alternate game / worlds like Second Life.

A side note, a lot of people seem to think the consoles are 'killing' to PC market. Has it occurred to anyone that rather than killing the PC market it might be feeding it. Modern games get more and more expensive to create. However with multiple new high end consoles, game developers now have a better chance of covering the cost because they can release the games over different platforms to different markets and groups at relativly low cost (compared to the overall cost of making the game from scratch). Think about how many of the last years really good games came from or went to the console: Bioshock, Rainbow Six: Vegas, The Orange Box, Elder Scroll Oblivion, Unreal 3 and (i think?) FEAR.

Taken from AFBrat77s post above

1996 - 2000 was the golden age of PC Gaming

Diablo and Diablo 2

Awesome games, Hellgate london is looking to be Diablo 2 meets the new millennia. For high quality clones with up todate visuals Titan Quest does a good job.

Baldur's Gate and Baldurs Gate 2

I call with Neverwinters Nights 1 and 2

Quake and Quake 2

Guns guns guns :) How about Quake 4, Quake Wars, Battle Field 2and Team Fortress 2

Half-Life

Awesome game, but than so is Half-Life 2 and episode 1 and 2

Grim Fandango

Possibly the best of Lucas Arts brilliant adventure games. It's a tough one to match, I'd go with Sam and Max episode 1-6 and add a the longest journey 2 (I forget the actual title)

Fallout and Fallout 2

Dosen't get much better than this.. can wait for next years follow up. To try and match it I'd call Elder Scroll: Oblivion, toss in KotOR 1 and 2 to make up the difference.

Tomb Raider and TR2

Heroes of Might and Magic II and III

It has been a while since I've come accross a really good 'light' turn based game. However We do have an under rated moderngame like galactic civ II that, in my opinion can measure up to past giants like Masters of Orion II (I know those are big shoes to fill but...).

Starcraft / Brood Wars

Aside from Star Craft II getting closer, the last couple of years have been a flood of good RTS's. For the outstanding storyline and great multi player, I'd have to say Company of Heroes.

Total Annihilation

Surpreme Commander?.. just kidding. Though Mutliplayer wise THX has given us more than just Company of Heroes, Dawn of War and especially the awesome standalone expansion Dark Crusade.

Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2

Someday I hope Force Unleashed might fill this slot, but for now I'd say Crysis looks like it's going to be not just a really good looking game but a game that bring manages to bring outstanding single player gameplay out of an FPS.. Much like JK: DF2 did.

Planescape: Torment

Tough act to follow, but I think one of the few titles that'd be a worthy comparison would be Bioshock. Both have outstanding story and atmosphear even if the two games play very diffrently from one another.

Dungeon Keeper

It's another game thats hard to really compare with much else do to its rather unique setting. but it is at its core a RTS, so.. Command and Conquer 3, maybe toss in the outstanding Civilization 4 and its two very good expansions.

Homeworld

While the two games are very diffrent I'd have to point to the recent World in Conflict. Both represent a fresh and diffrent take on the RTS genre and both are suported by a great and well presented storyline.

Heretic 2

I never really enjoyed Heretic, but thats just me. But fair is fair, another recent FPS centric game I really enjoyed would be S.T.A.L.K.E.R, brought back memories of some all time favoriest like Deus Ex.

Battlezone

Again somewhat diffrent ingenre but for awesome strategy games that breaks with the tried and true 'build a base and rush the other guy, I think Total War: Medieval II deserves a spot on the list somewhere (It's a personal favorit and it would have gotten offended if I didnt include it).

Unreal and Unreal Tournament

Well, UT3 is just around the corner and is (imho) looking pretty sweet. And of course Fear and the hopefully the upcomming followup are not at all bad shooters.

My personal opinion is that the golden age was in the early 1990's to early 2000's. You had revolutionary titles such as System Shock, Fallout, Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament, Half Life, Baldurs Gate, Deus Ex, etc. Now-a-days, the revolution seems to be stopping.

1) retail is certainly loosing interest in PC. NPD figures are also not great. over here in my local store, the PC section has definately gotten smaller as the shop accomodates the consoles and handhelds. the PS2 still has the most shelf space by far. however online sales and recurring revenues generated by pc games are not accounted for. no one seems to have a clue about how big the PC gaming market actually is and what types of games are selling.

2) consoles are not getting more competative on the graphics front...not technically at least (artistically speaking..id take okami over the vast majority of next gen games for its visuals). every time a new console is relased, theres a period where it rivals and sometimes has an edge over PCs. howeer at the mo a high end PC would give any console a pounding. by this time next year PCs will be so far ahead of conosles in temrs of horsepower, it wont even be funny. by this time 09 the gap between them will be comparable to the gap between a PS3 and a wii.

3) is pc gaming in decline? a bit yes. the US seems to be loosing interest in it overall as more and more ppl move to a console. its continueing to follow the japanese market in thsi regard....theres very little interest in PC gaming in japan. arcades and consoles are the biguns. PC still has some of its forts like south korea but they are getting fewer. maybe this will change as the performance gap between consoles and PC rises.

4) has the quality of PC gaming gone down? not more so than any other platform. PC still gets its gems (im really looking foreward to the witcher). however it has lost its sense of being on the rickity edge though. games really just arent as ambitious as they used to be imho. graphics quality is shooting up but other elements of games are being almost entirely neglected.

5) imho the golden age was when interplay were the big daddy of the PC gaming scene. so many cracking games like freespace, baldurs gate, icewind dale, planescape torment and fallout. of course there were many other great games from other publishers at that time too that were released for PC. since then though, the industry has mostly gone into a safety area and is just rehashing the same stuff over and over again. this is most pronounced on PC imho.

I wish a studio would make a game with no focus whatsoever on graphics that got received really well so that others could follow in their footsteps. As much as I love graphics, the need for them to be top notch is killing innovation :/ we don't see flight sims anymore because doing a "next-gen" one would cost lots and sales wouldn't back that up. Visual fidelity (rendering and animation) is the reason games get much more expensive to make and that's why smaller genres have died out.

Most of my genre favourites are old games. In my book, no DM game beats Q3 in any way shape of form, CS 1.6 is still my favourite online shooter, StarCraft is still the best competitive RTS around.

RTSes: This genre has pretty much never seen any innovation to be fair. Ground Control stripped away resource gathering and then one or two games use that concept today, but look at CnC3 or SupCom: they're basically the same game as their equivalents 10 years ago. They're hardly even refined, they're just changed and polished. As for StarCraft, it's great to compete in because it's so difficult to play. Newer games have more features to make them easier to play which leaves less things to be good at, but that's always been the progression of games I guess.

SP FPSes: There are still only two kinds of them IMO. Pre and post Half-Life. Oh, and Deus Ex :-P. Pre Half-Life ones were more or less refined copies of Doom, whereas modern shooters are still pretty much: shoot and have dudes talk to you. Half-Life 2 didn't revolutionize anything really, it just refined a whole lot, which is kind of dull but yeah... they make dudes talk to you in a more immersive fashion and do other stuff that technology allows which makes the game better simply because they have more freedom to add stuff. The basic design hasn't changed a whole lot.

People say that "it's not dying, we have all these great games". Yes, they're great but, "all" that new FPS games are doing is basically taking what was invented in Half-Life and trying to do it better. They do do it better too, and they end up as better games, but there's nothing genuinely new, only refined stuff. It's just that we have more powerful computers.

RPGs: They are, like most other games, becoming more accessible, seemingly at the expense of depth. I admit that's a pretty enomous generalization but yeah :P. I don't feel like the roleplaying aspects of RPGs have evolved much at all. Mass Effect and Fable 2 seem to be doing some interesting stuff with player emotion, but we'll see. Mass Effect has that new conversation system which is an innovation but it seems a bit gimmicky. I'm sure the rest of the game will be yet another refined BioWare RPG with great production values. They're not trying to do really new stuff they're just trying to do their old stuff better. I know I have a lot of ideas of how RPGs could change, you just gotta try to let go of your preconceptions of how a game should be, but 99% of all games today are designed from some stereotypical example and then they go "let's innovate this little bit here".

Guys like Peter Molyneux and Will Wright will always do bold stuff I guess, but I wish more people would do like them. To take a step back and rethink the core concept. Not all games can innovate, of course, but the HL type shooters are getting stale at this point (in my opinion at least).

Another consequence of the mass market appeal of games is that they are made easier so that they actually appeal. For hardcore gamers, easier games = meh. Unforgiving games = yay! (mostly referring to MP games)

1) Have you seen a decrease in the quality of PC Games?

I would say to a certain extent that PC games now don't really satisfy my gaming needs when they use to 5-10 years ago. FPS are deffinately on the decline where in the past we've been getting great shooters coming out one right after another it seems nowadays I'm waiting 2-3 years for good shooters. I'd say RTS games are slightly on the decline but that I think can be argued since 06-07 has had some pretty good ones, but before that we only had warhammer is seemed. RPGs I think are actually a bit better than they use to be with several online RPGs like WOW, and guild wars really giving a fresh breath to the genre.

As far as sports, fighting, and racing games I've never liked em on PC.

2) Do you think PC Gaming is in decline?

Obviously it is. MS Games for Windows was all about reversing the decline. Several developers have complained over and over again about the current decline of PC gaming, and many are jumping to multi-plats with consoles like the HL2: Orange Box, and UT3. Really I don't even know if you can call it a decline though. It's more like PC gaming hasn't really grown as much as console gaming over the years. Also I believe PC gamers are only spending there cash on certain games like WOW, Half-Life 2, and the sims making it even harder for devlopers to make money in the PC market.

3)when, in your opinion was the "golden age" of PC Gaming?

Probably around 96-00. The quality of games released in this period was amazing, and some of the best games today got their start durring this period. Warcraft, starcraft, Half-life, Quake, diablo, Unreal, the sims. Not to mention all the forgotten ****cs. Pretty much one year from that era is like 3 years worth of PC games nowadays.

No, there is no decline.

Imo, the Golden Age is now. But thats rediculous because thats like arguing over who's generation is better: is our grandfather's generations better because of the depression and WWII? Is my father's generation better because of Civil Rights, social progress, and Vietnam? Or is my generation better because of our freedom of expression and the current war?

Nobody knows the answer, but I know I enjoy games more now than I did20 years ago when I first started

There has been enough bad news since the last post above that there is no need to debate it. PC gaming is otally in decline.

I say this with a heavy heart, as I am a 20 plus year PC gamer that has never owned a console/

But facts are facts, and there is enough facts out there to show their is no point arguing the fact.

Only today Bioware announced the delauy of the PC version of Dragon Age from the start of 2009 to the end of 2009, so it can be released simultaneously with the 360 and PS3 versiopns .

There are practically no PC only AAA titles released any more. PC gamesare hardly carried in retail any more and we have seen 40% decline in PC game releases in the last 3 years.

There are practically no PC only AAA titles released any more.

Humorguy_basic