I really hope they honour your request for experiments revealing the effects of time, Cam. I'd guess that the time it takes for the effects to diminish and the intensity of them is roughly proportionate to the time exposed to the stimulus and the intensity of it.
I think that most FPS games are expected to tell some form of story (because we're pretty much role playing in that perspective). A story that's eight times (at least) shorter than the story we were expecting to experience is, thus, crapper. Some other genre's (fighting, puzzle, driving, etc) get away with it because their value is in how long it takes people to master their varied challenges.
So you either need to be a game that has fun, varied, usually competitive challenges that take ages to master and that's the point, or be a game that tells a long, engaging, immersive story (you could be brave and try and be both, but then quality becomes more important than length. E.g. Portal).
I once changed the settings on my mate's 1080p TV to 720p without him knowing. I told him about a month after, when he was pointing at it and saying "I can't believe you don't see how much better this is than 720p". When he gets a 4K TV, I plan to change it to 1080p and never tell him...
I love this show, it's my favourite on Game Spot or any game site, having knocked Zero Punctuation from the top spot. If only you did actually publish one every day though :)
I'm a PC gamer and stand by my rig, but I think there's quite a lot of overestimating on the PC's capability versus that of a console, and a lot of underestimating on how much faster you can make your game if you know the exact architecture you are writing for.
Consider Crysis 3. To play that on its midrange graphics settings you need either:
a PS3 (released Nov 2006) ;
an XBOX 360 (released Oct 2005); or
a PC with AMD 6000-series/Nvidia GTX 500-series (released Oct/Nov 2010 respectively - 5 years later) (Crysis 3 recommended spec)
Now let's compare hardware specs of 7th gen consoles and the average gaming PCs at the time, and 8th gen (PS4) consoles and average gaming PCs today.
PlayStn4: CPU: 2GHz x 8, GFX:"next generation", RAM: 8Gb
PC 2012: CPU: 3.2GHz x 4, GFX: 775GHz-1Gb, RAM: 8Gb
Those averages came from a lot of Googling and some intelligent guesswork. They aren't enthusiast specs, but they do seem fairly representative of your average PC gamer's spec. That said, real polls would be useful in case anyone knows of any. At any rate, what does all this suggest to me?
At the time of release, console hardware was slightly more advanced than the average PC, but broadly in the same generation. Despite this, it took the PC another 4-5 years to be able to play games that console hardware was capable of playing back in 2005/6 - we just had to wait for game developers to work out how to unlock the console potential. And that's the difference optimisation on a known platform can give you - and its something the PC just can't take advantage of because all of our PCs are different. The PC's grunt is a necessary compensation for the console's refinement. I believe that the PC grunt we have available right now isn't enough to keep up with the PS4's potential over the coming years.
Further, it seems to me that the PS4's hardware has a more significant lead over the average PC today than 7th gen consoles did when they were released. Game engines today and likely in the future are further targeting consoles, and hardware speeds are not expected to increase over the next 5 years as significantly as they did over the previous 5 years (wiki Moore's Law).
With all this in mind, I would expect it to be a good five years again before PCs are powerful enough to play what the PS4 has the potential to play in the same time frame, and it shouldn't take as long for developers to realise its potential as it did with 7th gen.
There are lots of other things to consider of course, like resolution, frame rates, texture qualities, game design trends, production budgets, standardising game engines and so on - but I think at the least it should give us pause for thought before being so quick to judge the PS4 as a weak step forward. To me it seems likely that the PS4 will usher in a next generation of graphics that the current console limitations hold us back from reaching. If history is anything to go by, us PC gamers will have to wait a couple generations of hardware to take advantage of that.
adrianlev's comments