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"Call of Duty 4" developer shocked by level of PC piracy
http://fourzerotwo.blogspot.com/2008/01/week-in-review-servers-servers-servers.html
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You go out and you buy the best system money can buy. You spend $3K (let's say) on it and man it is sharp. It plays every game you own, full blown. Runs them at the huge native resolution you have on your LCD, you can max out every single setting, and get a smooth as silk framerate. New games come out and they're a piece of cake to run as well. Life is good.
A few years go by and your system's not so hot anymore. You start having to turn down settings. You miss entire features because they're not supported by your card. You find yourself downloading demos of games you already want to buy just so you can know if they'll run worth a damn on your computer. You start having to make decisions like do you want a lower framerate but better graphics, or a higher framerate and poor graphics? You used to be able to have it all.
But hey, you can just upgrade again and everything will be 100% again.
The problem Crysis has is that it screws this up. I think it's possible to build a system today that can max it out but it's not financially feasible for most people. And by most people, I'm including 99% of gamers.
Not to say it looks bad at all on less-than-balls-out settings, but it annoys people, on principle, that you could spend that $2-3K on an upgrade and still not have enough. The point of upgrading is to avoid that hassle.
Game developers have tried to alleviate this over the years by having "settings" (i.e. low, medium and high) or to have autodetection algorithms. The problem with the settings is that you frequently fall somewhere between medium and high and you don't want the hassle of having to experiment (nor do you want to run the game and then later find out it could have looked better had you only tried a different setting).
The problem with the autodetection algorithms is that they favor higher framerates. They're notorious for telling people with awesome systems that they need to run at "Medium". Yes, I know "Medium" will give me 60fps, but "High" will give me a perfectly acceptable 45fps and will look a hell of a lot better. The autodetection algorithms are too conservative usually.
So, I think the Crysis problem could have been averted if the autodetection algorithms were better (I've played the demo once, so I don't remember this being the case but I could be wrong). If they could just ask you "do you prefer better framerates or higher quality graphics?" it would help. Maybe give them a target framerate range and let them test your system (I swear some old games would do this - Descent maybe?).
Crysis runs on a LOT of PC's. The problem they have is that their target audience doesn't want to fiddle and is annoyed, on principle, at not being able to max it out with the best system they have. I think if the autodetection algorithm was better and saved them the hassle, this situation could have been better.
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