Console Wars Thread! PS4 vs. Xbox One vs. Wii U Fight!

Assasins Creed.

 

Lol that's a unique perspective on their massive investment in gaming.

 

I'll definitely be getting it. In general I'm not a huge fan of the series (bought the first and sold before I even finished it, beat the second one, didn't bother buying the third), but the ship battles in IV look pretty gnarly. I would've bought it already, but I figure I may as well wait until I buy a PS4 rather than get the graphically inferior PS3 version now.

 

I only played the second one. This one is probably better. For all the hype about other games, this felt like what next gen is actually going to be. It looks AMAZING and it plays really well too. One of the best games I've played and a great story.

 

Yeah, I keep hearing that it's the best AC game yet, the one where everything finally came together and clicked. I'm looking forward to playing it, but still waiting for the PS4 to have a critical mass of games I want.

 

Yeah, it is a decent article. I think it touches on some of the points often brought up, including the "it's a marathon, not a sprint" comment. While true, there are some subtleties to that. It is hard to win a marathon if you were training for a sprint.

That might have been an exaggeration, but MS has generally been "behind" in investing in certain areas that would help them best I think. They do tend to pass on a lot of "quirky" games, unlike Sony and Nintendo. Several Sony-exclusives were actually pitched to MS first, but MS ended up passing on them.


This article is mostly about the possibility of giving gamers the choice of 720p/60FPS and 1080p/30FPS:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-in-theory-1080p30-or-720p60
But one of the bits of info in the article mentions that Killzone Shadowfall is actually NOT full 1080p in multiplayer (single player is full 1080p). It is actually using a somewhat complex rendering technique, but the thing that bothers me is that Guerrilla and Sony pushed this as native 1080p (in multiplayer), when it is clearly not. Essentially an outright lie. To their credit, it took a while for people to really notice (though most people noticed SOMETHING wasn't right). But it bothers me that developers would be so dishonest about something like this.

If you'd like to know more, the NeoGAF thread is pretty good (it explains a bit more how Killzone is rendering the game in MP):
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=778172

 

I caught that too. What's up with that? It's not a big deal, but I traded the game in awhile back anyway.

 

I haven't had the chance to really look into it, but it does sound like an interesting rendering technique. Something like rendering half the frame at a time (copying the pixels from the previous frame for the pixels that are "skipped"). It is different from simply rendering at a lower resolution and scaling it up to 1080p. I actually would be pretty cool with it, except Sony/GG basically lied about it being 1080p.

It might work well in some instances. Essentially something close (identical?) to full 1080p when not moving much, yet a much "cheaper" option on the hardware. Of course, in motion, the IQ will suffer quite a bit. People did notice this, but they thought it was a poor AA implementation by GG.

 

Yeah MS does need to lift its game when it comes to those "smaller" games for sure. It probably takes a lot of money and effort for not potentially a huge payoff that they hope from a "big" title, but I know if they had a bunch of smaller games on their online store right now I'd have been buying them just to play something new.

 

Quirky doesn't necessarily mean a small game. I'd classify something like Heavy Rain as quirky, but it sold over 2M copies. LittleBigPlanet has sold over 5M copies I think (maybe more across the whole franchise). Etc.

I think his point is that MS puts a lot of money into games like Titanfall, Gears, Halo, etc. Which is fine in some ways. Those games will sell a lot of copies (and a lot of systems). Though you do end up with some overlaps with those games, and gamers in other regions (who don't care for those games) won't have much interest in buying a system that focuses primarily on those games. This is partly why Xbox has struggled in regions like Japan.

Sony has been downsizing for a while, but one thing to note is that their 1st party studio is substantially bigger than the 1st party studio at MS (this allows Sony more exclusives, and more room to take risks). I guess MS has taken the approach of securing 3rd party exclusives, which does work in some ways. But it is generally very inefficient from a money perspective (especially if current sales trends continue), and it can be difficult to figure out which game will be the next big hit.

 

Not having a go at all in regards to sales figures. Hell, look at all the games that are sold on phones these days. I wish I owned a "small" game with a bird of some kind that flapped around.

I'd love to play Pong at 20 frames a second in 720.

 

Indie developers don't generally spend $20M+ on a game. Or even over a few million generally (if even that). Big studios can work on quirky games. Quirk in this case basically means something that isn't a shooter, sports game, racing game, etc.

 

ID@Xbox is a bigger initiative than many people realize... look for more information on self-publishing titles in the next year or so as they flesh out the back end for it and as Unity 3D support launches.

 

Boo! Never mind. I knew I should have waited for confirmation. RC Cola was wrong people.

(hey some people can admit it haha).

 

:grin:

 

Another PS4 sales update:
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-rele...ial-interaction-through-gaming-248315741.html
Now over 6M sold as of March 2nd (~700K sold since the last update during early February). 370K sold in Japan. 2.1M sold for Killzone, 13.7M games sold. We haven't gotten updated Wii U numbers since the end of 2013, but this would put the PS4 ahead and now in "1st place" I guess.

Yeah "marathon, not a sprint," but it will be difficult to reverse these trends I think.

 

So looks like PS4 is 1st place, Wii U is 2nd place, xbone is last place.

I do not get Nintendo why do they not make a console with specs on par with their competitors. They have the strongest first party all they need to do is get 3rd party games on their console.

 

Yeah, if the Wii U was more powerful and Nintendo had a decent online service (getting there slowly), the "war" would be more interesting.


http://www.dualshockers.com/2014/03...y-by-amazon-japan-is-a-release-date-incoming/
Hmm...MS might be ready to release the XBO in other regions now.


Also, not console wars exactly, but the next Rocksteady Batman game might be next-gen only. GameInformer should have details later today I think, but some of them leaked to the Internet (via retailers).

edit: Oh wait, here it is:
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2014/03/04/april-cover-revealed-2014-1039752374.aspx

 

I'd prefer saying XBone is in 3rd place. "Last" is kind of mean. At least throw out a bronze medal.