Caltrops - Dragon Age 2





	[quote name="Fussbett"][quote name="jeep"]In a broad sense it was a point about speed, my three year old desktop runs circles around that xbox hardware and I didn't even spend $800 assembling it, but in specific I knew about the 3.2ghz speed and forgot about the multicore so my singling out of the cpu is stupid when what has improved since the xbox 360s release is everything else about PC hardware, especially things that would effect features like running significant simulation engines alongside the actual gameplay.[/quote] Beyond just crunching the numbers of hardware, thinking that Dragon's Age 2 doesn't have a Dwarf Fortress simulation running underneath it because of console hardware limitation is very silly. It's developed with the Unreal Engine for fuck's sake. A game like DA2, as terrible as it is, already takes hundreds of people years to develop, and it's what people want. Especially when you say "fantasy version of Mass Effect 2", they want it even harder. Anyone playing these boring Bioware RPGs isn't asking for a Dwarf Fortress underpinning or destructible environments, they're asking for a romantic interest and dragons (au natural or wearing spacesuits). Getting caught up on my PC game backlog, I was just blown away by Far Cry 2. In the game I'd make my character wake up early to take advantage of as much daylight as possible (finally living out that morning person fantasy for me), and then one virtual morning it was randomly foggy! I was like "Shit, I hope the fog clears up or I won't get as much done today as I hoped", which is crazy. And remember, that's the game with fully dynamic fire and combustible everything. Then I loved last year's Just Cause 2, a game that would redefine destructible environments if Red Faction Guerrilla didn't already redefined it forever by making everything destructible, including the planet. One of the gimmicks of Just Cause 2 is that it has <a href="http://unrealitymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/large-video-game-worlds2.jpg" target="map">a crazy huge map</a>, but then sure, throw in a full GTA populace, day/night cycle and random weather effects too. Meanwhile the last two really good PC exclusives were Crysis and STALKER, each of which tried to take advantage of the PC platform by running like shit and not doing much else.[/quote]