Ah, the eternal debate - what's more hardcore, console or PC? DICE's Patrick Bachman has a very strong opinion, but we're not sure we agree...
It wasn’t so long ago that I was in London for the EA Spring Showcase. Among the games on show was Battlefield 3 and I got to sit down with Patrick Bach, executive producer of DICE for a rather fleeting time to discuss Battlefield 3. You can see a lot of what we discussed in the latest issue of Atomic magazine. While he was quick to shut down questions about dedicated servers, LAN and mod support for the upcoming shooter, he did reveal one delicious tidbit that made it difficult to hide the ‘Oh ruly!?’ in my eyes.
Here’s the skinny on what went down with the full question and answer to give you context:
Atomic: You mentioned jets, and that was something, apart from prone, that was one of the biggest things missing from the Bad Company series. How do you bring that back, especially to the console world, who haven't dealt with jets like people on the PC, where they were very fast and very hard to control. How do you do that in a multiplatform way for two platforms that have never experienced that?
Patrick: I’m not too worried about that actually. We see the console owners as… they are as hardcore as the hardcore PC owners nowadays. They weren’t five years ago but they are now. We don’t have a problem with giving people a challenge. The goal, of course, is to make a game fun; it’s not fun if you can’t take off! I’m not a real pilot so I can’t take off, what button should I press? Because then you get these elite users that just mock people because they can’t do something. And we don’t think that’s fair. It’s like, the best pilot should win; not the most technically skilled. It’s like, I’m a better pilot because I know how to fly this thing, but everyone should be able to fly. So that’s kind of our motto, that everyone should be able to try it at least. But I don’t think we’ll have a problem with having console players fly jets. They’ll probably be great jet pilots; probably greater than a lot of PC players; because console players are putting a lot of hours into our games, even now. So we can see crazy people doing crazy stunts with, y’know, helicopters on the console, which we didn’t think you could do.
Mr Bach, I couldn’t disagree more. This isn’t the part where I say that there is no such thing as a hardcore console gamer; far from it. This is, however, the part where I draw a line in the sand. As hardcore as the hardcore consoler may be, they can’t hold a flame to the hardcore PC crowd. There are some key reasons behind my logic.
First and foremost, PC gamers have had a much longer collective online gaming history to the point that the definition of ‘hardcore gamer’ has stretched further. What we’ve been enjoying for decades was only half introduced in the last generation of consoles and was still only fully embraced and pushed in the current generation of consoles.
The second point is that when you pit a console against a PC, the former is technically limited by what’s beneath the hood. The simplified ‘one hardware flavour services all’ design of consoles may offer universal gaming accessibility, but it removes the option to tweak and customise to the extent that a PC gamer can. Sure, you may be able to change your buttons and aiming sensitivity, but you’re restricted in almost every other way. PC gamers can tweak and modify to their collective heart’s content.
And then, of course, there’s the nature of online gaming as well. Having sunk my fair share of hours into the multiplayer portions of Call of Duty: Black Ops, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Crysis 2 and Homefront on both Xbox 360 and PC, the experiences are chalk and cheese. The faster pace at which these games tend to be played on PC coupled with the precision aiming of a trusty mouse mean that your average PC combatant needs to be more skilled and faster on their reflexes than the average Xbox LIVE gamer.
There are definitely contenders on consoles; hell, I’ve encountered a helluva lot of skilled players. But automatic snap-to aiming on consoles is a poor replacement for the deadly headshot potential of mouse-assisted aiming. Even running with Patrick’s helicopter example, consolers are still limited by a single controller, whereas we PC gamers have the option of finetuning light controls with keyboard and mouse or by plugging in a joystick.
The biggest limiting factor for me on console first-person shooter titles is aiming by way of thumbstick. But even with that taken out of the equation, I tend to see more deadly tactics and cunning—misdirection, ambushes, etc.—on the PC side of the fence than when I play online with consolers.
Put simply, the hardcore consoler has a long way to go before they’re even in the same ballpark as the hardcore PC gamer.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012