Recently, veteran game designer Chris Taylor -- maker of Supreme Commander, Dungeon Siege, and most recently, the woefully miserable Space Seige -- talked with Gamasutra about hardware requirements in PC gaming.
Going in the opposite direction of developers such as CryTek, who make games that only a small fraction of PCs can play with reasonable framerates, Chris Taylor believes that the age of the steep hardware requirement might be coming to end within five years.
Calling the period after the widespread adoption of the dedicated video card a "turbulent ten years," Taylor believes that what is typically considered 'low-end' hardware, such as integrated graphics cards and older CPUs, are becoming increasingly capable enough to deliver enough visual whizbang to satisfy most gamers. Instead of focusing on delivering cutting-edge eye-candy, Taylor thinks things like art direction and gameplay (gasp!) can appeal to people.
When you lower your hardware requirements, a game's possible customers base goes from "10 million and 20 million people to 200 million people," Chris points out. While this may seem fairly obvious, it is fairly uncommon for any big PC games to ever come out that support hardware more than say, three years old. And as most of you know, it has been like this for a long time.
Does Chris Taylor practice what he preaches? Judge for yourself: his last (and terrible, by the way) game, Space Siege, required a 2.6 GHz single-core processor, and a Radeon 9800 or NVIDIA 6800 video card.)
With games made by Blizzard -- most notably WoW -- The Sims (and all of the expansions), and games like Nancy Drew: The Phantom of Venice dominating the NDP PC game top-ten sellers list for a long time now, it seems reasonable to suggest that a least part of these games' success is due to their more forgiving hardware requirements. Sins of a Solar Empire also comes to mind; smaller budget, good gameplay, fine-looking graphics (but not cutting edge), Sins had lower hardware requirements and was one of the best selling games of the year -- most probably making more profit than Crysis. It almost seems like there is an untapped, unaddressed market out there or something?
Since the beginning of PC gaming, there has always been an arms-race of sorts for better and better graphics. After all, the PC has always been, and will probably remain, capable of delivering the most cutting-edge graphics. But it seems that somewhere along the line, the race for better graphics became a greater priority than the race for better gameplay. Perhaps because delivering better graphics is a much more tangible -- and easier to obtain -- goal than delivering a better gameplay experience, virtually every game out will have far more staff members in their graphics department than any other department (such as A.I programming, for example.)
While Chris Taylor says that "characters, the story, the UI, the design" should take precedence over graphics, it is very questionable if Space Siege delivered in one of these of categories (perhaps U.I.) Maybe his upcoming Defense of the Ancients inspired game Demigod (pictured above), which looks promising, will deliver more.
As many a PC gamer has experienced, nothing will make you want to 'go-console' faster than spending $500 on video card, only to have it barely handle the big games two years later.
But things may be looking up -- especially in the video card department, you can buy a very capable card these days for $100 (a 8800 GT for instance), or a extremely capable card for $160 (such as a HD 4850.) And a bit further into the future, say five years from now, cloud computing might take off to the point where most games are rendered from somewhere else, and just streamed to your computer over the 'net -- in which case, an inexpensive computer would run the game just as well as a far more expensive one.
Maybe PC gaming will eventually get back the platform's roots -- if you ask someone what their top five PC games are, I'd wager a bet that those five games had reasonable hardware requirements at the time the game was released, and had good design as their foremost aspect, not just great graphics.
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