# Let's Talk About: Parity



## Velocity (Sep 11, 2014)

To be entirely honest with you, even though I technically classify as a PC gamer myself, one thing has always bugged me about PC gamers. I've never understood how PC gamers can pay less for the same games as home console gamers and expect a better experience.

Take Dark Souls, for example. When it came out on the PS3 and 360, it had major issues but home console gamers got over them pretty easily. We understood that Blighttown sucked in terms of performance, but we adapted. Very few of us ever went through Blighttown more than once thanks to the shortcut that also served as the area's exit. When Dark Souls came to PC, in terms of performance, it was basically identical to the home console version. It had no extra bugs or performance issues and, instead, was sold at a reduced price ($40 vs the $60 everyone else paid) with a $15 DLC included free. So even though PC gamers were getting a $75 experience for $40, they were basically furious. There were so many complaints that the game wasn't running better than the home console version that some guy called Durante basically hacked the game to force it to run better.

...but why? Ultimately, why do PC gamers deserve better than parity? All this led to was the PC version of Dark Souls 2 being significantly better than the home console version and still at a lower price, a major kick in the teeth for anyone who bought (or wanted to buy) Dark Souls 2 for home consoles. Essentially, PC gamer's whining ruined Dark Souls 2 for everyone else.

Of course, it's no longer just about PC gamers. It's also a large number of PS4 owners too. In fact, the whole reason for this thread is a post I read on NeoGAF.



			
				Karl Hawk said:
			
		

> *Originally Posted by Interficium *
> Who will be the first to take a brave stand against parity in this thread? Which one of you is brave enough?
> 
> *Originally Posted by TAJ *
> ...





It got me thinking... Everyone knows the PS4 is more powerful than the Xbox One by a considerable margin. Everyone knows PS4 exclusives will look and perform much better than Xbox One exclusives. So when a multiplatform game as big as Destiny is released, PS4 owners are furious that it looks and performs the same on both consoles. They're so quick to accuse Bungie of foul play, of showing the Xbox One more love than the PS4, yet I'm sitting here wondering what all the fuss is about.

So what is it? A sense of superiority? Quite a lot of PC gamers seem to love calling themselves the "master race", comparing home console owners to peasants. Quite a lot of PS4 owners, similarly, seem to love it when DigitalFoundry releases a new analysis showing a multiplatform game performing worse on the Xbox One... So is it less about getting the most out of the hardware and more about the sense of superiority being injured?

What's so wrong about everyone, regardless of the hardware, paying the same price for the same experience? The PS4 and the Xbox One cost roughly the same and software released on them rarely costs any different, so multiplatforms should ideally perform identically on both. The exclusive releases are really all that should get the most out of their respective consoles because those are what justify the purchase. You don't buy a PS4 for Destiny and the new Assassin's Creed, you buy it for inFamous and Bloodborne.

I have nothing against getting the most out of the hardware I have, but I'm not going to complain if the same game on weaker hardware performs exactly the same. A situation like the Dark Souls 2 one is what I consider unacceptable. Releasing a PC version so clearly superior to the console version a month and a half later is simply a dick move and no different to FromSoftware giving the middle finger to people who bought the home console version during the launch month. Admittedly I shouldn't expect any less from the company that also gave the middle finger to idiots like me. Idiots who bought the first Dark Souls at launch, made it the success that it was, only to then be expected to pay extra for content PC gamers got for free.

I digress, though. My question is... What is so wrong about parity?


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## Patchouli (Sep 11, 2014)

PC gamer here.

For me it boils down to "if I built a $2,000 gaming PC, I want it to look and play better than it would on a console, by a significant margin". It's not that I want console players to have an inferior experience, or that I derive some sense of superiority by having a better system. It's that if I made such a large investment into a gaming PC, I'd like to see all that power being utilized.


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## Violent by Design (Sep 11, 2014)

PCs and consoles are not equal, so why would their be parity?

PCs are strongers than consoles, so naturally it is expected the games would run better on PCs.

I don't understand the complaint. As for your question as "why should I get Dark Souls on PS3, when I can get a better edition for cheaper on PC?" - the obvious answer is you shouldn't or you have a PC that can't run it.


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## TasteTheDifference (Sep 16, 2014)

Isn't most of the price differential to do with the royalty fee console manufactures charge the publisher?  The inequitable treatment pc gamers supposedly receive is probably more to do with lower unit sales on PC vs console, so that developers don't expect the additional revenues accrued by producing a better PC version to counteract the extra cost of doing so, maybe more in  terms of the opportunity costs of using of the limited cash resources of the publisher and man hours of the dev, ie instead of producing a better pc version those rea sources could be put into an entirely different game


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## St. YatōKiri_Kilgharrah (Sep 16, 2014)

People want to get what they think they paid for


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## Agent of Chaos (Sep 17, 2014)

I think at the moment for PS4 owners it a sense of "Haha! Take That MS/Xbox" after years of inferior PS3 ports and also dealing with unoptimized pieces of shit (Skyrim/Fallout) and year long waits for some DLC (GTA IV)

It's also why they are unwilling to feel to bad for Xbox One Owners and their plight on the Destiny DLC as well. And have a sense of "Well they put more effort for this system, so why not more for x as well?" (This is to the Xbox One version getting a boost to 1080p which had been 900p before)

Which when it comes to Destiny is true, DF even mentioned that the PS4 Beta and the final products are almost exactly the same, which shows very little was put into it after the Beta when AF was kinda shitty on it, a small thing but I digress.


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## Raidou Kuzunoha (Sep 17, 2014)

Patchouli said:


> PC gamer here.
> 
> For me it boils down to "if I built a $2,000 gaming PC, I want it to look and play better than it would on a console, by a significant margin". It's not that I want console players to have an inferior experience, or that I derive some sense of superiority by having a better system. It's that if I made such a large investment into a gaming PC, I'd like to see all that power being utilized.



Bayonetta on PC running two to three times the speed would be the raddest shit ever.

>if only


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## wibisana (Sep 17, 2014)

i think it all about business marketing
let say 
Dark souls's development (engine, coding, marketing) cost 100.000.000
selling to ps3 and 360 for 60 bucks
they sell 3.000.000 copies
so they already make profits

in the end they can give PC gamer discount.


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## scerpers (Sep 17, 2014)

Agent of Chaos said:


> I think at the moment for PS4 owners it a sense of "Haha! Take That MS/Xbox" after years of inferior PS3 ports and also dealing with unoptimized pieces of shit (Skyrim/Fallout) and year long waits for some DLC (GTA IV)



it's not just ps3 owners who do that. it's a behavior that is natural to all console owners since the dawn of time.


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## Juub (Sep 17, 2014)

So you would be ok with Smash on the Wii U being the same as Smash on the 3DS?

PC gamers got Dark Souls  almost a year after the consoles so it's understandable they expected their game to look and run better than machines that were by that point 7 years old. Unlocked frame rate and higher resolution has been a standard for PC gaming for years now. We just expected FROM software to meet these standards.

FROM software ported Dark Souls from consoles to PC. Literally ported. There were still Xbox 360 button prompts even if you were using a mouse and keyboard which quite frankly is unacceptable. Would you like seeing Xbox One prompt on your PS4 game? Higher frame rate and resolution is quite easy to accomplish. People had the feeling FROM were just being lazy with the port and they were right to think so.

Platforms aren't equal so I don't see why we should get the same experience on all of them. You think people wouldn't go crazy if Titanfall on Xbox360 and Xbox One looked and played the same?

As for Dark Souls 2, if the consoles could have handled the PC level of performance, they would have made it the same. Dark Souls 2 just couldn't run the same on 8 years old hardware. PC gamers would have been penalized because FROM decided to mainly develops for platforms that were nearly a decade old. That's akin to having a high level PS3 game with low PS2 level graphics. Unacceptable.

So no, I don't believe in parity in the way you suggest it. They should simply develop for the most powerful one then downgrade accordingly to get the most out of every systems. Parity isn't putting everyone on the same lowest common denominator. It's giving everyone what their machines are capable of.

Edit: While we're at it. Do you think people would like it if GTA V on next gen looked as blurry and ran as horribly as it did on the last gen consoles? You want no AA, blurry textures and sub 30 frame rate on your spanking new PS4 because crappy Xbox 360 that was released 10 years ago can't get on your console's level?


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## Naruto (Sep 17, 2014)

Velocity said:


> I've never understood how PC gamers can pay less for the same games as home console gamers and expect a better experience.



Then you have no concept of what the actual complaints are and the level of incompetence involved in releasing piece of shit ports on a platform capable of much more.

I think most PC gamers would be happy with things that aren't locked to thirty frames per second and games that refuse to render internally at the resolution you set. It's pretty sad that we've lowered our expectations to this, given that this side of a decade ago this wasn't a problem at all and publishers somehow still magically made money despite rampant piracy, but there it is.

Dark Souls gets a pathetic PC release with both problems described above, a member of the community fixes it within a week with a dll injector. But From Software has remained too lazy to implement those fixes in an official patch after god knows how long it has been.

And it's not always practical to implement a user fix, because some games require memory editing (like CE). Look at L.A. noire, for example. It's doable for us, but a pain in the ass. Yet if the developers themselves were to issue a relatively minor patch, it wouldn't be an issue. Alas, the general consensus is that we are not worth the trouble.

Turning the camera in a game at thirty frames per second is physically painful. An analog stick has inherent delay to begin with, so console gamers aren't used to responsiveness (or they think they are but have no idea what real responsiveness is). Try doing this on a console with an analog stick at thirty frames per second and let me know how well you can grenade wall jump into a straight airborne railgun perfect shot:

[YOUTUBE]PcbpIntnG8c[/YOUTUBE]

We own PCs because we WANT that superior performance and snappy controls.

I own a lot of consoles. From handhelds to home consoles, I own a lot of them. I would not expect a home console release of a game to look the same as a handheld release. The same comparison can easily be made between a home console and a pc.

This isn't about "pc gamers" as a community or whatever thinking they're inherently better than anyone else. You know for all the whining I hear about the master race jokes (and they are jokes, albeit rooted in the very real preference of one factually superior platform over the others) I see a lot of fucking annoying, childish rubbish arguments about the xbone and the ps4 and how one is so much more awesome than the other and blah fucking blah.

And as for the prices of PC games versus console games, this isn't rocket science. Publishers will charge whatever they can get away with. The big three companies are both the hardware manufacturers and the gatekeepers of software in the console industry, whereas anyone at all can release a game on PC and pay royalties to no one.

The PC enjoys an open environment with a lot of competition from dozens and dozens of digital webstores, and steam itself is much easier to deal with than Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo for a developer, so much so that Gaben has stated they are moving towards being nothing more than an API filtered entirely by their customer base.

More competition = lower prices.

Overall the sad thing is that a select few console gamers get upset when people prioritize customer-friendly business practices over the interests of some faceless corporation that will fuck you in the ass twice before they sell you lube DLC.

These companies aren't your friend. You don't need to look out for their interests, because they aren't looking out for yours. Your only job as a consumer is to put your money where your mouth is, which is what we're doing. If we don't like what a publisher is doing we reserve the right to bitch and withhold our cash, because we might potentially have less of it to go around than you do. And because we certainly have less than the big three.



Velocity said:


> ...but why? Ultimately, why do PC gamers deserve better than parity? All this led to was the PC version of Dark Souls 2 being significantly better than the home console version and still at a lower price, a major kick in the teeth for anyone who bought (or wanted to buy) Dark Souls 2 for home consoles. *Essentially, PC gamer's whining ruined Dark Souls 2 for everyone else.*





Your version did not become worse for our version becoming better. It was already as good as it could have been on the consoles it was released in.

Our platform was capable of more, which is why some of us chose to buy the game on PC, had to wait longer for it and had to purchase a more expensive machine for it. That is the entire point of having a PC for playing games on. That the experience can and should be better. It's the result of an investment.


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## Ippy (Sep 17, 2014)

Console peasants dare to speak out of turn!?


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## Naruto (Sep 17, 2014)

The rule for any gaming aficionado is to choose the PC version of a game if there is one, and get the console version only if you absolutely have to. This is because despite the many blundered ports, most PC versions of a game are still better than the console version, and also cheaper.

As gamers, all we want is the best possible version of a game. We will get it wherever it might be. That might mean getting the HD remastered version of a classic on PS3 instead of the old PC version because new models and textures are still better than old garbage upscaled to higher resolutions.

But if a game gets ported to PC and it's an obviously shitty, lazy port - then, evidently, we will complain and/or skip it entirely. If we wanted the shittier versions we would have purchased them earlier and on a cheaper platform.



Velocity said:


> PC gamer's whining





Velocity said:


> So what is it? A sense of superiority?



Thinly veiled thread of whining about whining.



Good job blaming us for getting screwed though, I'm sure publishers are happy they have you on their side


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## Juub (Sep 17, 2014)

Naruto said:


> The rule for any gaming aficionado is to choose the PC version of a game if there is one, and get the console version only if you absolutely have to. This is because despite the many blundered ports, most PC versions of a game are still better than the console version, and also cheaper.
> 
> As gamers, all we want is the best possible version of a game. We will get it wherever it might be. That might mean getting the HD remastered version of a classic on PS3 instead of the old PC version because new models and textures are still better than old garbage upscaled to higher resolutions.
> 
> ...


Couldn't agree more.

To add to that, what would be the point of a powerful gaming PC if we could always get the same experience on consoles? Velocity's definition of parity makes PC gaming worthless as a whole if we simply accept the crappiest versions. We'd simply get a console and not a 1000$ rig.

Also this comic strip is hilarious.


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## Krory (Sep 17, 2014)

This... this is a joke thread, right?


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## cnorwood (Sep 17, 2014)

Destiny had parity because it was a cross platform cross gen release. I'm Certain Destiny 2 will be the best on ps4 or PC (if it comes there lol) of course thats assuming that Microsoft wont do a Tomb Raider on Destiny. And lol pc, getting better graphics really doesnt mean much if I get the game 2 years later.


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