For years I have a yearned for a way to play all the games I wanted the way I wanted without having to fill a room with various devices. The good old PC has been creeping closer and closer to this ideal, as most multiplatform games make their way to PC these days, even if some are inexplicably months late (I'm looking at you, UbiSoft). Thanks in large part to Microsoft's DirectX and Valve's Steam service, PC games are somewhat like a console but with improved horsepower and flexibility. In other words, the platform has been flirting with perfection.
And then two of the biggest releases of the year occurred and sent everything to circle the bowl.
First, there was Crysis 2. Now that the dust has settled on this one, it appears that a piece of the Steam terms for publishers is that they cannot sell DLC directly in-game. Obviously, Valve is motivated to tie that back into Steam, though GFWL abortions are also available, since you have to go to that awful client or, now, xbox.com to get that content. I have no doubt that EA was aware that they intended to cross this line with Crysis 2 and then again with Dragon Age 2 later on. It's a classic EA pissing contest, like the one they had (and unfortunately won) with Sega during the Dreamcast era. The net is that you can no longer buy these games from the largest digital distribution platform on the planet, and I will never buy them at all. EA had broken what was a beautiful situation where all of my PC games were purchased and available from a single client, console style.
Several months later, and with nowhere near the fanfare, Square-Enix released the long overdue Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I was all over it day one, thanks in part to a sale and coupon from greenmangaming.com in the UK that allowed me to get the Steam code for $34. So I fire it up on the fateful afternoon of August 23, 2011. I look through the settings and can't turn stereoscopic 3D on. I stare at my 3D Vision receiver. It provides only a blank stare in return. I hit the sometimes necessary Ctrl-T to turn it on. Nothing happens. I exit the game and search for new nVidia drivers. Sure enough, there are some. I install those, enable 3D Vision, and go back into Deus Ex. Success... or so I thought. The title screen is clearly in 3D, so I start a new game. Once I get in-game though, everything is a little off. Every light in the game has this weird glow, almost as if it's being drawn twice but not picked up correctly by the 3D Vision drivers. I play for about half an hour before deciding that I wasn't willing to put up with this from a game of this caliber anymore.
After some research, I discover that there was a deal between Square-Enix and ATI to focus on the HD3D platform, which no one actually owns, during development. The official story (and it may be true) is that this was not done at the intentional expense of the de facto standard, 3D Vision. In any case, the developers don't seem tremendously motivated to patch the game to allow for better 3D Vision performance. In turn, I am not tremendously motivated to play their damn game.
And, thus, the beginning of the end is upon us. Thanks to egos and business deals, the PC's pursuit of platform perfection (say that five times fast) has been spun off course like Vader's TIE Fighter from the Death Star trench. Buying games from multiple sources and then taking a flyer on whether they work well with my hardware sounds an awful lot like PC gaming of the last millennium, as opposed to 2011. And this isn't the good kind of retro revival like all the new Transformers toys or Pac-Man Championship Edition. This is like bell bottoms and tie dye.
Where do we go from here? The answer seems to be in the hands of the console hardware makers, who have some easy choices that they'll somehow make hard between now and the next generation in late 2012 or 2013. If Sony can follow the PS3 with another region free, upgradable (from a storage perspective), well powered, large media (25+GBs per Blu-ray rocks), traditional controller but with available pointer controls, 3D supporting console, then I think I'm all in. The diminishing returns on power should be evident by that point, so the PC won't be leaps and bounds ahead of consoles like it traditionally has been. And at least I know there won't be multiple PlayStation Stores or 3D solutions. With any luck, the days of the console exclusive will be dead as well, except for the obvious first and second party games.
WTB: A way to play all the games I wanted the way I wanted without having to fill a room with various devices.
