Pushing the envelope too far.

I felt a rant coming on, so rather than blasting it at nick, I figured I'd vent on here.

Game developers (some of them) are pushing the envelope in directions and distances it shouldn't go.

I'm pouring over the latest hardware reviews in search of a great new dual core CPU, and they benchmark on some pretty intensive applications, and some new games. what i'm seeing is the latest, most expensive hardware will not run some of the games developed today at high quality settings.

I think some in the game development community aren't hitting the target. they should make their target a beautiful, fluid game that runs on the highest end systems they can buy at the time of release, with all the settings turned on. what some are releasing is games that run like ASS, and dont look any better than the last generation of games, because you have to turn off all the nice stuff.

Look at F.E.A.R. for example. I own a pretty great gaming system, and with decently high detail turned on, it runs about 10 frames per second. thats a slideshow. Another good example of this is call of duty 2. it's based on the ancient quake 3 engine, and it chokes my system to death drawing a few soldiers.

On the other side though, games like world of warcraft, guildwars, unreal tournament 2004, battlefield 2, and halflife 2.. they all perform well on this generations harware, and they're gorgeous. of course the beefier the hardware you get the better it performs, but you never feel like you're compromising if you bought a decent gaming rig.

My theory is that game developers have been running on the theory that processor speeds double every year or so. this hasn't been true for quite some time. sure, systems are still getting faster, but not at the same rate. by the time some of these games get good enough hardware to run them, the game will be old and obselete. how worthless is that?

thats my rant for today.