I was watching LGR’s Unreal Tournament 2004 video and in terms of amount of available content and the sheer size and scale of the maps, it makes the multiplayer of every single Halo game on the 360 look quaint by comparison, and UT2k4 came out a year before the console even launched.
LGR complained that Unreal Tournament 2003 from the year before only had 37 maps, which is crazy considering most multiplayer shooters on the 360 had maybe 10 maps with additional map pack DLC costing like 20 bucks for 3 maps
Genuinely for like a decade PC gamers watched as the games that were popular on console dragged the whole fukken industry down. Valve was infamously forced by Microsoft to charge money on 360 for a map pack that was free on PC, games went from letting the user simply drag and drop files into a “mods” folder to being locked down and all the code obfuscated to prevent mod development, and the games themselves got shorter and shallower chasing the trends that AAA devs pioneered in their race to get money from dudebros who only played Halo and Call of Duty.
Yes all of this was capitalism doing its thing but consoles were undoubtedly at the forefront of all of the enshittification happening at that time which is why people like me came to absolutely loathe them the way that mobile games are loathed for pioneering shitty practices now.
For eight fucking years every game had to be built with 512mb of RAM in mind
My text editor uses more than that lmfao
thief 3 and deus ex invisible war built with with consoles in mind and it dragged them down so hard, along with oblivion having the cities gated off instead of a great big open map like morrowind
Hell, there are long standing historically PC only game series that are being held down by consoles (design, and playerbase wise) right now. Look at Mechwarrior, the most recent entry (MW5:Clans) has a whole heap of core mechanic changes that seem to be intentionally designed in such a way that feels very dumbed down, yet feels like it’s just rubbing it the core’s faces that we’ll never really get a good title ever again.
Though right now MW5:Mercs is okay at best because it’s kinda the skyrim of mechwarrior right now with all the mods made to cover up Russ Bullock’s bad ideas.