(09-11-2010, 04:17 AM)MASKO Wrote: Lovely Lovely Lovely, except Single player PC games profit margin gets destroyed by bittorrent. Now you may be bad mouthing Console gamers and stereotyping them but as is the PC market is full of pirates absolutely destroying small companies profit margins. Were on the 360 pirates are the way smaller percentage.
You can cry about bittorrent all you want, this game is born for mouse-controls, and thus, the PC. Looking at the current hype wave, I could even see this become quite a successful title, I sure hope so. Quirky one-man indie games do sell 150,000 copies on the PC
(Minecraft), the
Humble Indie Bundle made over a million dollars in 2 weeks. You
can make a successful game on the PC. But you have to make it so that it actually plays to the strengths of the platform which Amnesia, through the smooth and responsive mouse-based controls alone, does excellently.
For a console release (and I wouldn't mind one, just saying from a PC gamer perspective), there would have to be compromises. Actual clicking and dragging would have to be replaced by either general use-buttons or more simplified quick-time events or joystick-waggling, thus removing that subtle feel of actually "touching" the in-game world. Text had to be resized, the UI changed and, eventually, a lowest common denominator would be chosen for future releases. I've seen it before. For a random example that really disappointed me recently, see Team17's "Worms" franchise go down from "Worms: Armageddon", over the dreadful XBLA release to the sad, sad "Worms: Reloaded" on Steam. Or, to a more subtle extend, Telltale and their strange,
joystick-oriented walking-system that replaces pure mouse-based navigation in their latest adventures.
I'm not saying that a developer
couldn't pull it off and release two different interfaces that play to the strength of each platform, but if history is an indicator, any move towards console means a lot of gameplay being "lost in translation" and the resulting compromise serving as a base for all future console
and PC releases.
Excuse me when I'm not that excited about this prospect.