So with the soon to be released Left 4 Dead, I am torn between the personally preferred Mouse and Keyboard versus the superior voice community and friend features on Xbox Live.
Granted if you already have a group of friends and/ or a clan that uses voice on PC, it can dilute the value of Live, but having only recently given the 360 a chance, I do really appreciate the ease of growing your friend pool and chatting it up with random strangers in games. Then again, I would miss my mouse in this what looks to be a very fast paced shooter as I never did quite get in the grove with thumbsticks.
He seems to be saying that XBOX LIVE friend features are superior because he actually has friends on XBOX LIVE.
Personally, I prefer Steam’s community, primarily because it has a lower ratio of random asshats… also, I have more computer friends, prefer mouse & kb, probably pc has significantly better graphics, so on and so forth.
I was talking about this exact difference with a friend last week (and one of the reasons I decided to throw up a poll).
I am a pretty hardcore PC gamer. Before a few months ago I just saw console gaming as something I put up with for certain games. However, the more I mess with Xbox live the more I am feeling that PC gamers are more of a closed system. They have their friends, they have their chosen voice program, and they rarely step out of bounds. Such as numerous PC games that have built in VoiP that nobody uses because they are all logged in with 2 or 3 other guys using vent or TS.
With Live on the other hand (while you still get some of that) people are more willing to use the headset sometimes and you can build up a friend network a bit easier.
I don’t think its some kind of innate social difference of users, but more that on Live it’s the only way to really do things and everyone is plugged in automatically. Whereas friend networks are just more closed as there are other options for PC. If you try to build friends, you can have a really full friends list of chatty folks on 360 a lot quicker than game X through steam on the PC it seems.
Or so is my experience anyway. Could be a misconception on my part.
True. Very true. And rather childish youths as well.
But then again, one of the things that make me feel the closed network thing, is I tried like hell to build a network of friends with BF2 and BF2142 without having to join a clan and it was like pulling teeth getting people to talk and work together.
With BF Bad Company I was originally irritated that console was my only option, but in retrospect, it has been a hell of a lot easier meeting people and getting good squads together out of repeat players. There are jerks and kids, but there are also a lot more adults that are willing to game it up and voice without having to have a secret handshake, dedicated server, and a webpage first.
It’s a Valve FPS. Get it on the PC or you’ll just be playing a bad game. Just look at TF2 on the 360. Is it any good? No. I don’t think it even has weapon unlocks.
Since single player seems to be non-existant and I’m unsure it gets legs while joining some random server and fooling around like with DoD and TF2 I will wait for reviews / demo.
There is a Qt3 Steam community with over 100 people in it, 20+ of whom are on playing something pretty much every night. Between that and the quality of Valve’s voice support, I don’t think your argument holds water.
To be fair to Valve, they did a really good job (IMHO) with the Half Life 2 games on the 360, as well as Portal. I actually like the vehicle sections in Half Life 2 a lot more now, having played them on the 360. Plus they actually have done full analog controls for the 360, not just a straight port from the PC controls. For example, in the F.E.A.R. port by Day 1 Studios, they ported over the movement from the PC game, and so you get only two speeds (walk and run) and you get only 8-way movement (equivalent to pressing WASD keys), which felt horribly awkward on the 360 controller, where shooters usually have analog speed and analog movement. Valve did a good job porting over controls in this regard.
So if someone is interested in the Co-op elements of Left 4 Dead, I think the 360 version is a very safe option, judging by what Valve did with Half Life 2. (And Ep 1 and Ep 2).
EDIT: As for the poll, I’m waiting on a demo. I’m not convinced that this is a game worth buying on either platform yet.
But none of those games have co-op or multiplayer. Only TF2 has cooperative multiplayer elements and it’s horrible on the 360. The level of support on the 360 for TF2 is practically nil. Despite the PR from Valve, they’ve pretty much abandoned TF2 on the consoles. I think any Steam TF2 owner will agree that the updates and unlockables have added a ton of value to that game.
I have Orange Box on the 360 as well as Steam. (One was a gift.) I loved playing HL2 and it’s Episodes on the 360, but TF2 is really not great on the console.
I picked 360, Im a achievement whore :( I liked how Fallout 3 had the achievements for PC, here is hoping more games start to follow suit, cause then I would definitely grab the PC version.
