Chris Taylor & Warren Spector Interviews

ComputerAndVideoGames.com has posted two separate “State of Play” interviews, quizzing Dungeon Siege creator Chris Taylor and Deus Ex creator Warren Spector about the state of PC gaming. A snip from the Chris Taylor interview:

Q: Windows Vista of course heralds the arrival of DirectX 10. What excites you about Microsoft’s new version of DirectX and how do you see it being employed to change the face of PC gaming as we currently know it?

A: My technical knowledge on the overall API is limited, but from what I understand, and as it specifically relates to graphics, DirectX 10 is state-of-the-art, and this API reflects the latest architecture for Pixel Shaders and “on GPU” geometry processing. It’s going to take awhile for developers to fully exploit the new features that the new DX10 cards offer, but the results will be worth it and take us all well into the future.

I suspect the biggest changes we’ll see is in the visual realism, and/or in the frame rates we experience… both of which can have a huge effect on the gameplay. But don’t get me wrong, it takes more than powerful API’s and next-generation GPU’s to make a game better, we really need to work on new game designs… designs which push out past the established, comfortable boundaries we live within today.

And a snip from the Warren Spector interview:

Q: Do you think PC gaming is suffering, or is going to suffer, at the hands of consoles in your opinion?

A: Well, it’s clear that the PC isn’t the only game in town, the way it once was. And for the PC to make a huge comeback as the dominant gaming platform I think there’ll have to be some kind of standardization or, at least predictability in hardware configuration.

I mean, on the one hand, the strength of the PC is its flexibility but, on the other, the incredible variety of configurations is a compatibility nightmare for developers and players. We need to get to the point where playing a PC game is as much an instant-gratification, plug-and-play experience as playing a console game. Until that happens, the rise of the consoles will probably continue.