My bad. My mind threw in an s into lot. And rewrote the rest of his sentence. Wow. That was kinda impressive actually. /me slinks away embarrassed!

Consoles are great for party games and shooters, but I have a hard time seeing a game with the depth Bungie is promising work in the console space. It just feels that they will have to cut a lot of complexity for the sake of usability.

You've pretty much summarized Bungie's design philosophy-- not just during the console years, but probably everything post-Marathon.

Myth was pretty complicated, but leaving out resource management and construction made the game simper than popular RTS games from the same period and eased the learning curve a bit.

Halo was designed to be very accessible, and it was designed to get more accessible over time, even while adding back some complexity to gain a bit of depth.

I think what Bungie will be trying to do with Destiny is to give people some of the social and cooperative benefits that you normally only see in very complex games on the PC (like Eve Online) and bring them seamlessly to a living room experience where you don't need to worry about what's going on under the hood-- stuff just works.

It's a tall order, I think.

Aside from 360 reliability-- which is and continues to be a HUGE issue (one I had in reserve just broke last week, way out of warranty, already repaired once) what is the objection that PC gamers have to the console? Is it the expense? Living room space? What?

PC-only gamers tend to be of the opinion that:

A. Mouse and keyboard is such a superior input method that they are being physically and mentally tortured if they are ever put in a situation where they have to use anything else. Driving a car must be hell for them.

B. If they're not using the absolute most bleeding-edge hardware they can afford, their gaming experience is being somehow hampered. If they're not seeing the most pixels at the highest possible framerate, playing games is pointless.

Note: There is some hyperbole above. But this is basically it - PC-only gamers either believe very strongly in mouse/keyboard, or they feel they need the latest hardware. For many of them, both are true.

Can I ask why?

I was sort of peeved when MS bought Bungie and they switched from making games for the Mac to making games for the Xbox.

That meant I either had to start buying Xbox(es) or find something else to play.

I thought I'd pull a dirty trick-- buy an Xbox and ONLY Halo-- eventually, if everyone did that, they'd be forced to release on other platforms!

Except... the Xbox wasn't all bad, and there were plenty of good games to play.

Aside from 360 reliability-- which is and continues to be a HUGE issue (one I had in reserve just broke last week, way out of warranty, already repaired once) what is the objection that PC gamers have to the console? Is it the expense? Living room space? What?

PC gives me more flexibility. I'm comfortable at a desk, two feet from my screen with a headset. I don't have to split my screen when I play with my wife. I can easily alternate between web surfing and gaming, listening to music, and communicating with my buddies (I know all of those things are possible on console, but it's a lot more convenient on a computer). I already have a pretty high-end gaming machine, and it's going to keep for years to come; a new XBOX is going to be an investment of several hundred dollars. I can easily access Indie games, demos, and information. I'm not restricted to the community that Microsoft pushes with Live; I can participate in Steam, Origin, or ignore the artificial communities entirely and just use Skype or Vent to keep up with my gaming buddies.

Consoles are trying to become PCs with every ounce of strength. Microsoft's redesign of the Dashboard and their vision for W8 are clearly intentionally similar, which I take to mean that they want to blur the line between gaming machine and personal computer. We already have modular consoles with "premium" features (bigger memory stores, for example). It won't be long before other components can be swapped out, and then there won't be much difference left.

Games which are developed with multiple platforms in mind have proven to be able to be of high quality (see the latest XCOM). Afterthought ports have historically sucked. I dream of a world where game developers push out their software on every available platform and don't hamstring themselves by focusing on one, then disseminating.

Just as an aside, I own a 360, Wii, and PS3, but the only one of those we got anywhere close to release was the Wii. My computer is something I will always have because I use it for things other than games.

Aside from 360 reliability-- which is and continues to be a HUGE issue (one I had in reserve just broke last week, way out of warranty, already repaired once) what is the objection that PC gamers have to the console? Is it the expense? Living room space? What?

For most genres, if given the choice I would play any given game on the PC (or Mac in my case, via an OS X version or virtualization). Whether Destiny is an MMO with FPS elements, or an FPS with MMO elements (more likely given Bungie's explanation), either genre is generally more preferable on the PC. For someone who is a fan of such genres, knowing they can't get the best possible experience is probably a little bit of a downer.