Gaming and Convenience

[Kyo_Ma]

Hello LTT forums, I wanted to share something with you guys that I've been hesitant to post. I am a PC and Console gamer and I do not play multiplayer. For the past few years, I've been slowly transitioning the AAA title releases towards the PC platform while saving all of my JRPG and exclusives on the Playstation format. My bone to pick with PC games (or all platforms to be broad)  is that they should all work on a moment's notice without complicated drm or weird manual patching and hoops to jump through.

 

What I am bringing up is kinda a mix of backward compatibility and support for PC games.

 

I would like to share the history of where I am coming from.

GTA San Andreas had a launching problem that required a patch so it wouldn't get stuck on on the load screen.

GTA4 was one of the the first PC title that just made me tired of trying to figure out how to log into Windows Live and doing a bunch of social club jargon. I gave up trying to play.

Mirror's Edge did launch but was constantly crashing so i gave up on finishing/repeating the campaign.

 

Those were a few titles that I've had trouble with in the past. More recently however, are titles from the Origin humble bundle and the Origin summer sale.

Deadspace 1 would not launch on Windows 7 or 8.

Burnout Paradise never loading beyond the login screen.

Red Alert 2 has display issues. 

 

I sometimes don't recommend PC gaming to my friends that are not tech savvy because they will not know what to do in an event of software failure (I'm tired of people calling me and having to do a remote connection to get stuff to work for them...). So I just recommend them to pick a console they like and run with it.

 

Out of convenience I deeply think that any type of gaming should be easier to deal with if I don't have time to fool around with manual patches, weird bypasses. I would like to come home and shove a disc into the PC/Console or execute a digital copy and expect it to work.

 

Here are some console games I've dealt with in the past where i kinda had the same issues so I'm not saying console platform is perfect, but a bit better in convienece.

Harvest Moon A Wonderful Life SE (PS2) - game lagged to death

Silent Hill HD Collection (PS3) - (oh gawd... this was the most horrific console release ever....)

 

Although I know Playstation Plus and Steam have automatic updates and that is beautiful but at the end of the day, it frustrates me to want to play a game and have it not work. I love PC gaming but prefer Console gaming out of convenience.

 

Am I alone in this predicament of PC games not working properly? Or am I a special case? I would like to hear your comments on the convience of PC gaming or all gaming in general (just the gaming aspect, we don't need to have another pc master race thread)

[Villain]

Generally, any issue I have with a PC game can be fixed by just googling the issue and finding other people with the similar problem. There have only been a few cases where that solution didn't work. It's definitely true that PC has more headaches than consoles do, but I hope that will change with the "next-gen" games being ported better, because ultimately it comes down to the developers making sure the game works properly before release. There are also resources such as PCGamingWiki that are working on making it much a smoother experience when troubleshooting.

[GameModeLiam]

I get where your coming from, but I kind of like having to troubleshoot stuff sometimes. Of course I want some things to just work once in a while, but fixing a problem on my own feels rewarding.

[Xorbot]

Believe it or not, it's been getting better over time.  It may not be perfect today, but I gamed ever since Wolfenstein.

 

- Have you ever tried to resolve an IRQ conflict?

- Have you ever had to mess with a non-3DFX card at the time? (ah, good ol' Mini GL drivers back in the day).

- Have you ever owned an ATI card circa 2001? (yikes, drivers from hell)

 

Those were the earlier issues.  Also, you had to hunt down patches yourself.  Did you ever connect to a BBS because your town didn't have Internet yet, and download a multiple MEGABYTE patch for a game, but on a 14.4 kbps modem?  Games today are auto patched.  The GFE now handles automatic driver updates (if you are into that sort of thing).

 

Games today need day-1 patches, so yea, still not perfect.  But over a long, long period of time, it is has been improving slowly.

[Yoinkerman]

You might just be picking crappy PC ported games.  The games I play don't really ever have issues.

[Stomplar]

 

- Have you ever had to mess with a non-3DFX card at the time? (ah, good ol' Mini GL drivers back in the day).

- Have you ever owned an ATI card circa 2001? (yikes, drivers from hell)

 

after reading this my hair grew back. lol

[DeViLzzz]

Kyo_Ma you lost me when you didn't spell convenience right.  

[Oshino Shinobu]

I tend to run into issues with setting up surround when a game doesn't natively support it. Mirror's Edge is buggy as hell when it comes to that. I've had a lot of problems with Origin and not being able to connect to the internet, so I can't play some games, but I like to blame EA for that. 

 

I have to admit that I get bored of having to download games fully before being able to play them on PC, and seeing as my internet isn't very fast, it takes a long time. 

 

This gen's consoles are much easier to use than PCs most of the time, as it's just put the disk in and play. But it looks like that's changing with next gen. The Xbox One and PS4 look more like restricted PCs than consoles with all of the DRM talk and having to install games or something similar. 

[ConfusedDolphin]

When you lay PC games one of the things you just have to come to terms with is that there will be bugs and compatibility issues and you will have to put some time/effort into solving them (sometimes).

[_wky]

I gave up on finishing NFS: Most Wanted (the most recent one) as it kept crashing.