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Video Games: Mystery Box Character Creation


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How much gaming pc can I get for a grand?

A quick look online reveals you can get a very decent gaming PC with an RX 570 8GB graphics card and 8GB of RAM for £600 (the likely ballpark launch figure of the next gen consoles) which will very comfortably outclass anything on current gen consoles and will easily match the next gen at 1080p and 1440p (that oddball halfway house between HD and 4K). For exactly £1000 you can blast that up to an RTX 2060 with 16 GB of RAM which will handle everything you can throw at it in 4K easily (thought not at 4K 240 fps, which for some obscure reason seems to be the new target for hardcore gamers, despite being overkill). And those a prebuilds. If you want to go full Cavill, you can shave £100-£200 of those easily.

US prices seem slightly higher for some reason. Not sure if there's some kind of parts shortage in the US, as it seems to be cheaper at the moment to order in from overseas.

10 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Because a good gaming PC costs twice as much or more and is much bigger of a hassle to set up and maintain. 

In 2006, maybe. In 2020, absolutely not.

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53 minutes ago, Werthead said:

 

In 2006, maybe. In 2020, absolutely not.

What part? The making of it, if you're doing it yourself? Way harder. The managing of windows vs the auto update systems of consoles? Virus protection and malware protection and the like? Way harder. Setting up all the different accounts you need for stores? How about customer support if.something goes wrong?

None of these things are easier. All are a hassle compared to consoles which are basically appliances.  They arent impossible or even super difficult, but they are a hassle, and they're way more of a hassle than consoles are. A whole lot of people own pcs and consoles and they have largely decided that their experience means nope, not gonna happen. 

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10 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

What part? The making of it, if you're doing it yourself? Way harder. The managing of windows vs the auto update systems of consoles? Virus protection and malware protection and the like? Way harder. Setting up all the different accounts you need for stores? How about customer support if.something goes wrong?

None of these things are easier. All are a hassle compared to consoles which are basically appliances.  They arent impossible or even super difficult, but they are a hassle, and they're way more of a hassle than consoles are. A whole lot of people own pcs and consoles and they have largely decided that their experience means nope, not gonna happen. 

Come on, you know better than that.

Fire up a PC the first time you use it like you do a new console, set up your accounts (which you have to do for consoles anyway), install Steam and you're pretty much set and away you go. If you decide to start using the PC to do other things (like go to iffy websites to download things you shouldn't), sure, you need to be more careful about antivirus and malware, which takes all of 30 seconds to do. That's it. And customer support if something goes wrong is exactly the same as with your console, you just call the manufacturer if it's in warranty and check out the Internet for advice (or pay a wad of cash )if not.

In fact, when I set up my ex's PS4 for her son, it took roughly four times longer to set it up than it did for any new PC I've ever owned going back to 1998. The number of updates it needed to get going were insane.

The customer support thing is particularly egregious: if something goes wrong with your console out of warranty, you're usually completely fucked (unless it's the hard drive, where you can usually just replace it). If your graphics card develops a problem on your PC, your PC will still work and you can just replace that one part, the same for virtually everything else. Unless the motherboard goes, you're never going to have your PC halted in its tracks by a single point of failure, say one that is red and ring-shaped.

Using a PC in 2020 is absolutely in no way harder than running a console, you just have the option to make it more complicated if you want to but usually for much greater versatility, and you can do that with consoles as well (updating the hard drives and so on).

There's a reason why modern consoles are pretty much just PCs running propriety OSes, including the phenomenon of having to offer different models with different specs for cost and to keep up with hardware development, doing the exact same things that were offered as weaknesses of PCs ten years ago, but for some reason are now perfectly fine.

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23 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

What part? The making of it, if you're doing it yourself? Way harder. The managing of windows vs the auto update systems of consoles? Virus protection and malware protection and the like? Way harder. Setting up all the different accounts you need for stores? How about customer support if.something goes wrong?

None of these things are easier. All are a hassle compared to consoles which are basically appliances.  They arent impossible or even super difficult, but they are a hassle, and they're way more of a hassle than consoles are. A whole lot of people own pcs and consoles and they have largely decided that their experience means nope, not gonna happen. 

And I agree with all of this as my PSO2 experience I keep bringing up attests to.  And Windows has tried to console-ify the experience down with the S-Mode that I first ran into this year and I think mentioned to you.  Basically it’s a smaller, more consistent install of Windows that only allows you to install verified MS programs and keep the experience consistent.

All these reasons you bring up are why I think consoles will continue in some form. I’m just questioning why if you’re going to buy a console, would you not buy a PS5?  Anything on Xbox I can do on my computer, but there are PS5 apps/games that I won’t be able to do otherwise.  (For a while at least)

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I'm mostly a PC only gamer, but I've gotta push back on the idea that its just as simple and cheap as a console. It's really not the literal plug-and-play that a console is; both in terms of setting up the device in the first place (unless you pay extra for someone to build it and get everything setup) and in terms of playing the games. There's a lot more graphics options you need to figure out on PC to get your games looking good than you have on console.

PC gaming is much easier than it used to be, but it's not the same thing. And I notice it anytime I fire up my Switch.

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4 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Come on, you know better than that.

I literally work in the PC and console game industry. I am telling you what we get verbatims from people all the time. 

4 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Fire up a PC the first time you use it like you do a new console, set up your accounts (which you have to do for consoles anyway), install Steam and you're pretty much set and away you go. If you decide to start using the PC to do other things (like go to iffy websites to download things you shouldn't), sure, you need to be more careful about antivirus and malware, which takes all of 30 seconds to do. That's it. And customer support if something goes wrong is exactly the same as with your console, you just call the manufacturer if it's in warranty and check out the Internet for advice (or pay a wad of cash )if not. 

Okay, so back up. The original idea was to make a machine. If you're talking buying some shitty Dell, that's slightly different - but only slightly. 

You have things like patch tuesdays. You have random reboots. You have to update video drivers. You have to update audio drivers. You will have OS installations and reinstallations. You will have game incompatibilities because for whatever reason that game on steam just crashes on your PC - and wouldn't be allowed on the curated console system. Your TV won't actually work with that video card because the HDMI driver on the TV wasn't tested for that video card (this happens, and ugh). Customer support from Dell is a nightmare compared to what it is on console, and if there's an outage steam doesn't notify you of shit. 

4 minutes ago, Werthead said:

In fact, when I set up my ex's PS4 for her son, it took roughly four times longer to set it up than it did for any new PC I've ever owned going back to 1998. The number of updates it needed to get going were insane.

This is fair, but that's a one-time hit. 

4 minutes ago, Werthead said:

The customer support thing is particularly egregious: if something goes wrong with your console out of warranty, you're usually completely fucked (unless it's the hard drive, where you can usually just replace it). If your graphics card develops a problem on your PC, your PC will still work and you can just replace that one part, the same for virtually everything else. Unless the motherboard goes, you're never going to have your PC halted in its tracks by a single point of failure, say one that is red and ring-shaped.

I literally work in Xbox support and this is inaccurate for us. There are things that are out of warranty that suck, but largely if something goes wrong in the like 3 year warranty period we send a new one out. And the red ring failure is a good example - MS replaced ALL of those consoles if you asked within 3 years. 

4 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Using a PC in 2020 is absolutely in no way harder than running a console, you just have the option to make it more complicated if you want to but usually for much greater versatility, and you can do that with consoles as well (updating the hard drives and so on).

Research indicates this is at the very least not people's perception. 

4 minutes ago, Werthead said:

There's a reason why modern consoles are pretty much just PCs running propriety OSes, including the phenomenon of having to offer different models with different specs for cost and to keep up with hardware development, doing the exact same things that were offered as weaknesses of PCs ten years ago, but for some reason are now perfectly fine.

So the really big one that matters to most people - especially with the experience on their phones - is the curated content. I alluded to this earlier, but people really want the Just Works experience. For consoles they are guaranteed that whatever game they get will work. They won't have to fiddle with driver settings, or have it simply fail to launch, or anything like that. They won't have to go get an nvidia driver to play it. They won't even have to update steam. It'll just work, without any hassle. Steam would like to do better, but they simply have too much of a moving target. 

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13 hours ago, Rhom said:

Kind of my point though was that why would you buy an XBox... which shares its XBox live accounts with Windows... when all the games are going to be on the PC?

My PC is a laptop. It can run most of the PC games I like to play (Rimworld, Stellaris, Kenshi) fine but I wouldn't expect it to run Halo or the next Elder Scrolls. I guess I could get a gaming PC but eh. The maintenance/configuration is a turn off. I'm a fairly technical person but I'm also very lazy and get annoyed when I have to update drivers or flash firmware or reinstall an OS. 

Just recently I realized windows 10 had just stopped updating for a month. It kept telling me "you're computer is up to date" and "last checked 5/15/20" when both of those things could not possibly be true. I was able to get it working by googling and typing some commands into powershell. but If I hadn't thought to look I'd still have no idea my computer had basically turned off updates. 

4 hours ago, Inkdaub said:

In other news...first person is trash and should be cancelled.

Huh, I much prefer first person view to third, at least for shooting games. and horror games. 

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4 minutes ago, RumHam said:

My PC is a laptop. It can run most of the PC games I like to play (Rimworld, Stellaris, Kenshi) fine but I wouldn't expect it to run Halo or the next Elder Scrolls. I guess I could get a gaming PC but eh. The maintenance/configuration is a turn off. I'm a fairly technical person but I'm also very lazy and get annoyed when I have to update drivers or flash firmware or reinstall an OS. 

You sound like a use case for GeForce Now.  Try the free version to test out a game or two on your laptop and see how you like it, provided you have a good internet connection (wired is preferable to wireless).

 

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I'm not overly familiar with the console side of things, but on Steam and whathaveyou you can really get a lot of games for low, low prices - is that something consolers can take advantage of too, or are the politically correct gang saving money after their initial purchase at a significant rate?

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There's also something to be said for the console experience and its convenience. I have a Switch and a laptop that can play games. At the end of a 8-10 hour workday staring at my laptop, the last thing I often want to do is stare at my laptop screen some more. So even though I have plenty of great games to play on Steam, I find myself gaming on the Switch more, whether on my couch near the TV or just in portable mode.

I do think that if I could afford to get any of the new consoles though that PS5 would be the clear choice for me, since it has so many exclusives.

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19 minutes ago, Ran said:

You sound like a use case for GeForce Now.  Try the free version to test out a game or two on your laptop and see how you like it, provided you have a good internet connection (wired is preferable to wireless).

 

My laptop does have an ethernet port, which I thought was odd when I bought it. I'll have to give that a shot. 

Just now, Soylent Brown said:

I'm not overly familiar with the console side of things, but on Steam and whathaveyou you can really get a lot of games for low, low prices - is that something consolers can take advantage of too, or are the politically correct gang saving money after their initial purchase at a significant rate?

No, console people get screwed price wise. Especially when it comes to the Nintendo Switch where you're often paying 2-4 times the price for a less updated version of a game. Microsoft does run sales on games but they're seldom as good as steam's. 

One thing Xbox does have is the Game Pass which gives you subscription access to tons of games. 

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I'm mostly a PC only gamer, but I've gotta push back on the idea that its just as simple and cheap as a console. It's really not the literal plug-and-play that a console is; both in terms of setting up the device in the first place (unless you pay extra for someone to build it and get everything setup) and in terms of playing the games. There's a lot more graphics options you need to figure out on PC to get your games looking good than you have on console.

For graphics settings there's usually a slider with maybe four options on it. There's pretty much just "very high" or "ultra" if you have a graphics card from the last 3-4 years. If you want to spend 2 hours working out the framerate gains from turning off soft shadow tessellation then you can do that if you really want. And again console games have this as well these days, usually a mode that sacrifices frame rates for graphical fidelity or vice versa (usually sold as do you want this to run reliably at 30fps whilst looking awesome or 60fps whilst looking slightly less awesome).

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I literally work in the PC and console game industry. I am telling you what we get verbatims from people all the time. 

I know. That's why you know better than to parrot lazy cliches that were outdated 10 years ago.

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Okay, so back up. The original idea was to make a machine. If you're talking buying some shitty Dell, that's slightly different - but only slightly. 

No, it wasn't. The original comment was about buying a machine. A couple of comments were raised about building a machine to save money (since assembling a PC these days is about as hard as building a medium Lego kit) but that wasn't the argument.

It's also quite amusing to immediately say people's choices are to build their own machine from scratch or buying "some shitty Dell." There are literally dozens of reputable companies building perfectly decent machines at mostly reasonable costs (though looking through Cyberpower, Newegg and a few other sites, the US seems to be getting some kind of shitty deal at the moment, comparable machines seem to all be about $100 up on European prices for the exact same kit, I imagine due to COVID-related supply chain issues), it's not a choice between build your own, buy a shitty Dell or spend three times what you need to on an Alienware.

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You have things like patch tuesdays. You have random reboots. You have to update video drivers. You have to update audio drivers. You will have OS installations and reinstallations.

Yes, because the consoles very famously never update those things, ever, at all.

On my current PC I haven't touched a single thing on it since early 2017 and it's running fine. I do a graphics driver update when I can be bothered to check for them (maybe twice a year) and occasionally if a brand new game prompts it: it takes 20-30 seconds. I don't think I've ever updated audio drivers on any PC I've ever owned (you know SoundBlaster isn't a thing any more, right, or Adlib?). I haven't had to do an OS reinstallation on a current machine on either of my last two PCs (this one since 2017 or the one prior I owned between 2011 and 2017). OS reinstallations went the way of the dodo when SSDs became a thing, since there is no longer any speed gains from doing so (my PC fires up to desktop from off in about 5 seconds, exactly like it did on the day I fired it up for the first time).

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You will have game incompatibilities because for whatever reason that game on steam just crashes on your PC - and wouldn't be allowed on the curated console system.

Theoretically that might still happen, but it will happen because the game is probably an unoptimised POS, which is the fault of the developer, not the system. I haven't had it happen to me for years, and certainly not with any moderately new game. The only game crashes I've experienced in the last decade have been trying to get a really old game to work or if the game itself is fundamentally borked (hi, Arkham Knight). It usually gets fixed pretty quickly. And again, this happens a lot on console games as well, as the likes of Mass Effect Andromeda and Fallout 4 can attest.

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Your TV won't actually work with that video card because the HDMI driver on the TV wasn't tested for that video card (this happens, and ugh).

That's a fair but somewhat rare complaint, although these days I don't know many people who directly plugs their PC into the TV instead of using a streaming app (I use an old £3 Steamlink but it's easier now to just use a SmartTV app to link your PC into the TV from elsewhere in the house).

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Customer support from Dell is a nightmare compared to what it is on console

I mean, you did bring up Dell solely by yourself when no-one else mentioned it, so true, but irrelevant. 

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and if there's an outage steam doesn't notify you of shit. 

That, at least, is partially true. Steam went down for about 3 hours a couple of weeks back and it was annoying if you were in the middle of downloading a title (you could still play games in offline mode, though). They did discuss it on their Twitter feed.

Googling "X-Box live down," reveals this week that Call of Duty: Black Ops II stopped working on the 360 this week for a day, PES 2020 was unplayable for several hours because of weekly maintenance on the server and "some users may be unable to start party chat sessions or view friend lists" for another couple of days, so clearly the consoles are flawless in this regard. Great communication though.

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I literally work in Xbox support and this is inaccurate for us. There are things that are out of warranty that suck, but largely if something goes wrong in the like 3 year warranty period we send a new one out. And the red ring failure is a good example - MS replaced ALL of those consoles if you asked within 3 years. 

If something goes wrong with a PC in the warranty period, you also get it replaced immediately as well (and you have to, by law, in the UK and the EU). So I'm really not sure what the comparison is, since warranties work exactly the same way for both (and for PlayStations as well).

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Research indicates this is at the very least not people's perception. 

Perception is less important than the reality.

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So the really big one that matters to most people - especially with the experience on their phones - is the curated content. I alluded to this earlier, but people really want the Just Works experience. For consoles they are guaranteed that whatever game they get will work. They won't have to fiddle with driver settings, or have it simply fail to launch, or anything like that. They won't have to go get an nvidia driver to play it. They won't even have to update steam. It'll just work, without any hassle. Steam would like to do better, but they simply have too much of a moving target. 

This perception of PC owners having to "fiddle with driver settings" to make a game "just work" is pure fantasy and is not in accordance with the reality of the situation for well over a decade.

And what does "go get an nVidia driver" or "have to update Steam" even mean? Next you'll be pointing out the dangers of Russians hacking your Internets ("ALL OF THEM") if you don't firewall your mainframe and spin up your private server.

The reality of what you can do with a PC is go play a whole slew of X-Box exclusives (like almost every single one of them apart from Halo 5 which doesn't sound like any great loss), then fire up PlayStation Now to play The Last of Us and then play a whole ton of platform exclusives (all at much cheaper prices than a console game) and then do whatever else you want with it.

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I'm not overly familiar with the console side of things, but on Steam and whathaveyou you can really get a lot of games for low, low prices - is that something consolers can take advantage of too, or are the politically correct gang saving money after their initial purchase at a significant rate?

If you take the lifespan of a console generation and a gaming PC as roughly being the same (6-7 years), then even if you spent three times on the PC what you did on the console, by the end of that period you will still be massively in the black on the PC from the massively cheaper cost of PC games. Steam, GoG, UPlay and Origin sales are part of that, along with X-Box Game Pass but the massive savings are through Humble Bundle and the weekly free Epic Store games.

In fact, we take it that the PS5 and XBX will launch at £500 (£600 appears to be more likely at the moment, or a split between them, but there doesn't seem to be much expectation for less than £500) and a decent gaming PC is £800, you could make up that difference alone in game savings alone in about six weeks through the Epic giveaways alone. And potentially far more over 6-7 years (assuming Epic can keep up the giveaways for that long).

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26 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Googling "X-Box live down," reveals this week that Call of Duty: Black Ops II stopped working on the 360 this week for a day

I wonder how many people that impacted. That's gotta be like 6-8 call of dutys ago. I also wonder how long they'll keep the 360's online infrastructure running? 

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30 minutes ago, Werthead said:

I know. That's why you know better than to parrot lazy cliches that were outdated 10 years ago.

They aren't lazy cliches. These are still people saying these things and having these experiences. 

30 minutes ago, Werthead said:

No, it wasn't. The original comment was about buying a machine. A couple of comments were raised about building a machine to save money (since assembling a PC these days is about as hard as building a medium Lego kit) but that wasn't the argument.

It's also quite amusing to immediately say people's choices are to build their own machine from scratch or buying "some shitty Dell." There are literally dozens of reputable companies building perfectly decent machines at mostly reasonable costs (though looking through Cyberpower, Newegg and a few other sites, the US seems to be getting some kind of shitty deal at the moment, comparable machines seem to all be about $100 up on European prices for the exact same kit, I imagine due to COVID-related supply chain issues), it's not a choice between build your own, buy a shitty Dell or spend three times what you need to on an Alienware. 

I brought up Dell because they're both the biggest seller and have routinely the best customer support. If you go through IBuyPower, for instance, their support is basically 'you are hosed'. It's perfectly fine to build one through them - but if something goes wrong, you're looking at dealing with it yourself. And a LOT of people have some very big horror stories about having to troubleshoot their PC.

30 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Yes, because the consoles very famously never update those things, ever, at all.

Certainly not at the rate or at the pain point of PCs. I know this again, because MS has a very different policy between updating XBox and updating PC precisely for this reason.

30 minutes ago, Werthead said:

On my current PC I haven't touched a single thing on it since early 2017 and it's running fine. I do a graphics driver update when I can be bothered to check for them (maybe twice a year) and occasionally if a brand new game prompts it: it takes 20-30 seconds. I don't think I've ever updated audio drivers on any PC I've ever owned (you know SoundBlaster isn't a thing any more, right, or Adlib?). I haven't had to do an OS reinstallation on a current machine on either of my last two PCs (this one since 2017 or the one prior I owned between 2011 and 2017). OS reinstallations went the way of the dodo when SSDs became a thing, since there is no longer any speed gains from doing so (my PC fires up to desktop from off in about 5 seconds, exactly like it did on the day I fired it up for the first time).

You haven't updated sound drivers? Huh. I had to recently when I got a new headset; it didn't like it because of USB3, and it was an error on their side (as no USB 3 headsets existed when it came out). 

I had to reinstall the OS on my son's machine last year because it got corrupted due to a misconfigured driver. Not that I was talking about that - I was talking about getting, say, OS May version vs. December, and some of the pain points customers have mentioned on those and how it hoses all sorts of random things. 

30 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Theoretically that might still happen, but it will happen because the game is probably an unoptimised POS, which is the fault of the developer, not the system. I haven't had it happen to me for years, and certainly not with any moderately new game. The only game crashes I've experienced in the last decade have been trying to get a really old game to work or if the game itself is fundamentally borked (hi, Arkham Knight). It usually gets fixed pretty quickly. And again, this happens a lot on console games as well, as the likes of Mass Effect Andromeda and Fallout 4 can attest.

But that's exactly the point - you don't have those guarantees, not nearly as much, and when you do you can get a refund fairly easily. I agree that you can have games that are unoptimized POS on Steam, but you just don't have those on consoles. Now, the flip side is that you have a massive selection of games, far more than any console, with years  and years of library to choose from - but a whole lot of people don't want that. They want some games, that work, and with no hassle. 

30 minutes ago, Werthead said:

That's a fair but somewhat rare complaint, although these days I don't know many people who directly plugs their PC into the TV instead of using a streaming app (I use an old £3 Steamlink but it's easier now to just use a SmartTV app to link your PC into the TV from elsewhere in the house).

That might be, but most people still connect their console to their TV. 

30 minutes ago, Werthead said:

I mean, you did bring up Dell solely by yourself when no-one else mentioned it, so true, but irrelevant. 

Again, Dell is the best in the PC land as far as support, and they're still not great.

30 minutes ago, Werthead said:

That, at least, is partially true. Steam went down for about 3 hours a couple of weeks back and it was annoying if you were in the middle of downloading a title (you could still play games in offline mode, though). They did discuss it on their Twitter feed. 

Again, ease of use. For folks like us who are online all the time and notice this stuff, this isn't a big deal. For others - it's a huge deal. 

30 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Googling "X-Box live down," reveals this week that Call of Duty: Black Ops II stopped working on the 360 this week for a day, PES 2020 was unplayable for several hours because of weekly maintenance on the server and "some users may be unable to start party chat sessions or view friend lists" for another couple of days, so clearly the consoles are flawless in this regard. Great communication though. 

I didn't say that they didn't have outages. I said that they notify people of them. Which is what people want, instead of having to just get a notice that 'something is wrong' but not know why. Believe me, there are an absurd amount of outages for games. 

30 minutes ago, Werthead said:

If something goes wrong with a PC in the warranty period, you also get it replaced immediately as well (and you have to, by law, in the UK and the EU). So I'm really not sure what the comparison is, since warranties work exactly the same way for both (and for PlayStations as well). 

It's much more of a hassle, you have to do this big RMA process, and it takes months. Whereas for consoles a lot of times you can just go to literally any store that sells them and get a new one. 

30 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Perception is less important than the reality.

I think you're overselling the reality of your experiences and not those of other people. This reminds me a lot of the arguments about Linux vs. Windows back in the day, and while you're right that it isn't nearly as bad as it was 10 years ago, it is still easier on a console vs. a PC, and people want easy. 

30 minutes ago, Werthead said:

This perception of PC owners having to "fiddle with driver settings" to make a game "just work" is pure fantasy and is not in accordance with the reality of the situation for well over a decade.

I had to do this to get Phoenix Rising to work two months ago. I had to reinstall my network driver to get Zoom to work. It happens. 

30 minutes ago, Werthead said:

And what does "go get an nVidia driver" or "have to update Steam" even mean? Next you'll be pointing out the dangers of Russians hacking your Internets ("ALL OF THEM") if you don't firewall your mainframe and spin up your private server. 

I had to download the latest nVidia driver in order to get Gears Tactics to work on the PC. I have to update steam all the damn time. For Gears Tactics, I had to look that up in order to figure out I needed to do it. 

30 minutes ago, Werthead said:

The reality of what you can do with a PC is go play a whole slew of X-Box exclusives (like almost every single one of them apart from Halo 5 which doesn't sound like any great loss), then fire up PlayStation Now to play The Last of Us and then play a whole ton of platform exclusives (all at much cheaper prices than a console game) and then do whatever else you want with it.

That's all true, and reasonable! I think PC gaming is better and it is my preferred platform, and I would heartily recommend it if you have the money. We have 3 gaming PCs in our house right now, along with another older one. But I also know how much work I do in maintaining those PCs, and it is FAR less than what I do in maintaining the xbox. 

Hell, here's another thing - setting up and securing a system for kids. There is so much more work to ensure that a PC is locked down compared to what I have to do with a console. Again, not an issue for you - but if you have shared systems with kids and adults, a console is another one of those 'just works' things by comparison. 

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For me being able to play whatever I want with my 350 Euro laptop is the height of simplicity. The laptop I also use to work, write and program with. So why should I pay a whole lot more money to get a piece of electronics that can only games?

To be honest, this is the first time that I ever experience such a debate about what is better live and I really don't get it. It also seems to be a bit of a country thing. As far as I can tell consoles are only in the US as big of a thing as they are. Here in Germany even in my school time I never met anyone who played on a console...

Granted, I can't really join in as I never ever owned a console, but... I really don't understand any of these arguments against a PC. Adjusting the settings for me is spending 5 clicks shutting down some effects I know just waste power for little gain while putting resolution and textures on max and that's literally it, you never go back to the graphics settings ever after that. So what's the deal? If a Windows Update kills your PC and you have to reinstall Windows, then that's on Microsoft and you still have to deal with it as a console gamer because hey, chances are you still own a PC, right? I highly doubt you'd go gaming with your neat console while you can't do your work or file your taxes because Microsoft fucked up. I also rarely touch my drivers either... The height of complexity I ever encountered is getting old games to work that don't. And that usually boils down to googling my problem and downloading whatever patch or missing .dll file is suggested. Then I can go play my favourite retro games instead of doing the console equivalent of... not playing what I want to play?

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Can you play splitscreen multiplayer on a PC? Surely it must be possible, I’ve just never heard of anyone doing it. That was undeniably a huge part of the appeal for consoles. The P in PC is a pretty big giveaway regarding its intended use, so if you want to get something you can plug into the TV for your kids, or have as an option if you have some friends round, a console is the obvious choice. Granted, splitscreen multiplayer has largely died off in the last 10 years, apart from with Nintendo, but I think that’s more to do with hardware limitations and those all-important graphics than actual demand.

I still haven’t forgiven Halo 5 for dropping splitscreen entirely. I didn’t touch the multiplayer as a result.

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The real question we should be asking Kal is how many generations of console ahead he is in his living room- have you a tv pixely enough to cope with the Xbox12 you've no doubt been testing, Kal?

I appreciate you may not be able to say a great deal about some of these things, but blink once for yes and twice for mamma mia!

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