Video Games: Mystery Box Character Creation

[Kalbear]

20 minutes ago, Toth said:

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?

So here's a very common experience we get calls for.

Parent calls us. Tells us kid wants to play game on PC. Game isn't working. Please help. Their friends are playing it, and they want to. But...it's old, and it doesn't work with the latest nVidia drivers. The reason their friend can play it is because it worked 10 years ago and they have an older PC.

The parent doesn't want to deal with this. The kid doesn't know how. In that case, the parent would simply be happier if the kid didn't even have the choice to do it. That would make their life easier. 

[RumHam]

32 minutes ago, Toth said:

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.

Japan too. Though it might be mostly handhelds now? I know Microsoft can't seem to sell and systems there but I assume the PS4 did fine. 

[Kalbear]

4 minutes ago, RumHam said:

Japan too. Though it might be mostly handhelds now? I know Microsoft can't seem to sell and systems there but I assume the PS4 did fine. 

The big ones are the US, Japan, and Brazil. The UK does a decent amount too. Europe, for whatever reason (honestly I suspect it's because of things like Amigas back in the day) has always been more PC-based. China had consoles banned for years and it's never taken off. 

[Toth]

21 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

So here's a very common experience we get calls for.

Parent calls us. Tells us kid wants to play game on PC. Game isn't working. Please help. Their friends are playing it, and they want to. But...it's old, and it doesn't work with the latest nVidia drivers. The reason their friend can play it is because it worked 10 years ago and they have an older PC.

The parent doesn't want to deal with this. The kid doesn't know how. In that case, the parent would simply be happier if the kid didn't even have the choice to do it. That would make their life easier. 

But isn't that a bad example for your point? The kid wants to play that PC game  his friend recommended him and your solution is to tell them that they shouldn't? Wouldn't a similar situation with consoles be significantly worse if he got recommended a XBox exclusive and can't play it on his Playstation or something? Because in that case your solution "just don't play it!" would apply as well, but unlike with the PC it couldn't be fixed by using Google.

To be honest, those parents sound like the laziest dumbest people possible. Paying out hundreds of dollars just so that they or their child don't have to use Google...

Like for real, some of these compatibility issues are no big deal whatsoever. A while back I had the sudden craving to play The Sims again, but I only own The Sims 2. I installed that on Windows 10 and a driver issue caused the game to only run in the lowest possible resolution because it couldn't wrap its head around my hardware. One Google search and a single edit in a text file and the issue was gone. Cost me about 3 minutes + loading times for starting the game again. Such an impossible endeavour...

Edit: No wait, two edits in the text file as the shadows also weren't rendered properly, but you get my point.

[Kalbear]

Just now, Toth said:

But isn't that a bad example for your point? The kid wants to play that PC game  his friend recommended him and your solution is to tell them that they shouldn't? Wouldn't a similar situation with consoles be significantly worse if he got recommended a XBox exclusive and can't play it on his Playstation or something? Because in that case your solution "just don't play it!" would apply as well, but unlike with the PC it couldn't be fixed by using Google.

To be honest, those parents sound like the laziest dumbest people possible. Paying out hundreds of dollars just so that they or their child don't have to use Google...

Like for real, some of these compatibility issues are no big deal whatsoever. A while back I had the sudden craving to play The Sims again, but I only own The Sims 2. I installed that on Windows 10 and a driver issue caused the game to only run in the lowest possible resolution because it couldn't wrap its head around my hardware. One Google search and a single edit in a text file and the issue was gone. Cost me about 3 minutes + loading times for starting the game again. Such an impossible endeavour...

I don't know if it's a bad example, but it's an example of the kind of thing that parents just don't want to have to deal with. They'd rather simply have their kid know that they don't have a PC, and can't play that game, and that is literally the end of the discussion. Instead of the kid having to beg them to fix things and make it work and spend that time to get it so they can play with their friends. It's much easier to say 'no, because we don't own a Playstation" than it is to say "no, because I don't want to spend the time to get your game to work on this machine". 

As to the 'laziest and dumbest', well, there are a whole lot of parents who really don't want to spend their time doing this work, because they're doing all the other things. That's not a very empathetic viewpoint for people. 

And yes, I know that these things aren't always that hard - but it really depends on the person. For a lot of people out there, 'edit in a text file' alone is enough to cause massive confusion. Heck, 'search for sims windows 10 resolution' is tough for some people. You have to understand that for a lot of people who own consoles they have almost no day-to-day use for PCs at all, or if they do they utterly loathe it. 

[Soylent Brown]

I was an Amiga kid back in the day - my parents never liked the idea of getting me a console, but a real life computer was okay!

Not sure how that would affect modern day though?

[Rhom]

2 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

And yes, I know that these things aren't always that hard - but it really depends on the person. For a lot of people out there, 'edit in a text file' alone is enough to cause massive confusion. Heck, 'search for sims windows 10 resolution' is tough for some people. You have to understand that for a lot of people who own consoles they have almost no day-to-day use for PCs at all, or if they do they utterly loathe it. 

YES!  I can't tell you how intimidated I was a couple weeks ago when someone here showed me how to edit a text file to make GoG recognize the fact that I owned Witcher 3 on the PS4.  I will admit to being quite proud of myself after having fixed it though.   

[Kalbear]

3 minutes ago, Soylent Brown said:

I was an Amiga kid back in the day - my parents never liked the idea of getting me a console, but a real life computer was okay!

Not sure how that would affect modern day though?

From my experience what's winning kids is Chromebooks. Like, they occasionally use a PC, but they know ALL about chromebooks from school. Which is odd because they're super limited, and also almost entirely web based. It's that and things like phones/tablets. PCs are still not nearly as common. 

[briantw]

1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

So here's a very common experience we get calls for.

Parent calls us. Tells us kid wants to play game on PC. Game isn't working. Please help. Their friends are playing it, and they want to. But...it's old, and it doesn't work with the latest nVidia drivers. The reason their friend can play it is because it worked 10 years ago and they have an older PC.

The parent doesn't want to deal with this. The kid doesn't know how. In that case, the parent would simply be happier if the kid didn't even have the choice to do it. That would make their life easier. 

Tell the kid to learn to fucking google. 

That's how the rest of us attempt to fix every PC problem.

[Kalbear]

2 minutes ago, briantw said:

Tell the kid to learn to fucking google. 

That's how the rest of us attempt to fix every PC problem.

Yep! That sounds like an excellent way to get a 5* rating on support.

(assuming you've let your 9 year old have administrative rights on that machine)

[Werthead]

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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.

Dell are definitely not the biggest seller of gaming PCs, which is what the issue was.

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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. 

You absolutely do have games that are unoptimised POS or bug-laden on console and I noted several of them. Steam also offers an absolute no-quibble refund on all games as long as you haven't played them for more than 2 hours. If you have, and the game has pretty major bugs that are well-known, they'll still give you a refund anyway.

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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. 

This might be a US/UK-EU difference, but here that doesn't happen. If something breaks in the warranty period it has to be replaced, immediately, no issue. I've worked on the retail side of things and the most you can do is run an in-store test to see if the thing really is screwed and can't be fixed with a component swap or software fix (most of the time it could), but if the thing really was borked, you had to replace it on the spot.

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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. 

I think this absolutely is perception. Everything is automated these days on everything. You might get an odd situation where your PC switches off auto-updating or your PS4 somehow "forgets" to check for optional updates until a game or a major patch forces it through, but generally speaking all PCs and all consoles automate their updates and processes now and have done for years.

If anything, I think the situation is that as people are using PCs less for other things at home (so 10 years ago you might have a laptop for web-browsing, now you're more likely to just use your phone) and general PC skills are declining - my teacher friends have noted young children arriving at school with almost no keyboard skills because they've been exclusively raised on tablets, phones and consoles which is a massive change from the past 30 years -  so the "myth" of PCs being more complicated to use seems to be growing at the exact moment they've become more streamlined to use than ever.

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I had to do this to get Phoenix Rising to work two months ago. 

Do you mean Phoenix Point (since Phoenix Rising is an ultra-obscure 2002 game)? That game was seriously borked on release, so that's fair enough. I'm giving that one a bit of a wide berth until they've updated it a few times.

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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. 

Steam updates itself every month or two, it takes seconds. Downloading a new nVidia driver takes seconds (unless you're doing the manual installation, which they recommend not doing).

Consoles are doing this as well, all the time, they just hide it as general "updates." The PS4 and the XB1 in 2020 are not running the same graphics drivers they shipped with in 2013.

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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. 

That is true, although again the consoles themselves also have browsers and you need to do some work protecting them from kids as well.

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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?

There is another point here that the price issue and everything else is becoming more non-existent because of the network technology in Europe (and even the UK, where it's worse than anywhere else in Europe bar possibly only Ireland, but still light-years ahead of the USA), so real-time streaming services are also a viable solution and have been for some years. So at that point you don't need a $1,000 or even a $600 PC, a cheap laptop will allow you to run everything at high quality.

It's the US that's holding everyone else back. Stadia could easily fulfil it's Netflix-but-games ambition if the US networking tech actually allowed it to work outside the big cities.

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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.

There's a few games that allow it (Rocket League does, the Codemasters Formula One games do, virtually all of the EA Sports games do, like FIFA and so on; Cuphead, GRID 2, the two Divinity: Original Sin games, the Gears of War games, obviously all the fighting games, all of the Lego titles etc), but it's less of a thing, and it's less of a thing on console as well compared to where it used to be. Running two sets of graphics on one screen means dropping the quality quite considerably, so they emphasise each person having their own machine to play with. I think Nintendo's strength has been focusing on the family/group experience at home which Microsoft and Sony have both moved away from.

Also, if you're looking exclusively at gaming for kids or friends, then a Nintendo is the more logical choice. The few times I've flirted with getting a console for myself (I've certainly lived in houses with consoles in them, but I've never bought one for myself), it's always been a Nintendo for that reason.

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

The Halo series does seem to steadily have been going down the toilet for a long time. Releasing Halo Infinite footage with graphics that look not a huge amount better than Halo 3 on the 360 is a particularly curious choice. If they were saying this was pre-alpha footage from a game three years out, fair enough, but this is a game that's supposed to be shipping in about four months.

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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...

Germany, most of mainland Europe and Russia are mostly PC hotbeds. Consoles are somewhat popular, but nothing like what they are in the USA, Japan and UK.

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Parent calls us. Tells us kid wants to play game on PC. Game isn't working. Please help. Their friends are playing it, and they want to. But...it's old, and it doesn't work with the latest nVidia drivers. The reason their friend can play it is because it worked 10 years ago and they have an older PC.

In most cases, that's something that can be dealt with in five minutes (and I did when I was dealing with customers), especially if the game in question is on GoG. If anything, the reverse is a much  bigger problem: a customer angrily demanding to know why the PC port of GTAV didn't work on their 8-year-old (at the time the port came out) £200 Acer laptop.

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I was an Amiga kid back in the day - my parents never liked the idea of getting me a console, but a real life computer was okay!

Not sure how that would affect modern day though?

 

The Amiga is a bit like the Joy Division of 1980s/90s gaming machines, hugely, massively influential and everyone's heard of it, but the perception of the actual number of people who were into it at the time seems to have been blown out of all proportion to the reality. I think the total lifetime sales of the entire Amiga range, from the 1985 Amiga 1000 through to the CD32 and Amiga 4000 in 1994, was about 4 million, 3 million of them in the UK and Germany alone and under a million in the US, mostly for graphics work. The SNES sold ten times that amount by itself, and the Megadrive/Genesis sold about three quarters of the same (although it took the consoles until the SNES and Megadrive to overhaul the Amiga in power, and the Amiga kept in the fight for years afterwards, was quite impressive; that machine was a monster in its day).

What the Amiga did do was provide a PC-like experience (and in some areas, especially audio, vastly superior) at a tiny fraction of the cost of a PC and provided a logical upgrade path into PC gaming, since the Amiga died and ceased being a viable platform at the exact moment (1993-96) that "gaming PCs" really became a thing, and people who came up on the demoware scene on Amiga found it easy to jump to PC. I think that had a big impact in the UK and Germany, along with the console focus on violent games and shooters, which the German censors really frowned on, whilst the Amiga and PC with their massive amounts of strategy games and less focus on realistic shooters were more popular.

The scene in the UK shifted with the PlayStation, which broke through the perception that consoles were just for kids and became something that everyone had in their front room under the TV, alongside the VCR. I don't think that happened in Germany and other parts of Europe.

[Rhom]

Finally making time for LoU2.  Only a couple hours in... man, oh, man am I glad I managed to avoid spoilers on the early game!!!

[RumHam]

13 hours ago, Kalbear said:

I literally work in Xbox support 

Heeey, so I know this is only tangentially related but while I was watching netflix on my xbox tonight I dropped my phone and now it has this like...spiderman 3 promotional web that I can't figure out how to get rid of. I already had some rice but if that doesn't work any ideas? 

[RumHam]

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The Amiga is a bit like the Joy Division of 1980s/90s gaming machines, hugely, massively influential and everyone's heard of it, but the perception of the actual number of people who were into it at the time seems to have been blown out of all proportion to the reality. 4

Wow do people know who Ian Curtis is in the UK? People barely know New Order in America. Though our suicide rates are super bad so there's that. 

[Kalbear]

2 hours ago, RumHam said:

Heeey, so I know this is only tangentially related but while I was watching netflix on my xbox tonight I dropped my phone and now it has this like...spiderman 3 promotional web that I can't figure out how to get rid of. I already had some rice but if that doesn't work any ideas? 

If you watch spiderman 3 it should go away, it's one of those super realistic ads which can track what you're listening to and what you watch. 

[RumHam]

29 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

If you watch spiderman 3 it should go away, it's one of those super realistic ads which can track what you're listening to and what you watch. 

the cure sounds worse than the disease / smashed phone 

[Inkdaub]

I like my consoles because I like to sit on the couch and play on my tv.  I am not against the desk, though.  I spent the better part of a decade playing WoW on a tiny little corner desk and never once even considered buying a couch.  So I don't know. 

I do sort of want to build a pc just to do it.  You order parts and then put it together?  What about programs...I assume you just pick the ones you want and install?  It actually sounds fun in a way. 

 

[Fez]

One other PC downside can be tiny font/UI scaling, though that's partially my fault. I play my PC on my TV from my couch, like its a console. And when there are games that expect my face to be about 2 feet from the screen instead of 12 feet, it can make things challenging. Its not even PC game exclusive problem, a lot of times they have pretty good scaling options (except Paradox games, I have to start editing .ini files with them, and it never fully solves the problem), it can be anything. The worst recent one was The Outer Worlds. Until they eventually patched it, that text was completely unreadable for me.

Anyway, on games instead of hardware, I'm really looking forward to Othercide and Faiere Tactics coming next week. But kinda struggling to find something to play this weekend. Most of the games I havent beaten yet from my recent haul (e.g. FFXV) I'm struggling to find any interest in. Maybe getting really into SWTOR for a bit is the right answer.

[Rhom]

Playing TLoU2 last night.  Still not that far in, but I have to say that I wandered into the music store and the scene with Ellie and the guitar is up there with the giraffe scene from the first game.  I'm hooked.

[Ran]

1 hour ago, Inkdaub said:

 

I do sort of want to build a pc just to do it.  You order parts and then put it together? 

More or less. Plenty of good guides (written and video) out there that explain the basics of what to do, and sites like PC Part Picker that let you put things together in a way that makes sure they are compatible. There's not that many components when building a PC, generally speaking:

Case (may or may not come with one or more additional fans already installed)

Motherboard

CPU

RAM

Cooling for CPU (fan or water-cooling; some CPUs will come with stock factory fans, others will not; you may also need thermal paste for the CPU, but some cooling solutions have it prepared with paste and others do not; do not use thermal pads, they mostly suck)

Power supply

Hard drive(s) (SSD highly recommended for your OS, programs, and games, regular old HD for storage purposes)

Graphics card (not necessary if you don't mean to game on it, as the CPU has an onboard GPU that's fine for basic display)

Operating system (Windows or some Linux flavor)

 

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What about programs...I assume you just pick the ones you want and install?  It actually sounds fun in a way. 

Pretty much. Not much different than installing apps on your phone these days.