265: Punching the Baby Seal of PC Gaming

[Fr]anc[is]

DRM and crashing are indeed frustrating, but the way I see it, that's not the PC itselfs fault. Fallout didn't suck because it was on the PC, it sucked because of games for windows suck and bethesda. however bad things about the console ARE their fault. I don't play consoles much, so the only thing i can think of is the reverse compatability crap. xbox sucks because its a microsoft product, but PS3 can play old games, but sony gave you a big middle finger.

 

[nofear220]

It seems like most of the people who disagree with Chuck haven't actually read the article. Everything he says is totally justified and if you suspend disbelief and just assume that he isn't lying for some unknown reason, then you'll see that his exasperation with the platform as a whole is warranted.

He isn't needlessly hating on PC gaming, he is merely pointing out the single biggest downside of the platform

I have read the article and my god could you not be more wrong. He did not give one justified point throughout the whole thing. Every single problem he encountered is common and easy to fix. Plus how is the single biggest downside of a platform the user? It isn't the PC's fault he is an idiot.

Basically his whole rant can be compressed to this "HERP DERP, MAN PC SUX ITS 2 HARD N' SHIT I THEY MAEK INSTALLIN GAMES 2 HARD Y CANT I JUST PRESS 1 BUTTIN. I GOT AH DELL XPS I SHUD BE THE BEST GAEMAR EVARRR!!1 TOO BAD PC SUX".

 

[Singularly Datarific]

Yeah Fallout 3 tends to do that. First play through a few years ago, "Holy shit the Wasteland looks awesome! Is that Megat- Error". Restart..."Megaton here i C- Error". Restart "Megaton- no wait save it first then just walk". Save "Ah finally Megato-Error' DAMMIT! after playing through the game and DLC i ended up with around....600 saves total.

Don't forget, it was buggy as hell on consoles as well.
My brother's experience was getting out of the vault, and it crashed on the loading screen to outside.
He never played it again.

I beat it, nonetheless, but as far as first impressions go, it does boil de blood.

 

[wadark]

TL;DR

Everything you say reinforces my point. You've worked in Tech Support, so you know what you're talking about. I have not, so I don't. I just want to play this game that I've been anticipating.

I don't know that long-install times mean I need a new disc drive. I wouldn't think I'd need a new one since I've installed a grand total of 4 disc games in the 1.5 years I've had this machine.

I don't know that directX comes on the disc for SC2...it certainly never popped up before, during, or after install. And if I don't know that it comes packaged, why would I ever go looking for it in the disc files or wherever I'm supposed to find it.

I got what I could afford from dell at the time and let me be clear, it works great. A couple hiccups now and then.


My point is that I don't know, and considering I've been using computers a bit longer than most people, they certainly wouldn't know unless they were told. But when asked, I get sarcastic know-it-all elitist remarks like yours. Again, you reinforce my point. Sure, its second-nature to you because you have extensive experience in the nuances, but to a layman like me, its a nightmare.

I believe that the article is great and explain (maybe a little less than articulately) the experiences that most anyone new to PC gaming suffer through.

Well I do apologize if sharing a bit of knowledge is considered sarcastic elitism by your standards. I guess it's the same way that every whine against the PC, which itself is a multi-platform market, sounds grating to me. See, this is the point: you compare your iphone or Xbox or whatever to a PC when you have to ask yourself: do all iPhones have the same specs? All Xboxes? Whatever variation will not be performance-based, and developers basically have to work within the same performance specs.

Computers on the other hand, come within so many ranges, from bargain basement shit that can barely play a Facebook game, to behemoths like Alienware systems. It's more like the auto industry, if you ask me. When you buy a lemon of a car, do you complain loudly that you can't participate in NASCAR? Yet people continue to overtax their systems, without at least checking with an expert to see if their rigs can handle the workload to begin with, then rant about it later on.

My point is, ignorance is inexcusable, especially in this day and age where everything is a Google and wiki away. Just the same way that you have to understand that your car works best with certain kinds of gasoline, you have to understand your system's limitations, tweak your games accordingly, do system tune ups, call Dell if you need help with that, and be happy that the devs actually made their game at least compatible with it in some way.

Oh and BTW, most new games install DirectX in the background, in the tail end of your game install. But yeah it's there.

You make a fair point, no doubt. But while sharing knowledge and info isn't elitism, saying something like "Its so easy a 5 year old can do it." is.

But you can't deny that regardless of how wiki/google-simple it may be, it still takes a fair bit of time to learn what exactly to do, find all the parts, and put them together properly. And then you have to learn a whole range of troubleshooting because if something goes wrong with a custom-built system, YOU have to be the one to identify exactly where/what the problem is, and how to remedy it.

On the other hand, you can have a decent Dell specified in an hour or so, and shipped to you in a week. And with people having full time jobs, friends, and family obligations, some just don't have the time, or simply don't wish to devote that much of their free time to it. And I really don't think that these people should be punished (whether by the simple fact that the games don't work, or by the people on the internet from whom the ask for help) for this.

Also, let's not sugarcoat the cost. While it may technically less expensive to build your own computer, that "discount" comes at the cost of the aforementioned research/study.

As far as performance specs go, I completely understand, and every PC game comes with the required/minimum/recommended specs right on the box. And if you buy a game without at least some basic knowledge of whether your system can handle it, that's your own fault. But my issue comes in when I know I have a system that can handle say SC2 (according to the printed recommendation), and I still have to jump through some hoops to get it to run properly (SC2 being of course a VERY mild case of PC gaming issues).

Concerning DirectX...all I can say is, while that may be true with some, or even most, games, it definitely did not happen with SC2. And as I originally said, it took me quite a while to figure out what I needed to do (thanks to the wonderfully designed microsoft.com)

 

[romxxii]

Spoiler

TL;DR

Everything you say reinforces my point. You've worked in Tech Support, so you know what you're talking about. I have not, so I don't. I just want to play this game that I've been anticipating.

I don't know that long-install times mean I need a new disc drive. I wouldn't think I'd need a new one since I've installed a grand total of 4 disc games in the 1.5 years I've had this machine.

I don't know that directX comes on the disc for SC2...it certainly never popped up before, during, or after install. And if I don't know that it comes packaged, why would I ever go looking for it in the disc files or wherever I'm supposed to find it.

I got what I could afford from dell at the time and let me be clear, it works great. A couple hiccups now and then.


My point is that I don't know, and considering I've been using computers a bit longer than most people, they certainly wouldn't know unless they were told. But when asked, I get sarcastic know-it-all elitist remarks like yours. Again, you reinforce my point. Sure, its second-nature to you because you have extensive experience in the nuances, but to a layman like me, its a nightmare.

I believe that the article is great and explain (maybe a little less than articulately) the experiences that most anyone new to PC gaming suffer through.

Well I do apologize if sharing a bit of knowledge is considered sarcastic elitism by your standards. I guess it's the same way that every whine against the PC, which itself is a multi-platform market, sounds grating to me. See, this is the point: you compare your iphone or Xbox or whatever to a PC when you have to ask yourself: do all iPhones have the same specs? All Xboxes? Whatever variation will not be performance-based, and developers basically have to work within the same performance specs.

Computers on the other hand, come within so many ranges, from bargain basement shit that can barely play a Facebook game, to behemoths like Alienware systems. It's more like the auto industry, if you ask me. When you buy a lemon of a car, do you complain loudly that you can't participate in NASCAR? Yet people continue to overtax their systems, without at least checking with an expert to see if their rigs can handle the workload to begin with, then rant about it later on.

My point is, ignorance is inexcusable, especially in this day and age where everything is a Google and wiki away. Just the same way that you have to understand that your car works best with certain kinds of gasoline, you have to understand your system's limitations, tweak your games accordingly, do system tune ups, call Dell if you need help with that, and be happy that the devs actually made their game at least compatible with it in some way.

Oh and BTW, most new games install DirectX in the background, in the tail end of your game install. But yeah it's there.

You make a fair point, no doubt. But while sharing knowledge and info isn't elitism, saying something like "Its so easy a 5 year old can do it." is.

When did I say a five year old can do it? All I said was that I find anti-PC whining grating because it's mostly just guys who buy budget systems complaining about being unable to run things it wasn't meant to. Yeah they're not expected to know that, that's why there's bloody tech support in the first place. But if they'd just take the advice and not complain first, that'd be better. You don't see car owners doing that sort of shit with an honest mechanic. Reminds me of this time when this guy started screaming when he lost his entire address book, only to backpedal later when I realized he just opened the wrong mail client. Contrast with this little old lady couldn't understand why her Internet was running slow, when it turned out she only had 512MB of RAM and had a bajillion IE windows open, who I assisted promptly because she wasn't really being hostile about it, and took the time to listen to my "connection latency vs system latency" lecture.

But you can't deny that regardless of how wiki/google-simple it may be, it still takes a fair bit of time to learn what exactly to do, find all the parts, and put them together properly. And then you have to learn a whole range of troubleshooting because if something goes wrong with a custom-built system, YOU have to be the one to identify exactly where/what the problem is, and how to remedy it.

On the other hand, you can have a decent Dell specified in an hour or so, and shipped to you in a week. And with people having full time jobs, friends, and family obligations, some just don't have the time, or simply don't wish to devote that much of their free time to it. And I really don't think that these people should be punished (whether by the simple fact that the games don't work, or by the people on the internet from whom the ask for help) for this.

Also, let's not sugarcoat the cost. While it may technically less expensive to build your own computer, that "discount" comes at the cost of the aforementioned research/study.

Even getting a customized Dell requires a bit of research. Building a system that does more than run Microsoft Office really requires a bit of looking into, especially when Dell tries to hawk you specific parts that may not be the best or most cost effective. I worked with them for a time, even their video card "upgrades" aren't the best in that particular budgetary line sometimes.

As far as performance specs go, I completely understand, and every PC game comes with the required/minimum/recommended specs right on the box. And if you buy a game without at least some basic knowledge of whether your system can handle it, that's your own fault. But my issue comes in when I know I have a system that can handle say SC2 (according to the printed recommendation), and I still have to jump through some hoops to get it to run properly (SC2 being of course a VERY mild case of PC gaming issues).

Concerning DirectX...all I can say is, while that may be true with some, or even most, games, it definitely did not happen with SC2. And as I originally said, it took me quite a while to figure out what I needed to do (thanks to the wonderfully designed microsoft.com)

Again, like my car analogy, you should be responsible for updating drivers especially if your system's over 2 years old, just like you're responsible for getting your car into the local garage very few thousand miles. On consoles you don't notice because the whole thing's a bundled device, and every system update takes care of everything. On the PC, since even prebuilt systems like Dells are invariably a mishmash of different products by different manufacturers, you really have to do it yourself.

But then if SC2 didn't install any system updates like DX, that's Blizzard's or distributor Activision's fault, not the PC as a gaming platform (unless you got a lemon system, which in that case, you'd be the one to blame. But you said it's not, so let's not). Every other game out there installs all of the crap that's required for the game to run, like DirectX, PhysX, and more recently, MS C++. My system's on its 3rd year now (though I did upgrade a year ago), and I haven't had any problems with game installations or running games smoothly.

Finally, even minimum and recommended specs can be misleading, because what some people don't understand is that minimum means lowest settings, while recommended means medium settings, with max settings devoted to rigs that are way beyond some people's budgets. It would be nice if the game, aside from automatically determining video settings, also lets you benchmark and tweak it so that you can get the best of performance and quality. SF4 did that, so did SC:CT and JC2. and the old FEAR.

 

[Samus Aaron]

AAAAAH THE FLAMES! I CANT ESCAPE THE HEAT!

Honestly, stop treating this guy like he's some sort of demon spawn just because he is frustrated with PC Gaming. Honestly, when there is no face to go with someone's words, people seem to lose all self-control. Anonymity can be a *****. Time to bring out the ol' fire extinguisher...

ATTENTION EVERYONE. STOP THIS WAR IMMEDIATELY. PLEASE DO THE FOLLOWING.
Step 1: Cool down, and restrain yourself from ranting. This is the Escapist, not Youtube or 4Chan.
Step 2: Read the article in its entirety.
Step 3: Carefully consider the perspective of the opposite side. Maybe they actually have some good points.
Step 4: Resume writing comments with the integrity and levelheadedness that comes with the classification of being a "civilized" being, noting that your opponents are not the Devil Incarnate.
Step 5: Profit!

Imagine yourself as the writer. Would you not be pissed in his position? Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems that the amount of fire produced by this thread is not proportional to Chuck's actual "hatred" of PC Gaming.

By the way, stop saying that he is too stupid to read the manual or build a computer or whatever! Don't you see that that is his whole point? Calling him lazy or stupid is not an argument, and a very immature one at that.

 

[wadark]

When did I say a five year old can do it? All I said was that I find anti-PC whining grating because it's mostly just guys who buy budget systems complaining about being unable to run things it wasn't meant to. Yeah they're not expected to know that, that's why there's bloody tech support in the first place. But if they'd just take the advice and not complain first, that'd be better. You don't see car owners doing that sort of shit with an honest mechanic. Reminds me of this time when this guy started screaming when he lost his entire address book, only to backpedal later when I realized he just opened the wrong mail client. Contrast with this little old lady couldn't understand why her Internet was running slow, when it turned out she only had 512MB of RAM and had a bajillion IE windows open, who I assisted promptly because she wasn't really being hostile about it, and took the time to listen to my "connection latency vs system latency" lecture.

Someone in this thread, it may not have been you, quoted me at some point saying that building your own PC was so easy a 5 year old could do it. If that wasn't you I apologize (EDIT: it wasn't you, I realized, my apologies again for putting words in your mouth), but my point in saying that was simply to point out that in the "PC Tech community", like in most online communities, there's a rash of elitist jackasses who respond to sincere requests for assistance with sarcasm and hostility.

Even getting a customized Dell requires a bit of research. Building a system that does more than run Microsoft Office really requires a bit of looking into, especially when Dell tries to hawk you specific parts that may not be the best or most cost effective. I worked with them for a time, even their video card "upgrades" aren't the best in that particular budgetary line sometimes.

But there are also pre-configured machines, and my experience, with Dell at least, has been that these are fairly good machines, not the absolute best, but more than adequate. And it doesn't take long to find one that does what you want. But even when customizing, it really only takes a relative understanding of what the major components (processor, hard drive, memory, video card) do to be able to put together a good machine. And many websites like Dell provide basic video instruction on that matter, which, while extremely basic in its explanation, does do a pretty good job of explaining it to the layman.

On the other hand, personally building a PC takes a pretty intimate knowledge of all the components (not just the major ones) and how they work together. Troubleshooting is also far more complicated since you don't have a single, central tech support to assist you. You have to be able to diagnose the problem and fix it yourself.

Again, like my car analogy, you should be responsible for updating drivers especially if your system's over 2 years old, just like you're responsible for getting your car into the local garage very few thousand miles. On consoles you don't notice because the whole thing's a bundled device, and every system update takes care of everything. On the PC, since even prebuilt systems like Dells are invariably a mishmash of different products by different manufacturers, you really have to do it yourself.

Drivers are something I don't have much of a problem with. Games will generally tell you if your drivers are out of date and with most video card companies like nvidia and ATI, they are pretty easy to find on their website.

But then if SC2 didn't install any system updates like DX, that's Blizzard's or distributor Activision's fault, not the PC as a gaming platform (unless you got a lemon system, which in that case, you'd be the one to blame. But you said it's not, so let's not). Every other game out there installs all of the crap that's required for the game to run, like DirectX, PhysX, and more recently, MS C++. My system's on its 3rd year now (though I did upgrade a year ago), and I haven't had any problems with game installations or running games smoothly.

My concern with something like DirectX isn't the fact that the game didn't install it. I don't mind that so much, but its that trying to figure out how and where to download it was a royal pain in the ass. I had to try and navigate microsoft's awful website to try and find the directX page, which then wouldn't even let me just update DirectX, so I'm not even sure what the DX page is for. Its not like PC gaming has one giant clenching flaw that makes it "suck", but rather that there are a lot of little tiny things that gnaw at some people and make it a really unattractive platform to game on.

Perhaps we've been spoiled by console gaming to some degree, but I'm not one who subscribes to the notion of "the struggle makes it all the sweeter." Fiddling with my computer for an additional hour on top of the install time to get Starcraft 2 to run didn't make Starcraft 2 any better when I finally got in. It made it worse because it took time away from me being able to play the game before I had other things to do.

Finally, even minimum and recommended specs can be misleading, because what some people don't understand is that minimum means lowest settings, while recommended means medium settings, with max settings devoted to rigs that are way beyond some people's budgets. It would be nice if the game, aside from automatically determining video settings, also lets you benchmark and tweak it so that you can get the best of performance and quality. SF4 did that, so did SC:CT and JC2. and the old FEAR.

That's definitely not a bad idea.

 

[gigastrike]

...I don't have that much trouble.

 

[beema]

I'll admit I'm getting pretty damn sick of so many PC games being so goddamn buggy and so terribly optimized. They suffer terribly from not enough dev and testing time. What's worse is when they don't even bother to patch them. I honestly can't remember a single (non-Valve) game I've played on PC in the past year that didn't have some terrible bug or should of played fine on my uber rig, but somehow managed to run like a slide show. I'd like to blame it on too much attention being lavished on consoles these days, with PC development being given the short end of the stick, but a couple of these games were pc-exclusive, so that's not the only issue.
I guess it's a difficult medium, with so many factors that the devs are unable to contro: hardware, drivers, OS, etc. With consoles you have the same exact setup with every user, so debugging has to be much simpler. Still... it's feeling pretty inexcusable much of the time.
From the sound of it, I'd also wager that your system isn't up to snuff, but I'll concede that keeping an "up to snuff" gaming PC these days can be like a second job.

Still, for all the irregularities, I vastly prefer PC over any other gaming platform, and I will not be casting it aside.

 

[L-J-F]

Wow you have some seriously bad luck there man.

Ever played Rigs of Rods? THE most unstable game I've ever played, and guess what: it works without incident 90-95% of the time, so much so that I don't even care all that much when it does crash.

The majority of crashes on my PC are due to me overclocking it too much or running too many things at once or mods. All of those things are the fault of the user.

And as said, never get a pre-built pc: you'll pay 3 times as much and get half the performance you could have if you'd built it yourself, or had gone to a computer shop and said "hey here's $2500 build me a gaming pc!".

Or maybe I and everyone I've ever known are blessed by the Fates themselves

 

[shadow skill]

All the more reason publishers need to give the development teams more time to fix bugs.

 

[DalekJaas]

I didn't think that was a particularly professional article, you sound like you have no idea what you are doing. Crysis never crashed once for me on my old dell, the problem is probably steam.

 

[MissAshley]

I understand the frustration, but instead of PC gaming I've had issues maintaining a Nintendo-worthy wireless setup. And when I finally got one going, my router seems to have given up the ghost. -_-

 

[NSGrendel]

The only PC game I've ever had real problems with is Nomad Soul and that is most certainly the software's fault.

 

[Cyan.]

The nerd rage in this thread is the best ever.

PC gaming is annoying, frustrating and complicated when compared to console gaming.

ACCEPT IT PEOPLE!

Doesnt mean that console gaming is better.
You cant play gmes like Starcraft or WoW on your consoles. Me, i used to be HUGE into hardware updates. Always buying the newest parts, always doing what i could to play the newest PC games on their highest settings.

And then i brought an xbox because someone said Gears of War was fun...

And you know what? Never looked back.

I have well over 100 xbox games, and i own a nice little laptop which i use to browse the internet. Its all i need.


Me, i prefer console gaming simply because its social (dont you dare mention LANs) and free of headaches.

If playing your new beloved PC title justifies sitting in your study alone while tweaking your graphics settings after the 3rd CTD in a row.... Then so be it, but it still does not eraze the irritation inherent in PC gaming.

If you like PC gaming, dude thats cool - Just stop pretending.

 

[Dana22]

The nerd rage in this thread is the best ever.

PC gaming is annoying, frustrating and complicated when compared to console gaming.

ACCEPT IT PEOPLE!

Doesnt mean that console gaming is better.
You cant play gmes like Starcraft or WoW on your consoles. Me, i used to be HUGE into hardware updates. Always buying the newest parts, always doing what i could to play the newest PC games on their highest settings.

And then i brought an xbox because someone said Gears of War was fun...

And you know what? Never looked back.

I have well over 100 xbox games, and i own a nice little laptop which i use to browse the internet. Its all i need.


Me, i prefer console gaming simply because its social (dont you dare mention LANs) and free of headaches.

If playing your new beloved PC title justifies sitting in your study alone while tweaking your graphics settings after the 3rd CTD in a row.... Then so be it, but it still does not eraze the irritation inherent in PC gaming.

If you like PC gaming, dude thats cool - Just stop pretending.

Talk about nerd rage huh.

 

[CalCD]

Everyone has a different experience, its probably pointless trying to tell people that their experience was the same as theirs...

 

[fenderstrat]

fallout 3 on pc made my life hell, yes. but i didnt run crying and yelling "never again, pc!" . that's just stupid.

 

[TundraWolf]

As someone who is a whole-hearted PC gamer, I don't take offense to this column. PC gaming can be a righteous pain the ass when it wants to be. I always regard my computer as a fickle god, only deigning to grant me use of it's celestial being when it so desires. I treat it right, giving it offerings of upgraded hardware, regular updates and the promise of constant tech support, in the hope that it will not rebel against me and shatter my life into a million pieces.

PC's are very fickle indeed. Every PC gamer knows this, whether they admit it or not. Every PC gamer becomes frustrated with their machine from time to time; it's the frequency of said frustration that varies from person to person. This is something that, as a PC gamer, you are required to acknowledge before you get too deep into the platform or you will become as frustrated as you seem to be. I'm not implying, of course, that you haven't come to terms with this: from what you've said in your article, you obviously signed that contract a few years before I did. It's just something that we must deal with if we want to use our computers for gaming.

I do take offense, however, to the tone of the article. I get that it was meant in jest (mostly), taking a bite out of the tense love/hate relationship you have with your PC. But, really, you just sound like you're looking for things to be wrong with PC gaming.

If your car breaks down every five minutes, something is obviously messed up with your car. Take it to a mechanic to get it fixed. If they can't do anything about it, get a different car. Same thing with your PC, man.

I get that you're tired of having to deal with this shit every time you want to play a PC game. God knows that I'd much prefer if I didn't have to deal with it either. But it's the devil that you know versus the one that isn't fixable, I guess. Better the possibility of being able to fix the problem quickly, with a download or two, as opposed to having to send the entire console away because it's shitted the bed so bad that it's too ashamed to work again.

My two cents, anyways.