Poll of the Day > I work at my computer. It's made PC gaming less enjoyable.

(+) Yeah! (+)

I can barely call myself a gamer anymore. I'm considering picking up a console but I don't think that would change anything, maybe a steam deck?

start an at-work chess club? or do you work from home?

pc gaming has never been enjoyable for me, which has been a very expensive lesson

console > pc

just flop onto the couch, put up your feet, grab that controller, and just play

never have to worry about tweaking settings or driver updates to make sure things work, because it all just works

Lokarin posted...

start an at-work chess club? or do you work from home?

Mixed schedule. I will be closer to work and go to the office more in a couple months.

Making a short walk from a computer screen to a console/TV does make a rather large difference psychologically I think.

Pick up a Switch or a PS4-5 depending on what you like to play.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

never have to worry about tweaking settings or driver updates to make sure things work, because it all just works

That's PC gaming for well over a decade.

spoken like someone who doesn't actually play on a pc lol

go play jedi survivor or the last of us on pc and tell me it just works

ConfusedTorchic posted...

go play jedi survivor or the last of us on pc and tell me it just works

it does for me... since I have a good pc, but ya - i know what you meant, also consoles been updatin' since the XBOX

wpot posted...

Making a short walk from a computer screen to a console/TV does make a rather large difference psychologically I think.

correct!

wpot posted...

Pick up a Switch or a PS4-5 depending on what you like to play.

a series s would be the most logical choice for someone with a capable pc, even if they don't really care to play on a pc anymore. it's cheap, it's powerful, it's got gamepass, and microsoft owns all the studios making anything worth playing these days

a switch is cheaper, but it's also the switch, which really only means the only games with any decent performance are first party nintendo made titles. (pokemon is not nintendo made. gamefreak isn't owned by nintendo. there's still no excuse for that shit fuckin early 2000s jank ps1 performance bullshit)

i don't remember the last time i've had to modify settings or the game wouldn't run on my pc for the past decade, and my pc isn't exactly great

but i can modify it to be better freely. like making the movespeed in stardew not shit. holy fuck you move at three snails per hour on vanilla

ConfusedTorchic posted...

pc gaming has never been enjoyable for me, which has been a very expensive lesson

console > pc

just flop onto the couch, put up your feet, grab that controller, and just play

never have to worry about tweaking settings or driver updates to make sure things work, because it all just works

I do that with my computer. Heck, I do that with my moms Tesla!

i really like my series s as someone who PC gamed for years

yeah PC just works most of the time, but ive yet to encounter an xbox game that didnt just work flawlessly, and it was cheaper than it would have been to upgrade my PC to the same degree

theres been a bit of a trend of AAA having slapdash PC ports recently, its nice to just opt out

Fierce_Deity_08 posted...

I do that with my computer.

steam big picture mode is basically just a console by itself

Kanatteru posted...

but ive yet to encounter an xbox game that didnt just work flawlessly,

any elder scrolls game, which PC has unofficial patches for to fix the game's bajillion bugs

btw; I do almost all my gaming on pc and I'm suuuuper cozy; I have a big soft chair I can practically sleep in

agesboy posted...

steam big picture mode is basically just a console by itself

any elder scrolls game, which PC has unofficial patches for to fix the game's bajillion bugs
edit: actually wait, skyrim's one of the few games that does have sanctioned console mods

yeah, skyrim and fallout 4 have official mod support on consoles, though the sony platform ones are a little gimped in that aspect since sony restricts how they can do it

i would be surprised if starfield didn't have mod support. it may not launch with it, but i would expect it to happen

agesboy posted...

any elder scrolls game, which PC has unofficial patches for to fix the game's bajillion bugs
edit: actually wait, skyrim's one of the few games that does have sanctioned console mods

why would you wanna fix bugs in a bethesda game theyre half the fun

oh wait i thought of one problem. in the dragon kart in yakuza: like a dragon and the drone races in judgment (yeah, both of them), trying to load the online leaderboards just makes the game hang forever. pretty minor and not sure if it happens on other versions, but still

Kanatteru posted...

why would you wanna fix bugs in a bethesda game theyre half the fun

it's still a jank as fuck game. it's just that things are actually placed in correct locations, the game crashes less, all the typos are fixed, quests completely break less, and things do what they actually say they do

Jedi Survivor in a Nutshell

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/4/7/AADnJsAAEbwH.jpg

ConfusedTorchic posted...

pc gaming has never been enjoyable for me, which has been a very expensive lesson

console > pc

just flop onto the couch, put up your feet, grab that controller, and just play

never have to worry about tweaking settings or driver updates to make sure things work, because it all just works

Yeah man those consoles have mastered it bud, it's not like you can actually hook a PC up to a TV and then use a wireless controller for the same experience!

Oh wait you can it's the year 2023!

Monopoman posted...

The day I can mod games on console as easily as PC is the day I consider them both closer to equal even then PC would win due to performance. Mods have made so many great games even better, and many games feel much weaker without them.

In the past, helly has insisted that mods shouldn't be included in comparing PC versions of games to their console versions, as they aren't "part of the game" (specifically, in comparing the PC and console versions of Minecraft, though presumably the logic would apply to others). This is, of course, nonsense.

it's only nonsense because you need to use external modifications for your enjoyment of the game

if you need mods to play the game, you're playing a bad game

this extends to random steam asset flip #999278493 to minecraft.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

it's only nonsense because you need to use external modifications for your enjoyment of the game

if you need mods to play the game, you're playing a bad game

this extends to random steam asset flip #999278493 to minecraft.

If you need mods to enjoy a game, then it's a bad game. If mods enhance the enjoyment of the game beyond what the base game can provide, however, any version with access to mods is objectively superior to any version without. Vanilla Minecraft is the same game regardless of platform (putting aside questions of playing with friends); if Minecraft is good on one platform then it's good on all platforms. Modding Minecraft makes it even better, therefore the best platforms for Minecraft are ones that enable mods.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

it's only nonsense because you need to use external modifications for your enjoyment of the game

if you need mods to play the game, you're playing a bad game

this extends to random steam asset flip #999278493 to minecraft.

Spoken like someone that has never played with mods, and there are plenty of examples outside of Minecraft and Elder Scrolls. Also most shit games don't get mods in the first place, because people are spending their free time making these mods. Not many are willing to drop 50-100 hours developing a mod for a game no one cares about that sucked. Also certain games are easier to mod due to tools made by the developer, some games require a lot more work to mod so they in turn get less mods in general.

Monopoman posted...

Also most s*** games don't get mods in the first place, because people are spending their free time making these mods. Not many are willing to drop 50-100 hours developing a mod for a game no one cares about that sucked.

Eh, that's debatable. Usually people don't put the effort in for games that just aren't good, certainly, but there are countless examples of modders taking it upon themselves to fix games that have critical issues that make them borderline unenjoyable without mods. Dark Souls' PC port is one of the more notorious examples of this, where everyone knew the game was good and worth playing, but the PC port was such hot garbage that you pretty much had to install DSFix to make it work. Bonus points where DSFix took less than 24 hours to generate, so it's not like the problems were anything other than laziness on From's part.

Lokarin posted...

it does for me... since I have a good pc, but ya - i know what you meant, also consoles been updatin' since the XBOX

You have to do next to nothing for that though. That's the appeal of consoles In a nutshell. Convinence

Sufferedphoneix posted...

You have to do next to nothing for that though. That's the appeal of consoles In a nutshell. Convinence

You don't exactly have to do much to update things on PC, either. Unless you deliberately disable automatic updates to have more control over your PC (which is entirely a personal choice that isn't at all necessary), most updates are downloaded and installed without any actual interaction. The worst you'll have to deal with is a system update that takes several minutes to install, in which case you just set it to install overnight or while you make dinner or poop or something and you can mostly avoid that inconvenience.

adjl posted...

Eh, that's debatable. Usually people don't put the effort in for games that just aren't good, certainly, but there are countless examples of modders taking it upon themselves to fix games that have critical issues that make them borderline unenjoyable without mods. Dark Souls' PC port is one of the more notorious examples of this, where everyone knew the game was good and worth playing, but the PC port was such hot garbage that you pretty much had to install DSFix to make it work. Bonus points where DSFix took less than 24 hours to generate, so it's not like the problems were anything other than laziness on From's part.

fs is very much a "it might work might not but here it is anyways dumbasses" kinda place for pc gaming

adjl posted...

Eh, that's debatable. Usually people don't put the effort in for games that just aren't good, certainly, but there are countless examples of modders taking it upon themselves to fix games that have critical issues that make them borderline unenjoyable without mods. Dark Souls' PC port is one of the more notorious examples of this, where everyone knew the game was good and worth playing, but the PC port was such hot garbage that you pretty much had to install DSFix to make it work. Bonus points where DSFix took less than 24 hours to generate, so it's not like the problems were anything other than laziness on From's part.

That kinda proves my point though the port was shit but people knew the game was good so they worked on it. Meanwhile I can list some bad PC games that never really took off had issues that made them not even average and 99% of them have 0 mods. Most of the time the developer of bad games typically are not great at setting up mod tools anyway so in that case it's a moot issue.

I think most big budget games typically have a pretty good base of a game in most instances though might have some issues on PC, I am mostly commenting on the rando games made by indies that can have wider varying levels of quality. Some indie games like Hades or Slay the Spire are massive achievements but there are 100's of bad indie games when you consider every rando making a game is technically a indie developer for every 1 game like that.

Monopoman posted...

That kinda proves my point though the port was s*** but people knew the game was good so they worked on it.

Ah, but then we get to the heart of the question: If it needs modding to be good, is it actually a good game? That ends up in a weird place when it only applies to one version of the game and there are other ways to experience it without those crippling problems, since saying "the game is good" about one version and "the game is not good" about another version of the same game isn't a great way to express that, but the question remains of whether or not having the potential to be a good game with help from modders actually qualifies as being a good game.

Mostly, though, I'd just like to see more publishers held accountable for releasing inexcusably bad PC ports. We can philosophize about what mods mean in the context of appraising games all we want, but when an amateur can fix a near-broken port with an amount of work that would cost the publisher maybe $500 tops, that's a very real issue that gets a free pass all too often. Unfortunately, I don't think there really is an avenue to do that, since enough people want to play these games that having to install a mod to get them running isn't enough of a barrier to really hurt sales, and if ever it did come to a point where a publisher couldn't sell a PC port because no modders were willing to make it playable, I suspect their first reaction would be to drop the port altogether and not to spend a little bit of extra time and money solving the problem.

adjl posted...

Ah, but then we get to the heart of the question: If it needs modding to be good, is it actually a good game? That ends up in a weird place when it only applies to one version of the game and there are other ways to experience it without those crippling problems, since saying "the game is good" about one version and "the game is not good" about another version of the same game isn't a great way to express that, but the question remains of whether or not having the potential to be a good game with help from modders actually qualifies as being a good game.

Mostly, though, I'd just like to see more publishers held accountable for releasing inexcusably bad PC ports. We can philosophize about what mods mean in the context of appraising games all we want, but when an amateur can fix a near-broken port with an amount of work that would cost the publisher maybe $500 tops, that's a very real issue that gets a free pass all too often. Unfortunately, I don't think there really is an avenue to do that, since enough people want to play these games that having to install a mod to get them running isn't enough of a barrier to really hurt sales, and if ever it did come to a point where a publisher couldn't sell a PC port because no modders were willing to make it playable, I suspect their first reaction would be to drop the port altogether and not to spend a little bit of extra time and money solving the problem.

I just want to say that for some that don't know mods are not just about optimizing a game, most of the mods out there add stuff to games or fix issues some might have with them. For instance in Cyberpunk you can get a mod to have a flying car, this was not implemented in the game but fits right in with what would likely be around by the year 2077 if they wanted it. GTA V for instance has a ton of mods that add shit to the game, though from what I understand Rockstar removed the ability to use quite a few these days.

We seem to be focusing heavily on the discussion of "fixing performance issues" which is hot button issue right now when many games have come out in a shit state on day1. We just had the recent example of Jedi Survivor which came out in such a bad state the Steam reviews blew up with negative reviews. Before that we had the Last of Us on PC which also came out in a pretty damn bad state on day 1.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

if you need mods to play the game, you're playing a bad game

on PC not only can you get mods, you can _make_ them. there's all kinds of games where I've fixed or added something that annoys me or felt missing. that doesn't make those games bad... it just makes them improvable; which is objectively better than not being improvable.

adjl posted...

You don't exactly have to do much to update things on PC, either. Unless you deliberately disable automatic updates to have more control over your PC (which is entirely a personal choice that isn't at all necessary), most updates are downloaded and installed without any actual interaction. The worst you'll have to deal with is a system update that takes several minutes to install, in which case you just set it to install overnight or while you make dinner or poop or something and you can mostly avoid that inconvenience.

Thought dude was comparing updates to having yo tinker with shit just to make the game work