(2017) Thoughts on PC Gaming: Revisited

NOTE: This review was originally posted to Tumblr on August 12, 2017, and has been reposted here for archival purposes. It may not reflect recent events or my current opinions.

On July 31, 2015, I posted a blog post on MLPForums that went over my thoughts and opinions on PC gaming at the time. Since then, a lot has changed, with stuff like the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X being announced and released boasting higher performance and (allegedly) 4K and whatnot, as well as AMD coming out with the Ryzen CPU line and Nvidia coming out with Pascal GPUs, both of which have been noted as having much higher performance than previous generations of their respective lines for typically less of the price.

And a lot has changed for me too. Back then, I was still pretty naive. I didn’t really know all that much about PC hardware and was very inexperienced with that sort of thing, and was essentially speaking as someone who mostly used low-end prebuilds up until then. However, since then, I went through 2 PC builds with different hardware and whatnot, and for a while I wanted to look back at my initial blog post and see really what’s changed for me as far as my thoughts go and really where I stand in comparison.

This review comes from the opinions of the poster himself. This does not reflect the opinions of the rest of the gaming community.

I will say that looking back there is still a lot I stand with in terms of the positives I mentioned. Freedom is still a key part that plays into why PC is my primary platform. The overall environment and amount of customization that PC has is something that I feel console has yet to achieve, and there’s so much more you can do with having a more open platform and more you can choose from. Obviously you can choose what type of peripheral you want to play games with, whether it be playing with a keyboard and mouse, controllers, steering wheels, a joystick, or even be like this guy and use bananas to play games. Point is, you have more options with what you want to control with, and even more outside of that. Don’t like using Windows for whatever reason? Download a Linux distribution or build a Hackintosh. Want to make your PC light up with tons of LEDs? Go ahead. Want to put your internals inside a cube case? Go ahead. Don’t like sitting at a desk? Plug your PC into your TV and use it like a console. And a big one, want to get more playtime out of games you’ve already played through thousands of times and even 100%ed and can’t figure out what else to do? You have the ability to install mods in that case. Yes, consoles are adopting that feature but as far as I know the modding community isn’t nearly as big or interesting as the PC has plus there’s also the whole paid mod system which definitely aren’t worth it. And I also still agree with my stance on backwards compatibility. I’m pretty sure around that time Microsoft had announced Xbox 360 backwards compatibility for the Xbox One, but even then it was really just for a select amount of 360 games as opposed to the entire library which is still pretty meek in comparison to PC. Outside of today’s games I’ve also bought tons of older games like the Half-Life series and Call of Duty 4/World at War and despite both of those being fairly old games on my current PC with no issues. And while there are some games (especially from the DOS/Windows 9x era) that have trouble running on current hardware and versions of Windows, but typically there are source ports that get those games running well and if all else fails you can install an older version of Windows in programs like VMWare or Virtualbox and run those games from there. And that’s not all, you can also play older console games too using emulators which just adds more to the extensive backwards compatibility and overall game library.

That said, I do want to talk about the things I mentioned about games. While I still generally agree with what I said, I do have to say that the way I put it was kind of awkward and I don’t feel like I made my point as well as I could’ve. I did mention that there wasn’t too many exclusive games on PC, but looking back that actually isn’t really true. Yes, while it doesn’t have the latest Marios, Zeldas (to be fair though you can run Breath of the Wild on the CEMU emulator), Uncharted, and the like, but there are actually huge lists people have made with games that have so far only come out for PC, which you can probably find over Google or something. Oddly enough, just a few months later Undertale was released, which is particularly one game that whether you like it or not was heavily popular and won tons of awards and whatnot, and it was a PC exclusive up until just recently when it was announced to come out on the PS4 and PS Vita, which had I posted my initial blog a few months later I would’ve most likely had mentioned it as a good PC exclusive. Another point I made was that typically games that originated on PC play better on PC, which still stands but I could’ve talked about this point a little more. And for the most part, whether they traditionally originated on PCs or not, games typically play better on PC anyway. Yeah, there are a few examples of games being poorly optimized and glitchy (*cough* Arkham Knight) but for the most part games typically run with much better graphics and detail and run at a solid 60 FPS (it’s 2017 why is 30FPS still accepted as standard. you better not give that “you can only see at 24FPS” or “30FPS is cinematic” shit), much better than consoles can do even despite the whole “4K” gimmicks that have been constantly being brought up with consoles like the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X.

One area that’s pretty often debated is whether or not PC is cheaper than consoles and the like. And on the surface level, consoles do seem cheaper, you can get a $300 PS4 or Xbox One S and it’ll typically play all the AAA games that are released for it, even if it’s not at the settings you want. That said, I do feel like the price gap between consoles and PC is really starting to shrink and in general you do end up saving money with PC gaming in the long run. With the new Intel Pentium lines, AMD’s Ryzen lines and Nvidia’s new Pascal architecture the price for performance ratio is getting a lot better with PC parts as of recently and there are builds out there that are just a little bit more expensive than a PS4 Pro that can actually play most AAA titles at normal/high settings at stable framerates. For what it is though, there is the common concern over other factors that aren’t typically accounted for in these builds like the operating system, monitor and keyboard and mouse, but even if you don’t already have those that typically doesn’t raise the price that much. To go more off of what I said about the freedom of PC gaming is that you can use essentially any USB keyboard and mouse that you want, and if you were to take a trip to Goodwill or something you can find either of those that should work fine on any modern PC for really not that much. The monitor part particularly I don’t really get the reasoning behind, since I could also argue that consoles don’t come with a TV that’s typically a lot more expensive than a monitor and even if you argue that most people just have a TV anyway, you can still plug your PC into a TV, so that alone I think debunks the monitor argument. The operating system I can definitely see as the big gray area when it comes to pricing, but even then there’s a few solutions. You can obviously use any one of the many Linux distributions out there, however typically those don’t support most modern AAA titles natively and even WINE is a mixed bag which isn’t guaranteed to run all your programs and games well, so most people are obviously going to go with Windows. That said, you can actually legally use Windows 10 for free by downloading the ISO off of Microsoft’s website without activating it and most features are perfectly intact, with the ones that aren’t being base customization features, and even then you can use a workaround to at least change the wallpaper, and you also have to deal with an annoying watermark. And even if you really want those customization features or just want that watermark out of the way, you can actually find working Windows 10 keys for pretty cheap in places like r/microsoftsoftwareswap.

You have to keep in mind, however, that even with all the startup prices aside, the price you’re paying for consoles does exceed the price you’re paying for PC in the long run. One of the huge deals about the price of consoles is the debacle over paid internet subscriptions. While you can use consoles for single player games, online multiplayer is obviously a point of interest that has risen really since the late 90’s and especially with consoles largely adopting it during the 2000’s. That said, Sony, Microsoft and even Nintendo now have gone the route of requiring you to pay a mandatory subscription to play online if you want to play anything more than some free to play games online. Yes, you do get games every month with the subscription but while this may be subjective and while I am mostly just speaking for PS Plus here since I haven’t looked too into Xbox Live, most of the games lately haven’t even really been good and in the PS4’s case, if you decided to stop paying for PS Plus for any reason you lose access to those games until you continued your subscription. And what makes it worse is that these paid subscriptions don’t even go toward server’s costs, because the consoles’ internet speeds are extremely slow and can takes hours for updates that aren’t even that big in terms of storage, whereas on PC there isn’t any mandatory subscriptions aside from your internet bill and somehow the internet speeds are a lot better. There’s also Steam sales that are extremely frequent and in those cases you can get pretty damn good games for a fraction of the price you’d be paying on consoles.

There are a lot of people who do mention that you constantly need to upgrade your PC, but I honestly find that to only be true if you’re one of those guys who wants the latest hardware and components that come out every year. Aside from that though, for the most part upgrading is less common than you think and while I can’t speak for everyone I’ve found myself using older components with my PC that managed to stand the test of time and work well for the kinds of games I play. The first PC build I ever did used a Core 2 Quad Q9550, a CPU from early 2008, initially paired with an 8800 GTS which hasn’t aged so well, but later upgraded to a 750 Ti, which is commonly considered a lower end budget card released in 2013, just a few months before the PS4 or Xbox One hit store shelves. And despite that, I was able to play games like Overwatch, Doom 4 and GTA V at good framerates albeit at low/normal settings. And on the other hand, the current PC I use (which was built by my brother in the summer of last year and then given to me a few months ago) uses an FX 6300 and a GTX 970 that was upgraded from a 670. Keep in mind, the 6300 was released in late 2012 and even then was never really considered a good CPU and more or less on the extreme “budget” end of the spectrum, and the GTX 670 originally used was from that same year. Granted the FX 6300 was overclocked and the GTX 670 was a superclocked version from EVGA with 4GB VRAM, but at the same time, I was able to play the same games I mentioned with even better framerates at high settings. The only reason I even upgraded to the GTX 970 was because my brother ended up offering it to me after getting a 1070, and in theory I could’ve easily gone by the next few years with the GTX 670 had I not upgraded. So if I can get by with a potato-esque CPU and higher-end GPU that both came out in 2012, a year before the PS4 or Xbox One came out, I can definitely say that even a nice budget build these days will at least last you an entire console generation or even longer before you really need to upgrade, especially considering the parts you can get on a budget are getting better and better as of late.

A point I made in the “Bad” category in my original blog post was regarding optimization issues and other problems that occurred with all the different kind of hardware and whatnot. And back then, I was mostly talking as someone who was using a Dell desktop with a Celeron and only having integrated graphics to work with. And yeah, if you’re going to be using that or whatever other Dell or HP desktop or laptop or something then you’re not going to get very far with what you can run. But now that I have experience in that sort of thing, optimization on PCs is actually not as bad as I thought it was and not as bad as I’ve seen other people make it out to be. I mean, like I said, I was able to play games like Overwatch, GTA V and Doom 4, all games that are generally considered heavy, next-gen games, on a Core 2 Quad Q9550 and 750 Ti, and at this point most budget builds these days can run a lot of next-gen titles at at least low/normal if not high settings at really good framerates, in many cases better than the consoles that games are “optimized” for.

Now, I will say that I do understand the advantages consoles just have. I do respect that a lot of people do prefer the simplicity of just plugging in a console, sitting back, waiting for hours of updates, and just being able to play whatever game you throw at the console as long as it has the label for the console you own without having to worry about taking time to build a PC, researching parts and worrying about game settings and whatnot. And I will admit myself that there are exclusive titles on the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch right now that do interest me and may lead me to getting said consoles sometime in the future. However, as a primary platform, I really can’t find much of a reason for me to return to consoles after being on PC for a couple years now. The overall advantages of PC really outweigh the negatives and I see myself going back to my selection of PC games a lot more than I’ve seen myself go back to console games. Yes, there’s the exclusives consoles have, but in general PC offers much more in terms of customization, freedom and even games that these days consoles just don’t have, and at this point I do feel the line between consoles and PCs sort of fading with the “plug and play” ideal kind of becoming obsolete as things like constant game and software updates happening and even with things like the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X that are more or less “upgrades” to already existing consoles.

And to wrap things up, I will say that if you have been a console gamer that has been looking to make the switch to PC, I’d probably say now’s a good time to do so. Again, with AMD’s new line of Ryzen CPUs and both AMD and Nvidia coming out with graphics cards that are really good for their price points as of late (in particular the GTX 1050 Ti and RX 560), at this point you’re definitely getting really good price to performance if you make the switch to PC and it is easier to say that the price gap between consoles and PCs in general is closing, and you’ll definitely be saving a lot in the long term. And if you’re not sure about building a PC and/or what parts to use, there are tutorials available on Youtube and whatnot as well as build guides in places like r/pcmasterrace that do help with selecting the parts you might want. I’d have to say that building a PC is a lot easier than you may expect, and essentially if you know how to build stuff with Legos, you probably won’t have a tough time building a PC.