Things I hate about PC gaming that almost makes me wanna shift to consoles

Hardware
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Since I got a Playstation 2 this year that I wanted so badly, I really missed the simplicity it had to offer. Sure at it's launch date the pricing was ridiculous, and it's major downside was you could not store data inside the console, it needed an external memory card that it sold the memory cards separately which at the time was very expensive. Aside of that, the console is phenomenal, to me personally there is no better games library than the Playstation 2. There was a lot of contributions from powerhouses like Capcom, Konami, Namco, Namco Bandai, Square Enix, Criterion etc, a lot of Great games that are still exciting to this very date, infact they're aged like fine wine defining what a Genre should be like. You bought the game, it's all yours. No monthly subscriptions, no microtransactions, no DLC, no season pass. The whole game, is yours.

You can call me a game scavenger, I'm a very patient person and I tend to buy games minimum three or two years after the initial release, or after its discontinued. Why you may ask, It's difficult for me to answer this because I myself hardly know the answer. I just feel like, the game after a lot of time matures, it gets bugfixes and performance fixes, the price is also streamlined from an unfair fullprice to more suitable one. And after the dust settles, the community decides on how much this game actually is worth.

That has nothing to do with my rant, just a recap.
This kind of bullshit is the new normal both on consoles and PC. But as we thought we are the master race of gaming, we have to deal with a lot more than consoles do.

The release or evolution of new hardware rate is insanely fast, just when you thought you got your bleeding edge graphics card or cpu, months later a new one is released and its significantly better than yours. It could be minimum a year that you start feeling performance tearing in latest AAA Titles.

The vastly outdated PS3 which released in 2007 in EU, Still have new games released to this date, and they run just fine. Despite that the game console was discontinued in September of 2015. Not in PC apparently if you won't update your hardware every 2 years apparently.

That's an another thing I have to deal with, Horrendous PC Ports. I clearly know that the publishers prioritize Consoles over PC Machines. It's blatantly obvious that the games should have been released for PC first with attention to detail and visuals that the current generation of hardware can handle it, then release it on consoles and nerf the game engine to be suitable for console gamers. Instead they do the opposite, I have to run bad console ports on lowest settings and still making the game unplayable.

And last, barely support for legacy hardware. I have an overclocked q6600 with a GTX 650 Ti and 8GB 800Mhz RAM. You may laugh about it as you want, I can barely run a bloody game at 1080p 60fps when the rest of the visuals are toned down, because even if your video card can play the game smoothly the cpu sometimes will bottleneck it. If I decide to upgrade my hardware the cost is approximately 900EUR, to enjoy your latest gaming titles without having to deal with performance issues. Then I know that we have a paradise like steam and they don't, Steam has DRM. And as I said I'm a very patient person, the new PS3 is very seasoned and you can buy it around 150EUR, and I know a used games market that each copy costs 10-25EUR. The PS4 is very near enough to drop their prices too, and there you barely don't have any PC exclusive because literally a PC exclusive is ridiculously rare.

What is really sad about that is even the consoles are vastly inferior to PC, they're more efficient. They're cheaper, you don't have to deal with performance bullshit, the rendering quality is fair, the games from second hand market could be better than Steam. Because you don't have to deal with DRM. I need to think about it.

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It sounds like a lot of your problem is you're buying crappy games.

I stay far away from 98% of AAA games and I have none of those problems.

Edit: I have several systems with 650 tis and they play games fine still.

2 Likes
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Hardware isn't advancing as fast as it was 10-20 years ago. When the PS2, Xbox and GameCube came out, they were relatively powerful compared to PCs of the time, but the PS4 and Xbone have been low powered since release.

A 7970, which was released more than 4 years ago, can still run games at relatively high settings at 1080p.

No wander you can't run games at 1080p 60fps, you've got a 9 year old CPU. DX11 games are very heavily CPU dependent, compared to DX12, Mantle, Vuncan, etc...

With newer APIs, the performance increase between consoles and PCs will only become more prevalent.

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Just turn down the settings of the game you want to play in order to match the one found on the PS3 and boom, problem solved. A PC is more capable than a PS3 for sure but at the cost of framerate and graphic detail (it's stuck in my head how bad Crysis 2 is on the PS3, barely keeping up the 30fps and dipping down to 25 during explosions or intense action; played on a stock Q6600 with 4GB of 800MHz RAM and a 6870 was another world). If you're willing to make sacrifices in game details settings you can go with a 1000€ PC for quite a long time, just requiring to upgrade the GPU once in 8 years (I did that so I know what I'm talking about). PC components evolution as always been really fast and fortunately right now we're hitting a roof in terms of core performance so buy a good i7 will surely be a good investment. The same can't be said for GPUs but it's a manageble cost overall. RAM is dirty cheap right now (4GB of Corsair XMS2 costed me around 70€ when now you can pick up 8GB of DDR4 for the same price) and storage is really affordable.
Other than that I partially agree with you about the console advantage of the DRM free games because if you want to fully experience AAA games you have to play the online part of it that requires a montly fee, so that kinda balances out the extra cash you might need to fork out to get a game on Steam. Surely the epxerience is more plug'n'play and streamlined but if you choose to play on PC you know what you might going to face.
Don't worry about the PC exclusive because consoles and PCs are slowly but surely merging and I hope this will stop the giant amout of bs that is developing a game on a PC that works better on a console than a PC itself.
If I were a console player and anyone would try to sell me a new console every 3 years I would feel ripped off a lot (the new PS4 with updated hardware).

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I have to agree with @Yoinkerman it sounds like a combination of going for crappy games and buyers remorse.

Because you have the option to run at higher settings you think your computer is inferior to what you can get in 4 months, the fact is if you ran your games at console settings on console grade hardware you'd get the same experience, but on PC you have options.

That says it right there. The fact is you dont even have the option to run that on a console, but you complain you cant run it on a PC so your thinking of switching to a console...

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There is something wrong with your system. As my media PC with only a slightly better video card plays games like GTA 5 and MGS 5 at medium settings 1080p near 60 FPS.

Also don't expect consoles to give you 1080 at 60 FPS.

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As far as PC hardware and game advancement goes, my general approach is to just play the hell out of good games I know I can run, and use that time to make money so that if I want to upgrade for a game, I can. Plus, if you have the cooling capacity for overclocking you can stretch your computer's gaming life out a bit, provided your hardware is three or so years old or younger at this point in time.

I actually built my current rig shortly before the launch of The Witcher 3, because I knew I wanted to be able to run it at very high settings. I felt this justified the decision.

The problem with the whole comparison between consoles and PC is that they are for totally different types of people. PC gaming to my mind is more about enthusiasts who love building PCs, who love pushing their hardware beyond its recommended limits. If you want to just sit down and play, no bells or whistles involved, sure, go console. It does what it is intended to, and is what I would deem satisfactory.

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One HUGE advantage consoles have is the OS. When you don't have to worry about running old office programs like WP 5.1 or Lotus 123 and cubicle dwellers checking out low grade porn you can write an OS optimized for gaming.
What game developers were able to do with a 486 or even an 8088 is amazing compared to todays games.
There are some bright spots. The Descent remake was such a big hit the original Descent makers are coming out with there remake. That must have been a WTF moment at interplay.
I am hoping for a remake of Wing Commander. It was a blatant ripoff of Star Wars.
I did like Quake 2 on the PC better then on the PS2

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Very confused with this entire post. No wonder you can't run games at high settings 60fps with your build. It's old.

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Umm... you do realize that consoles have just started doing that w/ poor graphical quality and only on certain games right?

This explains why you can't run them at that res and refresh rate

For a AAA title yeah... but when you actually look at the game library the PC has more games than all consoles ever combined by a huge margin.

I built my computer for under 700USD (including 100USD for windows) last year and have no problems running games

By saying this you have refuted most of your own argument...

Most of us will give you this one for AAA titles at least...

But you also have to realize we have more options than consoles do... by having more stuff there are inherently more possible problems but that is the trade-off we all must make: whether we want no issues and no options or tons of options and many issues (most of which can be fixed w/ a little bit of learning btw...)

Your argument isn't completely wrong or terrible... I personally feel that consoles do have their place and appeal (simplicity, local multiplayer (though this is becoming less common), and ease of access (in terms of price and lack of possible hardware options to sort through)). But, for my needs PC gaming fits the bill much better and that's what it all comes down to: What platform fits your needs better? It's not about who has the more exclusive titles or who experiences more issues, or who has more options that should determine what is the best for everyone. It is by those criteria that we must each decide what is better for us since we, as humans, are all different w/ different needs. The entire debate of whether consoles or PCs are better is utterly frivolous.

We should all be uniting as gamers and demanding higher quality games rather than keep accepting the crap that EA, Ubisoft, etc. put out and make huge profits from utter garbage rather than arguing which platform is better and constantly infighting rather than pointing our anger towards the ones who actually deserve it.