I don’t think anyone is saying it’s not improving, but I don’t think you’ll find many people who are really willing to believe that the experience at all equivalent. Heck, a quick glance at the StarCraft 2 forums shows a thread entitled “Hard crash 3/5 minutes in game” with…499 replies. And this is from Blizzard, who make stuff as rock solid as rock solid gets. Claiming that problems with PC titles are ancient history is clearly a spurious claim.
I think we’ve thoroughly beaten this argument by now. There are plenty of issues with games that people are encountering on the PC, right now. It’s not a myth. It’s not misinformation. Does it happen frequently? No. Does it happen more than enough that people whose normal passtimes do not include kicking around on internet forums are wary of PC gaming? Absolutely.
You just don’t seem the grasp the point here. Modern games. Running on new hardware. Have issues. Enough issues that people who aren’t comfortable with PCs or who don’t want the hassle of the occasional issue, are not interested. It’s great that you and a lot of people can brush these things off. But for the average user, PC titles are simply still too inconsistent. The numbers are coming down firmly in support of this.
Pretty much done with this discussion now. Everything that can be said has been said, it would just be repeating ourselves to go on. Either you can believe me, or you can continue thumping your head on the desk and asking yourself “Why are all these people playing on consoles instead of basking in the glorious glow of PC gaming?” It’s up to you. All I’m offering is an explanation, not a refutation of your way of life.
Another example, I installed ARMA II Combined Operations last night. Install went fine but it took almost an hour to install ARMA II and the Operation Arrowhead expansion. Then when I ran the game it ran and I could hear sounds/music, but got a black screen. Found the patches and installed them, that was another 30 min or so. No help. After searching the forums I found someone else who had solved the problem, he ran ARMA2 with the -window command line option to get it to run windowed, then set his 3D resolution to equal another resolution (forget what the second res was for.) With that option I was able to run the game in a window and after setting the res to 1650x1080 a couple times it finally worked. By then I was 2 hours in. It’s a good thing I’m currently single.
I will say that ARMA2 runs a lot better than I expected, and isn’t quite as buggy and obtuse as I’d heard. Of course I’m a OFP veteran, there are a lot of similarities in the interface. The graphics range between beautiful and so-so. It doesn’t overheat my power supply like OF Dragon Rising does.
Seriously, what kind of rig do you have that takes hosurs to install games? 1990 called, it want’s it’s x1 CD drive back. Your machine IS the 2004 emachines that fell off the back of the Wal-mart truck I hypothesized earlier, isn’t it?
Man, I downloaded ARMA II from Steam, installed in 10 seconds or less, and was playing in a few seconds after that. I was actually a little surprised, given that ARMA II is from a small indie developer, I was expecting a glitch or two, but I got none.
I have another quesiton for you control-Z, you apparently have a lot of issues with your PC and with PC gaming in general. Why are you still playing PC games? Something must keep bringing you back, right? What is it?
Dual core Athlon XP 2700 or something like that, 4GB, nVidia GTX 250, Viewsonic 24" LCD, Sony DVD drive is only a couple years old, don’t know the exact speed. Not cutting edge but runs everything I want to run. Oblivion, The Witcher, Fallout 3, all run fine.
This is an optimized machine, there is no junk running in the background. I honestly don’t know why it took so long; it didn’t seem like my DVD drive or hard drive were being utilized to their full capacity. The hard drive was my newest SATA drive. PC games just tend to be buggier than console games.
ARMA 2 ran well after I was able to see it. I have dozens of games installed and most work well. I’m just highlighting some of the problems I’ve had, my main point is that PC gaming is not always a smooth experience. If a game doesn’t work you can be doing anything from hunting and upgrading/downgrading drivers, editing cfg files, adding command line parameters, who knows what?
I think Steam helps with a lot of those problems, and when gamers have problems they have the game developer AND Valve to bug. So maybe problems get fixed faster. You still had to download ARMA 2, how long did that take? Depends on connection speed I’m sure, some people don’t have unlimited Internet, or can only get 1.5 megabit (like me.) Installing off a DVD is faster than an overnight download.
The CPU looks long in the tooth, but everything else is good. I really don’t know why a game take sso long to install on your PC.
And neither is the console gaming experience. Maybe smoother, but there are still issues.
Or wait for a patch. thing is, if you have a problem with a game on a console or your xbox, that’s all you can do. Wait for Microsoft to ship you a new one, wait for a patch. On the PC fiddling with some under the hood file might fix the problem the same day you run into it, at least while the developer patches it.
So, again, what keeps you coming back to PC gaming? Are you just a masochist? Or does it offer you something console gaming does not?
Yeah, a patch should actually be at the top of the list.
I like the better graphics and higher complexity of PC games, and the mouse/keyboard control combo. Favorites are Operation Flashpoint, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Unreal Tournament 3, Half-Life mods like Day of Defeat and Team Fortress, strategy games like Civ IV, and even a little RTS like World in Conflict.
I seriously over-indulged on every game from Atari Combat to EverQuest. The game that killed the dream for me was Ultima Online. It was such a powerful concept; so rich and spectacular and yet so fundamentally flawed. I played it for about 2 years, always wishing that it was better than it really was before I finally quit in disgust at the bugs and the cheating.
I played EverQuest for a long time too, always wishing that it was the Ultima Online of my dreams but always disappointed that it wasn’t. Star Wars Galaxies was the final straw for me and I haven’t really played a game since.
It makes a me a little sad sometimes. I still read game reviews and I have a big pile of games that I have bought but not really played over the last few years - Oblivion, Assassin’s Creed - I get so excited when I open the box but within a couple of hours, I am overcome with meh. I didn’t even open GTA4.
Funny, I think of Ultima Online as the last true MMO. No other game has come close to the completely open social dynamic UO provided, and Everquest and WoW aren’t the same kind of game as it at all. If you still want to try, EVE Online is the closest in spirit to UO, although it’s a completely different theme and worlds more complex.
Because if you only had to test a game on a console, your odds of detecting bugs go way, way, way up vs having to test the game on a console and 2^16th different PC configurations.
I still have streaks of playing Medieval Every now and then. I like RPGs but every time you get one you have to upgrade your system. That is a pain.
Good RPGs are rare on PCs nowadays.
Well I guess we’re even then. We get the occasional dumbed down GUI, controls, gameplay and graphics thanks to the consoles, you get the occasional hiccup thanks to the PC.
Speaking of, he/I have a Starcraft 2 demo and it says it has to upgrade 10 or so drivers? I dunno, I’m not there to see it. How can you upgrade them all in one fell swoop?
PS: That sounds fishy, to me. 20 drivers? Really? All outdated at the same time?
The game says it has to update 20 drivers? That sounds very fishy. The game will only check to make sure you have the latest version of DX 9 (And if you don’t it will install it during setup).
Is something else telling him that his drivers are out of date? He try running windows update first.
I have XP. So MIcrosoft hopes I die. When I tried to update my drivers I got programs offering to sell me programs that will update. They give crappy free versions that just tell you every driver is out of date. Buy the Pro version and get them done at once. Otherwise spend a week doing 2 at a time.
I think it is fishy too.