Faith in the PC Master Race dwindling

sounds more like a personal problem to me boyo

I use controllers on PC and console because I enjoy the vibrations. Come at me.

I may try a Steam controller, though I'm still on the fence about buying it.

I have to agree with spacev3gan: because of the consoles (since Xbox/PS3) PC gaming is not as expensive (anymore) than it used to be 15-20 years ago. That is if you are mainly aiming for 1080p 60fps. Of course there is always the occasional title that demands some extra power if you crank up the settings but most games can be played with pretty decent settings on older hardware, especially when it comes to the CPU. Of course, if you are playing on a 4k display or an ultrawide 34" 21:9 screen at 3440x1440 like me you might need more powerful hardware and it can get quite expensive. But the majority of players doesn't do this.

I understand (not in great detail) that there is a new breed of cheap high powered GPU's coming out this year or so too. Perhaps someone who actually knows something about that could comment on it.

The problem is twofold: MS and Sony skimping on hardware, and devs just not doing a good job with it out of the gate. We were all told that the new console architecture was more PC like, and so ports to PC would be better with next gen. That didn't happen. Like, at all.

PC player here. I've both a gaming rig and a PS4. Frankly Bioware sucks at PC ports now. DAI was a disaster at launch and Bioware had the nerve to say the PC version was "made by PC players for PC players" yet had many missing features that were patched in later, horrible and bugged out graphics option and poor optimization overall. Then again it was a debute for their first Frostbite game, MEA might have better optimization on launch.

Up until maybe 2011, I mostly gamed on consoles (PS/2/3). I felt very comfortable with a controller, and couldn't use a KB&M setup to save my life in anything other than a point-and-click-style RPG. I spent most of my early hours with ME2 shooting my gun into the sky. Then I built a desktop in preparation for ME3, and started buying up games during Steam sales, and abandoned console entirely except for nostalgia games.

And now I'm in your boat. I played DS3 on KB&M and got pretty good at it. Tried to play it at a friends house on their PS4 later, and couldn't even point my character at my enemies have the time. Got to see "YOU DIED" more times in 30 minutes than I had in my previous 20 hours of non-boss PVE on PC. A controller is the devil's own instrument. I just have to manage with whatever scrap of a KB&M UI devs see fit to give me.

Even if I didn't vastly prefer KB&M for most games, I love being able to tweak and mod my games. I'll spend hours trawling through NexusMods for mods to install before I start playing/replaying a game.

This is a rather loaded statement depending on how you look at things.

Hardware is needed to solve some issues like larger maps and better AI which is a very resource intensive thing to do with a computer. Could it be argued that great games can be made without those things? Of course, because it happened back in the 90s but that doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to improve our games.

The original Half-Life is my favourite game of all time but there are non graphical aspects of it that could be improved had the hardware available to us back in 1998 been better. As much as the AI was praised at the time, the AI really is quite dumb by today's standards(which even today's AI isn't terribly impressive in most games). The game also lacked any kind of physics system because our computers couldn't handle it yet(admittedly this hasn't been an issue in a very long time).



I owned a Wii and many of the games were fun, but basically all of my favourite games from that time period are on PC.

Which we also see one of the major issues with your post here: The talk of "real" gamers, implying that those against you are "fake" gamers. Rather than trying to make a point about pushing graphical fidelity not mattering, you're now just making preemptive attacks against those might not agree with you which weakens your argument as a whole.



Let's take a look at some games in the last 2 years:

DOOM - Okay, so the multiplayer in this was basically a flop but even that clearly had some effort put into it to bring us tools like map editors. The singleplayer however has wonderful refined gameplay and ID Software has nailed bringing the fast paced action of the 90s FPS into the modern era with games like this and the Wolfenstein series.

Overwatch - Blizzard's first real IP in about 18 years. The gameplay is very polished and while some will argue that the game should have shipped with more content, they have been adding more content to the game that isn't in the form of paid DLC.

Titanfall 2 - After some missteps with the first game they came back and actually listened to their fanbase. They added in a singleplayer campaign(even if it's on the short side), and fleshed out the solid gameplay the had in the first game.

Battlefield 1 - DICE has had plenty of time to refine their core gameplay with this franchise, but they managed to do a wonderful job with the whole theme of World War 1 with this game.

XCOM 2 - The game I've seen a number of people argue what the first rebooted XCOM should have been. It took everything from the first game and expanded on all the elements that worked for them.

The Witcher 3 - Regarded by many as one of the greatest RPGs in the last decade, if not of all time. Also still to this day one of the nicest looking games there is. That frying pan quest is arguably the single most referenced quest when talking about making what should be a routine fetch quite have an interesting story wrapped around it.

Fallout 4 - Bethesda trying to do for Fallout what Skyrim did for Elder Scrolls. If the modding community sticks around on this one all that there really is to say is: See Skyrim for results.

I mean sure there have been some games that were fumbles like Battlefront and Deus Ex Mankind Divided felt like they took what was a whole story and cut it in half, but I bet you I could go find some examples of that happening in the 90s as well.

On top of that you have a whole bunch of non AAA games that don't have the resources to even think about pushing graphics.



Wanna know something about Call of Duty and FPS games in general?

The story never mattered. The story you got in the original DOOM back in 1993 was little more than "Here be demons, now go murder them all and stop asking questions". Most FPS games continued along this line until 1998 when Half-Life started to weave story into gameplay which was really just providing us with an excuse to move from set piece to set piece as we killed everything that was between point A and B.

The reasons why games like DOOM were loved was because they told us that the objective was "destroy anything you can see" and gave us a handful of satisfying weapons to achieve that objective. The new 2016 DOOM understands that perfectly.



This actually ironically are things that would all require better hardware to really push. As a result of that, if you look back you'll find that most of the time higher difficulties in the older games also just imposed either buffs to your enemies or nerfs to you.



Actually the reason why the Collectors murdered the PS3 was because of a memory leak issue rather than anything graphical. One of the biggest contributing factors to many multi-platform games on the PS3 not running terribly well on the PS3 was because Sony decided that they wanted to use cell architecture in their CPU because it was capable of many more operations per second than standard CPUs are.

The end result was that the PS3 doubled as a cheap "super computer" for when you needed raw processing power that was cost effective, but the different architecture made it really difficult to develop for if you weren't purely focused on developing for just the PS3 alone.

With DA:I you had the problem of trying to develop for 5 platforms at once. People expected many upgrades because of the new console hardware, but those were things that the old consoles simply couldn't handle. Even if you eased up on the visuals of the game for the sake of the old consoles, there was a number of things that the decade old hardware of the 360 and PS3 just couldn't handle anymore.




Looking at Steam stats for today DOTA has a peak users of 906k while Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is 670k. Overwatch has also become huge in the last year, so I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the other genres on PC. Especially not FPS right now when Overwatch is more popular than Blizzard's other game, World of Warcraft(which happens to be the top dog of MMOs).

I do in general agree that graphics aren't everything but I don't think that it's been getting pushed at the expense of everything else in the gaming community as a whole. Many of the nicest looking games out there are also still very good games regardless of the graphics and I feel like a lot of people in general are mixing up "I don't like this game" with "this game is terrible".

First and foremost, I wanna say my goal was more about "food for thoughts", I wasn't trying to attack any game or genre or hardware

You bring a lot of good points, I wasn't trying to be totalitarian or impose my point of view and it was what it was, just my point of view...



Hardware is not the problem, it never has been
I agree hardware is important and contribute tremendously to push games to be better. I won't argue on this at all.

Given my programmer background, I would argue that every system must live inside a certain "power" budget (CPU/GPU/Storage/Memory). The hardware always limits you some way or another so you need to build according to those limits. Your systems need to respect those limits and leave a bit of leeway just in case something cannot be brought within parameters of that "power" budget.

Take the Wii as an example. The hardware is far from being the best, but it can do amazing things graphically within its limits. If you try to push too much graphics to be as realistic as possible and use very detailed textures, most of the "power" budget goes to that aspect and you're limited in what you can do with the remaining of the budget.

And the reverse is true too. If you use most of your budget to build the biggest map possible, the rest have to make due with what's left.

It's the same in real life, if you have 100$ and spend most of it in 1 thing, you limit your buying power for the other things.

I think you get the point, all I wanted to express is that a lot of games, not all of them, seem to push for graphics more than anything else. It is a choice, but it also has a cost.

"Real" gamers
I didn't intend to offend anyone with this. I was simply trying to express what most hardcore player consider "real" games.

For some bad reasons, hardcore player tend to think of mobile gamers as "not real gamers". I always a bit shudder when I hear a clueless friend that push 3 buttons on his phone and swear to me it's the greatest game of all time . But I can put aside those feelings and know fully well that those "things" are also games, maybe not to my taste, but still games. I don't have to like it to know they are gamers too. And I'm sure if I spent more time with mobile games I would find a couple really fun, but that's not the point.

The idea behind "real gamers" was that hardcore gamer are more or less talking about specific kind of games when they're talking about games and usually it's not mobile, MMO or MOBA. I'm not arguing those kind of games are not games or that players of those games aren't gamers, I'm simply trying to target the stereotype hardcore players have about what is a "real" game.

I hope this clears things up for people I might have offended. I'm all for more games no matter the platform or the kind of games.

ME3 and DA:I
I'll gladly take your point for ME3 and the Collectors. I remember now about the memory leaks and yes it's more likely this was the sole reason for the problems, not the graphics.

Although I would argue for DA:I. The dev specifically said one of the major problems was the storage. They used it all up for the 360 and PS3 and were then forced to drop releasing new content on them.

I'm not saying there wasn't any other factors, but when there's no more space, there's no more space. The dev did talk about lowering the textures quality, but finally decided not to because it would reduce the graphics to a level they weren't ready to accept. My opinion is they should have calculated their things better, they knew beforehand the amount of space they had and they did it anyway. It's their own damn fault. But yes, it is only my opinion.

Conclusion
I think you got the same thinking that I do, albeit you expressed it better. My opinion is simply "in general", it's not black and white, but a big grey area.

To me, the games that have beautiful graphics without having other systems suffer for it are simply games that balanced themselves correctly.

I wasn't saying graphics shouldn't be pushed as much as possible, I was saying it shouldn't be the end all be all like most marketing campaigns want you to believe...