So, I've always been more of a console guy than PC - I've dabbled in PCs over the years, sure, but my preferred platform has always been consoles. However, lately I feel like the appeal and advantages of consoles seem to have diminished somewhat.
See, the thing I liked most about consoles was their simplicity, the immediate plug and play convenience of them. PC configuration menus used to make me anxious, I'd worry that I wasn't running the game as optimally as I could be, whereas on consoles I figured the developer would take care of that sort of thing for me.
But now on consoles those kind of options are starting to creep back in - in many games on the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X you can choose between resolution, framerate and, sometimes, graphical embellishments. As a 4K TV user I love the clean, jaggy-and-shimmer-free quality of a 4K image, but sometimes the higher framerate is more desirable, albeit at the cost of image quality.
I think the two recent experiences that have precipitated this crisis are Jedi Fallen Order and the release of Halo Reach for the Master Chief Collection. I really loved Jedi Fallen Order, and completed it 100%, but the performance was extremely lacking. In high resolution mode, the framerate generally hovered around 30fps, but the frame pacing was off, and made it rather unpleasant to play. I'd watch Twitch streams of people playing on PC at a solid 60fps, and, I won't lie, I envied them.
I'd like to say I had a good experience playing Reach, but I haven't finished redownloading the 110GB(!) of Master Chief Collection required to do so. My Xbox tells me I can start playing before the download is complete, but the game just gets to the title screen and hangs there. If I quit out of it, it makes my Xbox unstable. Master Chief Collection continues to be possibly the biggest shitshow of the generation - just a big, unwieldy, broken lump of a game. There are still Achievements that I earned back when it first came out that I haven't been awarded.
How I long for the PS2 days of buying a game from a shop, putting the disc in the drive and, within moments, I'd be playing. No patches to download, because the game HAD to be finished and optimised before it was pressed to disc. Yes, I know games are a multitude of times more complex now, but it still gets me down. My friends and I only have a very limited amount of time to play online together - we wanted to play a little Rainbow Six Siege the other evening, but nope, there was a 5GB update to download which made it out of the question.
I'm hoping that maybe these are just end of generation blues, and everything will be better when next gen starts.
See, the thing I liked most about consoles was their simplicity, the immediate plug and play convenience of them. PC configuration menus used to make me anxious, I'd worry that I wasn't running the game as optimally as I could be, whereas on consoles I figured the developer would take care of that sort of thing for me.
But now on consoles those kind of options are starting to creep back in - in many games on the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X you can choose between resolution, framerate and, sometimes, graphical embellishments. As a 4K TV user I love the clean, jaggy-and-shimmer-free quality of a 4K image, but sometimes the higher framerate is more desirable, albeit at the cost of image quality.
I think the two recent experiences that have precipitated this crisis are Jedi Fallen Order and the release of Halo Reach for the Master Chief Collection. I really loved Jedi Fallen Order, and completed it 100%, but the performance was extremely lacking. In high resolution mode, the framerate generally hovered around 30fps, but the frame pacing was off, and made it rather unpleasant to play. I'd watch Twitch streams of people playing on PC at a solid 60fps, and, I won't lie, I envied them.
I'd like to say I had a good experience playing Reach, but I haven't finished redownloading the 110GB(!) of Master Chief Collection required to do so. My Xbox tells me I can start playing before the download is complete, but the game just gets to the title screen and hangs there. If I quit out of it, it makes my Xbox unstable. Master Chief Collection continues to be possibly the biggest shitshow of the generation - just a big, unwieldy, broken lump of a game. There are still Achievements that I earned back when it first came out that I haven't been awarded.
How I long for the PS2 days of buying a game from a shop, putting the disc in the drive and, within moments, I'd be playing. No patches to download, because the game HAD to be finished and optimised before it was pressed to disc. Yes, I know games are a multitude of times more complex now, but it still gets me down. My friends and I only have a very limited amount of time to play online together - we wanted to play a little Rainbow Six Siege the other evening, but nope, there was a 5GB update to download which made it out of the question.
I'm hoping that maybe these are just end of generation blues, and everything will be better when next gen starts.
Last edited:
