Topic: PC Gaming

Gonna pick myself up Hot Wheels Unleashed on PC. I feel like it'd be better suited to playing it in bed on my Switch in small bursts, but seeing all the work that has been put into the visuals and given how much of the game seems to focus around customisation, I feel like I am doing myself a disservice playing the Switch version. Not to mention the online races on Switch will probably be awful.

My only concern is - like we've seen in the past - the review cycle will end and suddenly everything is a microtransaction. Hearing all the stuff about how progression/unlocks work, if that doesn't turn into a MTX farm, then I almost don't know why this progression/unlock system even exists.

First impressions of Hot Wheels Unleashed... kinda mixed?

The attention to detail/authenticity is impressive. This is a pretty game, with an almost overwhelming amount of customisation which is all fun to play around with - especially with that sweet photomode, but I get very mixed performance. I kept tweaking my settings but couldn't get any consistency. Sometimes the game would be running around 80 fps, the next 40 fps with noticeable chugging with no reasoning as to why.

The tracks can be very spectacular, but it is a bit odd to play an arcade racer with nothing really to it. Like I know this isn't a cart racer, so maybe expecting power ups and stuff is not realistic - and for sure, the fundamentals of how it feels to play feel good - but there aren't really collisions or anything either, it just a very conventional racer, presented like something else because occasionally there'll be a loop de loop. You can sort of tip opponents over, but it's awkward and doesn't really seem to be designed as an approach of play because it will often wipe you out as well. I just don't know how long you can drift around the same orange bits of plastic with no real variation before this gets really boring.

Difficulty is a real mixed bag as well. I initially played on Medium and it is pretty easy until you make a mistake and there just seems to be no way to recover, the pack will just shoot in front of you and I dunno enter a wormhole or something because there is just no catching up.

On easy, you can fight your way back if you make mistakes fairly easy. But if you go too long without making a mistake, you're just racing on your own because you're leaving that CPU in the dust.

Feels like there needs to be a difficulty in between, as when you are driving around outside of the pack the game can feel very dull pretty quickly.

Oh and yeah, the games economy... not fun. You get three cars up front, I have earned two more loot boxes since then and I have already had one duplicate. That just seems insane to me.

Picked up Arkham Knight on sale, missed out when it was free a couple of years back but still. This is what I love about PC gaming. I don't have a super high end PC but for current prices it's not bad. Getting a 6 year old game on sale, turning the settings up to max, getting ~70fps at 1440p with GSync.

Who said PC gaming was about the bleeding edge? Sometimes it's about middling hardware from 2 year sago and revisiting 6 year old titles at a level of quality you would've needed bleeding edge hardware to get to at launch.

@skywake, I'm thinking about picking up some of the Batman games, but I already spent around $100 in the sales since almost every Japanese publisher is holding sales at the same time, so I should hold off.

Speaking of, I got Final Fantasy Type 0 HD, Gun Gun Pixies, Neir Automata, Onechanbara Origin, Star Ocean: the Last Hope, Sword Art Online: Lost Song, Sword Art Online: Re:Hollow Fragment, & Tales of Symphonia.

@skywake
Bleeding edge gets all the attention because it’s exciting to talk about, and it’s the best version of PC gaming.

But for me, PC gaming is about freedom. It’s about having gyro aiming for every game that needs it, it’s about having G-sync to negate Framerate issues, it’s about free online, and, it’s about the ability to buy into whatever build you want. If you want bleeding edge you have that option, but if you want mid tier and something that’s good enough to run games at a reasonable level, you can do that too. You can even go low spec for a budget price and still manage to get a decent experience.

Studies show only a very small percentage of PC gamers have high end rigs (say, 2080 ti or higher at this point). Like 95% of PC gamers have builds less than that. But everyone assumes every single PC gamer has that high end build. Some do, obviously. But most dont.

I think the problem is a lot of PC communities are insular and insecure. They tell you you HAVE to have the cutting edge because there is just no point otherwise, which often scares people away. But in reality you can max out games on a mid range machine for years after certain components have been replaced by something shiny and new. They just need to justify to themselves they haven't wasted 2k to unnecessarily upgrade to a card that can't do much more than a card made four years ago, because games aren't made just for the highest of end hardware.

That’s the thing. Most games aren’t cutting edge in terms of how demanding they are. I was running a lot of games in 4K on my AMD RX 480 lol, and that thing was barely on par with an Xbox One.

It is true that a lot of the AAA games are incredibly demanding and if you want that 4K 60 experience, you’re gonna need a good PC. But I think a disproportionate amount of attention and value is placed upon the 4K 60 experience. Yes, it’s the pinnacle of gaming right now. But I gotta be honest, 1440p 60 is pretty darn close. Even 1080p 60 is not that difference. It doesn’t have that super crisp image but it looks respectable enough.

And with DLSS and VRR now making games easier than ever to run, The need for cutting edge is becoming less and less.

I still like to have cutting edge just because, why not. I got a 2080 TI back before GPU prices skyrocketed. I would love to upgrade to a 3080 or 3090, but I’m not going to spend thousands of dollars just to get 20 extra frames when I don’t even notice frame drops anyways using VRR.

And if money was an issue I could make this card last for 10 years. I bet it’ll still be running most games at 1080p 60 in the year 2030. With VRR and DLSS probably making 1440p or even 4K 60 viable for the majority of games.

I think the reason why so many people assume you need a high-end set up is because if you’re not going to out-do what’s available with consoles, then why bother? Not that I agree with that sentiment because again, I think PC gaming is about freedom. I’d rather play a game in 1080p 60fps with gyro aiming, VRR and free online than I would play it in 4K 60, no VRR and $60/yr online.

I tend to find the more AAA something is, the less demanding it becomes proportionately, this is because a lot more time/resource has been spent optimising those experiences for PC, properly.

Although you are right, the waters have become muddier on both sides of the water. As DLSS tech gets better, it is only going to make life better for people like me who can't afford a cutting edge machine.

But it also true that over previous generations, the Series X/PS5 leap truly feels massive, it feels like they are really competing with PC for the first time. PC will undeniably pull ahead over the course of the generation, but before you had to settle for maybe an inconsistent 60 fps at a low, upscaled, resolution even on a "pro" console at best. This meant you could outspec those consoles with a PC very easily. Maybe it'd be more expensive, but not by much.

However, given the Series X/PS5 are basically solid, midrange, PCs and given all the various shortages driving prices that gap is all but closed. You're going to need to fork out that much extra to get a noticeable performance leap above the Series X/PS5 right now, so really, I feel like console gaming has never been more viable than it is right now.

If GPUs were in stock at MSRP, I feel like PC gaming would take over. When a 3060 goes for just $500 and slightly outperforms even my 2080 ti (which cost more than twice that amount a year prior), there’s very little reason to not jump in.

But thanks to inflated pricing, the 3060 is more like $800 and the 3070 (MSRP $700) is more like $1200. 3080 is like $2000 and 3090 is around $3000. That’s a massive turn off. For the first time they actually cut their prices by 50% which was a legendary win for PC gamers. And yet none of us are experiencing the benefit of that aggressive pricing because everything‘s been scalped or bought up by miners.

If consoles would just offer gyro aiming mappable to any game, or if devs included it in most games like on Switch, I’d probably just play games there instead of PC. Even with the $60 a year online, that’s a sacrifice I’d probably be willing to make. But as long as they force archaic control schemes for games with right analog aiming, all the value in the world can’t make up for it..

Moving to talk more specifically about a PC game, after just bouncing off of Hot Wheels due to how frustrating it was, I went back and played through the first three episodes of True Colors. Assuming they don't ***** the bed with the ending, this might be my new favourite game of the year. It can be a little cheesy/artificial at times, but when you've experienced genuine grief, you start to realise that a LOT of media that claims to explore grief, really doesn't truly understand it. I feel like this really does get it and that scores a lot of bonus points for me. It really made me think about and face things I hadn't thought about in many years. It certainly helps that the performances and writing are so strong, I just really love spending time with these characters. And it helps that visually the game can be so interesting in how it realises the worlds inside of us, shaped by our emotions. The sometimes stiff animations and rather cardboard looking town, don't do justice to how hard this game can go at points. It also has the best motion capture for the faces I have ever seen. I am such a simp for Alex.

I remember when I first played Mass Effect and thought to myself, man, I'd love a version of Mass Effect where I didn't need to slog through some ropey combat section to get to the next story section or character interaction, like to me, the dialogue wheel was the whole game to me. Everything else was filler to overcome. This is something I have felt about almost every BioWare game and so I am really glad that Telltale and Life is Strange are both doing the sort of "what if it is a BioWare game but with no phoned in combat to pad the game out" thing I dreamed about as a kid. I hope as time goes on, more and more games pop up in this style.

Games which play like TV shows, where you shape the direction of the story and create the voice of the protagonist. It is the most fun type of game to me.

There's a component of that but there are equivalent nonsense things pushed in other communities. There will always be people who want to justify their own purchasing decisions. The difference in PC gaming because the spec is constantly moving and the price is highest at the peak? That's where people feel they need to justify their purchases the most.

But that same mentality exists even on this forum to it just comes up in a different way. In the Nintendo space the equivalent is the "gameplay > graphics" mantra or the aggressive denial of any need for better hardware. That's where the "I spent this money, I was right to do so, this is why" lives for Nintendo.

For me, I've been in the PC space for a long time just not necessarily always for gaming. From my experience the most dominant mentality when you get into PC part picking is value for money. You want to buy a new HDD? Well this 4TB drive is 3c/GB which is better value than the 1TB drive at 5c/GB or this 6TB drive at 6c/GB. You want a new CPU? Well in most modern titles you're going to be GPU bottlenecked, a Ryzen 5 5600 will do the job. You say you're gaming at 1080p? Well you don't need a 3080, in this current market see if you can find a 1080 used or something

..... that's the PC gaming space I'm used to

Yeah, have a look at the results of a Steam survey to see what hardware people are actually using, and the bleeding edge kit is typically a long way down the list.

Your average PC gamer is still using four CPU cores, an entry level card from five years ago like the GTX 1060, and playing at 1080p. And that's still fine for all but a handful of the most modern games.

Obviously, you can spend a heck of a lot more than that and benefit from it by running games at higher settings, frame rates and resolutions, but you certainly don't have to if you just want to play the games.

Going by the aforementioned Steam survey results, there's maybe 10% of the market with the 30-series GPUs and 8-core CPUs; it's probably the segment that spends the most money and makes the most noise, but it's not really that representative as a whole.

Being new to the Switch, the complete denial of the console's limitations in some circles - even on this forum at times - is wild to me. Like are these people lying to themselves, or have they lied so long they've bought into their own delusion?

Like, it is true that great graphics don't make for a great game on their own necessarily and the Switch hardware is obviously not inherently *****, it can achieve great things when a game is properly optomised. But when you're playing a game on the Switch docked in like upscaled 720p, chugging away at barely 30 fps, we can't keep pretending this hardware is fine.

If you like something, that is reason enough. Making up BS or just ignoring problems, to justify things to yourself is not a healthy way to enjoy things. It is also why Nintendo gets away with so much scuzzy *****, because people just enable them at every turn, always coming up with Nintendo's excuses for them rather than admitting that a lot of what Nintendo does is anti-consumer.

@Pizzamorg
I've been following Nintendo on the interwebs since I got into them again around the time the DS Lite launched. The "gameplay > graphics" mantra has been a thing since the before the Wii launched. I mean fundamentally it's a reasonable position that becomes more and more true as we get diminishing returns from better hardware. But some people definitely take it to an extreme.

Also when the "gameplay > graphics" thing started the options where $400AU for a Wii, $650AU for a 360 (500AU for the "Core" SKU) or $1000AU for a PS3. When people started saying that most people were yet to upgrade to HDTVs so the fact that the Wii was significantly underpowered wasn't THAT much of an issue. So, Twilight Princess and Super Mario Galaxy > gaming at resolutions my TV doesn't do anyways. Yeah? It was much a mantra about the value proposition at that point in time

That's not really as true now. At this very moment the Switch OLED is actually more expensive than an XBox Series S in Australia. Pretty much everyone has at least a 1080p capable TV, probably around 55" or so. Odds are in 2021 you have a 4K set that can do some degree of HDR also. And on the other side you can get a smartphone that can play games like Pokemon Unite which is good enough if you're just casually into Nintendo

So Nintendo isn't the budget option anymore, we buy into Nintendo not because it's a better value proposition. We buy into it because we like Mario, Zelda, Metroid. But the mantra sticks because graphically Nintendo are still behind

Most gamers don’t have the time or interest to “go after Nintendo” every time some arbitrary threshold isn’t met. The hardware is what it is and people accept it because there is no other alternative. Doesn’t mean people wouldn’t appreciate something better but it also doesn’t mean the hardware is unusable or that most games on it aren’t perfectly satisfactory as it. Do they play better elsewhere? Sure. Are there some bad ports? Yup. A fair few, in fact. But that doesn’t mean people have to go protest down at NoA headquarters either.

People just want to play games and have fun. They don’t have time for all the outrage. If Nintendo does something that actually warrants major pushback, usually they get it. Just look how much backlash there was over joycon drift. But you can’t expect people to permanently live on Twitter with protest signs. Most gamers are just normal ppl working jobs and enjoy gaming as a hobby in their free time. When new hardware comes people will buy it. But until then, this is what we’ve got and there’s no sense not having fun with it, or bitching about it every time a game falls short. Just skip it and play something else. Because all the complaining in the world isn’t going to make new hardware fall out of the sky.

So “fine” is a subjective and relative term. For many, myself included, it is actually fine. Fine enough, anyways. Not every game is 720p docked. And not everybody thinks 30 FPS is unplayable, especially for a handheld hybrid system (heck, I’ll probably even be playing steam deck at 30 FPS for the sake of battery life). Many games run 900p or 1080p docked and 720p handheld. Those games tend to get conveniently omitted when referring to Switch game performance. As do the majority of exclusives which look and run great (One or two exceptions notwithstanding), which are the majority of games ppl buy the system for. And even the games that are less, most of the time it’s because they’re really demanding games. But even stuff like Diablo 2, Sniper Elite 4, Borderlands Handsome Collection, Bioshock Collection, etc, run 1080p or 900p at the worst. It’s not all sub-720p docked. And even when it is on the lower end docked, a lot of times it still looks pretty good. MH Rise is a great example- the overwhelming response has been that the visuals are impressive for a hybrid handheld game. And, if it’s not fine for others, then it’s not. And that’s ok. Just come back next gen. But I think hostile feelings toward people who feel a different way about something, or being satisfied with something others aren’t, isn’t the right approach.

With that said, there is definitely some who take “gameplay over graphics“ too far, and pretend graphics don’t matter at all. They absolutely do. I keep trying to explain this to people, that gameplay over graphics simply means that graphics aren’t the end-all be-all, and there are other important factors that also matter besides graphics. Which is why you have tens of millions of people who would rather play games at lower graphical settings on Switch because the games are really fun and the flexibility of the system offers more value to those consumers than better graphics do. There are infinite degrees of freedom with respect to aspects consumers value. Graphics is just one of them. It’s an important factor, arguably one of the most important factors, but it’s still only one factor. What that doesn’t mean though, is that you throw graphics out the window entirely and pretend like they have no value at all. That’s just straight up ignorant. The value graphics offer is variable. The more you have, the less more is worth. Which makes it a complex matter as some treat any improvement visually as worthless. While others treat any improvement visually as priceless. The truth lies in between.

I think it goes both ways with people justifying what they have. You have people who want to justify their expensive set ups and tell themselves the “peasants who play lesser systems” don’t love gaming as much as they do. On the flipside, you’ve got people who can’t afford more expensive things and justify their inferior experience by telling themselves “A better set up isn’t needed and only idiots would spend that much money“. Either way you look at it, each group is hostile towards the other because both groups want to justify what they own out of insecurity. One has insecurity and wants to flex, while the other has insecurity and wants to deflect.

Secure gamers are the ones with high end systems that don’t act like it’s the only way to game, and the ones with mid to low tier systems who don’t act like those with something better are idiots. Game and let game.

For any that aren't aware, along with sales, there's also plenty of demos up for the week on Steam.... I've tried a few & got plenty more to try

Nice, demos are always nice and plus with Steam being so central in PC gaming, it has a such a wide library. I remember testing out the FFXV demo to see how it runs on my set up. Nier Automata is on sale for $20 and it's calling out to me (I wanna play it and do a LP on it) ><;

I'm looking for some opinions on gaming laptops, and I know there are other places I could be asking this, but I put some value on the knowledge represented in the NL community, so...

I'm currently looking for a laptop, and leaning strongly towards the Lenovo Legion 5. Some reasons include the fact that I have had good experiences with Lenovo computers, and that I write a lot so I want a very solid keyboard (I'm not a professional author, but I've been published here and there and am looking to get back to writing seriously now that my kids are old enough to not need constant attention).

The Thinkpad is, of course, legendary in business class and has probably the best keyboard you can find these days - but I'm also a gamer and want something I can play reasonably big games on, and Thinkpads don't make great gaming machines. (As far as I know, there is no current Thinkpad with a dedicated GPU, definitely not in the price range I'm looking at).

I hear the Legion keyboard is very good - not "Thinkpad good" but a firm, tactile keyboard that is better than most. Meanwhile, in-depth reviews say it is a very solid gaming laptop for the price, and can play most of the games out there - just not the ultra high end games at max settings.

Does anybody active in these parts have experience with the Legion 5? If so, would you recommend it for gaming and media and typing an hour or two a day? Alternatively, do you know of another laptop you would strongly recommend for those purposes?

Some details: the Legion I'm looking at has these stats - Lenovo Legion 5, 15.6" FHD (1920 x 1080) Display, AMD Ryzen 7 5800H Processor, 16GB DDR4 RAM (expandable), 512GB NVMe SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050Ti.

It goes for about $1050, which is a price I'm comfortable with. I could probably throw another few hundred bucks into the purchase for a better computer, but I'm definitely not looking to spend more than $1500, and I'd have to really LOVE the laptop at that price.

About me: I need a jack-of-all-trades, NOT the biggest most powerful beast with the 17" screen and shock-and-awe graphics, also not the ultra-slim 13" lappy that can't play anything made after 2010. In gaming, I mostly want this for RPGs, 4X like Stellaris and Civ 6 and some sim games like Cities Skylines. I have a PS4 Pro and a Switch, and those pretty much cover my "action and spectacle" gaming needs. This is for the games that the Switch can't handle and are not the most comfortable to play on the PS4.

Any thoughts at all would be greatly appreciated. I'm just about ready to pull the trigger, but not 100% sure yet.

Sounds like you know more about at least Lenovo than anyone here is likely to, @JasmineDragon ..... The specs you listed look great for a gaming laptop! That certainly should be able to run even the latest & biggest games, as there's no point having the ultra high graphics settings on a screen that size anyway I'd just be thinking it's about the sort of time when they start doing good deals on tech stuff, so maybe wait just a couple of weeks to see if the one you want gets discounted? Maybe one that currently costs a bit too much gets discounted enough, too?

Idk, where to ask this but maybe the PC crowd knows a thing or three.

Does anyone have experience with Nintendo Switch capture cards? I'm looking to invest in one without having top of the line or without breaking my already broken wallet.