Topic: PC Gaming

@Sdelintwouters The Ripsaw def looks to meet that low price I was looking for .. Definitely good to hear the options though. Thanks for letting me know ^^!

Is anyone getting age of empires iv? Any RTS fans in here?

Wanted to try out the new Far Cry at the end of the week, when I get home but I am wondering whether I should hold off. It feels like a big optimisation and balance pass is surely on the way, I wonder if I play it now, I’m going to have a worse experience if I wait a few weeks for a couple of patches.

With my cynical hat, it's never a great idea to pay full price for the benefit of getting a game early with some extra bugs. Just wait until the first patch has dropped, it's in a Steam sale, and you'll have a better experience all round. It's not like there aren't plenty of other Ubisoft open worlders to while away the intervening months with.

That said, if you can't wait I don't blame you. I was all over Far Cry 4 back when that came out. It's only since then that I've become a bit jaded with the series. In the wise words of Vaas Montenegro 'Insanity is doing the exact... same f**king thing... over and over again' and that's how I feel Ubisoft have treated the series since 3.

I have such a backlog of PC games I may never buy a new one. For a day one purchase, the game would have to be simply amazing and on my radar for months.

@BruceCM @Sdelintwouters Thanks for the thoughts, guys. I decided to go ahead with the Legion 5, received it yesterday and so far I'm well pleased with it. It's a massive upgrade from my old laptop, which is now about seven years old (and was never top of the line).

I haven't done much yet except a little writing to test drive the keyboard, which gets high marks so far, and installed a few games from my Steam library.

Played a few turns of Civ 6 to see how it plays on the PC compared to the Switch and PS4 Pro (yes, I triple dipped on Civ 6, I really like Civilization). The answer is it blows both of them away. Of course the initial loading time is much shorter than on the Switch, but it's also significantly shorter than the PS4. Enemy turns are quicker, movement and battles are smoother, and everything is prettier.

I honestly love the Switch port of Civ 6, I think the control scheme is amazing and it's great to play Civ on the go. I'm not about to stop playing it on the Switch. But it's a fact that the Switch struggles to run the game, especially with larger worlds. And playing the game on PS4 has never really felt right to me.

Resisting the temptation to buy every game on Steam, I did buy Age of Wonders Planetfall on sale and played the first tutorial this evening. Fun game so far.

It depends far more on the optimisation of the title, than the hardware itself.

Yeah, there's no simple answer to that question. While developers of twitchy action games are starting to target 120fps, it's far less of a priority for other genres.

You don't really need high frame rates for something like an RPG or a flight simulator and they've also got to juggle other demanding features like anti-aliasing, ray tracing, and volumetric lighting. Or, just maybe it'd be good to have a huge draw distance so there's less visible pop-in?

So, on the one hand, we'll probably not get to the point where ever game runs at 120fps for a very long time because there will always be compromises. On the other hand, for the latest games in the genres where it really matters, we're pretty much already there.

People weren't kidding about the weird optimisation of Far Cry 6 on PC. The game makes it seem like I have headroom even with high res texture pack enabled but this appears to be an error as the textures are worse with it enabled, suggesting my hardware is overwhelmed.

However, there is no consistency either way. Some textures are worse than others and cutscenes look awful, and appear to be capped at 30 fps off.

With the high res pack off, the game looks better but still not as good as you might hope. Guapo, a wonderful companion, permanently looks like he is waiting to load in, regardless of HD textures on or off.

The AMD DLSS thing improves thing like Guapo, makes him sharper and more detailed but still never fully there. The problem also is then everything looks over sharpened and weird, even on the ultra quality mode, because some textures seem better optimised than others, so some benefit from this and others don't. Just can't seem to find a good middle ground.

LETS ***** GOOOOOOOOOOOOO

lol why are people even buying consoles anymore?
they don't even get to keep the exclusives

I hope this eventually trickles down to their B-tier stuff like MediEvil & Sackboy. I mean, I could still absolutely play them on my PS4, but it's much harder to find the time to play it in comparison to my laptop.

Luckily, I've already played many of the "big" exclusives I'm interested in, but I'll definitely be holding out on Ghost of Tsushima as that probably won't be too far behind now.

@6ch6ris6 Presumably, fans of Sony games don't want to wait 2 - 4 years to play their games. And, y'know, once things are more back to normal with the chip situation, the consoles will still be cheaper than building an equivalently powerful PC.

But yeah, I'll be waiting to see how this evolves over the generation. I don't really want to buy a console if all of its "exclusive" games go to my PC eventually.

It definitely speaks of a wider issue in gaming that generally the early adaptors are always the worse off. You get to play it the day it comes out but that is really your only reward. You are most likely going to be paying a lot more and for most likely an inferior version, whether that be bugs/performance issues/balance issues/exploits or other things which will be patched out or whether it just be that it is exclusive to a platform that is inferior to the platforms it will end up on. If you play a lot of games like I do, I play them Day One because I have nothing else to do, but in this period of gaming, if you only play a couple of titles a year, I really do recommend waiting for at least a year on every release to see where it ends up landing and you'll likely get a huge discount if it is on PC.

Realistically it'll probably go the other way. Consoles are by far the cheaper option currently if you can get a hold of them. I expect once things return to normal we'll hit the usual cycle for console v PC pricing where the value of console gaming slowly erodes as the generation wears on. Assuming we don't get mid-cycle revisions which... I expect we probably will

Given the massive leap in power for the Series X/PS5 over previous gen, the mid gen refreshes could either be really exciting or be as throwaway incremental as the OLED Switch.

Hmm. I’ve been watching the AoE IV videos which look great but also led me to the DE versions of the old games… I had ignored them thinking it was just a graphics bump (which is not enough for me to double dip from my CD-ROM versions) buuuuut seeing new factions… guess I have three new, old games to buy. They need to redo Age of Mythology next. I need it.

i got the HD edition years ago and i am still unsure whether i wanna get the DE version. i would feel kinda stupid buying aoe2 AGAIN. third time then, as i also bought it as a kid 20 years ago.

I am just over thirty hours into Far Cry 6 now and according to my stats, a little under three quarters of the way through. Like almost every Ubisoft game, the bloat is ***** real here. Like it isn't Valhalla levels where it took like 10 hours to get to the opening credits but it is still long and thin. Like the map is huge, but there isn't a huge amount of justification for why it needs to be so big. Lots of dead space, a real lack of variety, not a lot of activities really either. And it is a shame, as some locations are really cool, I just kinda wish they made the map smaller so we were bumping into those more interesting locations more frequently and spending more time in them.

Almost all of the changes this makes from previous games feel like a bust to me. At first, the move to a more looter like system seems strong because your going off the beaten path might reward some kind of special weapon or the next piece for whatever build you are running, but it becomes pretty clear after a while that the loot just isn't interesting. The perks on the gear are never as interesting as some of the skills you could get on the trees in past games, the Supremo backpack adds so little I forget to use it half the time and a lot of the unique/Resolver weapons you'll find and never use, because the new ammo system puts such strict limitations on you, you'll probably run one dedicated arsenal for the whole game and just never change it. Like for real, gear has rarity ratings but it doesn't make any difference as far as I can tell. Take that rifle you get at the start of the game, stick some AP rounds on it and maybe upgrade the silencer and you can ride the whole game with that, as long as you shoot in the head.

That is another real problem for me with this over previous games. Despite what others have said, the game is actually really hard in terms of how fragile Dani is, the limitations imposed on you by the ammo system, the endlessly respawning enemies etc but the difference here is using stealth is so ludicrously overpowered, so ludicrously lopsided, you can easily cheese the ***** out of the game and make it seem like it is super easy. Shots to the head basically circumvent the ammo system and even when taking over bases, I headshot about half a dozen dudes and the base is captured. Silencer is only just starting to get warm.

I always came to Far Cry for the chaos, but you just handicap yourself with chaos here. Dani dies in like three hits, enemies respawn endlessly, vehicles start spawning in, your ammo supply begins to dwindle and if you use the wrong ammo you literally do no damage at all. Just feels *****. Especially when you know you could have cleared the base in about 30 seconds if you used stealth instead.

Finally, I really miss the Guns for Hire. They finally give us a protagonist with a real personality, voice, personality in Dani and so it seems a shame that out in the wild, she doesn't have anyone to share that with. It was always a joy when you had two Guns for Hire interacting with one another and musing on the world and I just couldn't help but wonder at just how much fun Dani, Sharky and Hurk would be together. Like don't get me wrong, having Boomer come back and have him be able to ride around in cars for you got a legit pop from me in a way games don't do for me, but just feels like a wasted potential.

Needless to say, this game, Far Cry 6 is not on my list of games to play.