Zarathustra[H]
Extremely [H]
- Joined
- Oct 29, 2000
- Messages
- 39,093
With risk of sounding like an old fart (even though 40 is supposedly the new 30) I have to admit, the state of gaming has me somewhat bummed out.
Earlier today I was subtly probing my stepson (so there wouldn't be any spoilers) about how he felt about the performance of his PC. I wanted to figure out if maybe an upgrade of some sort was in the cards for the holidays.
His machine is not terrible by any means...
(It's an AMD Ryzen 7 3800xt in an aging MSI B350 Tomahawk board with a GeForce 2060 Super)
He has a G-Sync Compatible / Freesync2 1440p screen that seems fairly decent, and I was concerned he may not be getting decent performance out of it at 1440p.
To my surprise he seemed completely uninterested in any upgrades at all, and thought his PC was perfectly fine for what he does.
Remembering my own youth, and the constant clamoring for newer and faster hardware, even immediately after the last upgrade, I found this odd, so I sought clarification.
So he told me all he plays are competitive titles, and in just about every one of those competitive titles you are at a disadvantage if you don't have all settings at minimum. Shadows, extra foliage, etc. etc. It gets in the way, and hurts your ability to do well. So, the first thing he does in every title is turn every single setting to minimum, and when he does, there is barely a single title that doesn't run really fast.
I used to play competitive titles. I was totally addicted to the original Counter-Strike three years in college from 2000-2003. Yes, winning was fun, but I also remember thinking how awesome it was when Source came out, and all the graphics were improved.
Even as recently as the summer of 2017 when PUBG was still Early Access, I remember thoroughly enjoying how it would bring my Titan to it's knees at 4k, and yes, I still won me several chicken dinners. After not playing the game for a few years (while fun, the formula got old quickly, especially after getting good enough to repeatedly either win or make it to the top 3) I reinstalled it just to check out the new maps (last time I played there was only one) and I hated it.
The game had dumbed down mobile game graphics and was thus completely uninteresting to me.
I guess I just find this really depressing. Like, if you are just going to play with shitty graphics, what is even the point of playing on a PC at all? Buy a cheap android phone and just play with the plebs.
I don't play competitive titles much anymore, as I find playing them in the lootbox/streaming era just annoys me more than anything else, but I wish game studios would do something about this. Maybe instead of matchmaking just based on skill, also doing so based on graphics settings? If you have a large enough player base this should work, and it will allow people to stay competitive without removing all the foliage to see better.
Because that shit is just depressing.
Old man out.
Earlier today I was subtly probing my stepson (so there wouldn't be any spoilers) about how he felt about the performance of his PC. I wanted to figure out if maybe an upgrade of some sort was in the cards for the holidays.
His machine is not terrible by any means...
(It's an AMD Ryzen 7 3800xt in an aging MSI B350 Tomahawk board with a GeForce 2060 Super)
He has a G-Sync Compatible / Freesync2 1440p screen that seems fairly decent, and I was concerned he may not be getting decent performance out of it at 1440p.
To my surprise he seemed completely uninterested in any upgrades at all, and thought his PC was perfectly fine for what he does.
Remembering my own youth, and the constant clamoring for newer and faster hardware, even immediately after the last upgrade, I found this odd, so I sought clarification.
So he told me all he plays are competitive titles, and in just about every one of those competitive titles you are at a disadvantage if you don't have all settings at minimum. Shadows, extra foliage, etc. etc. It gets in the way, and hurts your ability to do well. So, the first thing he does in every title is turn every single setting to minimum, and when he does, there is barely a single title that doesn't run really fast.
I used to play competitive titles. I was totally addicted to the original Counter-Strike three years in college from 2000-2003. Yes, winning was fun, but I also remember thinking how awesome it was when Source came out, and all the graphics were improved.
Even as recently as the summer of 2017 when PUBG was still Early Access, I remember thoroughly enjoying how it would bring my Titan to it's knees at 4k, and yes, I still won me several chicken dinners. After not playing the game for a few years (while fun, the formula got old quickly, especially after getting good enough to repeatedly either win or make it to the top 3) I reinstalled it just to check out the new maps (last time I played there was only one) and I hated it.
The game had dumbed down mobile game graphics and was thus completely uninteresting to me.
I guess I just find this really depressing. Like, if you are just going to play with shitty graphics, what is even the point of playing on a PC at all? Buy a cheap android phone and just play with the plebs.
I don't play competitive titles much anymore, as I find playing them in the lootbox/streaming era just annoys me more than anything else, but I wish game studios would do something about this. Maybe instead of matchmaking just based on skill, also doing so based on graphics settings? If you have a large enough player base this should work, and it will allow people to stay competitive without removing all the foliage to see better.
Because that shit is just depressing.
Old man out.