PC vs Consoles - a war for the ages.

The purpose of this post is to gather feedback from the best video game community in the world (that would be you). Let me give some context for my situation.

My first exposure to video games was Pong at my uncles house in the early 80s. I thought it was really cool and wanted more. Then my mom bought me an Atari 2600 and I was head over heels in love - there was a space strategy game that jumps to mind as a favorite although Empire Strikes Back and Missile command were both favorites as well.

Sometime later, my mother remarried and my now stepfather was a computer programmer by trade so naturally our house shifted to a PC focus. I started playing Space Quest and Police Quest obsessively. At some point, we upgraded to the "legendary" Packard Bell 386SX-16. Now I could play wing commander (which I did to the point of throwing up one night (ok, so I ate a lot of raw cookie dough that night too, don't judge me).

Next I built my own PC with the help of a local business. It was a 386-40 with an AMD processor. I was heavy into simulation games at the time like civ, sim city, overlord, and front page sports football by Sierra. I was not paying attention to the console scene at all. This would continue through my high school, college and early professional years where I would build my own PCs and then play games on them. Mechwarrior 2 and mercenaries are firmly entrenched in my mind as favorites from the late 90s. Geat blend of strategy and action.

But then in the early 2000s as the PC industry really took off, games became much more complicated to run. I remember trying to play need for speed undercover and knights of the old republic on my PC and just having a miserable time trying to do both. I was a big madden fan for a few years there as well (I've been cured of that disease but that thanks for your concern) and that game really reinforced to me that I did not want to play gamese on PC anymore. So many glitches, so many iterations of the graphics driver game, so many games locking up. And I just got fed up with it.

I stopped building PCs and I bought a Playstation (about the same time the PS2 was announced). Football was better but I missed the multiplayer angle. We had a league going at work. Racing games were way better. The analog controls just translated to a racing game so well. Time went on and I moved up to an XBox where I started playing MechAssault. Now to be fair, MechAssault crashed a LOT, but I never felt like it was anything that I could do to fix it except try again so at least there wasn't the frustration of problem solving every issue. Mechassault was as much fun as I have ever had playing a video game. It was slower than your average shooter but still had great action. I don't have the fastest reflexes so I've been trampled on in recent years with all of these twitch shooters. Along the way I fell in love with the 360 and it's multiplayer focus. But now some of my franchises (mechwarrior) are coming out as PC exclusives - what is a console fanboy to do?

So now here we are in 2012 - consoles are clearly king of the hill but I sense PCs making a comeback or maybe carving out their own niche in today's market. I can't justify both console and PC - the expense is just too great.

So my question for all of you is - where is the best place to play games? Is the driver game gone? Can I put a disc in my PC and start playing a game without install the way I can on my 360? Can I play all games with a game pad? Is it worth the upfront cost difference? How much are you spending every five years to keep your PC up to date?

Thanks in advance for reading my silly wall of text and for any thoughts you might have.

Please reformat that.  I can't and won't read it like that.

Consoles are the king of the hill?
It's expensive to build a full PC for gaming at a visual quality and frame-performance equal or greater to that of consoles?
I am confused.

Can I put a disc in my PC and start playing a game without install the way I can on my 360? 

Can I play all games with a game pad?

How much are you spending every five years to keep your PC up to date?

@JRock3x8 said:

So my question for all of you is - where is the best place to play games? Is the driver game gone? Can I put a disc in my PC and start playing a game without install the way I can on my 360? Can I play all games with a game pad? Is it worth the upfront cost difference? How much are you spending every five years to keep your PC up to date?

Where is the best place to play games? Depends on what you want, there is no general answer to that. As a PC gamer I would say PC but I get that consoles have there advantages.

Can I put a disc in my PC and start playing ... ? Nope, you can't and probably will never be able to. There is always an install (which has it's own advantages, just ask console gamers about loading times).

Can I play all games with a pad? Not all of them, but developers got a lot better with that the last few years. I would say you can play most recent games with a pad and, for the most part, even switch on the fly.

Is it worth the upfront cost difference? Again, depends on who you ask. Keep in mind a PC is not only for gaming, every gaming PC is also a working machine. You can do much more with a PC then with a console. If you dont need that its probably not worth it.

How much are you spending every five years to keep your PC up to date? I can only talk for myself. My last PC I had for about 5 years. Last year I ditched it (gave it to my sister) and build a new one for about 1.2k € ... you can get a cheaper one thats very capable but I use my PC a LOT so it was worth it to me. I see myself buying a new video card in maybe 2 or 3 years.

You sound like you don't want gaming to be a hassle. Tbh, as much as I love PC gaming, it will always be more involved than console gaming. You would probably be happier with a console.

Meh, it just looks like a cry session from someone who doesn't know what they are talking about.

Stick to the Xbox 360 brother, you do not sound like you can handle the hassle of maintaining a PC.

So my question for all of you is - where is the best place to play games?

Is the driver game gone? Can I put a disc in my PC and start playing a game without install the way I can on my 360?

Can I play all games with a game pad?

 Is it worth the upfront cost difference? How much are you spending every five years to keep your PC up to date?

Consoles are just shitty PCs with limited OS and hardware. /end

Where do smartphones fall into the loop for people who may want to save even more money on hardware by lumping all their media into one package they, while you or I may not, find acceptable?

I use multiple PCs in my household. When my server needs more power, my gaming PC gets an upgrade and my server in turn, gets the gaming motherboard and CPU which I downclock to reduce heat and power consumption. Or, if my gaming PC gets a new motherboard/CPU, my server gets it regardless.

In the last 6 years, I've built two PCs. I still use them. A Q6600 and a i5 2500k. With video cards, boards, memory, SSDs, and power supplies, I've spent a little under 2k for both PCs. My GF has an old Dell that's 5 years old. It's a simple Core2Quad that was struggling to play games. $60 later, an AMD 6750 has her playing Skyrim on high at 1080p. ME2 and 3.

In the last 6 years, I've bought a PS3 and 360. ~1k for the both. I've had to replace the PS3 because the BRay drive died. $350. I had to replace the 360 because of RROD. Twice. ~$500. If I didn't love fighting games so much, I wouldn't have replaced em.

My expectations when it comes to gaming? Silly high. The load times on consoles are enough to drive me away in most games. Hell, launching Firefox on my 5400 rpm drive at work is hell.

We look down on console war bullshit, I don't really know why we can't look down on the same PC vs Console crap.

What "war"? They just offer different experiences. A world where either consoles or PCs didn't exist would be a TERRIBLE place. I would like to see consoles and PCs make love, not war :) We might be about to see the results of that in the next console generation ..

We look down on console war bullshit, I don't really know why we can't look down on the same PC vs Console crap.

What "war"? They just offer different experiences. A world where either consoles or PCs didn't exist would be a TERRIBLE place. I would like to see consoles and PCs make love, not war :) We might be about to see the results of that in the next console generation ..

Some good thoughts and some pigheaded nonsense. Thanks for both. ;) I think what I took away from this is that maintaining a proper game PC requires more effort than I have time to give.

Most PC games support gamepads out of the box these days.

@JRock3x8 said:

So my question for all of you is - where is the best place to play games?

For sophicated games consoles can't match and probably never will match a pc.

Part of the problem right now with consoles being "king of the hill" is that the lead development for them means more streamlined games with a coke can production line mentality.

For me personally, I love strategy games, so, you can pretty much guess without thinking too much.

The problem with consoles right now. that effect pc gaming is the developers treating the pc like garbage and the gaming media actively blanking it out in favor of consoles or giving it outright bad media attention. The other problem of course, is piracy. Alot of people game on the pc specifically because of it, giving nothing towards the industry.

If I knew anything about computers I'd like to get a good PC for games because steam is really amazing.

But I do think the PC has some problems, usually with a console game, everyone is getting the same experience. You pop in the disc, it plays, and when it plays it is fine for everyone.

PC's on the other hand aren't all created equal, some PC's run a game better because it has a better graphics card or more RAM or whatever.

I have a Mac laptop, so really the only games I'm super interested in are smaller indie things and valve games, but even those can't run well at times. Also I have a windows computer that is a bit old (vista), but when I try to play Deus Ex on it, it crashes every time. I know that game is from 2001, but I feel like no matter when the game was made, I have a hard time playing it unless it is a late 90's early 2000's blizzard game. I even tried to play Dagger Fall on a Mac with DOS Box and I couldn't figure it out (ironically playing SNES and PS1 games is really easy)

Also I kind of think WASD is an awful way of controlling a character in 3D. I liked to play as Scout in TF2, and sometimes I really have to struggle with the controls.

@Nottle said:

If I knew anything about computers I'd like to get a good PC for games because steam is really amazing.

But I do think the PC has some problems, usually with a console game, everyone is getting the same experience. You pop in the disc, it plays, and when it plays it is fine for everyone.

PC's on the other hand aren't all created equal, some PC's run a game better because it has a better graphics card or more RAM or whatever.

I have a Mac laptop, so really the only games I'm super interested in are smaller indie things and valve games, but even those can't run well at times. Also I have a windows computer that is a bit old (vista), but when I try to play Deus Ex on it, it crashes every time. I know that game is from 2001, but I feel like no matter when the game was made, I have a hard time playing it unless it is a late 90's early 2000's blizzard game. I even tried to play Dagger Fall on a Mac with DOS Box and I couldn't figure it out (ironically playing SNES and PS1 games is really easy)

Also I kind of think WASD is an awful way of controlling a character in 3D. I liked to play as Scout in TF2, and sometimes I really have to struggle with the controls.

True. Alot of people and focus is on laptops, notepads and what not rather than a desktop pc.

To get a powerful laptop costs alot more than it would to just build your own desktop pc. Alot of laptops aren't even as powerful as home consoles with a lack of dedicated graphics card. If you look at windows 8, even Microsoft are focusing on these rather than the big box that sits on your desk.

@JRock3x8 said:

Is it worth the upfront cost difference? How much are you spending every five years to keep your PC up to date?

One thing I always wonder about people who compare the price of PC gaming to console gaming is...what about your TV? How much did you spend on your TV? TVs are significantly more expensive than most computer monitors. You can say "Well, I use my TV for other things as well. I was going to have one no matter what," but I would say the exact same thing about having a capable computer.

PC gaming: Expensive computer, cheap screen.

Console gaming: Cheap computer, expensive screen.

A tv is generally mainly used for tv and most households have one.

@whyareyoucrouchingspock said:

A tv is generally mainly used for tv and most households have one.

A computer is generally mainly used as a computer and most households have one.

@JRock3x8: No, no it doesn't require more maintenance. There are plenty of people using 460 and 8800's to play today's games on PC. You may not get all the shiny baubles, but it works great. You can pay $500 for a good gaming PC hook it up to the same screen as your console, and play pretty much anything with a controller, even games that don't have native support can be pretty easily played with a gamepad with something like Pinnacle Game Profile which is awesome with a wireless 360 gamepad. ANd as far as I know, doesn't require setting up at all, it has profiles for games already made and with a 360 gamepad should work flawlessly. I used this way back when I wanted to play Halo CE on PC with a gamepad after a collapsed lung had me in bed for a couple weeks.

With Steam, you never have to update games, you just download them once and they are there and up to date forever, you never so much as have to wait for a few minutes at start up to download a title-update unless you're trying to start a game right as the update comes out. With a decent internet connection, you can have access to potentially hundreds of games within 30 minutes or so. I downloaded Dragon Age: Origins: Ultimate Edition in like an hour, and that fucker is huge. I never have to switch discs, all I have to do is click a button and any game I want is immediately starting and playing.

Sure, there are shitty PC ports. But there are plenty of games on consoles that are total shit. I think it's a little unfair, because with games like Deadly Premonition, Tenchu Z, Mass Effect, Rage, Mafia 2, Bayonetta and many others having significant issues on one/both consoles, often despite the PC version being excellent, it seems like things are a little more even. Plus, even somewhat broken games are usually fixed (Even Bulletstorm eventually worked for me, and was about 3 times better with a mouse for aiming and lining up skillshots) and even if there's a small graphical issue, they run and handle super well.

If you get a good PC it's not too hard to keep it up to date. You can even just buy a premade one, spend a little extra, and not worry about upgrading, just trade it in. Doesn't Dell still have that thing where you pay extra and then you can trade the PC back in and get a huge amount off a replacement PC from them? Even if not, $500-$600 will buy you a PC that can easily play at the same quality as a 360 with better responsiveness and framerate and probably higher resolutions. If you're already used to playing 720 games on a 1080 screen, even if you can't have full settings and 1080 resolution, you could easily just keep it at 720 for those harder to run games like Witcher 2.

Also, mouse and keyboard gaming is fucking great when you get used to it. Look at Mass Effect 3. One button does like 5 separate functions. That would never be needed on a keyboard, because there are plenty of easy to access buttons around WASD, and after a month or so of adjusting (I used to be a 360 only gamer before two Augusts ago when I built a modest gaming rig) the mouse for aiming is fucking fantastic. And even without adjusting it was just as good as an analog stick. I do understand racing games on consoles, but most of them aren't coming to PC these days anyway, so no worries there.

Sure, you can spend extra and be able to push any current game at 1080 with AA (which is less needed at 1080 than 720, so you can get away with much lower AA for the same smooth lines) at decent to great framerates (pretty much always higher than 30), but even that's only going to run you $800, beyond that you are paying for more pixels and more AA and mostly needless graphical pretties.

@Zithe said:

@whyareyoucrouchingspock said:

A tv is generally mainly used for tv and most households have one.

A computer is generally mainly used as a computer and most households have one.

Except these are mostly underpowered laptops, tablets on a tiny screens.

I refuse to read this silly wall of text.

@MordeaniisChaos said:

@JRock3x8: No, no it doesn't require more maintenance. There are plenty of people using 460 and 8800's to play today's games on PC. You may not get all the shiny baubles, but it works great. You can pay $500 for a good gaming PC hook it up to the same screen as your console, and play pretty much anything with a controller, even games that don't have native support can be pretty easily played with a gamepad with something like Pinnacle Game Profile which is awesome with a wireless 360 gamepad. ANd as far as I know, doesn't require setting up at all, it has profiles for games already made and with a 360 gamepad should work flawlessly. I used this way back when I wanted to play Halo CE on PC with a gamepad after a collapsed lung had me in bed for a couple weeks.

With Steam, you never have to update games, you just download them once and they are there and up to date forever, you never so much as have to wait for a few minutes at start up to download a title-update unless you're trying to start a game right as the update comes out. With a decent internet connection, you can have access to potentially hundreds of games within 30 minutes or so. I downloaded Dragon Age: Origins: Ultimate Edition in like an hour, and that fucker is huge. I never have to switch discs, all I have to do is click a button and any game I want is immediately starting and playing.

Sure, there are shitty PC ports. But there are plenty of games on consoles that are total shit. I think it's a little unfair, because with games like Deadly Premonition, Tenchu Z, Mass Effect, Rage, Mafia 2, Bayonetta and many others having significant issues on one/both consoles, often despite the PC version being excellent, it seems like things are a little more even. Plus, even somewhat broken games are usually fixed (Even Bulletstorm eventually worked for me, and was about 3 times better with a mouse for aiming and lining up skillshots) and even if there's a small graphical issue, they run and handle super well.

If you get a good PC it's not too hard to keep it up to date. You can even just buy a premade one, spend a little extra, and not worry about upgrading, just trade it in. Doesn't Dell still have that thing where you pay extra and then you can trade the PC back in and get a huge amount off a replacement PC from them? Even if not, $500-$600 will buy you a PC that can easily play at the same quality as a 360 with better responsiveness and framerate and probably higher resolutions. If you're already used to playing 720 games on a 1080 screen, even if you can't have full settings and 1080 resolution, you could easily just keep it at 720 for those harder to run games like Witcher 2.

Also, mouse and keyboard gaming is fucking great when you get used to it. Look at Mass Effect 3. One button does like 5 separate functions. That would never be needed on a keyboard, because there are plenty of easy to access buttons around WASD, and after a month or so of adjusting (I used to be a 360 only gamer before two Augusts ago when I built a modest gaming rig) the mouse for aiming is fucking fantastic. And even without adjusting it was just as good as an analog stick. I do understand racing games on consoles, but most of them aren't coming to PC these days anyway, so no worries there.

Sure, you can spend extra and be able to push any current game at 1080 with AA (which is less needed at 1080 than 720, so you can get away with much lower AA for the same smooth lines) at decent to great framerates (pretty much always higher than 30), but even that's only going to run you $800, beyond that you are paying for more pixels and more AA and mostly needless graphical pretties.

Yes. Features that add fairly minimal diffrences like ambient occlusion and anti aliasing can chew up huge amount of frames to the point of crippling even a beefy system.

@whyareyoucrouchingspock: I guess that makes more sense for people who still pay for cable. I've been out of that mindset for some time now.

@whyareyoucrouchingspock said:

@Zithe said:

@whyareyoucrouchingspock said:

A tv is generally mainly used for tv and most households have one.

A computer is generally mainly used as a computer and most households have one.

Except these are mostly underpowered laptops, tablets on a tiny screens.

I don't know anyone without at least one or two desktops in their household, and most of them are pre-built so they come with (not great) HD monitors.

Also, a laptop is going to run you at least $200-300 dollars and that is at the absolute shit end of things. Most people I know with laptops who don't need them for anything in particular like work or gaming still pay more than that, $400-$600 for a decent laptop.

Also, even if you divide the cost of a TV up between all of it's inputs, it's probably more than $130, which you can get a perfectly good HD monitor for. A $1000 dollar TV is still going to average at least $300 an input. And plenty of people out there only use two inputs, say a console and Cable. A console can play DVDs and potentially Blurays, and it can watch Netflix, so most people I know with consoles use them on the off chance they watch physical media.

@Zithe: interesting but ultimately does not apply to me - I do all of my gaming and pc work on the same 20" monitor.

@MordeaniisChaos: one thing I will never do is play games with a mouse and kb. I spend 50-60 hours a week banging away at a kb and mouse - I have NO desire to touch them when I leave the office.

Thanks for those who are posting well thought out replies - I really appreciate it.

@JRock3x8: I guess I can see you getting keyboard mouse fatigue, but again, gamepads are totally an option for pretty much any game, short of something like WoW or RTS games and the like. I don't personally have that issue and am more than happy to use a keyboard and mouse when I want the precision or more buttons, but I do understand the desire to relax with a gamepad. If I had a bigger screen (currently I'm using a little 4:3 1280:1024 screen) I'd probably invest the 8 bucks I need to be able to use my 360 controller on my PC and play things like Witcher 2 with it reclining in my chair. In fact I plan on upgrading to a better screen quite soon and I've been considering it. I spent a lot of time with my 360, from launch till I got this PC, and even for a good while after that. But in my opinion, PC gaming is much more enjoyable. Just the framerate alone, even on my shitty 5770 that's about to die from being used for so long (I got it from a friend when he upgraded), is worth it in my opinion. Going back to play games like MGS4 is at times painful because of the awful framerate. And by awful I often mean average by console standards.

It isn't a war when the winner is so obvious (PC)

someone who thinks that PC's are winning - please show me some numbers to back up your argument.

@MordeaniisChaos: strange that you mention frame rate as a pro for PCs as that is one of the major reasons I got OUT of PC's - whether it was a bad hard drive or an out of date graphics driver or whatever, I always experienced bad screen flicker and frame rate issues with PC games that I have never experienced with a console. I tend to play games much slower than some people so I don't tend to run myself into situations where the game is just trying to simulate and render more junk than it intended to.

@JRock3x8: You got out of PCs when PCs were just starting to do cool things, no one had a good experience at the time beyond having impressive visuals. Today, things are different. There may be some issues, but framerate is almost never an issue. There are a few games here and there that have issues, but all of these games you could easily just make sure it's a competent port and if not just get the console version to be safe. If you're having framerate issues today, it's because you don't have a good enough PC or your trying to push too much out of it. But if you pay $500 for a PC today, you will easily run anything a console can at the same settings, higher resolution, and higher framerate. I average 45 fps in games on my very unimpressive PC (I still only have 2 gigs of ram and an old not terribly great CPU and a dying and also shitty GPU), and most of time I can easily hit 60 as long as I set things up right, which doesn't take much work at all. Usually the auto detect that pretty much every PC game has today will set it lower than you can handle and give you the optimal framerate. If you're not super picky about how a game looks that'll probably do you just fine. Maybe bump up textures or resolution up because those tend to be a little off and rarely effect you /that/ much. The only two games I have ANY trouble running right now are Witcher 2 (which looks fantastic, hence the poor framerate) and Skyrim, which I play on high settings with the high res texture pack and a fair number of texture mods. And ram is a huge issue with that game, so my 2 gigs is hurting me a lot. And I can easily get Skyrim to run well when it counts (during 90% of combat, ie inside) with 4x AA which is all you really need with a decent pixel pitch, and high settings. Turn em down a bit and I can get the game to run at 60FPS the whole time. I'm pretty sure I average 60 FPS with the "suggested" settings which look about as good as the 360 version does. Better, probably. Games like Dragon Age: Origins and Crysis and Mass Effect 2 and ANY Source (Valve) game run super smooth, super consistently, and without a hint of lag. Borderlands is so damned good on my PC it's not even funny. Fantastic framerate, incredibly responsive, and I got rid of the outline shader which lets me use motion blur and AA and the game IMO looks better that way. I've never really played a game on console that was better than it was on PC except GTA IV, which still refuses to run. But that's because it's a lazy shitty port. And didn't really run great on the 360 either, and at least when I pushed all the settings down to low and was able to run it at a decent framerate, GTA IV's combat was enjoyable on a mouse and keyboard (not having to use the auto aim to be precise is pretty awesome)

- Pc's are about a clearer output. In every respect. Resolution, framerate, detail, precision, speed. Do these things matter? If they don't. Get a console.

There is a barrier of entry. What you actually get in terms of better quality has to mean the world to you. You need time, and dedication to actually become a user able to overcome problems inherent to pc's within seconds rather than hours.

If you see a pc gamer running a high resolution and a high framerate and go, "meh" or "yeah, i'd like that, so long as it's always easy". Then a console is the best choice. Always.

If you want that yourself with a passion, seeing someone run a game a 1920x1080 or 2560x1600 or 120hz blows your mind, and makes you crave what you believe is an mindblowing jump in fidelity and smoothness. Then that passion will drive you to spend the money required to achieve that and the time required for learning how to troubleshoot a pc - without asking people in a forum. You will simply know you want that. You will catalyze all of that yourself automatically.

Stick to the Xbox 360