PC Gaming Ruined Me

I used to be a ps3 fanboy. That once beloved console has been the object of neglect for the last year. Why, you ask? Because I put aside a modest amount of money for a decent gaming rig. About six hundred dollars over all. But man, playing games in true 1920 x 1080p resolution on high settings, i just can't go back to the consoles. They look like shit in comparison. In June, when the Last of Us is released, will be the first time I touch my ps3 in a year. So I ask, Giantbomb community, has anyone else taken the plunge (into PC gaming) and found it difficult to turn back?

For those of you who are interested, i used last generation parts purchased at Newegg when I built my PC to keep costs down, because like Vinnie, I have a baby boy named Max too.

I bought a gaming PC at the end of last year too and haven't played any games on consoles since then. Like you, I feel like I can't go back to consoles now.

I did, in September of last year, and there are a lot of duders here who have done the same. However, it seems like most of them are still A-OK with occasionally firing up the 360 or PS3 to play a console exclusive.

Me? Pretty graphics are nice but I do not at all need them to play a game. Don't get me wrong, I really love playing games on my PC, and I really appreciate the graphics, but what I appreciate more than that is the higher framerate. 1920x1080 is nice as well, but those 60 frames and VSYNC are what I aim for at all times and what I miss most on consoles. Honestly, I don't think that old graphics ruin a game at all.

Some games are fine and some aren't. I beat Bioshock Infinite on PC and actually bought it on 360 to replay it so I can take in the story again now knowing the facts. Boy the console version of that game is reaaallly bad looking in comparison.

But I also recently bought Dragons Dogma Dark Arisen and that game looks fine, although before I installed the Hi-resolution texture pack included in the box it looked like the Unreal engine just wasn't loading textures at all.

If anything kills of consoles, it won't be mobile/casual games, it will be cheap gaming PCs; you are right, even a cheap $600 PC will blow current consoles out of the water and when you consider how cheap the games can be on Steam or any other download service it's PC all the way. 10-15 years ago game consoles made a lot of sense when a halfway decent gaming PC was $2000+ and often came with annoying driver issue/compatibility problems, but now things really couldn't be easier and prices just keep going down for whatever reason. I do still like my PS3 for the exclusives though.

Thats a great point, about the frame rate, I never noticed when I just played consoles, but going back and playing Red Dead or Dark Souls (omg, blight town), the slow down in frame rate is so much more obvious than it used to be.

And not the graphics necessarily, but the resolution, it hurts to see something in 720p. :-P

Third (or fourth? Fifth? Whatever...) one here to have bought a new gaming PC in last december, but I still play games on PS3 with ease. That is, when there's no pc-version available or so. 'course when it's some multiplatform game, I pick the pc-version due to much cheaper price and better performance. But still, I have never been that picky about "poor" framerate (if comparing to 60) or so. I have played on PS3 since 2009 and I think it wasn't untill seeing the crew comparing Far Cry 3 between the xbox and pc-version, that I went "...oh wow. If I wouldn't enjoy the gameplay and atmosphere so much, I would toss this terribly running piece of garbage out of the window."

I've played PC games since I was 2 (my first PC had an orange monochrome screen), so whether or not it has ruined me is not really something I can judge. I have consoles but they have always been secondary to PC in terms of usage. I use my consoles basically only for exclusives. I probably won't even bother getting one of the next consoles since my PC will likely already be more powerful than them.

See, that sort of thing doesn't bother me. Do I see a difference between 1080 and 720? Yeah. And 1080 is real nice. But it doesn't stop me from enjoying something like Nocturne, which is on a PS2 and at most 480p. The only thing that can really absolutely kill my enjoyment of a game, graphically speaking, is screen tearing; a chugging framerate can if it's bad enough but I can kinda deal with that.

Yeah, i'm pretty much in the same boat regarding the exclusives. The only reason I still have the ps3 is for games like Red Dead or Uncharted and Netflix.

I took the plunge in January and have been loving it, but the PC/console differential isn't just about graphics and performance for me. There's a very different vibe sitting at your desk with a mouse and keyboard than there is while laying back with a controller. The medium is the message and all that. But while it has definitely become more apparent to me, the aging of consoles isn't keeping me from enjoying those games. I go back and play older gen games all the time; I actually love psone graphics. So yeah, there's more to games than just a pretty picture.

I got a gaming PC in the beginning of this year, and man oh man...

I love my X360 but that thing.. The matchmaking, the bad graphics, the excruciating loading times, the controller aiming/shooting, the lack of hotkeys, I never realized it was that bad but all that stuff IMMEDIATELY stood out when I started playing games on PC again. Last time I owned a gaming PC was when Half-Life 2 came out.

I can hold a mouse and aim with it freely and accurately, that's the biggest advantage for me. Sure graphics are great and high FPS makes me feel like I'm in a dream world, not to mention them Skyrim mods, and the loading time is so fast I can never finish reading the tips. But this mouse and keyboard, 9 adjacent buttons to set as quick hotkeys, a big space bar that sexually arouses me when I tap it, and the fucking MOUSE. I tried playing Rage on the 360 a while ago and I just wanted to pluck out the analog stick and yell at it, asking "why can't you be a mouse?"

Yeah, I'm getting a little hot here, but I feel like a born again Christian. This is the high I felt when I first laid eyes on Deus Ex in 2001, I can feel it again!

I'm not really a stickler for graphics. The main reasons I love my gaming PC more than anything is because of its versatility, the fluidity of the games (depending on the port and the settings of course), and the great amount of game sales.

I'm not planning on buying a console besides the Wii U that I'm buying much later into the cycle when I can take my pick of first-party games. My PC has everything else covered.

Also, not just the graphics, but once you get used to using SSDs with all your computers (I have one in both of my machines), it makes consoles feel extra crappy.

i'm kinda weirded out by this new popularization of PC gaming. to me PC games were real time/turn based-strategy games, CRPGs, flight sims shooters etc. but it seems like the more and more people are playing games on PC's the idea of the PC game is kind of dying. when i hear people talk about the reason to by a PC is inevitably to play games (usually a console game) with considerably better graphics. im not trying to be elitist i just kind of yearn for the good old days when there was a lot of higher budget (for the time) innovative games on PC.

Gamers are extremely fickle. I love PC gaming, but just wait until the next-gen exclusives begin dropping.

I rigged up my consoles so they can work on my monitor, tends to mean I play consoles more than I used to due to my PC addiction.

@songwriter1987: I did the same thing and I am not sure If I can go back either. even more so that I have a Gamepad for games that work better with and and can swap over to my TV if I want at all.

My 360 has been sitting under my friend's tv at his house for probably the better part of a year.

He just forgets it's there too.

All of my consoles are plugged into my monitor as well. It's great, all of my games are in one spot and no one bothers me here.

You shouldn't yearn because what you're saying isn't really happening. Those games still exist. That's the beauty of it. If you have an adequate PC you get all these types of games that haven't/don't really work on consoles AND ports of traditional console games themselves (barring first-party exclusives).

As far as the big budget thing, eh I don't know. Will we ever get a PC flight sim with a "triple AAA" budget? I don't know. But that's where stuff like Kickstarter and the "indie game" scene come in to pick up the slack.

God yes. Dude, playing MGS4 after spending $2000 on a PC is harrrrrrd. The framerate, the latency, the textures... bleh.

But with ACTUALLY GOOD (kidding, MGS4 is fine) games, I don't mind. Something like Gears of War 3 is fine because of a pretty great framerate and a generally sharp looking game that also manages to still be super fun on a gamepad. That being said, if I can play on a PC, no way am I playing it on a console. Yuck!

There will be a couple exclusives, sure, but PCs today can play better looking games than PS4 games already, so I am not worried. I'll probably get a PS4/Durango so I can play whatever comes out before I go to boot camp because there are bound to be cool games, but I get the feeling plenty of the good ones will come to PC anyway (Watch Dogs, BF4, Witcher 3, etc). Not much I'm interested in that won't be coming to PC that's been announced, so we'll see how May/E3 goes.

Yeah, the versatility is astounding. I love that I can play Bioshock: Infinite and FTL on the same machine. The indie game scene is quite a selling point. And then there are AAA PC exclusives like Sim City and Starcraft II.

I got an awesome ASUS laptop last christmas, mostly cause my old computer was straight BUSTED, and H-O-L-Y S-H-I-T!! Graphics!!! I haven't had a "powerful" computer since 2007! so the past few months have been me downloading all those steam games I bought in sales but could never actually play!

Arkham City, Skyrim, and Sleepy Dawgs have been the greatest Difference from their console counterparts. Can't wait for Farcry 3 to go on sale.

I just want to play games, i really don't go fucking nut balls on consoles games. I played Bioshock Infinite on both PC and Xbox and the xbox version was fucking horrendous, low res textures ect. but it was the game that made me go EHHHHH. It's fun i'm wasting time who cares.

Perhaps I haven't played that many PC games yet but I haven't noticed that big of a difference. I actually been enjoying handheld gaming more this year then both PC and consoles.

There's still some great console exclusives to enjoy but with Steam's big picture mode and controller compatibility there is no reason not to play most games on PC if the option is available. I'll be interested to see if this changes with the next-gen consoles.

My PS3 is covered with dust.

However, that may change once I get Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut.

No, console games don't look like "shit" in comparison to PC games.
Unless of course you compared PS1 vs 2013 High-End PCs

But I'm just a gaming fanboy, I don't care what platform I'm playing it on.

They really do, you don't see it is all. Which is fine, not everyone does. Also nice try, it has nothing to do with being a "fanboy" of anything, he said he loved his PS3 more than anything and was just stating and asking a question in the thread he made. Nice try though.

i don't mind too much. i havn't touched my xbox 360 for a while though. ps3 and pc is mostly what i play on. don't really play too much of newer pc games as my computer is getting really old.

The only thing that really bugs me about the consoles is that retail is cheaper than digital. My preference is for digital, but I'm not going to pay a premium to not have a box shipped to me. Otherwise, yes console games look worse. But it ends up being a case by case basis on whether it is acceptable.

That said, I only bought the consoles way late in the cycle out of curiosity for some of the titles I could not get on PC (my PC was already grossly higher performance at that point, and it is a larger delta now). I'm not going to say it was strictly speaking worth it, but the cost of wiiu/x360/ps3 is not exactly a terribly big hill to get over.

Not really, even after getting a gaming PC I still play COD on consoles because I think the PC versions are fucking terrible. Also I've played a lot of stuff like WWE 13, Persona 4 Arena and Halo 4 this year so I've been getting a good bit of use out of my consoles.

I don't find it hard at all. Even with multiplatform games being so ubiquitous nowadays, the PC library is still missing a huge segment of "console-style" games. I recently played Vanquish on PC and even though it was 1) not the best looking game by current standards and 2) a shooter on console, I had a blast playing it.

@zeforgotten: Okay, this is an extreme example, because not only are the textures dramatically better on the pc, but also more detail is added to the pc version because of its ability to render more detail.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXQWrd4lMlg

@songwriter1987: Sure, but saying that they look like "shit" is just pathetic fanboy hyperbole. (not saying, OMG YOU FANBOY! just using the word like you did)
For what it's running on, Crysis 3 looks good enough on a console.

Also

@pause422:

Try reading the first 7 things he wrote in the topic of this thread.
Need a hand figuring it out?

As I have switched last year to PC as my main gaming platform, it has been a blast! I will play consoles with my friends from time to time, but that is rare nowadays.

Anyways, will I be going back to consoles? No. Will I buy the new consoles? It depends on the games they will have at launch and a few months after it.

I got a real gaming PC a few months ago but I'll still fall back on consoles for my main gaming needs, since the majority of games I enjoy or want to play are on consoles. In the past I never cared about resolution, graphical power, framerate or anything, and now that I can play most PC games maxed out...I still don't really care about that stuff. I care about the games I'm playing/want to play. If that game is on PC, I'll get it. If it's on PS3 or 360, I'll get it.

I can only sort of understand. Having played through this, graphics don't matter to me too much (I can't even notice FPS in a natural environment), but I have felt that feeling of being unable to return through controls. Half-Life 2 was the first FPS I'd played on PCs, and it ruined console shooters for me. DAMN YOU, MOUSE AND KEYBOARD!

Welcome.

Im seriously contemplating buying a used PS3 just for The Last Of Us.

Also, welcome indeed and enjoy.

PC gaming spoiled me. I originally bought Bioshock Infinite for the 360, but I couldn't wait so I got it off of Steam. By the time I received the 360 copy I had finished the game. I couldn't play through it a second time on xbox, because it looked terrible comparatively.

I play on both PC and 360 regularly without any real issues of that kind. Do the PC versions look a hell of a lot better? Of course they do! We're talking about a 10 years old console, after all. But the difference doesn't really bother me. The 360 versions look fine, they are sufficiently optimized that they look and flow well enough that I'm not bothered. If you ask me, artists and designers nowadays are pretty damn good at hiding the flaws.

I don't "see" the resolution difference that often. Well of course I see it if I compare screen-by-screen, but I play the 360 on a 26" 720p TV from a decent distance so it looks sharp enough. Really, the difference isn't that in-your-face unless you hook the console up to a 1080p PC monitor - TVs handle scaling pretty well. Ditto for frame rate - the consoles have a leg up here, as far as below 60 FPS framerates are concerned, thanks to being able to consistently keep a set framerate reasonably well most of the time. Of course, if you compare them version to version - say, like Skyrim on both, it's going to be much more apparent, but when would you do that?

@nivash:

Well, in consoles you get either sub 30 or a solid 30 frames per second.

Heres what you get with PCs, so id say the leg is more up on that side.

@zenmastah: I meant more in a subjective sense: 30 FPS doesn't feel as bad on a console because developers go great lengths to make sure the game never gets outright unplayable. On a PC, hardware incapable of going very far beyond 30 FPS can reach outright horrendous framerates at times. That's why you want to go to sixty, to make sure it stays between 40 and sixty at the worst times or at least never goes under 30.

So my point was that consoles handle FPS around 30 better than PCs. And because if this, the lower FPS isn't as big a deal as it is when you compare graphics cards, for instance.

Meh. I did the plunge a couple years ago and haven't had much trouble going back. Only time it really gets me is when there's terrible aliasing issues or loads of pop-in.

I'm in the same boat. The current generation of consoles just can't run games properly for me. Lower res, lower textures, barely able to touch a constant 30 FPS. Then, the controls. I used to be ''okay'' with the joysticks, especially with shooters, but now that I've returned to the mouse, damn it's so imprecise. Finally, the insane loading time on the 360 just to boot up the dashboard killed it for me.

@snail said:

Welcome.

Yeah seriously, when I made the switch I felt like an idiot for not doing it sooner.

oh yeah, that'll give me a reason to check if my PS3 still turns on.

Also, the 360's just painful to use at this point. Like Ryan was saying a podcast or two ago, that shit just moves like molasses; everything about it. So labored and slow. That hardware was not meant to do what all that software demands.

After running a trimmed down OS from an SSD for a year or so now, a slow UI (game or system) can be one of the most frustrating things.