Justin258

"Design work" can mean a lot of things, but if it means intensive Photoshop work or video editing or 3D modeling or something else that resource intensive, then yes, a better processor and some DDR4 RAM could do you some good. Still, I'd suggest saving up some money and going for a processor, RAM, motherboard, and aftermarket processor cooler all at once, as upgrading the processor you have will need all of those parts at once (I tried the stock cooler on my own Ryzen 7 2700X and the temps got pretty high so I wouldn't suggest depending on that).

If cost is a concern, Ryzen processors have picked up a pretty good reputation for performance-per-dollar since they came out. A Ryzen 7 2700X is around $300 right now.

If you buy a new CPU, you're going to have to buy a new motherboard and RAM to go with it. Both AMD's and Intel's current processors require DDR4 RAM, the processor you currently have uses DDR3 RAM.

Whether you upgrade or not depends on whether you really want to spend that kind of money. I wouldn't say it's necessary, but I also think you would see some gains from it, especially if you multitask while playing games or if you play a lot of open world games.

If you're playing games just to complete them, you're doing it wrong. If you always think about how many games you have to play, you're going to be stressed out and anxious and feeling like you have too much to do all the time. You can't finish everything, so don't try to.

My best advice would be to forget actually finishing everything in your current backlog. Don't worry about it. If you're playing a game and you're just not having fun, don't keep playing it. Play something else. Sometimes you spend a year anticipating a game and you get it and it's really not doing much for you and that's OK. That happens sometimes to every enthusiast of all types, so when it happens to you, shrug your shoulders and move on. Part of this is also accepting that every time you buy a game, you're running the risk of getting something you might not actually like, so make sure that's money you're OK losing.

My second advice would be to focus on one or two games at a time and don't try to play twenty plus hour games back-to-back. This one can take a little while to get used to - at first, your thoughts will probably frequently wander into other games and keeping your mind on a few games is hard. But it gets easier.

And, finally, if you're forcing yourself to play something then you probably need to either play something else or go do something else. Whenever I'm not enjoying a game I'd like to be enjoying, I put it down and go read a book or do some chores around the house or something and then come back to it a day or two later. After two or three times of trying this, if I'm still not into it I'll put it down and go do something else with my time. I don't have enough time to play something that I think I'd like instead of something that I actually like.

Full backwards compatibility with everything would be amazing. Imagine a box that could play everything from the PS1 to the PS5!

That's kind of a pipe dream, but I'd pay for a console that could do that.

4K HDR 60FPS probably isn't going to happen, not as long as developers can squeeze better looking textures and effects out if 30FPS. Which is why I'm probably sticking with PC next gen. I have the consoles this gen but have barely played them.

It's really a decision to be made between the developers and the publishers. If they don't want to implement an easy mode, then they shouldn't have to, or they shouldn't be made to by a public who only wants to experience a portion of the game instead of the entire thing as intended.

As a comparison, Herman Melville had no obligation to make Moby Dick easier to read. He could have released an easier version of the novel, but he didn't, so you need to read the book if you want it.

Does this suck for people who don't have the time, patience, or capacity to get into something? Yeah. It does. But if I were a game developer and I wanted to make a difficult game, I'd be really fucking bummed if I spent all that time perfectly balancing everything and someone just said "yo, can I just blow past all that?". My immediate response would be "No, sorry, the difficulty is part of the game".

I don't think that attitude is toxic. I think it's just believing in the product you've made and the audience that it's made for.

None of this is to say you shouldn't criticize a game for having an unfair difficulty, or for saying that the difficulty is just way too high for you to enjoy it. That's fine. But please don't act like developers or publishers "should" change their game just for you, even if (and this is going to sound mean spirited but no argument thus far has changed my mind) you can't play the game for some reason. Not every game has to be for everybody, and not everybody has to be able to finish everything.

...on the flip side of that coin, if you want a difficult game but don't have the self-control to avoid turning the difficulty down, then perhaps you don't actually want a difficult game and should re-evaluate what you're looking for out of video games. If Sekiro or Cuphead or whatever actually had an easy mode, that doesn't hurt anybody else's enjoyment of a game. Adding accessibility is a thing that's becoming more and more popular and that's great.

As a final note, I'd like to mention that despite loving everything else about Sekiro, I wound up dropping it without getting very far in because I just didn't find it fun. Parrying was never my strong suit in Dark Souls, I couldn't get the hang of it in Bloodborne, and I'm garbage at it in Sekiro, too. I don't really want to spend hours and hours getting good at a combat style I don't particularly enjoy, so I dropped it. It's possible I'll pick it back up at a later date but some part of me feels like that's not going to happen.

Since I started listening to music, I've used too many different programs for listening to music and reset that number too many times to give you an accurate number.

...but I'll see if Google Play keeps up with this.

Black Crown Initiate's Selves We Cannot Forgive has been a staple of mine for a little while now and I listened to Polyphia's Renaissance until I was sick of it.

In reality, I've probably listened to Opeth's Blackwater Park (the whole album, not just the song) way more times than anything in that list, August Burns Red's Messengers has been in and out of my listening rotation since high school, there's a lot of Death in there somewhere, I love Ne Obliviscaris's Portal of I album and parts of Citadel are amazing too. Alter Bridge's Blackbird has also been a staple since high school.

Basically I like a lot of hard rock and prog metal.

EDIT: So what I posted above doesn't seem to keep track of what I listen to on my phone, which is a shame because I'm sure that list would be very different. It's not that I'm ashamed of the list or anything, just that it isn't representative of my listening habits, not since a few years ago at least.

Destiny is a lot of fun to actually play. It feels fantastic all around, and that's pretty much the reason why I played the first one for a total of 25 hours or so and the reason why I played the second one for a fair bit more. It's so much fucking to just shoot things in that game that I didn't even mind doing the same missions over and over again, for a time at least. I also think that game looks fantastic. It's too bad that virtually everything else about the game, from UI design to story to characters, are all either flat and boring or downright trash.

But even Destiny pales in comparison to something like Doom 2016. You're just not going to get the damn near perfect gun-feel that games like Doom 2016, Halo, and Half-Life 2 have in loot shooters. Those games only have a handful of guns and enemy types and the designers can focus on making the absolute best versions of those things.

I'd really like to see a single player shooter structured like Dark Souls. No, I'm not talking about its difficulty or online features or obtuseness, but rather its level design and static loot. I think that, in the right hands, that would be a pretty awesome kind of game.

(I also think the guns in Borderlands 2 are some of the worst-feeling guns in any AAA shooter. People complained about Halo's guns looking like Fisher Price toys and going pew-pew too often, but Borderlands 2's guns felt like shooting fucking Nerf darts.)

...this is a troll, right?

For everyone saying Cyberpunk, I seem to recall the same reaction at that E3 demo (this has to be next gen, right? This can't possibly be an Xbox One/PS4 thing!) but didn't CDPR confirm multiple times that yes, Cyberpunk 2077 would be coming to current-gen consoles? In any case, I think that game looks awesome but I fully expect the final product to not quite live up to what was shown at E3. Come on, dudes, you know that we always see idealized, hyped-up versions of big games like that and the end result is never quite the same thing.

Meanwhile, has Bethesda announced platforms for Elder Scrolls VI and Starfield? What about Halo Infinite? That FFVII remake will probably come out on the generation after next, I wouldn't hold my breath on that thing coming out anytime soon.

That's probably partly because you're getting older and partly because the last generation went from 2005 to 2013 - three years longer than most generations, and a lot of 2014's biggest titles came to 360/PS3 as well.

Uh... that sounds like Call of Duty World at War zombies, perhaps even the original map.

I didn't like Black Ops zombies all that much and I think I might have played one other zombies mode since. But I played so fucking much World at War zombies.