I’ll be honest here - if you can put the money aside, this is where I’d post the “why not both” gif.
95% of the time, any cross-platform game will end up being better on PC - you can get more performance from it, hopefully mod bits & pieces of it, fans can often fix broken parts long before patch certification gets through MS and Sony’s hoops, and the massive back catalog of almost every game ever is available for a few bucks.
But by the same token, there are console exclusives that will never see the light of PC gaming that are well worth playing. Uncharted is the obvious example due to its recent release, but as Paula said in The IT Crowd, "I’d hate it if a game came out on one and I couldn’t play it ".
My suggestion for the PC would be to make sure you’ve got a decent PSU and cooling so you can upgrade the GPU down the line. I personally wouldn’t go top of the line - the sweet spot between price & performance is typically a few spots below that, although the new NVIDIA cards are supposed to be both high performing and relatively cheap, so that might change. A controller is also worth picking up, because despite what the master race says, mouse and keyboard isn’t always the best choice for every type of game…
Also, get The Witcher 3 (and 1 & 2). If you like old RPGs and Skyrim, this takes all of the good things from them and turns it up to 11. Also the upgraded Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle, can’t go wrong with them.
Strictly speaking, no. It is a sequel to them, but a lot of players have come new to the series and enjoyed it. Recaps are around on youtube and the like.
TW2 is certainly a top-notch action RPG though, so worth the 40 hours or so of gaming. Fighting etc isn’t quite as smooth as TW3, so it might be harder to go backward, although the story is arguably a bit tighter, due to the comparative straightfowardedness of the game.
The first game is built in a Neverwinter Nights fashion so has aged accordingly in terms of gameplay style, but has fantastic atmosphere and music. It’s harder to get into but worth it in my (fan) view.
To everyone who recommended Grim Fandango Remastered: I don’t have enough likes for you. I didn’t know it existed. I really hated when they went from 2D to 3D in Monkey Island. You went from some pretty great artwork to, well… crap. The games looked like shit. 2D is okay! You can use 2D and no one will complain! I promise! Just don’t make it look like shit.
Interestingly, I didn’t like them as much for some reason. Not bad, but I didn’t enjoy them as much as Fallout 3. I should look into New Vegas.
Dishonored sounds promising. I think you kind of picked up on what I liked best about Thief. Atmosphere is important.
That was because those games were quarter junkies. You were supposed to get maybe ten minutes of play before you put in another quarter and they were never designed to be “finished”. “How do you finish an arcade game? Why would one end?” Were questions people making video games would have asked in the late seventies/early eighties. I’m also really not crazy about this model, but I find there are occasional exceptions like Tetris, and I find I can tolerate some roguelikes. (I’m intrigued by No Man’s Sky, but it seems more Sandbox-like than roguelike-like.) I also can’t just watch a TV show for the most part, I have to be doing something else. Which is how I ended up binging on the roguelike Spelunky in one window while Mock the Week ran on YouTube for about a week. Why can’t we have a shows like that in America?!
But like I said, most of the time I really am not crazy about endless lack of variety (with asterisks) and some games really go out of their way to offer you that lack of variety. I don’t understand it.
See, it kinda makes sense for a simple arcade game as you say, sure. And it’s not like Space Invaders has a plot. It’s just “shoot them before they land, and don’t get shot” and nothing else. But still, the endlessness of it all really got to me. And in a game like Destiny, it takes me out of the moment. Endless respawns don’t really happen with Covenant mobs in most PvE Halo scenarios. Once you shoot that pair of Hunters, they stay dead and usually more of 'em won’t show up if you linger in the area. Which makes sense. But in Destiny patrols, there’s an endlessly respawning supply, in small manageable groups. Really makes me feel like I’m not doing the galaxy a lick of good.
But remember, some quarter-fed arcade games had actual endings, and could be beaten. I never got good enough at any of them to get there, but the obviously endless ones like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Centipede, etc. were too Sisyphean for me to enjoy for long.
Oh, and if you enjoyed Fallout 3, definitely play New Vegas.
Your list betrays you as a PC gamer. Don’t try to deny it.
I’m not saying that Zelda isn’t great. I bought a WiiU just to play the remastered version of Wind Waker. Zelda games are fucking great. But the rest of your list is a PC list. Which is why…
Listen to this.
Listen to this.
The difference between Dishonored and Thief is that in Dishonored you are fantastically OP and need to restrain yourself from mass murdering everyone. Whereas in Thief the best you can do is sap some poor sap and hide their body. Still, Dishonored is the closest heir to the Thief legacy.
Been. Talking. About. this. New Vegas with all expansion packs and fan mods is the definitive 3D fallout game, IMHO.
Like Mass Effect, the second Witcher game is the best of the series. W3 may be more fun to play, but W2 is the better game. You are forced to side with either the dwarves or the elves, and you MISS AN ENTIRE CITY if you only do 1 playthrough.
W3 is tons of fun, but you miss tons of character development if you start there. The Wrex clan is not the same if you only play ME3. Mordin Solus is not the same if you only play ME3.
If you want to understand why this is so funny, you need start before ME3.
I dropped like 80 hours into Witcher 1 not because it was a good game (it wasn’t, terribly unfun combat mechanics), but because the world and backstory is so good. Still, that’s only worth it if you already love W2.
This is your thread, so up to you whether you want to consolidate this with the Offworld version that daneel mentioned. It’s up to you, really, except I will hate you forever for splitting up the bb gaming community.
Just ask an admin, real slow and polite, like this:
Hey, I’m Commander Abe and @Falcor is my favourite Don’t Push Your Luck Dragon on the Citadel. Would you be so kind to merge this thread with that offworld one over there?
Here’s a snaussage. Who’s a good DPY Luck Dragon? Is it you? It’s you!
Nah this has a different flavor. This topic needs a new title, though.
Not a big fan of one size fits all forevermore chat topics, myself. And this one, if you re read the first post, is pretty goal driven in what it set out to do, IMO.
You got me. I think I’m balking at the cost of the hardware more than anything. I need to start with a whole new everything. I can’t bring my four year old current consumer grade Gateway with an A6 quad core up to speed through a GPU upgrade alone.
With steam sales, I would expect the total cost of ownership of a PC to be less than a consoul, assuming you play a sufficient number of games over a couple of years.
I rarely buy games at full price anymore. There’s at least 6 years of AAA back catalog you have to plunder. New Vegas is $9.99 now, and sometime before the end of the year it will be less than 5 bucks. I think I paid like $2.50 for one of the most perfect games of all time, Dark Souls.
Yeah the stagnation of CPU perf has had unexpected benefits on the PC side – you almost never need to upgrade CPU, RAM, mobo any more. Just slot in a new midrange GPU and bam, you’re good.
That will continue for a long time as current consoles have super slow (or as I like to say, “Intel Atom class”) x86 cores, so the CPU demands for modern games will continue to be teeny-tiny relative to what a PC, even a 5 year old PC, can do.
I [quote=“ActionAbe, post:32, topic:78384”]
I can’t bring my four year old current consumer grade Gateway with an A6 quad core up to speed through a GPU upgrade alone.
[/quote]
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you are correct about that; but the one handy thing about modularity is that it doesn’t really cost much to test the theory.
As long as your existing system has at least one PCIex16 slot(whether gen 1,2, or 3) even the newest GPUs will work(power supply permitting, OEM systems tend to have ones of decent quality; but not much headroom for fancier parts than the system could be configured to ship with) with it; so there is no real downside to bumping the GPU and PSU if necessary first; and then seeing how the performance is. If it is good enough, excellent. If not, you’ve lost only a little time and can look into an appropriate CPU and motherboard upgrade.
The one major nuisance(exact magnitude depending on how much RAM you currently own, if it’s a just a couple of 2 or 4 GB DIMMs, or 4x2GB, that’s not too painful; but if you already have a decent chunk of RAM it’s a pity to toss it) is that a 4 year old system more or less implies DDR3; and your options are substantially more limited if you want to continue using your RAM rather than getting some DDR4. Perfectly doable, I actually had to pick up a 2011-release LGA 1155 motherboard replacement earlier this year and Newegg had plenty of new-in-box stock, never mind the secondary market; but local retail availability was next to nonexistent unless you wanted LGA1151 boards with DDR4 only.
I dunno, AMD’s CPU stuff is pretty behind at this point. I’d recommend a mid-range Skylake or Broadwell Core i3 chip (or i5 if you want to be a bit fancier) over literally anything in the AMD stable today. More modern platform and amenities.
I hope AMD can turn their fortunes around on the CPU front because it’s looking dire and has been for about the last four years now… an Intel with zero credible competition (well outside of smartphones and tablets I guess) is quite scary
You got me. I think I’m balking at the cost of the hardware more than anything. I need to start with a whole new everything. I can’t bring my four year old current consumer grade Gateway with an A6 quad core up to speed through a GPU upgrade alone.
