By Sam Coles:
Console gaming is something I’ve stuck with for the past 15+
years due to the fact the convenience of the plug and play nature. However that
convenience has dwindled since late 2012 with the annoyance of waiting for
updates and installs to finish.
Back in the day PC’s use to be a royal pain in the neck to
game on before the period of Steam where everything was at your fingertips, so
if you wanted patch a game you had to wait for the company to produce a file or
floppy disk if you go further back to 90’s with a patch. The consoles back then
had the advantage because when you bought one you could take it out of the box,
hook it up to the TV, put the game in and it would start with a loading screen
or two but you were straight into the game with no installs or updates.
The Xbox 360 and PS3 was the step into online gaming with
consoles and this wasn’t a problem it was fantastic that games could evolve
from standard local multiplayer to global multiplayer were you can make friends
from all over the world. This was also great as well as they could fix minor
problems and bugs with games with small patches, these were mostly harmless as
they were generally between 1-10 MB at most. However once we got towards 2012
the patches started to get bigger and some games started to come with mandatory
installs which resulted in console gamers waiting rather than playing. Then as
the 7th console generation came to a close in 2013 games came with
installs due to the hardware being stretched where they couldn’t stream the
data from the disc alone.
The Xbox One and PS4 released in November of 2013 which like
any gamer I was super excited, I didn’t get the two consoles until 2014 and I
was super excited. However as I got the consoles an ugly reality cropped its
head up with the huge patches as game developers realised that they could
produce a low effort release at launch where they could fix the problems later.
We had infamous launches such as Battlefield 4 not working where it took DICE
nearly a year to fix, along with Halo The Master Chief Collection which came with
a massive 22 GB patch, but the game still didn’t work properly. This is where
the plug and play nature of consoles for consoles died and I understand that
games are now bigger and require the horse power and other things to run them
but it is persuading me to get a gaming PC and leave consoles.
As of now we have these mid generation consoles which add a
bit of extra power due to the fact the consoles were under powered when they
were released, this is where these companies have forgotten the reason why
people buy consoles because when you buy a console you have a fixed piece of
hardware for at least 5 years and then you move on to the next one. These “new”
consoles are dumb in my opinion because these specs are what the Xbox One and
PS4 should have been when they originally released these damage controlling
consoles really show the state of gaming on consoles.
Reading this you probably think I hate the Xbox One and PS4 and
that is not true, I like them I’ve played some fantastic games on the systems I’m
just merely highlighting the issues that they have, you can like something and
still critique it that’s what makes us human.
This was a short editorial about how consoles aren’t really
consoles anymore they’re trying to be PC’s and inferior PC’s at best. Honestly
I might just give up on future consoles and move to PC gaming as the parts are
getting cheaper and they are easy to assemble. Who knows maybe things will get
better but it’s not looking good at the moment.
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