I'm writing this article in lieu of playing Dark Souls 3 because, like many others, I have beaten the first boss, and the game crashes any time I try to go further. Right now I'm watching a very long update bar which I estimate means I have an hour and a half more of waiting before being able to see if I can progress to Firelink Shrine.
I'm not aware of our PS4 or XBone cousins having any of the same issues.
Not only that! Again like many others I downloaded the, quite frankly excellent, Telltale bundle from the Humble Store last month. It was a package full of top quality games like The Walking Dead, Tales From the Borderlands, and The Wolf Among Us. Want to know something? Not one of them worked straight away. I had to employ a workaround to get them to operate at all. (The short version is: they won't load up in fullscreen mode (the default mode) with the default resolution for some unknown reason. I would simply be staring at a blank screen. By opening it on PC, then streaming to my Macbook I am able to see the game and change the resolution, which fixes the issue). Again, it took me a whole evening of not playing The Walking Dead to get to that point. Now, I'm no tech whizz, I don't work in a technical field at all, and I am therefore very impressed with myself for managing to sort out this issue; it's not something that was suggested on any forum I've seen, I simply stumbled across it on my own, and I therefore think that there must be others out there who are very disappointed by the fact that they still cannot get their games to work.
I am very much a PC fan. The advantages that it has over console make it the clear winner for me. This is the, very persuasive, article from Reddit's PC Master Race sub about why PC gaming is the way forward. However, that is about the only part of that particular subreddit that I'm able to get on board with nowadays.
The PC Master Race label, I think, started as a cheeky jab at console players, much like the ones that they have back at us. However, it now appears to have become more than that, with some PC advocates being completely unable or unwilling to admit that the platform has any flaws. Well, as someone with limited time to play games, I am severely pissed off at not being able to play the game I want to play on one of my very few days off work, and instead having to waste time hunting the internet for workarounds, and downloading massive updates. Sad as I am to admit it: on days like this I kick myself for not just buying a PS4.
There is a general feeling in the PC gaming community that we are treated as second-class citizens compared to the console gamers, who get a version of a game optimised to their machine, which works on day 1 most of the time. Yes, they may have poorer graphics and frame rates, but if it's a choice between an ugly version and a version that doesn't work at all, maybe the ugly one isn't so bad? I agree completely that PC players should have high-quality and reliable games, especially in Triple-A titles which we pay £40+ for, from the moment they're downloaded. However, that's just not the way it is. PC versions of games are prone to bugs that the console players don't have to deal with. It's a major advantage that the console players have, and we PC players apparently just need to bend over and accept it.
Conclusion: PC 'master race' members need to get off their high horses. In theory the PC platform is superior to consoles, but it's far from perfect, and it's occasionally very disappointing indeed. PC gamers' shit stinks too guys.
