Share your unfiltered, unpopular gaming opinions and let's dive into some real discussions. If you come across a view you disagree with, feel free to (respectfully) defend your perspective. I don't want to see anyone say stuff like "we're all entitled to our own opinions." Let's pretend like gaming is a science and we are all award winning scientists.
My Unpopular Opinion:
I believe the criticism against battle royales is often unwarranted. Most complaints revolve around constant content updates, microtransactions, and toxic player communities
Many criticize the frequent content updates, often cosmetic, as overwhelming. However, it's optional, and no other industry receives flak for releasing more. I've never seen anyone complain about too many Lays or coke flavors.
Pay-to-win concerns are mostly outdated; microtransactions are often for cosmetics. If you don't have the self control to not buy a purple glittery gun, then I'm glad you don't play the games anymore, but I don't think it makes the game bad.
The annoying player bases is the one I understand the most. I don't really have a point against this except that it's better to play with friends.
Overall I think battle royale games are pretty fun and rewarding. Some of my favorite gaming memories were playing stuff like apex legends late at night with friends or even playing minecraft hunger games with my cousins like 10 years ago. A long time ago I heard in a news segment that toy companies found out that people are willing to invest a lot of time and energy into winning ,if they know there will be a big reward at the end, and battle royales tap into that side of my brain.
This is just my opinion
It really depends on your expectations. Once you clarified that you meant parity with current consoles, I understood why you wrote what you did.
I'm almost the exact opposite of the PC princesses who can say with a straight face that running a new AAA release at anything less than high settings at 4K/120fps is "unplayable". I stopped watching/reading a lot of PC gaming content online because it kept making me feel bad about my system even though I'm very happy with its performance.
Like a lot of patient gamers, I'm also an older gamer, and I grew up with NES, C64, and ancient DOS games. I'm satisfied with medium settings at 1080/60fps, and anything more is gravy to me. I don't even own a 4K display. I'm happy to play on low settings at 720/30fps if the actual game is good. The parts in my system range from 13 to 5 years old, much of it bought secondhand.
The advantage of this compared to a console is that I can still try to run any PC game on my system, and I might be satisfied with the result; no-one can play a PS5 game on a PS3.
Starfield is the first game to be released that (looking at online performance videos) I consider probably not being worth trying to play on my setup. It'll run, but the performance will be miserable. If I was really keen to play it I might try to put up with it, but fortunately I'm not.
You could build a similar system to mine from secondhand parts for dirt cheap (under US$300, possibly even under US$200) although these days the price/performance sweet spot would be a few years newer.
Yeah precisely. I bought a PS4 to play Spiderman. Then they asked me to buy a PS5 to play Spiderman 2. Fuck. That. My PC is older than my PS4, and I'll be playing Spiderman 2 on the PC when it gets ported. This is what made me mostly give up on consoles after Halo 5, and Spiderman has convinced me to abandon them entirely. Except for my Switch, which is still going strong and playing new releases after 6 years. Nintendo knows what's up. Sony and Microsoft don't.
You can't do the math on the price per performance of a PC at one point in time. You have to do the long term math.
I aim for mid tier, so something like $800-1200 if I built everything new. But I rarely tax my system. Here are my specs:
I can play most games at reasonable framerates (40+ FPS, most >60) at 1440p. My system is about as good as a console, at least in overall experience (my screen is a foot from my face, so it looks better than 4k at 10x the distance).
I recently upgraded for ~$500, and before that was rocking a Ryzen 1700 (got for programming, not gaming) and GTX 960. I didn't upgrade because a specific game ran poorly, I upgraded because I wanted better non-gaming perf (compiling code, Wayland on my Linux system, etc).
My kids are just fine on my laptop with an AMD APU (3500U), and most of my most played games would work pretty well on that hardware.