I hate GTA online. Actually I have to admit I still don’t understand the appeal of online gaming, it has never scratched the itch for me.

I’ll play GTA 6, but I’m going to keep my expectations in check. I also agree, GTA IV was thus far the pentultimate. I really like RDR2 as well, both are definitely in my top 5.

Well the games for sure haven’t for the most part gotten any better. Maybe with the exception of the Rockstar games, like I totally get all the hate, but their games are also always next level.

And the dial up days lol. My dad wisely and thankfully got a second phone line.

Also I remember those underpowered computer days too lol. We got a 200 Pentium MMX the spring of 97, and that thing was cutting edge at first, but it quickly got pretty dated, like even around 2000 it was starting to struggle with some of the newer stuff. The old man insisted on riding it into the mid aughts. I was long and away at school and afterwards, with my own computers by then, but he rode that thing into the ground, and oh boy was it crawling at the end. We’d come home from school, where we had like wide open broadband, and have to suffer through Christmas break at dial up speeds lol.

8-tracks and 45s. I even remember early day modems where you actually had to pick up a landline, dial the number and then place the receiver in a specially built cradle that used analogue noise to communicate. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20 that used cassette tapes to save data.

Best days of life if you ask me. Well actually maybe the mid to later 90s, when the Internet first started coming home for everyone. Watching live concerts and Napster and all of that. Instant messaging people, and being able to download every Nintendo game in existence, on demand. When computer games went from here to THERE, like Carmaggedon and games like that. Those were the magic days. When I discovered Napster I think we legit skipped school for almost the entire week.

Thanks for a trip through the memories!

I’m old enough I can remember operating an 8-track deck in my dad’s truck. Didn’t have GPS accessible until oh geez, probably my later 20s? My kids are very young, so they only know the touchscreen world.

I don’t think there’s any going back. If we had to, like if there was a bad event or whatever, I’d like to think we could all eventually adapt, but it would be rough for sure. A lot of people wouldn’t make it.

You definitely aren’t.

If they only still made them like Bowie…

I agree with everything that you’ve said, it’s sad and pathetic, but we’ve invited the monster inside. The calls are coming from inside the house now.

I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been on a steam forum.

This shits generally everywhere nowadays, there’s no hiding from it. It’s like a worldwide pandemic of brain rot at this point. Everyone is polarized, and that’s never going to lead to anything good. I’m still not sure we should all be this connected to each other.

Social media in moderation and with responsibility and rational thought, there’s nothing wrong with that. But people don’t seem to be able to self police themselves, it’s turned into a massive addiction that’s maybe somehow just as bad as the opioid crisis in some ways. It’s infection has circled the globe, turning a lot of otherwise decent people into mindless meme chodes and racism repeaters.

Can’t speak for you, but I’m still playing both pretty regularly. I still play GTA IV quite a bit too, and return to San Andreas often enough. Vice city is still a classic, but those older ones are just getting a bit janky, which is ok considering they are 20+ years old. All of these games were ahead of their time.

Definitely sets the bar pretty high, maybe impossibly high, for GTA 6

Say what you will about Rockstar, but they make games that 20 years later you still want to return to them (I guess just about 8 years later in this case).

It’s really slow for about 1/3 of the way through, and then you get to Saint Denis and it starts taking off a lot harder.

It’s a masterpiece, but definitely a slow burn. It’s a top 3 game for me for sure.

It’s the next stage of corporate capitalism. It’s actually been underway for the past 20-30 years. We’ve seen the rise of the class of corporate overlords, none of whom could actually do the jobs beneath them, and add value of dubious quantity and quality. They take their MBAs and leveraged debt, and hack and chop, leaving a trail of chaos and dysfunctional broken companies behind them.

AI is just the next phase of this, and is going to be an economic destroyer, not value creator. Nobody seems to care that it can’t actually really do much useful, let alone replace people in their jobs. This seems completely lost to all of these corporate dweebs though, because again, none of them could actually do any of the jobs beneath them when the chips fall.

What AI could maybe replace though, is the executive lair of most companies. It’s not like neither add any fucking value, actually having AI in an executive role would probably lead to value creation, as everyone else could just largely ignore it unless it was useful.

What a world we live in.

Broderbund is right up there with top tier game makers, their games may be largely relegated to the history books now, but for all the right reasons. You didn’t even have to be a big video gamer, to appreciate one for their products (think Carmen Sandiego or Sim City). They definitely had an outsized impact on the industry, and I think we’d all be in a better place today if companies like them were allowed to thrive. Instead we get private equity, beta tier releases and preordering. Not to even mention all these stupid remake$

How is this a patient gamer, didn’t this game just come out literally this week?

The Horizons are just literally too much, they are overwhelming. Yet at the same time, they start to feel repetitive, like there will be a few good speed challenges or a handful of races that are enjoyable. Other than that, there’s so much, yet it feels so dead.

Forza Motorsports, the latest iteration was straight up trash. The online multiplayer has been wrecked by people that just outright cheat, like it’s so bad it’s blatantly obvious. You have no way of winning if you aren’t cheating, and most likely will end up in a pileup somewhere in the back because no one can drive. The story mode has been wrecked by a progression system that just literally makes no sense. It’s arguably a fairly attractive game to look at, but totally empty inside.

Sure as shit would flip the PC market on its head. That’s needed.

I’m not a big believer in customer shaming. This shifts the blame from the root cause.

This last iteration of Forza was awful. If that’s how it was going to be for this franchise going forward, good riddance. I’m sorry for the human impact this has though, that parts not lost on me. But the product was complete shit. Leaves a cavern sized hole in the market now. Forza has had a monster sized impact on the genre. That cannot be ignored.

She said see you later boi

So is AMD with their availability of literally three video cards in stock for all of North America at launch. Which in turn just fuels the scalpers. Downvote this all you want guys, AMD is just as complicit in all of this, they’ve fuelled this bullshit just as much.

If you could happen to fall into a 5800x or a 5800x3d for a decent price (getting harder to find I’m sure), I’d skip the upgrades and AM5. It doesn’t look like it’s going to go the distance like AM4 did, there’s already AM6 talk going on for 2027. There’s very little real world actual advantage to AM5 vs 4, it’s just largely more anti-consumer behaviour and marketing from PC chipmakers.

Maybe to their inventory department too, because let’s be frank, that’s what AMDs downfall really will be. Every product launch for them is now a faux launch, because no one can get their hands on the hardware. It’s not quite as bad for the processors, but their GPUs? Forgeddaboutit.

That last one is especially horrifying. You don’t own games when you cloud game, you simply lease them. We all know what that’s done for the preservation of games. Not to mention encouraging the massive amounts of shovel ware that we get flooded with.

Problem is preordering has been normalized, as has releasing games in pre-alpha state.

It’s just kind of unnecessary. Gaming in 1440p on something the size of your average computer monitor, hell even just good ol’ 1080 HD, is more than sufficient. I mean 1080 to 4k sure there’s a difference, but 1440p it’s a lot harder to tell. Nobody cares about your mud puddle reflections cranking along in a game at 120 fps. At least not the normies.

Putting on my dinosaur hat for a second, I spent the first decade of my life gaming in 8/16 bit and 4 color CGA, and I’ve probably spent the last thirty years and god only knows how much money trying to replicate those experiences.

Not to mention the cards have gotten huge and you just about need a nuclear reactor to power them. Melting cables and all.

Those cards were like what though, $199?

Fuck those guys too honestly. AMD is fueling this bullshit just as much as Nvidia.

The PC industry has turned into a scuzzy hellscape for average joes that just want to have decent options at realistic prices. They don’t even care about gaming anymore, it’s about YouTube and BitcoinBruhzz now.

I’ve still got a still pretty decent setup (5800x3d 4070ti), but it’s the last stand for this guy I’m afraid. Looking over the past decade or so, I’ve honestly had better gaming experiences on consoles for mere fractions of the price of a PC build. Mods and PC master race nonsense aside. Sure you don’t need a subscription for online PC playing (I rarely play online), but you can barely get a processor for what a PS5 costs anymore. Let alone a video card, which is upwards of a lot of people’s take home pay for a month, the way things are going.

I’ve barely played it, but I’ve had enough of this crap. I’m not biting.

I mean at the end of the day, it’s the gamers opening their wallets though, right? That’s the biggest behaviour that’s leading to this, when the chips fall. It’s like when people complain about preordering, well thats got a super simple solution: just don’t do it.

I’ve never bought a lootbox or a gaming pass. That sort of stuff irritates me, like sell me the game or fuck off. I’m ok with a DLC that expands a storyline or a new world or something, that comes a couple years later. I’ve always viewed that a bit differently, as long as the content of the core game isn’t affected. But even when companies are like buy the deluxe tier of our new game that has the Broken Road Protagonist Best DLC ever, releasing June of this year, that pisses me off because it’s like you purposely held that back to sell as additional content. I don’t tend to buy games that do that, and if I do, I never purchase nor participate in the additional content.

I mean this game is a banger, and the Williams’s contributions to gaming history is all time, but wtf is this and how is it an actual article?

I’m absolutely sure this is going to suck. What a way to wreck a legendary franchise. These games were sooo good too. Shame on EA

So I had a 2070 in mine, and updated last year to a 4070ti. I’m not going to lie to you here, the difference hasn’t been earth shattering. I mean it’s obviously better, but if you are gaming in 1080p, you should still be good for a bit yet. Games are released so horrendously optimized anymore, it doesn’t matter if you have your own personal nuclear power plant powering a video card the size of Texas, it’s still going to suck.

What card do you currently use?

But it’s ENHANCED this time.

Now shut up and give us your money. We have shareholders to enrich, won’t anyone just think about the shareholders…

That’s just it though. The top managers who make these decisions will probably be fine, half of them are probably at their desk this morning. It’s always everyone else that has to pay the price for their management missteps.

I desperately wanted one of those a couple years ago, but no dice. It was largely a paper launch in Canada. Still don’t see them very often either.

I fell for it last gen. Once I was done shoehorning (and I mean shoehorning) an oversized power supply, a video card that’s the size of a bus terminal, and all those stupid splitter cables, I swore any further purchases off.

Everything is just way too expensive, the gains are marginal, and it’s a lot of fuss all to just largely play re-rereleases of games that are 30+ years old, and other horribly optimized games that will take 2 years to sort out and in the meantime the computer you are using is irrelevant because it’s just going to run like shit no matter what. The hardware itself is questionably optimized too.

I’m running this setup into the ground and when it comes to gaming, I’m a console guy going forward.

You could have a video card the size of a nuclear power plant, and it’s still going to struggle with this unoptimized POS. Rockstar sucks at optimizing their games for PC, and it’s kind of inexcusable at this point (most of their games are a decade+ old at this point). RDR2 was the only large exception, but it still struggles here and there. They especially seem to struggle with grass textures. Case in point, watch GTA 5, it’s fine in the city. You’ll be chugging along, 180FPS or whatever, but the minute you leave the city your frames drop to like <30 FPS in spots, unless you really turn the detail down.

It’ll be unplayable. GTA Online as it is, is barely enjoyable and mostly unplayable.