Starfield [XBSX|S, PC, XGP]

Isn't direct controller input disabled on PS5's browser?

 

Any lost market is still a loss, especially when that market was the biggest consumer of your product at full price.

I know it's easy to throw insults when you aren't equipped for better but there's no salt, I'll buy it fron Steam if it turns out to be any good. It's no big loss to the PS market really, makes room for better games and gives smaller studios rooms to grow. It's jsut sad for Bethesda and the rest that they will be eventually become another footnote in PS history.

And like I said simply buying your way to the top isn't going to make people fall over themselves to join your party, it just breeds contempt for the most part.

 

I would have been a contender but then I took an arrow to the ladder....

 

No idea, never owned a PS. You can use the controller in the MS Edge browser. I've seen some use it for Steam & Stadia.

Tommy McClain

 

Title says Xbox and PC.

This post reads like something from the early 2000's lol.

Yeah i dunno what these few are complaining about, their sure living in another time frame. Its the other way around, consoles have become more like pc's (updates, patches, firmwares, online etc) while pc'x have gone from something like W98 to W10/W11 and steam.

Since where talking about gaming, its very possible to use either an xbox or playstation controller on pc

Again, some seem to live in another time frame indeed regarding controllers aswell

Hm, i did suspect your aim awhile before.

 

It's still inferior. Which is why it's not widely adopted on PC. Only those that can only play on controller choose to do so, it's definitely not common as a performance choice.
slow adventure titles, fine, w/e. But on PC, high frame rates, low settings graphics, instantaneous response type inputs are the ideal setup when it comes to wanting to move into higher skill brackets for any sort of fps or rts game.

 

A controller might be "inferior" if you want to "move into higher skill brackets" when competing against other keyboard + mouse players on a gaming platform which support them.

I prefer playing GTA, RDR2, racing games (BeamNG, Assetto Corsa, Forza series) and my various NES and arcade emulation ROMs with an XBOX controller plugged into my PC. However, I also prefer K+M for most of my FPS games (Skyrim, Fallout series, Prey, Doom series, Tomb Raider, etc), most of my Steam-based 2D or top-down scrollers and RPGs (Civ, Endless Space series, AOE series, Noita, Baba is You.)

Both have their place; I tend to use a controller for games which are more relaxing for me.

 

The thing is, on the pc you have a (much) wider choice and customization of control input. The idea that controllers (like the one on xbox and PS) are a hassle to use on PC is a thing of the past. Their as easy to use on pc as it is on any of the consoles.

Same with the TV/living room, its no more then just plug & play.

 

I only say a dongle because it'll be a cheap enough dedicated device. It might be a couple of years before I bother, so I may well have a laptop or something by then. Not one good enough for local gaming, but certainly good enough for streaming.

But yeah, for a lot of casuals - or people like me who are core gamers but casually involved in Microsoft's ecosystem - a dongle seems pretty much ideal.

That said, I'd buy Starfield at £60 for my PS5 if that was an option. That's compared to the £30 I'll likely pay for a couple of months of GamePass.

There's a cost to porting, but there's also likely some amount of PS5 development already done that they'll have to throw away.

And then how many people are there like me who aren't going to switch for Zenimax's games vs the number of people who may be tempted?

And how many people will subscribe to GamePass for Starfield, forget about the service after they're done with the game, and never use it again while still paying?

There's plenty more besides just that to consider. And after typing that, I'm just relieved I wasn't the one trying to justify a $7 billion purchase!

I'm not keen on the "if you can't beat them, buy them" mentality either.

But that's a whole other discussion for a whole other thread; one that's bound to attract swarms of fanboys and generally get pretty depressing/boring.

 

Yeah, plugging in an actual xbox controller straight into a Windows 10 box and everythtng was indeed "it just works." It seemed like basically all my games already knew button mappings, even the Steam overleay was all "hey, you've got a controller, howabout we enter Steam Big Screen Mode" or whatever it's called. Pressing the Xbox button on the controller also brought up the Windows 10 xbox functionality where it would let you select from common + recent games to hop straight into, and would take you out of a game to look at stats while playing.

I also saw mention of patching and software updates and whatnot earlier in this thread. I have an Xbox One X (obv not the newest and similarly-named Series X) and that bastard kinda sucks when it updates. Want to play games while it downloads and updates in the background? NOPE. Want it go faster? Hahah NOPE. Want RDR to load in less than forever even when I bought an external USB3.1 high performance SSD drive? LOL NOPE.

It's still fun, yet anyone grouching about patches on (modern) PC's still being any level of actual work doesn't seem like they've been on a modern PC. In nearly all cases, I'm not even aware a PC upgrade has happened until I get the little notification in the bottom right corner of the screen letting me know a reboot will be necessary at some point. All the while, I was likely using my PC the entire time utterly oblivious to whatever it pulled down and installed.

 

Exactly this. I find the whole argument about patches & updates a little bizarre to be honest. It had merit 15-20 years ago but as you say, these days everything is automated and mostly silent.

Granted my PC is online at least 8 hours a day so it has time to do all this stuff in the background, but a Windows update that actually requires a reboot is like what, once a fortnight? And by "requires" I mean, tells you it would be nice to do so when you get a chance via a completely unobtrusive icon in the bottom corner of the screen.

Games stores/launchers all update themselves as long as they're running and again, simply inform you a restart is required (literally a 10 second task in Steams case) every couple of weeks or so. And the games within them update automatically without any kind or user input as far as my experience goes unless you specifically turn that feature off.

That just leaves the graphics drivers which I'll grant are released on a very frequent (monthly?) basis. But you don't have to update whenever a new one's released, hell it's entirely optional even when a game ready driver is released for that new game you're about to start. And if you do choose to upgrade, GeForce Experience does it near silently with a couple of mouse clicks and no restart needed. I probably upgrade once every 3 months or so.

For all the talk of consoles encroaching on typical areas of PC advantage like load times and image quality, the opposite is in fact equally true if not more so. The PC user experience over the past couple of decades has become far more user friendly while consoles have become far more PC like with regards to system updates, game patches, bugs, crashes etc... and now even configurable graphics options within games - which used to be considered a bad thing in some circles, but is now acknowledged as a good thing.

 

It's funny that some people are acting like MS paid $7 billion just for Starfield. Lol.

This is one game of many and only a quarter of what MS is up to strategically wrt GamePass has anything to do with Bethesda even.

Every nice exclusive brings a casual PS gamer one step closer to the MS ecosystem. MS keeps adding straws to the camel's back. Starfield might not be the straw to break it, but it is one more straw ... or perhaps several.

 

Is it that frequent? I never notice as I shutdown my PC off each night, yeah ever so often it gives 'updating message dont turn off PC' when I start it again but I assumed you didnt need to install these updates. sure it was dire back in the bad old days, but now windows only crashes maybe once a month and everytime it hits me, fuck I used to go through this multiple times a day

Oddly though my android phone I never reboot, its always on 24 hrs a day, does it crash? apps do fail but the OS, cant think of that happening for years (wouldnt even know how to reboot my phone, I assume hold down power key for long time?), IOS sometimes needs to be rebooted maybe every 6 months

 

It'll be interesting to reassess Microsoft's strategy towards the end of the generation. It looks to me that they're aiming to be a "software as a service" type setup rather than the traditional hardware-software console provider.

It's arguable that setup is the future of gaming, just depends whether internet setups and people are really ready for it.

 

It has this for Windows Updates, but not for Steam. It's both a blessing and a curse. I love it on my desktop, not so much on my HTPC/server (which I don't want automatically updated). But you can get around the automatic updates to a certain extent by marking the network as being on a metered connection. Critical updates will still get forced through, but that's cool by me since those are far more important.

The biggest drawback is that when it powers up to download and install updates, it also powers on the displays. MS needs to change this behavior, IMO, so that silent updates like this don't power on the display. It's annoying when you're asleep and suddenly your room is filled with light. I've since gotten into the habit of manually turning off the displays (a minor annoyance) to avoid this happening.

Regards,
SB

 

I'm IT tech support for my parents. So, often, when I visit, there'll be something for me to sort for them, whether it's a suspicious message on their phones, some sort of update for their laptop, or my old PS4 has made them nervous somehow.

My use of the laptop is usually a minimum of 2 weeks apart. And uniquely amongst all of the platforms I use, there's always something that needs pissing about with. My own, long since broken laptop wouldn't present me such problems, since I used to at least turn that on for emails/internet most days.

So yeah, I think @DSoup is correct: if you regularly use your PC, the update process is pretty much invisible; if there are chunks of non-use, the update process seems to be more PS3-like

 

Lol, Windows already has exactly that. It's a setting called (funnily enough) 'Windows Automatic Maintenance'. The PC will wake at the time you set (default 2am), download all the pending windows updates, install them, run any other pending maintenance tasks/security scans, and then go back to sleep once finished.

Steam does by default apart from the restart. There are literally support threads for people who want to stop it. And yes, when Steam is running (which it can be set to do by default at Windows start) it will automatically keep all of you games up to date silently unless told not to. This is the same for other games platforms as far as I'm aware.

Then I have good news for you. See above.

Yes it does, see above.

What lack of Steam auto update? See above. The only thing it doesn't do automatically is restart itself after an update (which is like a mouse click and 10 second wait, but I agree would be nice if done for you).

 

In addition to above, there are also optional configurations in Steam to allow it to pull background updates even if you're actively playing a game. For those of us with enough CPU power, disk throughput and internet / network capacity, there's no reason to NOT enable that behavior.

Back to Windows updates happening auto-magically at 2am: Buddha does have the same basic gripe as me, which is it fully powers on the device and all accessories which, if you're in the same room, makes for an obnoxious bright light when your monitor goes full blast.

A very long time ago when I was using it, the now defunct Windows Home Server product included an installable client for all your home Windows boxes to wake up in the wee hours of the morning and run a backup. The challenge was, it didn't automatically put the machine back to sleep after the backup was done. I wrote a small piece of AutoIT code which was triggered within Task Manager on any power event to read the registry for the configured client backup time. If the current system time was within 30 minutes of the backup window time, and if it saw the client backup application running, my app would sleep until the client app finished -- or my app would immediately exit if one or both conditions were false. After my app woke up from the client backup finishing, it wait another ten minutes for any mouse activity, and if nothing then it would put the box back to sleep. I put that latter part in for an occasion where my wife was awake at an arbitrary time and somehow went to go use her little netbook after the backup had started -- and my script put her machine to sleep after backup finished but before SHE was finished lol.

A few months later it occured to me to drop in a piece of production code I used at work -- another AutoIt script I wrote called the "WSUS Crowbar" which force-installed any pending Windows Updates. After the backup was complete, it would then force-search for updates and then force-install all pending updates it found, using all the Windows Update Services API calls (basically all of which are still valid today IIRC.) And when the updates were done, it all went back to sleep again.

I was sitting here thinking I could maybe dig out that code and modify it to shut off the screen, but it would only happen after the screen already came on. Not much help there