I’m not much of a PC gamer, much to the distress of many of my friends who assume that just because I write about games for a living, I probably know how to fix their computer problems. Unfortunately, I grew up in a house without a home PC – we had a Mac instead – and therefore have always done my gaming on a combination of console and Macbook. Even now, I always gravitate to console versions of games instead of their PC counterparts, for the comfort of playing away from a desk and for the familiarity of a recognisable UI. I still don’t really know how to use a Windows PC and, to be frank, I never will.
I only really have the PC because I need it for work. Plenty of games, especially smaller indies, are developed primarily for PC and only reach other platforms much later, and being on top of new games means being tied to this platform, as much as I don’t want to be. That was the case with Baldur’s Gate 3, which I started playing on its August release on PC. It only reached PS5 a month later, in September, and Xbox in December.
It looked… fine! My fascination with the game, like most other people’s, was not because it had incredible graphics, it was because the gameplay was so fresh and the design so intricate that every turn was a new surprise, but I thought hey, this game looks pretty decent. I don’t know that much about PC tech and I won’t claim to, so I defer toDigital Foundry, which writes in detail about the last-gen technical makeup of the graphics and how to optimise your settings for the best performance. This is all mumbo jumbo to me, of course. I know that it looked nice, and not super impressive.
Then, a few days ago, I finally booted up Baldur’s Gate 3 on Xbox, and oh my god, I can actually see how great the game looks in detail. One big difference: Xbox’s graphics are already optimised for the machine, so I don’t have to fiddle with the settings to make it look and run great. It already does that out of the box, and every option in the graphics section of the settings is no longer my business. Another big difference: my TV is huge and displays 4k resolution. Everything looks great on it. My monitor’s resolution and refresh rate, in contrast, is… uh… who knows? Not me. I paid my high school best friend’s older brother to build it for me, and I did not ask him to explain what he did to me.
There are some things I never intend to learn about, and my PC is one of them.
I do not typically play the same games on two different platforms – I’ve never had a reason to, since I gravitate to my console for games I’ll be playing over a long period of time – so I’ve never realised just how stark the difference between these two machines is. Now that I’ve seen the light, I can never unsee it. Am I going to do anything about it? No, because I don’t have the time to be researching all my PC’s different components and figuring out what would be better, and I don’t have the money to pay for new parts (or most likely, a better monitor). This just reaffirmed that for me, a lazy person, the console will probably always be the easier and better option for playing video games.
