GC writer Jason ‘Tempted NZ’ Candish takes us through his recent experiences of putting Xbox Live gaming behind him and making the move to PC gaming. He talks about the reasons why he believes Xbox Live gaming is no longer appealing and why gaming on the PC has become a serious consideration for him and other XBL gamers.

So after three years of gaming on Xbox Live on my 360, I have made the move back to PC gaming. I had allowed for my PC to slip into the category for PCs you could label as “Junk” – an old Athlon 2500+ coupled with an ATI 9800 Pro.  It wasn’t running much but that didn’t really matter, I had been addicted to Quake 2 for most of my PC gaming life so no hefty PC requirement to be found there. After growing up and moving out of home, I had been playing on consoles with friends, so it was just used for surfing the net anyway.

That changed when I got my 360 in 2007, my partner and I had moved house and I ended up getting a gold Live connection for Halo 3. A month later Call of Duty 4 came out and changed my gaming world forever. When Call of Duty 4 was released, it felt to me like this is what first person shooters on a console should feel like. The 60 frames per second just made it so much ‘crisper’ than anything else for competitive play. I started a clan with two brand new ‘e-friends’ which quickly found success. We had a whole lot of fun, talked with a lot of people, kicked a lot of arse and I still keep in touch over MSN with most of them.

Say what you like about the inferiority of consoles but practically everyone has a microphone, sure you wish a lot of them didn’t, but it also means you’re guaranteed to be “social”. Coming from a situation where eight plus people would contribute their two cents about any topic that came to mind (because you could), to a pretty silent PC gaming world was profoundly noticeable. The main method of communication in public matches is typing and it feels like a big step backwards.

It was a really fun time to be on Live because the community was big enough to have a heap of people to play with but small enough to know practically everyone. But now I honestly believe the best is behind us, it feels to me like Microsoft is catering towards children and casuals far more these days with things like Kinect. Their approach to avatars and advertising in general all feels very ‘family’ orientated.

This meant a gigantic influx of people on Live who had no concept of online etiquette, and towards the end of my time playing on live, this had a massive impact on my enjoyment of the service. Most online games now come with a feature to mute players and you would find yourself muting entire lobbies as soon as you join. Some people will tell you to use the Live system of muting everyone minus those on your friends’ list, but this breaks the intrinsically important social aspect of Live itself – it’s what it’s marketed for and it does it very well. It’s the users who let it down.

I would also say a lack of “Local Search Only” really hurts a console that is predominantly FPS orientated and nothing kills a game community like the inability to get decent local matches with a good ping. This fact has intriguingly been missed by a few developers who really should know better, a backup system built directly into the dashboard should have been added as a feature a long time ago.

With the ratio of awesome people to not-so-awesome people decreasing at an alarming rate and friends drifting away to the PC, I only really had one choice. I love co-op gaming, it has surpassed my competitive spirit and I just really need to game with friends. So back to PC I went.

Jason's Gaming Rig – Near Completion

Steam, in my opinion, is the sole reason PC gaming has made such a powerful return, people are taking the model Steam has created and are running with it and if it wasn’t for Steam, I wouldn’t be gaming on the PC. Now that PC gaming has a ‘hub’ if you will, everything you could want is integrated; voice chat, friends lists, game libraries, game forums  and online store all in one piece of software. Using it as a base for your gaming is awesome and it covers everything I feel I could have lost by moving away from Live. Did I mention the fact that Steam is also a FREE service?

I’m very glad I have moved to the PC, it felt like it was time to move on, with a 30 frames per second standard at (a usually) up-scaled 720p resolution,  consoles were beginning to feel very dated graphically.  Patches have to go through certification which for smaller ‘less important’ games can take an unacceptable length of time. Customers finding it acceptable to pay more to unlock content that was already on the game disc is very insulting. It has become harder and harder to defend gaming on the console, controllers are useable on the PC which benefits a fair few genres, medium settings on most games still look better than their console counterparts. Your peripherals are not locked in at an expensive price because a company has a monopoly over them and DLC that is charged for on consoles is often released free of charge for the PC. It is not amusing knowing that developers are forced to charge for software they wanted to release at no charge.

A lack of dedicated servers and reliance on peer-to-peer hosting hurts any competitive console gaming.  Mix that in with pricing for games being terrible on consoles compared to the bargains you can pick up on sale for the PC and you have a pretty potent cocktail of mediocrity.  There’s literally no reason to get a console now-days barring a cheaper entry point. The vibe I get online is that the PC is coming back in a big way, piracy is becoming common on all the platforms now and a lot of developers appear to have grasped that there is a huge community of gamers who want hardcore games that aren’t stripped down for a casual audience.

My time on consoles was great, I had a ball and met a lot of interesting people but now, I really do look forward to the depth and freedom PC gaming can provide.