A friend told me about this game, and I thought it would be perfect for my (then) 10 year old. We got it for the PS4, and it was nothing but frustration. The biggest controls were complex and confusing when mapped to the PS4 controller, you couldn't install mods, and the game was buggy, frequently crashing and corrupting saves.
We finally got the PC version (which I run under Wine on FreeBSD), and it works much, much, much better.
I used to buy them because they worked without an internet connection, and the devkits usually provided their own (well written) primitives and game engines so bug-free (or seemingly bug-free) games tended to be the norm.
Now everyone just writes things in unity and the DRM forces you to have a reliable broadband connection, I don't see the point anymore.
Given that I want to play games, my options are to spend a bunch of time and energy researching, price-shopping for parts, and building out what would likely be a $1000+ dedicated gaming Windows PC, continuing to funnel time and money into upgrades as games demand more and more horsepower; or pick up a $250 current-gen console at Walmart, knowing that it'll be able to handle anything I throw at it, and only worry about upgrading several years from now when some game I really want comes out on a future generation console.
As someone with a limited entertainment budget, the latter option is by far the more attractive option.
I build a new PC approximately every 7-10 years and so far my computers handled everything fine. My current one which I'm about to replace has a first gen i7 and a GTX480 and they worked perfectly with pretty much any game. I'm about to replace it, probably with a 7700k and 1080Ti which should again last for quite a while. The only reason why I'm replacing it at all is because some random component on the motherboard started overheating so I finally have a good reason to upgrade.
> spend a bunch of time and energy researching
This is a terrible argument, I know jack about hardware yet am able to build a relatively decent computer. It's not rocket science, a couple minutes of looking through your local computer shop should give you a good idea what sort of components are good or bad. You can also throw your build into PCPartPicker which will generally let you know if something is wrong.
Oh, not up to the challenge of playing games with a controller? /s
But seriously, adjusting controller sensitivity/etc to your liking and practicing helps a lot. You can also turn on aim assist in most shooters (it's usually on by default, actually). There are plenty of great PS4 exclusives that it'd be a shame to ignore simply because you think they're unsuitable for controllers (depending on your taste - Horizon Zero Dawn, Bloodborne, Uncharted 4, The Last of Us, Nier Automata, Nioh, Ratchet and Clank, The Last Guardian, Persona 5, Gravity Rush).
That said, there definitely are plenty of games that have terrible console controls (especially bad ports, like Kerbal) and I've never seen an RTS done well on a console.
Don't forget top-down and fighting games. RPG's too.
But if you're talking about games that have a first/third person aiming component, yeah, mouse and keyboard are better, but if you're stuck with a controller, you just aim a bit differently. You have to rely more on strafe-aiming, sweeping, and movement prediction.
It's usually not so bad the controller is a reason to give up on otherwise good console-only games.
I agree that console gaming is not really attractive nowadays if you're not on a budget and don't mind missing a few exclusives.
>the devkits usually provided their own (well written) primitives and game engines so bug-free (or seemingly bug-free) games
I don't think that's quite right, I think the main reason games seem buggier nowadays are because:
- Nostalgia goggles, some games were utterly broken even back in the day, we just don't remember those.
- Games are a lot more complicated these days, it's easier to test Pacman than GTAV.
- You can now patch games so "going gold" is not that much of a deal anymore. Back then if your Nintendo 64 cartridge shipped with a game-breaking bug you were screwed.
- Even though the games themselves are overall more complex, gamedev is also more accessible thanks to Unity and other frameworks. That lowered the bar for game devs and as a result the average skill level is probably lower than it used to be.
In my experience the "well written primitives" is a myth. Older console (anything up to the 16bit era) hardly had any primitives to speak of, you just wrote assembly and talked to the hardware directly.
Later consoles had a kernel or "BIOS" but it's really not as good as you could imagine. To take the PlayStation for instance, the BIOS is a piece of crap with poorly optimized code and buggy functions. Just read a bit trough http://problemkaputt.de/psx-spx.htm#kernelbios to get a taste.
FileSeek: Movement from the eof is incorrect. Also, movement beyond the end of the file is not checked.
FileGetc: For some strange reason, the returned character is sign-expanded; so, a return value of FFFFFFFFh could mean either character FFh, or error.
strstr: After rejecting incomplete matches, the function doesn't fallback to the old str address plus 1, but does rather continue at the current str address
Since the PlayStation doesn't have a MMU many games actually hotpatched the BIOS to fix some of these issues or add functionality.
What's happened to the console ecosystem is a whole bunch of different things. More accessible tools (e.g. Unity) and platform holder development programs have gotten more developers who are less experienced and not as well funded onto the console platforms. Availability of easy online patching has lead to physical releases, which have to be finalized months before the actual release date, being intentionally left incomplete, with gaps to be filled in by a release day patch. Changing technology cycles have made console generations blurrier. And yes, online DRM has become a thing, although I'm not sure that's quite as onerous in practice as you suggest; it's not like current consoles just refuse to run any games while offline.
That's not an exhaustive list. The appeal of consoles is what it has always been, they're still the easiest and cheapest way into modern video games. But it's true that some of the advantages over the PC platform have begun to erode.
Now we have the controllers, but no games
The whole thing is just dumb
Besides, last time I looked the native Linux version was still 32 bits only. KSP has many problems with 32 bits platforms.
The 32-bit version crashes immediately after a failed mmap()
The 64-bit version has issues with nvidia GL libs that I didn't try to get past.
Wine just worked.
There has been some work recently with mmap and linux compat, so I will retry again when I have the chance..
No luck with linuxemu?