FC5 teaser

[BinnZ]

And with today's game sizes you'll need a dvd box the size of an encyclopaedia to bring them home

[Art Blade]

 

[PZ]

I don't know why they can't do Bluray for PC games if it works for the consoles. My PS4 games are all Bluray these days.

[Art Blade]

PCs don't come with BR players by default. Even if you buy one, you can't just use it because of the copyright mechanics and specific requirements, including licenced player software for films. In other words, consoles are better in this respect.

[PZ]

Well, they certainly don't make it easy to game on the PC. My PC gaming days might be limited to the games I already have because it seems like it is just too much trouble.

[Art Blade]

I would completely agree if you said, "they certainly don't make it easy to game on the PC if you don't have fast internet access"

[PZ]

Ah, yes - that certainly is the main factor for me. Even on the console I become tired of having to set the machine to do an overnight update. 

[LowPolyOWG]

I can agree with you Art, today's games require a gigabit network to download fast (Like 10-15 minutes). Too bad such networks isn't available everywhere. Honestly, I find the Internet access in some first world countries strange. Notably looking at USA/Oz...

Now, we do have areas with no fibre, but the majority of households here in cities are connected to a fibre network. I really miss my gigabit network in Hamar

[PZ]

It's all about the profits. For instance, the republicans voted to rescind net neutrality which allows the providers to allow, throttle down, or deny access to sites on their whim. This allows the providers to focus their advertisements, and more control what the end user sees.

With that in mind, it is easy to see that a few people in the outer areas don't matter a hill of beans to people/companies like that.

You guys already know how crappy my service is, and for having that privilege, I get to pay three times what someone in town pays for access that is a hundred or more times faster.

[fragger]

Agreed GKID, internet access in this country is largely *bleep*. I'm on the National Broadband Network (NBN) now, but I got lucky - my net access is reasonably quick (for Oz, that is) and appears to be quite stable. However, only about 15 kays away in the main town, businesses and households are struggling with it, as are other population centres with more than a few thousand people in them.

When it was first proposed, it was going to be fiber-optic all the way, right to the premises, with whizz-bang new hardware driving it all, and the access speeds were going to knock everybody's socks into the next room. But as soon as the grandstanding dickheads politicians who originally touted all this, and who have about as much understanding of these things as they would about the composition of Pluto's core, began to realize just how much it was going to cost (and how long it was going to take), they did what they do best and compromised on it. Now it's a sloppy mish-mash of fiber-optic and copper with a jerry-built conglomeration of mismatched hardware driving it, and most connections are to local nodes, not premises.

So much for the "world-class internet access" we were supposed to have. Oh, and it was supposed to have been completely installed by 2016. Now they're saying 2020 - and it will be obsolete and totally incapable of handling the traffic volume by then. Hell, it is already.

The final result appears to be that the more populous an area you live in, the slower the access speed becomes. Well, that's just dandy. My access speed is about the same as it was before, which I'm fairly happy with, but that's mainly due to the fact that I don't live in a hugely populated area. In the cities and larger towns, it stinks. We're effectively going backwards. At the rate it's going, it will soon be quicker to use dial-up - except you won't be able to because the old landline network will have been dismantled.

Actually, don't get me started, it's too nice a day...

[nex]

I'm very lucky if and when my so called modern day 10Mbps optic fiber line will actually give me
5Mbps.
The bastards here stole all the money that was budgeted for optic fiber   

[LowPolyOWG]

That's bullshit

[Dweller_Benthos]

At least I have an "unlimited" connection now. It's 4G so it's decent speed - for a cell phone. The "unlimited" bit is that I can download as much as I want, per month, up to 22GB, and after that I "may" be throttled to any speed including below dial up, depending on "network congestion".

So a 50-60 GB game? Probably a couple of days continuous downloading, and that would put me well over the "throttling" limit.

[LowPolyOWG]

Dang, that must be *bleep* Honestly, I guess the ISPs in USA/Oz can go *bleep* themselves...

[fragger]

To be fair, it's not entirely the fault of the ISPs, although they're not exactly the selflessly charitable types It's more the fault of the pollies who bit off more than the ISPs could chew.

Whoever is to blame, it' still a shemozzle. But it's better than nothing, I guess. And it's still way better then the crummy access I had up until a few years ago, when I switched ISPs. That was like upgrading from tin cans and string to CB radio