How did we get here
It started simple enough. I needed more current titles for benchmarks. Comparisons of hardware need a reference and performance in popular games gives that. New components aren’t always better and sometimes you are better off with what you have. The new part doesn’t improve the experience.
This is usually straight forward. See what is popular, look at reviews, watch for sales. This sometimes leads you astray, however, which is the case with at least one game I’ve recently purchased. I won’t mention the title, but there is a video linked here. This used to be a very popular franchise but a number of moves have ruined that.
The First Issue
The first obstacle you face is the size of files to update or download. Steam told me I needed a whopping 463GB to install this thing. That is larger than many of the SSDs I put in budget builds and the entire drive on mid priced builds. AT that point, I should have known this was a bad idea.
I didn’t have the almost half a terabyte required for this on my portable SSD, so I removed older games I don’t test anymore. I know this will bite me in the butt later as I have older systems I need to test. Still, I carry on because the people need their benchmark. I find room, I load it and proceed to testing.
I’m then met with a series of warning messages. This is not uncommon, A lot of games will give a message about video memory, or a video card driver. This game gave several. The first being that I was using a hard drive instead of an SSD. I literally chose the SSD because it’s portable. Chalking this up to the settings thinking the external SSD may be an internal HDD, I moved on .
I get the customary video driver warning for a driver that was released last week instead of last month, so I ignore it, knowing the driver is current enough, but the warnings didn’t stop. I also got one for a bios update, and the big one after that, Secure Boot.
Secure Boot Issues
Now, I understand that publishers want to keep players from cheating and exploiting the game, but Windows 11 already has some of these requirements and it shouldn’t take a tech expert to play a video game. A game should not make you go into the BIOS of your PC and make changes. It is too easy for someone to make the wrong change, and render the PC useless.
Sucking it up for the team, I make the changes on a couple of my PCs, because it is not a default setting, and carry on. That is until I get to a more budget system with an older AMD video card. What was a mid tier adjustment because a six hour adventure with no end to the ride.
The older AMD card would not allow the PC to post after the change, although, any card with current driver support would. I tried this with an RX480 and RX580 both, with no success. In the case of the RX580, it boot looped and required a BIOS reset. That is not something your average twelve or thirteen year old is going to try to do to play a game.
In the end, this set up won’t be testing that game. I may go back later and play with drivers, but it won’t be today, nor will it be this week. I move on without it and test everything else, which work great, by the way. The system is great, the game sucks.
Additional Feedback
The ironic thing is, that it seems more and more that people don’t even like this game anymore. They play because their friends still do, and many admit the fell out of love with this series a few years ago. I wonder why. Insert sarcasm here, I know perfectly well, why. The game, and indeed the series is more trouble than it’s worth and when you stray so far from a great experience, you end up like Kmart, or Blockbuster, or any number of fond memories from our past.
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