First off, I only half apologize for the lackluster title for this article. "Reinstalling" was my original placeholder since this article was going to be all about reinstalling games and the name stuck in my head, so that is what we are going with as this article is going to print.
Last summer I purchased a new laptop since my previous one (an MSI CX61) I bought back in 2015, was either closing in or past the typical lifespan of a laptop. It was also starting to show its age, booting up slower than normal, taking longer to open and close programs, and just running slower than it used to even a couple years into owning it. I was very happy with the quality and performance even though I did not make any hardware upgrades, so I was looking into a new MSI laptop to replace the old one. Evidently, all of the MSI laptops I was looking at (because our house is not really set up to have a desktop tower) were out of my price range and since my fall off in the PC gaming arena (as if I played competitively or something) I did not see a reason or a justification for purchasing a laptop that could run anything that came out after 2018 that would require 50+ GB of data.
So I ended up opting for an Acer Aspire 5. The specs were decent and I could run some games that I looked into, just nothing like DOOM Eternal. The computer had a 10-key after all, something that I would need for my job (if I required to work from home without being able to bring home a work computer) and I just like having the option of a 10-key over a standard-sized keyboard. I can deal with slightly smaller Return or shift keys and I can operate a 10-key faster than the numbers at the top of the QWERTY board, so that being one of my requirements limited which laptops I had looked at. While there are some issues I have with the Acer Aspire (such as the sound quality and volume, and how the Home Keys have dual functionality that I am not fond of when it comes to taking screenshots using gaming clients that by default use the F12 for screenshots), it works well really for what I need it to, which so far has been researching and writing articles for y'all; and the occasional video game here and there.
The other morning while listening to The Elder Scrolls Online soundtrack and frequently seeing ads for the new expansion for Blackwood on Instagram and Twitter, I began thinking about the game again and whether or not the Acer would be able to run ESO well enough to not crash every few minutes. So I downloaded the client (onto my external hard drive because the hard drive on this Acer is at a paltry 256 GB and I've already used up a good portion of that on some other games and mostly music) onto my external hard drive (Transcend 2 TB, which I cannot recommend enough), waited a few hours (read 12+ hours because there was 100+ GB of data to download, patches to download and install, et cetera) and then started the game one-morning last week while Goblino was down for his morning nap. Well, it booted up just fine, I verified my identity logging into my Bethesda account and was happy to find all four of my ESO characters that I have played with over the years. There was Jaconian, the Nord Dragonknight in the Ebonheart Pact that I started it all with on launch back in 2014. There was Loviner Jorlock, the Altmer Mage I created to quest with Conklederp's Magicia Sorcerella (who is a Breton Mage) in the Daggerfall Covenant. There was the Bosmer Nightblade I created to play through the Aldmeri Dominion quests; I know that you can cross-play questlines while in different factions, I just like the idea of having separate characters for each faction. And then I have my Dunmer Templar (Ebonheart Pact) that I just created because I had never created a Templar before outside of when I first started playing and was just tooling around with the character creator.
Well, to get to the point, the game ran fine although I do only have the graphics options set to Medium nearly across the board, although there was some befuddlement going on in Cold Harbor with the character model not turning around when running, but that went away after logging out and starting back up the following day. So yay on that!
I also reinstalled the demo for The Evil Within which I last attempted back in 2018, so it will be interesting to see how the Acer fares. I hopefully will do better than the paltry 8-10 fps that the MSI gave me.
I also reinstalled Dark Souls II: Scholar of the Lost Sin and ran through the opening area, although I have yet to actually create my character this time around and select their class. Last time, I had created a mage if only to start out with ranged spells, so I may take that route, or maybe I will go with Deprived, which I did for my most recent run-in Dark Souls on the Switch.
Oooooh! And I think I will reinstall Alien: Isolation too. I started that game shortly after picking it up through one of Humble's Monthly Bundles, back on August 23, 2017. However, similar to The Evil Within, the game chugged even on the low settings, although I think I hovered between 10-15 fps. I played a grand total of 17 minutes, which probably includes messing around with the graphics and control options (gotta invert that Y yo!)
With all of this reinstalling, I honestly do not see myself moving back to a predominantly pc gaming front because it is still a matter of finding the time to commit to playing a game in 20ish minute bursts and then before going to bed, which is usually playing the Switch in bed. So unless I were to invest ($699 - $1,099!?) in the Smach Z(ero?), which I have not heard anything about in five years or more, it is going to be portable gaming in bed for the foreseeable future. But it is nice to know that if I wanted to, I could rejoin Loviner Jorlock or Amanda in search of her mother Ripley. I just like having the option, even if I end up not being able to reinvest the needed time for some of those games.
You know what, thanks for making it through to the end. I realized halfway through this that I probably could have saved it for a Monthly Update article, but I decided that I wanted to continue writing something that was mildly interesting to me and probably useless to everyone else reading. But that is what the Internet is for.
No comments:
Post a Comment