Currently, my office is my couch with my laptop on my coffee table and my keyboard on my lap–along with my cat sometimes. Such as right now. He is standing on my knees (on top of my faux fur throw) and staring at the vicinity of my face. I don’t know why he’s not sleeping or lying down, but he is energetically licking his fur. Probably because I just fed him. I expect he’ll curl up in a ball in a few minutes and take his tenth nap of the day.
He is sniffing the air as I eat my lunch-which includes mayo and grilled chicken. Now, he’s loafing on my lower legs and probably about to fall asleep. I love this about autumn; he wants to get nice and cozy. In the spring and summer, he fucks off and does his own thing. Which is fine as well, but I do like a warm cat on my legs. He is a short-haired cat, but he gets nice and fluffy in the winter.
I have a computer room. I got a swank desktop in order to play Elden Ring, which was really smart. They drop the specs for the PC less that two weeks before the game was released (ten days, I think), which was not nice of them. They don’t care about their PC players, though, and never have. When Dark Souls came out, PC players petitioned for a year to get the game on PC (there is no PC port for Demon’s Souls, sadly). When the port finally came out, it was, as the kids say, hot trash. It was nigh unplayable. Thanks to a modder, durante, dsfix was born. That’s the saving grace of PC gaming–you can mod the hell out of anything. He made it so the game ran smoothly and did not freeze-stutter all over the place. I tried running it without dsfix and it was horrid. I think he ended up with a job in the industry because of the dsfix? Or that might be an urban legend. But he is a god among men for saving Dark Souls: Prepare to Try and we will always praise his name.
Where the hell was I going with this? I cannot remember. Oh! Right. FromSoft not giving a shit about their PC players. It’s because consoles reign supreme in Japan, though PCs are starting to make a dent in the market.
By the way, Elden Ring has sold roughly 17 million copies since launch. 10 million of those copies have been on PC. I. Am. Just. Saying.
FromSoft did not release the PC specs until less than two weeks before the game dropped. If the requirements had been anything similar to the other games, that would have been fine. The other games did not need much in terms of memory, storage, graphics, or anything else. Elden Ring, on the other hand, requires a BEEFY machine. There was no way my laptop was going to handle it, and I had to scramble around to get a desktop that could handle it.
Here’s the thing. In the past, when I bought computers, I tried to get one as cheap as possible. I’d scrimp on things and see what was the bare necessity, forgoing some of the things that were nice to haves. This meant that I usually had to add memory or be not satisfied with the laptop. The last few computers I’ve gotten have been laptops and they’ve always shown their age badly by the time I upgraded (every four years or so).
This time I decided to get a desktop because I had been eying one for quite some time. I bought my last desktop over a decade ago, and it was pure trash by the time Elden Ring rolled out. Wait. That’s not fair. It wasn’t hot trash, but it was running like garbage because I hadn’t touched it in years. I probably could have gotten my brother to get it to run decently, but it was old. I wanted something new that could last another decade or so. And, the old desktop didn’t have SSD while my laptop did. This is one of those things that once you realize it exists, you cannot live without it. At least I can’t. Going from SSD to non-SSD is so painful.
Much of my viewpoint of life has changed since my medical crisis. I am a saver by nature. I don’t spend money. Period. I mean, I’ll drop a hundred dollars on a pair of shoes that will last me a decade, but in general, I pay as little as possible for everything.
I deliberately did not do this for my desktop. I told my brother what I wanted and gave him a eye-watering upper limit (for me). It was twice as much as I paid for my last laptop (this laptop! The one I’m typing on!), which was roughly a thousand dollars. I wanted a terabyte of storage, at least 24 GB of memory, and…the requirement for a 1070 graphics card. I went for a 3070 because I wanted it to last me through the next decade or so. Was this asking a lot? Hell, yes! But it was Elden Ring. After my medical crisis, I just wanted to be able to play this game and experience a new and wondrous world created by Miyazaki. I did not want the performance to suffer in any way. My laptop only has a 1050 or 1060, so there was no way it could handle Elden Ring. So, yeah. I decided to splash out a bit. I decided to get a really fucking good machine so I could enjoy Elden Ring to the max. It was my first new FromSoft game in nearly three years–and the first since I died twice.
Oh, by the way, I ended up paying roughly $1,400 for my desktop because I got a really good deal on it. I’m so pleased. I also have two monitors (I already had them) which is really nice, too. I can watch a video while playing Elden Ring, which is a good way to live.
I was really lucky that I checked the specs and was able find the perfect machine before the game dropped. That is extremely privileged of me, and I fully acknowledge that many of my PC kin would not be so lucky. It was really shitty of FromSoft to drop the specs like that, especially when….
The game sucked ass on PC on day one. Because my machine was so beefy, I only had some microstuttering and two hard crashes. I don’t care about pop-ins, so I didn’t notice that. Other people had much more problems with the PC port on Day One. Hopefully, one day, they can release a decent PC port along with the console version. To be fair, they’ve worked ceaselessly since and the game runs smoothly now.
Here’s the thing. I’m looking to do video because blogging is dead; long live blogging. Very few people read any longer, so it’s all videos. Because of this, I want an office space that is both utile and comfortable. I want a sit/stand desk and a better ergonomic chair. I need a good mike, a decent light, and a good camera.
I’m thinking about streaming, but I’m not sure what I’m going to stream. I would love to do FromSoft games, but I have to figure out an angle for it. I’m not good at the games so so it would have to be from the angle of being mediocre. I’m in the early part of my fourth playthrough, and I had forgotten how fragile I am at the beginning of the game. This is Elden Ring, but any From game, really. I never feel OP until NG+, really. Or if I do, it’s because I summon humans to help me. I’m terrible at the games no matter how much I play them.
I’m still in the planning stage, but hope to move onto the ‘I’m actually doing it’ stage soon. Stay tune.