I think the issue was it wasn’t clear what items were available to craft. If I had known that axes, pickaxes, shovels, etc. were all in the game then it might have been easier, but even making the crafting table (2x2 wood planks) wasn’t very intuitive. Honestly, there wasn’t much of a clear path forward with most of the recipes. Advancements and the recipe book later helped a lot, but it was pretty hard to play during beta and alpha without the wiki or a mod like TMI.
Then there’s redstone. I feel like even today, redstone is completely unexplained in the game, and while you can kind of figure it out on your own, many of the intricacies are left unexplained (repeater locking, timings, comparators, how redstone is passed/not passed through different kinds of blocks, gates, etc). Without taking some time to learn about digital logic and basic computer engineering concepts on your own, redstone is basically magic dust that does a thing when put in a specific configuration.
Also, being pedantic, but shears weren’t added until beta 1.7. Wool dropped from sheep before that. That being said, alpha had a lot of really weird mob drops (why did zombies drop feathers?) and there wasn’t much use for wool anyway beyond decorative purposes and hiding doorways with paintings until beds were added in beta 1.3.
Minecraft. Back when I started playing, it wouldn’t even tell you what recipes existed, yet gave you a 2x2/3x3 grid with hundreds of types of items/blocks to figure it out yourself.
Somehow I ended up with a pre-order by buying a laptop. It feels like they’ve been practically giving them out, at least with their AMD partnership, and assuming you’re already in the market looking at hardware. I wasn’t even planning to buy the game originally, maybe I’ll play it.
PCIe gen 5 speeds are double PCIe gen 4 speeds, for the same number of lanes of course. Whether a hard drive is capable of those speeds is another story (although my current drive pushes the limits of gen 4). I’m not sure what the fastest PCIe gen 5 hard drive on the market is right now, but eventually we will start to approach the limits of gen 5 and start looking at gen 6 drives, at least at this rate.
There are some games that split high-res assets into separate free DLC. I don’t know how common it is, but I’ve definitely seen it on Steam. For example, Shadow of War does this with high-res textures and 4k cinematics.
I can’t say my experience playing PC games comes even close to that.
My PC is already on - it’s a multipurpose machine, so I was already using it for something else.
Steam opens on startup, no need to open it.
Steam auto-updates the game in the background. No need to wait.
I don’t think I’ve ever needed to update a driver to play a game. Also, regularly updating most drivers is actually not recommended, and you should only really be updating them if something’s broken. Graphics card drivers you might want to update now and then, but even then it’s rare that a graphics card driver makes a game suddenly playable. This seems comparable to firmware updates for consoles, although the last two consoles I used were a Switch and I think a PS3 so my memory’s a bit hazy there.
Yes, third party launchers are obnoxious. It still only takes maybe 10 seconds at most to get most games opened though, from my experience. Not all games use third party launchers either, but sadly a lot of the bigger games do.
Being able to continue easily where you left off does seem like a benefit consoles have. It’d be interesting to see that on PC, although I have yet to find a need for it since you can save practically anywhere in most games anyway, with the exception of cutscenes and tutorials I guess.
It takes me maybe 10-20 seconds to get most games that I play open on my machine, excluding the obnoxious splash screens games have when you open them which is the reason I think #6 might be a compelling argument. With the splash screens, it’s easily 2-3 minutes because more than half of that is sitting there staring at some stupid brand logos.
Of course, I already have a PC for other reasons, and the PC’s hardware is more than capable of playing games (moreso than most consumer gaming consoles at least, if not all), so I’ve never really felt like there was much reason to get a console, with the exception of a Switch since it’s a handheld. There’s already an enormous catalogue of games to play on PC, so it’s not like I’m missing out on much. Also, I might be a bit unique in that I’m using my PC all the time anyway. For someone who doesn’t use a PC very much, I could see a console being more appealing due to it being a dedicated gaming device.