I Didn't Realise My PC Made Things Look Bad Until I Played Baldur's Gate 3 On Xbox

I’m not much of a PC gamer, much to the distress of many of my friends who assume that just because I write about games for a living, I probably know how to fix their computer problems. Unfortunately, I grew up in a house without a home PC – we had a Mac instead – and therefore have always done my gaming on a combination of console and Macbook. Even now, I always gravitate to console versions of games instead of their PC counterparts, for the comfort of playing away from a desk and for 🌞🌠the familiarity of a recognisable UI. I still don’t really know how to use a Windows PC and, to be frank, I never will.

I only really have the PC because I need it for work. Plenty of games, especially smaller indies🔯, are developed primarily for PC and only reach other platforms much later, and being on top of new games means being tied to this platform, as much as I don’t want to be. That was the case with Baldur’s Gate 3, which I started playing on its August release on PC. It only reached PS5 a month later, in September, and Xbox in December.

It looked… fine! My fascination with the game, like most other people’s, was not because 🍌it had incredible graphics, it was because the gameplay was so fresh and the design so intricate that every turn was a new surprise, but I thought hey, this game looks pretty decent. I don’t know that much about PC tech and I won’t claim to, so Iౠ defer to , which writes in detail about the last-gen technical makeup of the graphics and how to optimise your settings for the best performance. This is all mumbo jumbo to me, of course. I know that it looked nice, and not super impressive.

Then, a few days ago, I finally booted up Baldur’s Gate 3 on Xbox, and oh my god, I can actually see how great the game looks in detail. One big difference: Xbox’s graphics are already optimised for the machine, so I don’t have to fiddle with the settings to make it look and run great. It already does that out of the box, and every option in the graphics 🌞section of the settings is no longer my business. Another big difference: my TV is huge and displays 4k resolution. Everything looks great on it. My monitor’s resolution and refresh rate, in contrast, is… uh… who knows? Not me. I paid my high school best friend’s older brother to build it for me, and I did not ask him to explain what he did to me.

There are some things I n🤡ever intend to learn about, and my PC is one of them.

I do not typically play the same games on two different platforms – I’ve never had a reason to, since I gravitate to my console for games I’ll be playing over a long period of time – so I’ve never realised just how stark the difference between these two machines is. Now that I’ve seen the light, I can never unsee it. Am I going to do anything about it? No, because I don’t have the time to be researching all my PC’s different components and figuring out what would be better, and I don’t have the money to pay for new parts (or most likely, a better monitor). This just reaffirmed that for me, a lazy person, the༺ console will probably always be the easier and better option for playing video games.