Five things I hate about my first gaming PC

Back in November 2021, I picked up my first gaming PC, a Razer Blade 14. I spent weeks running it through its paces, and while there was a lot to love about the experience, I also ran into quite a few issues that were too egregious to ignore. These are the five things I hate about my first gaming PC.

PC specs recap

A quick refresher: My test device is a Razer Blade 14 with an AMD Ryzen 5900HX CPU mated to an NVIDIA RTX 3070 mobile GPU. The 14” display is a QHD panel with a 165Hz refresh rate. In terms of I/O, it comes with Razer’s proprietary charging port, 1 USB-C port, 1 USB-A port, an HDMI port, and a 3.5mm jack.

Setup was relatively easy, albeit time-consuming. There were a ton of downloads and updates that my Razer needed to take care of before everything was up and running.

Then came the frustrations…

Disparate online game stores

A huge advantage of PC gaming is that the games you buy can come from all different types of online stores. However, while this can be seen as a positive by some, having access to disparate stores means there isn’t a unified library where you can easily browse and add games to your collection with a click.

You have to first download each store. (In my case, I worked with the Xbox app, Steam, Epic Games Store, Ubisoft Connect, and EA’s Origin.) After that, you have to download the games you want from each store. Then to access those games, you have to either create a desktop folder where you can place shortcuts to your games, or remember which app each game came from and launch it from there.

Not a deal-breaker, but it's definitely a little less convenient than console platforms where everything you need exists in one neat place.

Tedious game settings

The second hurdle I ran into is both a pro and a con, depending on who you ask. On one hand, PC gaming offers players a wide variety of graphical settings they can adjust in the menus to optimize gameplay. On the other hand, if you’re not well-versed in what these settings do and how they need to be adjusted to account for new variables, graphical performance will suffer.

Most of the games I tested came with baseline settings that were automatically determined by my Razer’s internal specs. However, when I connected my QHD Razer to a 4K monitor, those settings were thrown completely out of whack. Where I’d had smooth performance on the laptop screen, I had dropped frames and freezes on the 4K monitor, prompting me to readjust the settings to get things back on track.

Now, I know what you’re thinking — duh, of course there are differences between QHD and 4K — and I hear you. But for someone who plays games on a QHD laptop, who also wants to occasionally play on a 4K monitor, and who may even hook up to his old 1080p TV from time to time, having to readjust settings in every instance is far from the user-friendly experience I’d hoped to have.

Add another point for extraneous hassle.

The case of the missing cloud saves

This one irks me more than it may irk others, but it’s a huge point of contention for me. I love the security and convenience of cloud saves and backups for game data. Not only do they let you bounce from device to device with ease, but cloud saves also provide a safety net in the event of a hard drive failure or another unforeseen mishap. As a result, I believe every game should have cloud saves enabled by default.

But whereas cloud saves are a core component of cloud gaming services like GeForce Now, Google Stadia, and Amazon Luna, things aren’t as straightforward in PC Gaming Land.

For starters, not every game supports the feature. I was dismayed to find that the progress I’d made while playing Kena: Bridge of Spirits on GeForce Now didn’t carry over to the downloaded version on my PC. As it turns out, the Epic Store does support cloud saves, but even if you have them enabled in the Epic Store app, there's no guarantee that a game's developers have implemented them.

Discouraged but not yet deterred, I moved on to one of my other favorite indie games from 2021, Blue Fire. According to the game listing on Steam, this title does support cloud saves. So imagine my chagrin when I downloaded the game and found that none of my progress from GeForce Now carried over, either. Upon further research, it’s apparently known that Blue Fire’s cloud save feature has been bugged and rendered inoperable for months — something the average person wouldn’t know, again, until it was too late.

Loading and reloading

Coming from consoles and cloud gaming, I expect it to be relatively easy to grab a controller and hop into a session. My PC didn’t share this sentiment.

On several occasions during my time with the Razer Blade 14, games would occasionally take longer to load than usual, making me wait several minutes before finally booting up. I’m sure there’s a good explanation as to why a PC game that hasn’t been updated or otherwise altered would need to reoptimize, recompile, or do whatever it did, but as a console and cloud gamer, the lack of on-screen prompts explaining why it happened made it feel that much more unnecessary.

In another session, my PC even hard crashed itself to sleep right in the middle of booting into a game — not the type of behavior you want in a gaming machine.

Unexpected bugs and troubleshooting

With my confidence in PC gaming waning, it wasn’t until I spent 45 minutes troubleshooting a simple problem that I decided to throw in the towel.

One evening, I found the Xbox app unable to launch games. I could download titles, but they simply wouldn’t open or play. I tried a handful of solutions: power cycling my PC, repairing/resetting the Xbox app, uninstalling and reinstalling apps and games. I tried everything I could think of, to no avail.

Then finally, I found a random YouTube video from a knowledgable person who suggested that I should make sure the clock on my PC was synced correctly, or issues may be prevalent. Could it really be this simple?

The answer was yes.

Sure enough, my clock was two hours off from the actual time, something that had likely happened while I was fiddling with settings earlier in the day. When I resynced the clock, my games opened immediately as if they’d never hit a snag.

Was it a stupid oversight on my part? Yes. Would I ever make that mistake again? Definitely not. Should the Xbox app have thrown out an error message identifying the problem for me? Wishfully, yeah, but PCs aren’t set up that way. Was I frustrated beyond belief? Without a doubt.

Mistakes and regrets aside, I wasted 45 minutes trying to track down a solution that was as simple as adjusting a clock. It was at this moment that I realized PC gaming was far too tedious (and moody) for me to ever enjoy in the way I do cloud and console gaming.

Back to my roots

Ultimately, I decided to box up my Razer Blade 14 and send it back from whence it came.

For me, gaming at its very core is about having fun. It shouldn’t be difficult, or tedious, or frustrating just to get a title up and running. While PC gaming offers a lot of benefits to the right kind of gamer (high-performance GPUs, 120+ frame rates, huge libraries, etc.), my own experience was far from what I’d consider reasonable. I found myself spending too much time on settings, making excuses about its shortcomings, and compromising my player values just to justify my want for a gaming PC, which in the end, I ultimately couldn’t reconcile.

At the same time, I’m also grateful for the experience. After the various hurdles I encountered in trying to enjoy PC gaming, the only thing it really did was make me all that much more confident in the many benefits consoles and cloud gaming platforms bring to the table: centralized game libraries, reliable cloud saves/syncs, and frictionless playing experiences. They’re just about the player having fun with their games, exactly the way it should be.