Words by Greywolfe

We've kind of established that I don't play very many modern games at all.

Some part of this is indifference. A lot of modern gaming tropes seem to boil down to "kill all the things," but a lot of it has to do with the fact that games made over the last fifteen or so years seem to just have no soul at all.

If I've seen one Doom, I've pretty much seen them all. Likewise, while Assassin's Creed seems to slowly be creeping towards something interesting, every iteration just feels like the iteration before with some other gamification going on in the sense that you need to collect MORE of these shiny things.

There are other problems: gaming is moving ever more in the direction of DLC-being-the-game. Recent examples include Street Fighter X Tekken, where Capcom sold you the disk, then locked some of the DLC away on the actual disk they sold you and expected you to fork over money for those locked characters.

On top of that, there's the bugbear of terrible DRM schemes where you need to - for example - login to your Rockstar Social Club account and also Steam before you can bother playing Grand Theft Auto V. This doesn't even bring up the travesty that is Diablo 3. A complete single player game locked behind an internet login.

So, modern gaming is problematic for me.

But more problematic still is the new version of Windows. And Windows 10 is seriously making me re-think my stance on gaming.

Windows 10 Forces Updates On You. Even Though Those Updates Might Break Your System.

Right now - and bear in mind that Windows 10 is barely two weeks old - there's an issue with some people getting the current set of cumulative updates for the new operating system. The way it tends to go is: they install Windows 10. There's no way - if you're on an ethernet connection - to tell Windows 10 to not get patches. Because, of course, in their infinite wisdom, Microsoft know better than you.

So your computer grabs the patches. Windows told it to. Then the patches are installed on your machine. Again, because Microsoft mandated this crazy plan. What happens next? Well, the patch then rolls your computer. By which I mean that it encounters something it didn't expect. In this particular scenario, your computer reboots, finds the problem is still there, never makes it to the login screen and reboots again, ad nauseum.

All of this, of course, bodes badly for gaming. You won't get any done. But worse than that, this particular roll of start-fail-restart might do your computer actual harm.

Thanks, Microsoft!

Microsoft Have Changed Their EULA And You Belong To Them Now.

This has been coming since the Xbox One fiasco, where Microsoft were attempting to foist their DRM scheme on all the users all the time. Back then, I even suggested that they'd try again and try harder. And this time, there'd be very little advance warning. And surprise! That's exactly what happened.

Instead of giving people advance warning before Windows 10 rolled out, Microsoft stealth-changed their EULA on 29 July, 2015. It covers Windows 10, but it's pretty worrying stuff.

When you install the new operating system, it auto-generates a machine identity number. That number is then tied to your machine, making it pretty unique. Microsoft intends to use this number to target you with ads. But more nefariously, this machine id is communicated to "trusted third parties" who, of course, Microsoft won't disclose. Sure, they could be advertising partners, but Microsoft have stated in their new EULA that they have final say on who these people might be.

And the worst part about all this? Even if you tell Windows to not communicate anything to Microsoft...they STILL listen, because some of their bits of software still send information back home, regardless of what you tell it.

Does this open a can of worms regarding privacy? Absolutely. Do I want any part of that? Not really.

Thanks, Microsoft!

Gamers Don't Get Any Say In What They Can Turn Off.

Most folks who install Windows 10 are probably going to opt for some non-pro version of the Operating System. Why? Because you don't really need to be running an enterprise copy at all. You're a home user. And as a home user, you expect that you should be able to turn off any privacy invading bits that Microsoft have opted you into [and believe you me, all the privacy headache stuff is turned on by default.] - but nope. Group Policies - the only way you have to turn a lot of this stuff off - only ships with the Pro version of Windows 10. There are hacks, of course, but you're on your own in the land of regedit and unsafe software that people have hacked together in the last two weeks that might not pass any sort of smell test.

One more time with feeling: Thanks, Microsoft!

Bonus! The Only Reason To Install Windows 10 Is DirectX12.

This isn't a very good reason to be going with the operating system at all. Sure, down the pike [maybe in 2016 or so] it'll start bearing fruit, but right now? There aren't a lot of games running DirectX12 at all. And even when Directx12 does roll out, it'll have to have a backward compatability layer for Directx11. [And possibly Directx10.]

A final thanks to Microsoft!

What I think? I think that right now there's no good reason to switch, just yet. Not for gamers, anyhow. And beyond all that, Windows 7 will only have it's end-of-life in 2020.

And when that happens, you can bet that I'll be moving over to a Linux distribution of some persuasion if all this stuff isn't solved by then. [As a person who doesn't generally place bets, I'm willing to put money on the fact that Microsoft are going to test their arrogance one more time, and maybe this will be the time that all this stuff sticks.]

Because, like I said in the opening paragraphs, my gaming won't be seriously impacted. I play old games. Old games are reasonably well supported by Linux. What those of you who are into modern gaming are going to do, I'm not sure. But the future direction Windows 10 is marching in does worry me for gaming.

Conclusion

I hope that whichever operating system you're on, it doesn't give you hassles, but I do want to urge you to think long and hard before you do this upgrade. Windows 10 is not particularly privacy friendly [and thus, not really consumer friendly] and we really ought to be thinking about how much of our identities we want to give up to Microsoft.

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Images courtesy of Pixabay:

Pixabay