Step 4 — The first session: installing, launching and settings

Step 4 of 5

This is the step where something finally happens on the computer. It is also the step where people most often create work for themselves, by starting a large download at a bad hour, installing from the wrong place, or deciding after four minutes of a stuttering picture that the machine is broken.

What follows is an order of operations that applies to any large online game on a desktop computer. It is deliberately general: it describes the category, not any one publisher's buttons, because every launcher arranges its own screens differently and the shape underneath is the same.

Where the files should come from

Only two sources are sensible: the publisher's own website, reached by typing its address yourself, or a recognised distribution platform where the game is officially listed. Anywhere else — an archive site, a link in a video description, a search advertisement for a game's name — risks giving you a modified file.

This matters more for games than for most software, because installers for popular titles are widely imitated. The Australian Cyber Security Centre's general guidance for individuals at cyber.gov.au makes the same point about software generally: get it from the vendor, keep it updated, and be sceptical of anything that arrives by another route.

If a page offers you a "faster download" through a separate program you have never heard of, close it. That pattern almost never belongs to the game's publisher.

The order of operations

1. Check free space again. You wrote the figure down in Step 2, but things have been added since. Confirm the drive still has the stated requirement plus roughly half again.
2. Pick the hour. Start a large download when the household connection is quiet — the middle of a weekday, or early morning — rather than at eight in the evening.
3. Plug in and set the machine not to sleep. A laptop on battery that suspends halfway through a forty-gigabyte transfer wastes the whole morning. Set the power options to keep the computer awake while plugged in, and put it back afterwards.
4. Start the download and leave it alone. Watching the bar does not speed it up, and using the connection heavily at the same time slows it down.
5. Let the installer finish its unpacking. Many installers report "100 per cent" for the transfer and then spend another stretch assembling the files. Interrupting there is the commonest cause of a broken installation.
6. Let the launcher patch before you try to play. It will almost certainly download an update straight away. This is normal for an online game and is not a sign that something went wrong.
7. Restart the computer if the installer asks. It is asking because a driver or a system component changed.
8. Put the power settings back. Easy to forget, and a laptop that never sleeps is a flat laptop.

What is happening while you wait

A large game download is not one file. It is thousands of small ones, verified as they arrive, then unpacked into their final form. That is why the progress bar moves unevenly, why the time estimate is wrong, and why the drive stays busy after the network goes quiet.

Speed is set by whichever link in the chain is slowest: your connection, the congestion between you and the publisher's servers, or the drive's write speed. There is nothing to adjust and no setting that improves it. The useful lever is the hour of the day, and you pulled that one already.

If the figure in the launcher is given in gigabytes and your plan has an allowance, write the number down against what Step 1 told you about the allowance. It is better to know before the transfer than after.

The first launch

The first start is always the slowest. The game compiles shaders — small programs that tell the graphics chip how surfaces should look — and builds caches it will reuse afterwards. A long first launch followed by faster ones is the expected pattern, not a fault.

Sign in with the account you made in Step 3. If the game offers to remember you on this computer, that is reasonable on a machine only you use and unwise on a shared one.

Expect to be asked about a tutorial or a practice mode. Take it. Games of this genre have more controls than a newcomer can discover by experiment, and twenty minutes in a quiet environment is worth more than two hours of confusion in live matches.

Controls, and the five minutes that save an hour

Before the first match, open the controls screen and read it once. You are looking for five things, and every game in this category has all five under some name.

• Movement and look. Usually the W, A, S and D keys with the mouse to aim. Note the sprint key and the crouch key, because they are the two most used after movement itself.
• Mouse sensitivity. How far the view turns for a given hand movement. Too high is the most common beginner complaint and the easiest to fix.
• The map or objective key. Knowing where to go is most of what separates a confused first hour from a comprehensible one.
• Communication. Where the voice chat key is, how to mute it, and how to mute an individual player. Find this before you need it, not during.
• The pause or menu key. In an online match it will not stop the game, but it is how you reach settings mid-session.

If you use assistive settings, look for them here too. Many games in this genre include toggle-versus-hold options, subtitle and caption controls, colour-blind modes and adjustable interface scaling. They are usually spread across the controls, accessibility and interface pages.

The three settings that matter most

If the picture stutters, change these three before anything else, one at a time, so you can tell which one helped.

1. Resolution. The number of pixels being drawn. Dropping from a very high resolution to a standard one is usually the single largest improvement available, and on a smaller screen the difference in sharpness is modest.
2. The overall quality preset. Most games offer low, medium, high and so on. Start at low, confirm the game runs smoothly, then move up one level at a time. Starting high and working down teaches you much less.
3. Shadows and effects detail. Shadow quality is habitually expensive for what it adds. Lowering shadows, reflections and volumetric effects often recovers a great deal with little visible loss during play.

Leave the rest alone at first. Changing eight settings at once tells you nothing about which one mattered, and a game that is running acceptably does not need to be tuned further on day one.

When it is the connection, not the picture

There are two different kinds of "it feels bad", and they need different fixes. A low frame rate looks jerky but responds instantly to your hand. High latency — the delay introduced in Step 1 — looks perfectly smooth but responds late, and other players seem to move in small jumps.

If the problem is latency, the graphics settings are irrelevant. The things that help are a wired connection instead of Wi-Fi, moving closer to the router, asking the household to pause large downloads, and choosing a server region closer to Australia if the game lets you.

Most games in this genre display a latency figure, in milliseconds, somewhere on the match screen. Learning where it is makes the difference between diagnosing a problem and guessing at one.

The hypothetical household, continued

The invented household from the homepage reaches this step with 61 GB free after a clean-out, an integrated graphics chip and a connection that is slow after six in the evening. This is an illustration, not anybody's experience, and no result is being promised.

They start the transfer at nine in the morning and go to work. The laptop is plugged in with sleep disabled. By the evening the files are unpacked and the launcher has applied one update. The first launch takes several minutes and they almost close it; they wait instead. In the tutorial, the view turns too fast, so they halve the mouse sensitivity. The first match stutters, so they drop the preset to low and the picture steadies. They leave the remaining settings alone and stop after two rounds, having spent nothing.

Before you move on

The game is installed, patched and running at a setting your machine is comfortable with, and you know which keys do the five things you will need in the first hour.

Step 5 deals with everything after the first session: who classifies games in Australia, how optional spending is presented, what to do about unwanted contact, and how to leave tidily if you decide the game is not for you.

Checklist: Roll call for Step 4

1. 4AThe files came from the publisher's own site or a recognised distribution platform.
2. 4BI confirmed free disk space immediately before starting, not from an old note.
3. 4CThe transfer was started at a quiet hour for the household connection.
4. 4DThe computer was plugged in and set not to sleep during the transfer.
5. 4EI let the installer finish unpacking and let the launcher apply its first update.
6. 4FPower settings have been put back to normal.
7. 4GI signed in with the account from Step 3 and completed the tutorial or practice mode.
8. 4HI know the sprint, crouch, map, voice-chat and menu keys.
9. 4IMouse sensitivity is set to something I can aim with.
10. 4JI started at a low quality preset and raised it one level at a time.
11. 4KI can tell a low frame rate from high latency, and I know where the latency figure is shown.
12. 4LI checked the accessibility and subtitle options if I need them.