I'm going to be honest here, I'm new to PC gaming and what I see is blowing me away. I'm stuck between getting Xbox One to play my beloved Forza 5 or something more practical such as building my own gaming PC/PC just for me. I know this seems meaningless to you guys as to what the obvious answer is here but keep in mind that I'm new to this type of thing. I'm honestly reaching out with this question and I hope to get at least some kind of polite answer. Please ignore the fact that I don't have this game and don't let it bias your answer. I have a choice as the holiday season and my birthday is coming up soon. Thanks for reading this and answering if you do.
Buy a pc It's more expensive, but the hardware is better. The graphics are more beautiful and BeamNG doesn't work on Xbox One DON'T BUY THE PS4!!!!
For the same price as an Xbox One, you would be able to build a good gaming PC that could probably run BeamNG and many other games well. Although an Xbox One can do other things besides gaming, a PC can do much more. In the end, it really comes down to the games you want to play, and if Forza 5 is the only Xbox One exclusive title that you want to play, then there are so many more PC games that are as good. For example steam is a great way to find some of the best games for PC. If you think building your own PC is out of the question, this is a great video to get you started with parts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfGE4i_A6E4 And if you need to know how to put it together, there are plenty of great tutorials out there that can help you.
i have forza 5, and it is a stepup from previous forzas, but honestly... get a PC and an xbox controller. xbox one may have forza, but PC has beamNG and project CARS
pCars (project cars) is a beautiful game. Looks better than forza and will blow you away. While they are releasing for the xBone & PS4 it will not look the same. The only downside to PC gaming is the initial cost. A gaming machine to max pCars will run you around $1300 and to max beamng with a lot of cars you are looking at about the same to $1500. Game are cheaper though, 49.99 vs 59.99 for new releases. I love pCars.
I'd go for PC because if you're careful you can get one cheaper and much more powerful than the new gen consoles. (Mine was less than $400 including screens and everything. Specs in sig.)
PCars looks like it may scratch that sim racing itch when it comes out, I'd definitely go for a PC. I prefer the open platform and wide variety of games, rather than an over saturation of AAA titles on the XBOX with a sprinkling of good smaller games. Also, Steam sales are awesome. I can buy Far Cry 3 for USD 7.49 right now, while it's still USD 24.99 in GameStop for PS3 and 360 today. Steam also drives competition in the sales section, EA was offering Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for a dollar the other day, and had a bunch of other games for sale on Black Friday. (BF4 -40%). You can also use any peripheral you want with enough adapters/drivers/etc., with the X360 controller being fully supported, the DS3 having 3rd party driver support, and both the X1 and DS4 controllers getting official drivers early next year if SONY and Microsoft are to be believed. You can also use flight sticks for flight games, steering wheels for team fortress, and a good old keyboard and mouse for other things. The PC gaming community also has a tendency to be a little more mature than the console communities in my experience, with players often using voice chat to give team directions instead of screaming derogatory statements about your mother. Not to mention PCs can multitask as well as, if not better than, the new consoles. As is pretty obvious, PCs have more hardware power than the X1, but at a higher price. The price is actually cheaper in the long run if you make wise game purchase decisions (steam sales/indie early crowdfunding), and because you don't have to pay a monthly subscription. The PC serves double function as a work station so you don't have to buy a useful thing and a game thing, just one thing to do all the things. You also don't have to pay a fee (PS+, XLive) to use your internet (which you've paid for) to play games (which you've also payed for). The Xbox one is good for Kinect (which, while not good for games, I can attest to its usefulness for navigating menus on the 360.) It also has ease of set-up on its side, and a warranty that doesn't run up the moment you use it. (Watch out, some "warranties" on PC parts expire the moment you plug them into a PC instead of a specialized testing unit, though people have caught on to this and many offer proper warranties now.) The XBox is also technically easier to use, although most quality stuff in the PC world these days is pretty much plug&play, so I personally don't consider it an advantage. The controller is also moot, as PC support is forthcoming. Depending on your situation, all of your friends may be on XBox Live, this is really value added depending on the individual. Both have their advantages, but at least for me PC is the logical choice.
PC, in the near future there will be emulators for the xbone because of its x86 architecture, besides if you go and check Assetto Corsa not that is a real racing sim, with waaay better driving physics than forza, besides in the long way, xbone games are way too expensive and you have to pay (something that I find stupid) to play online. Also mods.
First gen xbox was x86 yet there werent emulators for it. Just because the one uses x86, doesnt mean we will see console emulators of it tomorrow.
I'm glad for the positive feedback and I have begun to plan the build, do you guys think I should use Intel or AMD processors/Mother Board?
No it did not. The first gen used an intel pentium 3 CPU running the windows NT kernel at 733MHz: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_(console). The Xbox 360 used PowerPC. Computer systems is one of my primary interests btw, even designed and emulated a highly simplified 16 bit instruction set once. - - - Updated - - - Intel is the genuinely more powerful chip at the same clock speed as the AMD equivelant. Comes at extra cost though (although thats narrowed in recent years). I personally run AMD, I just flat out could not afford intel when I built my system, hence why it also has a near obsolete GPU. If you can afford it: intel. Tight budget: AMD. AMD also handles overclocking better.
The reason the Xbox moderately large isn't emulatable is due to the lack of documentation. The bone is pretty much just an AMD APU with a bit of problematic ESRAM chucked in the cauldron.
First gen in terms of hardware is damn well documented. But it is using the full windows NT kernel as its operating system, none of windows NT is open source, nobody really knows how you could fool a legitimate "bios" image into thinking its on legitimate hardware and it is way too complicated to try to write a high level bios emulator for (as is used for most consoles PS1 and earlier). In theory though, it could boot inside a modified version of something like virtualbox. Xbox One is even more complicated. Windows NT is the kernel powering "normal" windows on your laptop or desktop. Trying to emulate that with little documentation, very hard, very very hard. If they had opted for the Windows CE kernel though it would have probably been emulated within a few months of launch, CE is very well documented. - - - Updated - - - CxBx never actually functioned fully. They tried to which I give them great credit. But it was later found that many demo videos were faked, the few real ones showed huge amounts of errors. Project is long dead. There is one Xbox Emulator actually. That would be the one built into the Xbox 360, but of course that was made by the same people that made the consoles so they know what they are doing, yet it still had issues.