End the bad PC ports
The worst year in history for PC game ports—just five months in!
THERE HAVE BEEN SOME TRULY AWFUL PC game ports— Batman:ArkhamKnight, DarkSouls:PreparetoDieEdition, and the original ResidentEvil4 all spring to mind. But 2023 will go down as the worst year yet for lousy PC versions of great games—and we’re not even halfway through the year yet.
TheLastofUsPartI turned one of the greatest games ever made into a laughing stock on PC, with a shader compilation process that took longer than Steam’s allotted refund time, and bugs that turned the famously serious game into an outright comedy. One month on, and it’s still not fixed. WildHearts is similarly unplayable, with the top review on Steam stating: “The price is higher than the FPS you will be able to pull in this game.” Funny, except for those who bought it in good faith.
This month’s review game, Star WarsJedi:Survivor, suffered a similarly ignominious launch. There’s a brilliant game in there, but not one that I would recommend to PC players, even if they have a cutting-edge system. When I played it on a gaming laptop with an i7-12700H and RTX 3070Ti, I couldn’t get the average frame rate above 45 fps, and that’s with settings on low. It appears as though the open world setting and streaming of assets is unoptimized, so no matter what visual settings you use, the frame rate will never be smooth. EA’s response: “[the game] isn’t performing to our standards for a percentage of our PC players” and actually blamed gamers with high-end hardware as the problem.
Unlike consoles, submitting PC games to Steam or Epic Games Store doesn’t require the same quality control—I would love to see these retailers being more stringent on what they will accept. Some punishment for repeat offenders like EA would also be welcome. Right now though, everyone is being hurt by this, especially the likes of Nvidia and AMD, who are selling expensive GPUs to buyers who can’t even run the latest PC games when they come out.