Wild Hearts, a monster battler launched on Thursday, has a “mainly bad” Steam review. “This game’s price is more than its FPS,” the review states. Helped 571 people. Five users clapped slowly. It won the Michelangelo trophy.
Wild Hearts’ immediate user review collapse reminds me of December’s Warhammer 40K: Darktide (currently mixed, with nearly 30,000 negative reviews). It reminds me of Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s “disappointing, barebones port” from late 2021 and Elden Ring’s stuttery PC performance, which Digital Foundry concluded “just isn’t good enough.” It reminds me of Nier: Automata, which was review bombed after Square Enix left it unpatched for four years and published a superior version on the Microsoft store (a fix finally arrived on Steam months later). Game studios are delivering poor PC ports, and PC performance is declining.
2023! If we can’t have flying cars, we can have PC games that don’t stutter every 30 seconds.
PC ports have always been poor. From 1993’s DOS Street Fighter 2 to 2015’s Arkham Knight, we’ve covered the worst ports. After outstanding ports like Grand Theft Auto 5, the Tomb Raider trilogy, and Days Gone, we’ve elevated our standards. “Same as it ever was” isn’t an excuse—natural it’s to believe past mistakes won’t be repeated forever. But, some major publishers aren’t learning.
Creating a feature-rich, well-optimized PC game is a significant task, but guidance on what to include is easier than ever. The features PC gamers demand, written by Dark Souls modder Durante in 2014, were rebindable keys, unlocked framerate and resolution support, customizable FOV and aspect ratio, and moddability. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Ubisoft’s accessibility efforts should become ubiquitous.
We’ve advanced since Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition.
Several cross-platform PC games have received accolades for performance and options: Hi-Fi Rush’s developers focused on removing Unreal Engine 4’s stuttering before its release a few weeks ago. Death Stranding demonstrated Nvidia’s DLSS’s power. But enough games have arrived recently with either bizarrely awful performance or essentially missing functionality to annoy PC gamers again.
Are PC ports getting worse?
“I was almost broken as a reviewer for Digital Foundry [in 2022],” Alex Battaglia stated in a video on how developers may avoid last year’s “lousy” PC ports in 2023. His points expand on Durante’s 2014. Console ports have more visual options and fewer restricted framerates than eight years ago. Great news: console ports are arriving in numbers we couldn’t have imagined a decade ago. They still mess up things, but gone are the days when we were grateful for any PC version that wasn’t a dumpster fire.
Better-than-console performance is no longer cheap.
“What I want most from PC gaming hardware this year is some semblance of value,” our hardware editor Dave James said in January. Ultra-enthusiast hardware cost is killing PC gaming. The Nvidia RTX 4080 costs $1200—$500 more than the GTX 2080 five years ago. You could have constructed a 2080 gaming rig and still had some difference.
So, we now scrutinize PC ports. You either invested a lot of money and expect a game to run smoothly with all the bells and whistles, or you’re on lesser hardware that suffers greatly when a port isn’t optimized.
In 2016, Durante wrote on the difficult word “optimization,” which players often use to mean “this game doesn’t perform properly on my System.” A new generation of consoles may change our expectations of PC gaming difficulty. With the PS4 generation (2013–2020), we could set everything to Ultra, but that doesn’t make a game unoptimized.
I don’t think that’s why most ports are criticized today:
- Steam reviewers criticized Forspoken for appearing worse than its trailers and contemporary open world games while being as demanding as Cyberpunk 2077.
- Horizon Zero Dawn, Sony’s first major PC port, had flawed anisotropic filtering and poor borderless windowed performance, although patches fixed them.
- HD remasters of vintage games always need mods: Last two years’ offenders include Chrono Cross and Ninja Gaiden Collection.
- A file mix-up caused severe stuttering at launch for the Callisto Protocol, which was promptly fixed.
- Gotham Knights, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Stray, Kena: Bridge of Spirits, and Evil West are Unreal Engine 4 titles that launched with stuttering issues.
- A year after launch, Elden Ring still stutters—particularly disappointing in a game restricted to 60 fps.
Disabling 2K’s irritating launcher improved Midnight Suns’ framerate. - Variable rate shading caused fuzzy textures and stuttering in Dead Space, however a patch addressed the first.
These were all real issues that went beyond a game’s hardware requirements. Following one high-profile release after another may make it seem like every game has a launch issue, even if it’s not that severe.
Several launch day difficulties can be fixed. Some don’t. Wild Hearts’ PC performance is well below what it should be given the game’s degree of detail, and its sub-60 fps console performance suggests that this was the game’s intended performance. Mid-range hardware performance is terrible enough that pre-release testing should have shown these concerns. That suggests EA decided to release in this state, even though it’s pressing performance fixes in the next several weeks.
No need for this. I’d like to see more last-minute delays if performance isn’t good. This might frustrate some players, but it would be refreshing to see a publisher like EA explain in depth what polish is needed and why. It’s not like we’re distributing PC games on CDs anymore, so I don’t care if it breaks marketing plans. Releasing a game with such obvious framerate issues poisons the well, and it’s impossible to recover from primarily poor Steam reviews.
Better than a last-minute delay: build a beta period into the development cycle with ample time to fix things. Release in early access if you can’t change the date.
PC players must accept that stuttering will persist beyond 2023. (though Unreal Engine 5 offers a glimmer of hope). By precompiling shaders, more developers could stop this epidemic. PC gamers may be restless about game download speeds, but we can all wait five minutes on the initial menu to prevent a massive stutter every five minutes.
Outside huge budget games, 2023 PC gaming is more fun and lively than ever. It’s better than the days when unlocking framerates doubled game speed. We just need to keep applauding the ports that get it right and pushing the ports who get it wrong to acknowledge and fix their faults to keep PC gaming healthy. As always.