Entertainment
PC game developers try to explain why modern console ports are so bad-Michael Beckwith-Entertainment – Metro
Given the constant stream of bad PC ports of otherwise beloved games, a couple of devs have offered an explanation for what’s going wrong.
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The Last Of Us Part 1 – never forget Sony thought this was okay to launch (pic: Twitter)
Given the constant stream of bad PC ports of otherwise beloved games, a couple of devs have offered an explanation for what’s going wrong.
All too often do PC versions of multiplatform games turn out worse than their console counterparts. A high profile release like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor can enjoy a mostly smooth experience on consoles while the PC version is met with countless complaints of poor performance.
Sometimes, you’ll get something like the PC port of The Last Of Us Part 1, which quickly became notorious for how completely broken it is. It wasn’t just choppy frame rates people took umbrage with; the whole thing was riddled with more bugs than a flea circus.
So, why is this such a frequent issue? Marc Whitten, senior vice president and general manager of Unity Create, believes one key reason is ‘the sheer diversity and variability of PC configurations that games will be played on.’
Playing games on PC has always been far more complicated than playing them on console. Although there may be different models, a PlayStation 5 owner doesn’t need to triple check their console will be capable of playing a new release like Final Fantasy 16.
Some PCs aren’t as powerful as others, meaning they’ll have a harder time running larger, more demanding titles with high end graphics and the like. They may not even be able to run them at all.
That’s why when PC versions are announced, the developer and publisher share the minimum PC requirements – it’s so you’ll know if your hardware can run it before you fork over £60.
Speaking with Digital Trends, Whitten adds that ‘different operating systems and new driver updates, heat and latency, and user customisation’ can also be a factor.
Given how many possible configurations there are, the argument is that developers simply can’t account for every single one.
Hi-Fi Rush director John Johanas agrees, saying, ‘It’s pretty unrealistic to think that you can make a product that will run flawlessly on what feels like an unlimited configuration of CPUs, GPUs, memory, and more likely, what is running in the background.’
Perhaps unsurprisingly, their comments have already seen a lot of pushback from PC gamers who think this isn’t a good enough explanation, arguing that by this logic there should be at least some PC builds where these versions run smoothly, but this is never the case.
Others think the far simpler explanation is that publishers are content to rush out these PC versions and make as much money as they can from pre-orders, and then apologise/promise to fix things later.
It’s easy to believe that was the case with something like The Last Of Us Part 1. It’s impossible that Sony thought it was in a decent enough state to actually sell for £50, and yet they did anyway.
The problem with most of their answers is that they could equally apply to PC gaming at any time in its decades long history and yet the current problems have only been evident for the last couple of years.
Hi-Fi Rush systems programmer Hideyuki Miyashita claims that part of the problem is a feature in Unreal Engine 4 that’s meant to reduce stuttering, called Pipeline State Object(PSO) caching, which is currently only optional and not being implemented automatically.
That seems awfully specific for such a wide range of problems though, including games that run on Unreal Engine 5, and that means it may be some time before PC gaming becomes as reliable as it once was.
Hi-Fi Rush managed to avoid any such disaster on PC but it’s more an exception to the rule (Picture: Microsoft)
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