While this year has been really strong in terms of quality of games, the same can’t be said for PC ports. Last year they already faced problems, but this year they reached completely different proportions, and especially in the first half of the year one broken port after another came out. That’s why Alex Battaglia and John Linneman from Digital Foundry, in addition to videos about games with the best graphics, decided to also make a video about the worst PC conversions of the year. But because they wanted to give game companies a chance for some compensation (three months for possible fixes), they only counted games released by the end of September.
A total of six ports were chosen, but the first three of them represent those that the developers really worked on and were significantly improved. This is especially true for the first mentioned, i.e. PC port The Last of Us Part I. In its disastrous state at the time of release, Naughty Dog’s remake of the famous game would likely have dominated the charts, but the developers managed to get the game into very decent condition within a few weeks. Many bugs have been fixed, shader compilation has been shortened, low textures finally look real (even with less VRAM usage), and CPU utilization has been greatly improved. Essentially, big improvements across the board and a great example of what post-release support should look like. Although, of course, we would like the game to come out in this state.
Second corrected title Forgotten from the developers of Luminous Productions, a now-closed studio under parent company Square Enix. From the first trailers, a beautiful-looking RPG, which in the end (and not only) was very disappointing in terms of graphics. The lighting and shadows look frankly bad and one might say even worse than in the previous game on the Luminous Engine – Final Fantasy XV. However, the patches brought in the Ambient occlusion system from FF15, which made Forspoken look much better, and textures began to load correctly on PC (originally many of them did not load at all, and because of this the game looked even worse). Besides the visual improvements, the game also runs a little better.
The latest game to receive significant improvements is Redfall from Arkane Austin studio. A game running on Unreal Engine 4, which has been causing problems for developers for a long time. Very poor CPU usage, freezing when crawling or broken shadows… However, most of the issues were fixed within a few months of release. Shadows look much better and CPU performance is much higher (about 50%). Unfortunately, stuttering is still present, but Alex Battaglia says the stuttering isn’t as disruptive as in other games higher on the list.
It ranked third on the list of worst PC ports. Dead Space remake from Motive studio running on the Frostbite engine. While the game offers great graphics, clear menus, and efficient use of the GPU, it unfortunately suffers from a huge number of glitches on PC. Stuttering occurs repeatedly in certain places, often when moving to another room, so it appears the game is running in the background trying to load a lot of things quickly. Although several patches were released after release, unfortunately the stuttering was never fixed and probably never will be.
It took second place Star Wars Jedi: Survivor from Respawn studio. Despite the fact that the game has received a number of patches, major problems still remain: a huge number of freezes during the passage (along with a broken camera and character animations, due to which the game will never be smooth even without freezes), poor CPU usage, many bugs and visual glitches, or even a complete crash of the game. In this case, I can confirm from my own experience, I played Jedi: Survivor in September and encountered such a series of problems that I’m glad that even though I successfully completed the game, it still significantly spoiled the experience.
The “winner” of the award for the worst PC port was the title Wild Hearts from Koei Tecmo’s Omega Force studio. Not only does the game not look very good, but it also generally has an incredible amount of very long crashes, where it is not even clear what is actually causing them, since they appear almost everywhere. Some of these are likely related to shader compilation, but many of them appear when simply running around the world without making it feel like the game needs to load anything.
Interestingly, the first three games in this ranking were published by Electronic Arts, although each of them is behind different developers. But the truth is that EA titles are released in unfinished form, and it seems that they are simply not fully corrected even after release. The situation is similar, for example, with the EA Sports WRC game, which, if not for the September deadline, would very likely also have made it into the ratings.
The first half of 2023 saw the release of some of the worst PC versions of AAA games I’ve ever reviewed – in this video @dark1x and I’ll talk about some of the PC versions that improved and the ones that didn’t. #StutterStruggle must die!https://t.co/TJzb0CWQAo pic.twitter.com/52IOgVr0tM
— Alexander Battaglia (@Dachsjaeger) December 28, 2023
Source :Indian TV
