But when it comes time to play a major AAA release, which is the main driving force behind having a solid gaming PC in the first place, you’re forced to compromise, even on high-end hardware. You can look at the large swath of indie releases coming to Steam every week and devices like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally and say that PC gaming has never been better. Redfall‘s UI breaks if you set your abilities to mouse buttons, for example, and everything from Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order to Marvel’s Midnight Suns requires multiple launchers to get running (and sometimes those launchers further hurt performance).
That’s not to mention other, non-performance issues with PC ports.
But if you look at the other games released in the past two years - Dying Light 2 Stay Human, Hitman 3, and Forza Horizon 5, to name a few - they launched relatively free of performance problems on PC. Last year, Gotham Knights and Elden Ring both suffered shader compilation stuttering, and Resident Evil Village exhibited massive frame rate slowdowns due to its digital rights management (DRM) at launch. There have been echoes of this in the past few years. At the very least, it’s becoming an expectation that you’ll encounter a few performance issues. It’s getting hard to trust that a new game will run at all on PC. That’s every AAA release that’s been released so far in 2023, short of Atomic Heart and Hi-Fi Rush. There have been disasters in the form of The Last of Us Part 1, Wild Hearts, and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, but even Returnal, Resident Evil 4, Hogwarts Legacy, Forspoken, Redfall, and Dead Space have seen issues to varying degrees. And in 2023, it feels like we’ve been getting an Arkham Knight at least once a month.īasically, every AAA release on PC this year has been littered with problems. A capped frame rate, horrid performance, and constant stuttering made it one of the worst PC ports ever released. Publishers were willing to devote more time to PC as a platform, leading to better graphics menus, more control options, and the death of dreaded mouse acceleration.
In the years leading up to it, there had been a bit of a renaissance is PC ports. Wind back to 2015 when Arkham Knight‘s infamous PC port released.
But if I was just playing games and not testing their performance, I know I’d be more inclined to spend my $70 on a platform where I know the game will at least run. That’s more than I can say for most new PC games these days. I consider suffering through stutters and crashes in new games just an occupational hazard, of course.
0 kommentar(er)
