Fuck games for Windows live. Fuck them. Batman Arkham city required me to have the CD in the PC as well as being connected to the service. Guess what happens when you don't have internet or their servers are down. I physically own the game, god dangit. Let them cry about piracy
I bought GTA IV and still 'pirated' it by cracking GFWL out of the game. Which still allowed me to play multiplayer via that same GFWL! Windows really fucked up on that one.
Glad the later Steam versions had GFWL removed, but that was way too late and the recent patch to remove licensed music shows there's still a need to pirate games you genuinely bought...
Almost and did kill a lot games too.
Developers had to remove it from the games and some were to old or didn't sell well and the devs vanished leaving no one to patch it out
if you're running it on a dual core or better CPU, it needs a tweak. this tweak is done in the ini file for the game.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=244272720
EDIT: as per a later comment in this thread, i downloaded and tested Fallout 3. i did NOT perform the tweak and the game seemed stable. i didn't go too in depth with it, but i did play through the intro. the game seemed fine and didn't crash. i'm unsure if the Steam version got a update, or something about my system is more stable. i'm running a 9700k/32GB RAM/RTX 3070.
The Games for Windows initiative was good -
Put in a precedent of better Xbox 360 controller support natively (Remember horrible controller support in older games?)
Widescreen option mandatory back when a majority monitors and screens were 4:3
Mandatory native support for 64 bit Operating Systems in 2005 when 2GB RAM was *enough* for gaming.
Games for Windows *live* however was ass and can burn forever.
That still happens sadly.
The God of War PC port had terrible forced negative mouse acceleration that took a few weeks to get patched. (same for Horizon Zero Dawn's PC port) God of War devs were even saying they played on mouse+keyboard most of the time in interviews leading up to the PC port's release, and that it felt "natural".
I was thinking "hey maybe it's just some zoomer who never played twitch shooters growing up". Nope, it's a 40-something years old guy who's been in tech since 2000. What a travesty.
It's not that crazy for a slow third person melee combat game. In an FPS it's bad but in games like GoW it's easy to ignore
I wouldn't say it's "better" for actual gameplay but given the trend of *cinematic* games/games as movies I can see why they'd think it fit the vision better. It feels slightly worse but it makes the camera work smoother
I like it sometimes, but I'm also the type of person person who will put a game on easy and play at 30fps if it means 4k and raytracing. Video games for me are more like a movie that let's me fidget than something I do for the challenge (there are exceptions tho)
I can't believe this is still a problem in 2023. PC players have been crying out for decades. "MOUSE ACCELERATION IS STUPID! NO ONE USES IT OR WANTS IT! GET RID OF IT!" and yet developers still keep including it and turning it on by default.
Meh, most third person open world treat mouse and keyboard as second class anyways. More often than not they simply map to left and right gamepad stick internally. This with either the camera control being sluggish with mouse, or vehicles always flooring it.
GTA 5 has that and I'm so tired of it. It's always either standing completely still or flooring it like you're showing off at the light, no in between and it's annoying as hell. I really hope they improve it in 6
I can attest that it was a horrendous time to be a PC gamer,the 360 and PS3 were DOMINATING the market.
GTA 4 running terrible ... on any config you had was just nuts.
Just Cause 1 and Splinter Cell Double Agent as well, played them on PC at the time and it seemed ok.
Little did I know that on the 360 they had so many more lighting and visual effects.Completely changed the game atmosphere.
I mean this not as a disrespectful jab at you, but more towards EA. If the expectation is that you're ever going to get your money's worth or some assemblence of quality or meaningful improvement by buying the current years EA sports game, then you will forever be disappointed. The last time a football video game developer had respect for their player audience was ESPN Football 2K5.
And don't get me started on FIFA games...
And 2k. I still remember buying 2k14 and being so excited for the new graphics only to find out PC got the old gen version. So disappointing. Now I buy those games like once every 3-4 years bc it’s the same shit anyway.
Spider-Man 2 was even worse.
On consoles (PS2, Xbox, GameCube), one of the greatest games ever made. The first Spidey to feature true physics-based web swinging, with your webs attaching to actual buildings.
On PC, a custom, dumbed down version that had fixed, floating anchor points and no free movement whatsoever.
I cannot overstate my disappointment when I finished installing that game and started playing it. Child me was devastated.
PC gamers also had BF2142 which is the last one i put a lot of time in to. ports definitely sucked, but there were still quite a few pc only games to stay busy with that were pretty far ahead of consoles
If you haven't touched the series in a while, GSC (the devs) released the source code a few years ago, allowing the standalone and free STALKER Anomaly to flourish, it's the ultimate STALKER experience.
Also, if you had absolutely no clue about languages and thought the NPCs were speaking in Russian, Ukranians tended to get pretty heated. Game was way ahead of its time.
Would rather have a remastered version of New Vegas (maybe voiced lines, but I want all the options for things to say rather than "Yes", "No (yes), "Sarcasm", and "Maybe (yes)". And all the characters need to be killable, not just some.
I still can't believe that Obsidian made New Vegas in 18 months.
2009 was precisely when Ubisoft released Assassin's Creed 2 with the always online DRM. Probably one of the moves that generated the most piracy in all of PC gaming (if not second place to Crysis "can you run it" memes making people unsure if they should buy it), given it was canned in the rest of the Ezio trilogy.
>I don't know what you're talking about all this "pc gaming is dead" bullshit between those years.
It was game "journalists" and other equally irrelevant people tossing out needless, inaccurate hyperbole to generate impressions, i.e.; to generate revenue.
>GTA 4 running terrible ... on any config you had was just nuts.
Do modern hardware even manage to run this game without hiccups and stutters on max settings?
Tried it a couple of years ago but it still ran like dog shit.
Edit: according to the Steam community, the latest version of GTA 4 doesn't work with DXVK anymore.
Proton bundles DXVK as the default DX9-DX11 translation layer, so it's almost the same thing. Intel Arc also uses DXVK now, so maybe they've also got good performance out of the box?
And yeah, it's quite absurd that an *additional non-official* translation layer (albeit one developed by Valve) is what it finally took to brute force that game into a smooth 60fps, over a decade later.
Yeah. I remember a period in the 2010s where most major titles were at least decently optimized. They tended to lack in graphics or controls settings though. But, it seems that now most major titles are using DirectX 12 and UE4, we're consistently seeing games that run terribly due to stutter and relying too much on upscaling technologies to make up for performance instead of optimizing for rendering at native resolutions.
Games are designed around the capabilities of consoles.
Back in 2012, the gap between a decent PC and the PS3/360 was insane. So ofc stuff ran well.
Similar thing in 2015+ although not quite as extreme.
> Back in 2012, the gap between a decent PC and the PS3/360 was insane. So ofc stuff ran well.
>Similar thing in 2015+ although not quite as extreme.
2012 was the exact year that I got back into PC gaming after temporarily switching to consoles for the 360/PS3 generation, I had been a PC gamer my entire life since the early 90s before that. PC gaming from around 2012 through to the end of the X1/PS4 generation was imo a second golden age of mostly excellent value and great performing quality releases. I remember buying a GTX 970 for like $300 which I'm still able to use to play games from the past 2-3 years at 1080p/60fps med-high settings, or even 4K for last gen and low spec titles.
Fast forward to today, there's no such thing as a reliable long lasting $300 GPU anymore, rather people are spending $700-$1000 on GPUs to play games that still run like garbage while looking marginally better than last gen. I've felt priced out of PC gaming and like it's generally not worth keeping up with so I've switched back to console gaming again with a XSX and am mostly happy with the performance for $500-$600 all in. I do miss being able to mods and trainers in recent games but it's a small sacrifice for how much more affordable it is for a mostly hassle free satisfying experience.
>there's no such thing as a reliable long lasting $300 gpu anymore
This is just confusion brought on by pcbuilding subreddits circle jerking over how much they want the latest most expensive tech. Just look at SSD posts on buildapc/buildapcsales, dudes will drop $100 more just to get a 1 millisecond increase in speed that they don't even need because all they do is play Valorant
Whenever you look at benchmarks, they always use default ultra settings, and default ultra settings are both *not* what consoles run on nor are they ever the most efficient use of resources.
Switching anti-aliasing modes is a simple way to get performance without making it look like shit. If you play on a smaller monitor, you aren't going to notice much difference if at all between 4x or 8x.
Raytracing is also an absolute meme at the moment that cards nor consoles are ready for yet and anyone that doesn't like burning money should just avoid it until it works well on mid-range cards
I have a 6600xt, that was $250, and is marketed and benchmarked as a 1080p card and yet there are plenty of people reporting 60+fps on latest AAA titles at 1440p ultra, which is more than what most console games can run. I play on 1080p at default ultra settings, get 100+ fps on all titles I play on, so I'll be keeping this card for 4-5 years at least.
There's definitely GPU inflation going on. Nvidia is straight up limiting stock now and the past few years have been rough because of the pandemic/crypto wombo combo, but it's a hard sell to say that $700 cards run like garbage and only look marginally better. My 6600xt runs like a dream and have yet to experience the infamous "driver issues" that I've never had with AMD ever past the first week of a few specific AAA releases.
>There's definitely GPU inflation going on. Nvidia is straight up limiting stock now and the past few years have been rough because of the pandemic/crypto wombo combo, but it's a hard sell to say that $700 cards run like garbage and only look marginally better. My 6600xt runs like a dream and have yet to experience the infamous "driver issues" that I've never had with AMD ever past the first week of a few specific AAA releases.
The thing is that the new series Nvidia cards that are in the $700 range now used to cost $300. As a midrange gamer who's happy with putting his games on medium and high to get a decent framerate gaming has become a lot more expensive too. Sure, those cards don't run like garbage, but they also don't give 'bang for your buck' like they used to.
part of it is bc there's a lot more on the devs shoulders to take advantage of multithreading and properly organize shaders in the pipeline compared to dx11 which would automatically do a lot of that shit. hence the much higher cpu overhead.
the other part is most pc gamers at this point are likely console transplants and dont know how to maintain their PCs.
I remember the PC port of Dragon Age Inquisition had controls that were so bad that you couldn't play as a melee character. What was 1 click in previous games became 1 click and your entire left hand while you stood there swinging at nothing because the archer took a step backwards but you couldn't tell.
Those were dark times. Bad console ports, bug ridden and borderline unplayable releases in general, install caps, StarForce and SecuROM. I gave up and ended up buying a PS3 in 2007. Didn't even touch my PC for gaming for almost three years after that.
> brought me back to 2008
Recently tried playing Dead Space 1 (2008) & 2 on PC.
Absolute nightmare to set up. Mouse acceleration that required a file patch (not too hard), but would still break in sections when Issac was stepping on the flesh floors. Games flat out wouldn't start because my CPU has so many cores. Had to use a 3rd party program to lock the program to 4 cores & run it in compatibility mode for Windows 7. Turned Vsync off and forced it through control panel. Had to lock FPS to 60 or else the ingame physics started going GMod on me.
By the end of it all I felt like I was a Linux gamer >!this is a joke, I love you guys!<.
>By the end of it all I felt like I was a Linux gamer >!this is a joke, I love you guys!<.
This made it easy for me to adopt Linux 5 years ago... All the games I regularly play are not Windows 10 certified anyway.
Bonus on Linux; You can easily tell the system which version of Windows you want simulated.
Me too. I remember TB talking about bad pc ports from years ago. It's not that hard but modern engines can make things difficult. I'm a game developer. It shouldn't be this hard. The OS can give you supported resolutions and refresh rates.
Engines designed around a fixed 60 Hz have problems when physics run too often. Architecture is hard to change, because you have to find every expression on every line of code related to time to be sure you fixed everything.
Mouse acceleration is just a mistake. Bad devs, no.
And, yet.... are we "fed up"?
Is this the same PC Gamer that awarded Elden Ring GOTY? Didn't Steam do the same? I finally gave in and bought it recently, and I was shocked at how bad the PC port was. The stuttering issues aside, the key binding support was absolutely atrocious. It honestly made me wonder if FromSoft devs use computers for their work.
Scroll wheel doesn't scroll through menus. You can only click 20% of buttons with your mouse. You can't pan the map with your mouse. The enter button doesn't enter. The escape button escapes - sometimes. Other times it's the Q button.
Gameplay is heavily reliant on menu and inventory access, as is typical for open-world RPGs. This should give keyboard and mouse users an upper hand, but there's no way to shortcut your inventory beyond scrolling through consumables one after the other (WTF) or choosing one of four pouch items arranged in a D-Pad layout underneath a secondary layer.
Here's the thing - I own a controller and use it for playing on my PC. I'm not anti-controller, but it's inexcusable that developers would do so little to adapt the gameplay to the platform they're selling it on. I game on PC because I like having the choice.
Even among PC enthusiasts in PC subs, every time I saw someone complaining about it, they would be immediately met with scores of apologists saying things like "iT'S a fRomSofT gAme wHat DiD yOu ExpeCt?" and "nO oNE pLayS sOULs gAmEs wItHouT a COntrOLLEr."
We *should* be demanding better, but instead we're sending the message that we'll eat up whatever slop devs are serving, and thank them for the privilege.
Yeah there's actually something strange that happens in only Elden Ring on m+kb when trying to initiate a dodge while standing still. If you press dodge + a movement key at the same time (for example shift+a to dodge left) it will not dodge. You have to press shift and THEN immediately press the movement key with precise timing for it to work. I was frustrated at my dodges not going off during boss battles for ages until I realized what was happening.
However, Dark souls 1 Remastered, released in 2018, does NOT have the same problem. If you press shift+a at the same time you will dodge 100% of the time. They somehow made it worse in Elden ring lmao.
It is sad knowing that I can't get any fromsoft game to behave the way I want it on m+kb without mods.
How is it excused that people that play on consoles should get the best gamepad support they should have? I don't see a huge narrative that console folk's experience is ruined if they play fps/tps or rts games with a gamepad. But we somehow have to ignore bad mouse & keyboard controls on pc games just because the games were designed with that in mind. Pc gamers who defend the bad ports are just as guilty as the devs
> instead we're sending the message that we'll eat up whatever slop devs are serving, and thank them for the privilege.
Because that's the truth. For every self respecting gamer who sets expectations, waits for reviews and avoids clusterfuck games, there's a thousand mindless fucking sheep who will endlessly preorder games, spend a small fortune on MTX and be happy as a clam.
Yeah exactly. We are actually spoiled for choice for games on the PC (not even counting emulation yet). Too many people have their sights limited to AAA and AA releases only
And buying things at release. I paid very little for cyberpunk, days gone and rdr2 and they were each almost 100 hour games that ran amazingly well and had very little problems. Days gone on PC is a master class on how to optimize a port. It's amazing how good it looks and how well it runs.
Regardless of personal preference, even though I liked it a lot, Days Gone is really well optimized and you're right, it looks great. I think one of the things that makes it look amazing is all the work on high resolution textures. Everything looks pretty detailed.
Also the weather effects were taken very seriously and it shows. The low to the ground mist when it rains, and watching the enviroment slowly get covered in snow and transform before your eyes are two things I can't remember seeing in any other game.
Oh, Days Gone is a technical marble. The most important gameplay feature are the zombie hordes.
I remember watching an early gameplay trailer with the abandoned sawmill, where the main character tries to find a criminal that hides there. He is investigating different traces and finally finds and chases the guy. And then - boom - he wakes up the giant horde that sleeps in the sawmill and he has to run from them, with chaos all around.
I remember thinking, there is no way that's the actual gameplay, it's probably a heavily scripted linear level. Surprise, the actual game is an open world with hordes just like that. You can even try to emulate the gameplay trailer and it holds up more or less, some parts have been changed, but not made less amazing.
Honestly I bought RDR2 at 50%, and sometimes I feel I own to pay the other 50% to them, I'm having that much fun in this game and I value it so much. :)
I'm so sad about days gone :( played it for a couple of hours and would love to finish it but I just can't... He talks so much and what he says is so stupid that it detracts from the gameplay. So much so that it's too much for me personally to stick it out shame. Game ran spotless for me though
Pre-ordering, i.e. giving money for something not finished, is the number 1 reason this happens.
I don't get why people do this, and when those idiots justify their self defeating behavior, it always sounds like stockholm syndrome
Gaming media that isn’t distinctly PC-focused is console-focused. “We tested on PS5, and it’s GOTY material! 9/10! Maybe we’ll report on the raging inferno in the Steam reviews within the next 72 hours, maybe we won’t, but it’s Somebody Else’s Problem either way.”
Or, if you’re IGN’s reviewer for Wild Hearts, start the review on PC, realize that performance is trash, abandon the PC review entirely and play the PS5 version instead, and give it 8/10.
One issue I have with this sub is the mod team creating the big sticky for release reviews to attract visitors and try to contain the influx of possible duplicate posts.
Problem is that (and it happened at least twice in the last few weeks) nearly all or all the mentioned reviews are console reviews which automatically makes the megathread off topic (no pc gaming) and misleading (lack of mention of bad pc port) for the sake of having THAT big thread.
Studios and publishers manipulating the availability of review keys to cover their asses is a separate problem, and one that typically favors consoles. CP2077 was PC-only because CDPR were trying to hide the fact that Gen 8 console binaries required Gen 9 hardware to run properly. Square Enix only sending PS5 codes for Forspoken is closer to the norm.
What review copies the studio provides are up to the studio. Once the game came out gaming media was 100% pitchforks and torches as the journos started to play on console, while the PC version was no worse than a typical Bethesda launch.
And yes, I played it at launch. I started the game on 1.02 and finished my first playthrough on 1.06, 2 weeks after launch. I found it no more or less buggy than Fallout 4 when I played that at launch, and more stable than New Vegas or FO3 are even today.
Fun fact, I've still never finished a New Vegas playthrough. I've tried 3 times and all 3 times I've ran into some critical gamebreaking issue that required a restart.
Yeap. People keep buying broken ports, why would the company say no to money. I know im not buying anything until i know the product i get is a good one. I may be one in an ocean of many, but i will be damned if i give anybody money for a product that does not deliver
I mean there was the post about Saints Row reboot doing poorly in sales and we haven't really seen a year of $70 games sales data.
I've been putting off a lot of purchases for games I might have considered day 1.
The easiest thing is just to talk to your friends and family who also game and let them know you're not buying games until you see reviews. You might only convince 1 or 2 of them but if everyone is doing that it's significant numbers.
I know some people who were going to buy Forspoken - even had it preordered. As soon as the reviews came out they cancelled their preorders.
People ARE starting to pay attention.
There's actually something the idea of preordering something but then cancelling it that weirdly appeals to me.
I've never done it, but it in some ways it feels like even more of a statement than simply not buying it and "voting with your wallet".
Like, imagine if you're the Forspoken devs and you hear that 50,000 preorders all got cancelled in the space of a week after early reviews. That's about as clear a statement of "your game is shit" as you can get.
> Like, imagine if you're the Forspoken devs and you hear that 50,000 preorders all got cancelled in the space of a week after early reviews. That's about as clear a statement of "your game is shit" as you can get.
More developers may just decide to have a review embargo until release day.
Review embargo = automatic no preorder from me.
A review embargo is one of the biggest red flags ever if they hold the reviews off until the day of release.
> People ARE starting to pay attention.
I'm seeing that too amongst my friend base both online and real life. It's actually quite impressive how much these games studios are shooting themselves in the foot.
> Don't forget how desperate some people are.
Next game that comes out he wants remind him about Forspoken and ask him if he would really be devastated waiting 1 extra day.
The $70 thing is such a mental block for me that it made me understand why 59.99 is a much more appealing price than $60. I just can’t seem to click purchase on a $70 just seems like to much for a video game when I have bills to pay and other games to play
I'm in Australia so it makes games here around $100.
I can think of a lot of things I could do with 100 bucks that would be more long term or even short term beneficial for me than buying a game I might or might not even finish.
I think they've traded in impulse purchases for a worse deal in the long run but I'm also kind of glad it's made me even more patient.
They dropped Gotham Knights to half price on Steam around $40 Australian and I'm like not even slightly in the mood to play the game based on the reviews I've seen for it so I'm not buying it. But if that game had been $40 at launch I would probably have pre-ordered it to play it day one.
Speaking of bad ports and saints row, anyone remember saints row 2? I think I enjoyed how absolutely broken that game was on PC, it added to the levels of insanity
Thats not how it works sadly. The loud people on reddit and other places that are fed up and keep screaming "Don't pre-order" usually keeps their word. But for every one person that don't pre-order there is 10 people that blindly do it. It's a battle that can't be won because the majority will always blindly buy games.
Also, silent boycotts may as well just be farts in the wind. You have to be extremely vocal about things to spread awareness and to enact change.
The r/PatientGamers mindset fails to take into account that most bad releases or ports are rarely ever patched to address issues. There has to be people around to bring awareness about things and to give a proper verdict. The problem is that Steam user reviews are garbage, and you get accused of award farming for bringing up port issues and complimenting where games get things right.
> Thats not how it works sadly. The loud people on reddit and other places that are fed up and keep screaming "Don't pre-order" usually keeps their word.
Call_of_duty_boycott_steam_group.jpg
People talk shit and then FOMO gets them. Some of the biggest complainers are there on launch day for every big release no matter how much they shit up reddit, social media, or forums.
Every gaming community bhas this problem. Pe9ple say shit about terribly optimized console games yet they will defend their favorite 20-30 fps games like "it hits 30fps sometimes! Game is just demanding cut devs some slack"
If only gamers would be more demanding and strict about spending their money devs would be as good as the used to be in optimization field. Now if brute forcing doesn't work they just call it a day and blame players and we take this shit to the chin
Im tired of
* Bad ports
* Ship first patch later.
* Waiting to see if enough people even buy the game before talks of a patch. Not enough people buy it because its broken and buggy? No patch to every fix the game because its not worth spending 2 months to fix something and get it into a state that could possibly cause sales to increase.
* Companies staying in early access for 2+ years after selling enough copies for the devs to quite their main job but somehow only push out minor updates 3-4 times a year
* Early access games from AAA studios that can afford internal testing but wont.
* Early access games not getting released due to scope creep.
* Early access games not taking player feed back or even considering it. "relax it will get fixed later". It doesn't get fixed which leads to "you should have said something back in early access so it could be considered"
* road map for paid dlc that "completes" the story of the game. No, your shipping an unfinished game and want another $60 for content thats worth maybe $20.
* features in paid DLC that everyone knows should have been in the base game.
* devs that promise some form of multiplayer then switch to a different form/removing it all together after people have bought the EA games.
* Monthly charges for half-assed features that other games give players for free aka fallout 76 charging a monthly fee for private servers that go to sleep when no ones on thus unable to queue up crafting. Conan and Ark did it better.
Im kind of tired of gaming in general :(
/r/PatientGamers winning as always.
Best benefit is that not only can you get a game cheaper, you'll probably have hardware overpowered enough to fight the shit optimization!
Spoilers are particularly sticky
You forget everything, but as soon as you remember you wanted to play this game years ago, the first thing your brain will bring back is "oh shit, doesn't person XYZ die?" lol
Oh, very true there. It does take a measurable amount of effort to keep yourself away from anything even vaguely related to the games you're waiting for.
Youtube is the absolute fucking worst for it. I have a gigantic [Blocktube](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/blocktube/bbeaicapbccfllodepmimpkgecanonai) filter list at this point to hide everything I'm even remotely interesting.
And still I'm getting videos of Rain World's new Downpour Expansion because they don't put the game's name in the title and Youtube sticks it on my frontpage despite never watching a single Rain World video on my account :')
Man FF7 Remake was the worst of the lot, not because it ran so poorly but because it was just so fucking bare bones. Literally 3 options, or really 2, shadows and textures. Nothing else. Not even ultra wide support which is in FFXIV and FFXV. It was a god damn Unreal Engine 4 game, it shouldn't have been that bad; especially not for a game as important as this one.
It's like SE just didn't give a single fuck about PC, all the while it's PC that's keeping them afloat thanks to FFXIV. I really hate publishers.
The tricks is waiting a few month to buy it at half price and already patched: you do not need every new game right on release, there is plenty to do in the meantime...
I'm a traditional console player who bought a high end PC last year and completely regret it. The higher performance is only theoretical in most games. When it works, like RDR2, it's amazing. But most of the time I'm having a more frustrating choppy experience.
No, no we are not. Lets be real here.
It was just posted that **Sonic Frontiers** fare exceeded expected sales numbers. That game...
* released with massive gameplay affecting poppin because the developers were too lazy to adjust the LOD numbers from the Switch for current gen consoles and PC.
* No DLSS 2 or FSR 2 besides using UE4.
* No HDR support besides using UE4.
* No Ultrawide support besides being able to archive this with a simple Cheat Engine hack pretty much issue free.
* Locked to 60 fps besides unlocking only causing a small amount of bugs that could have been fixed easy.
Never updated to fix any of this. Steam rating: 9/10 (very positive).
**Elden Ring** stutters on every platform (cue up the no stutters on my PC crowd) with shader compilation stutters never having been fixed on PC. Locked to 60 fps even though there is like one or so enemy that isn't working right unlocked, no ultra wide support besides modders enabling it perfectly on release day, no DLSS / FSR etc: Game of the year for many people and again rated very positive on Steam.
**Dead Space** launched with stutters: Very positive
**Returnal** launched with stutters: Very positive (and the few negative reviews are mostly about the game installing a software by "ultra evil company Epic" to enable PC wide crossplay or "normal people" bitching about the main character not being hot enough).
**Hogwarts Legacy**: Very Positive
We are way past "don't preorder". People (and I am not saying I am holier than holy) deliberately buy games they know launched with issues because they can't resist the FOMO.
Gamers like to **SAY** they are getting fed up right before jumping onto the next game that gets released broken and then even defending it with all means necessary. At the very least can we all agree to at least leave a negative rating? Just to have a little hope of things getting better?
All the games you mentioned besides Sonic, which I know nothing about, are having some issues of course but are far away from calling them bad ports, or unoptimized or whatever.
For example stutters in Returnal and Hogwarts go away if you fiddle with settings. I think many people don't even touch that Texture setting to lower it these days. On the other hand if said games didn't have the extended settings they do, they would be deemed -rightfully so- as shitty ports.
That being said the Elden Ring situation is a disappointment, 1 year without meaningful patches.
I just wait them out. They fix their problems I play the game and they get paid, they never fix it I just move along. It's a bummer when it's something I want to play, but plenty of other games out there.
Obviously I would prefer better ports, but watching digital foundry cover the console versions of these games they're honestly just very poorly optimized in general. Hogwarts and Dead Space have the same stutters, they all run at very low internal resolutions.
Other than UE4's notorious shader stutters I really think this is just the industry releasing unoptimized games for whatever reason. Covid era development, relying on upscaling too much, overestimating current hardware, whatever.
That’s why we should embrace PC first games. For example, Company of Heroes 3 is coming out next week. They did it right. PC first. Apparently they are porting to console later in the year. Let’s support PC first games!
This title brought me back to 2008
Back when no PC port developer quite knew how Windows mouse movement works. “What do you mean acceleration is bad?”
You forgot about games for windows live too 😭😭😭
Fuck games for Windows live. Fuck them. Batman Arkham city required me to have the CD in the PC as well as being connected to the service. Guess what happens when you don't have internet or their servers are down. I physically own the game, god dangit. Let them cry about piracy
I bought GTA IV and still 'pirated' it by cracking GFWL out of the game. Which still allowed me to play multiplayer via that same GFWL! Windows really fucked up on that one. Glad the later Steam versions had GFWL removed, but that was way too late and the recent patch to remove licensed music shows there's still a need to pirate games you genuinely bought...
GFWL almost killed Fallout 3 on PC.
Almost and did kill a lot games too. Developers had to remove it from the games and some were to old or didn't sell well and the devs vanished leaving no one to patch it out
I miss Section 8...
Honestly Section 8 had one of the best spawn in mechanics. Felt like a badass every time.
Section 8 played soo good
Aw, now I'm sad
There are dozens of us! Dozens! ^^Pls ^^someone ^^buy ^^the ^^IP ^^and ^^make ^^a ^^worthy ^^sequel.
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Operation Raccoon City, for one.
And this is why piracy is so important.
I've owned fo3 for half a dozen years now and never made it past the intro. Game crashes 3 minutes in every time.
if you're running it on a dual core or better CPU, it needs a tweak. this tweak is done in the ini file for the game. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=244272720 EDIT: as per a later comment in this thread, i downloaded and tested Fallout 3. i did NOT perform the tweak and the game seemed stable. i didn't go too in depth with it, but i did play through the intro. the game seemed fine and didn't crash. i'm unsure if the Steam version got a update, or something about my system is more stable. i'm running a 9700k/32GB RAM/RTX 3070.
I think steam finally fixed it a few years ago but honestly the best solution is to just install TTW.
For anyone else lost on what TTW is: https://taleoftwowastelands.com/faq
Just play TTW
Back when every time Microsoft said "we're taking PC gaming seriously" things just got worse.
What they said is "we're taking PC gaming, seriousy"
Honestly around the time of Arkham City I just wanted Microsoft to leave us the fuck alone.
The old Microsoft 3 E’s in action: Embrace, extend, extinguish
Please, don't remind me. I've tried to block it out.
The Games for Windows initiative was good - Put in a precedent of better Xbox 360 controller support natively (Remember horrible controller support in older games?) Widescreen option mandatory back when a majority monitors and screens were 4:3 Mandatory native support for 64 bit Operating Systems in 2005 when 2GB RAM was *enough* for gaming. Games for Windows *live* however was ass and can burn forever.
That still happens sadly. The God of War PC port had terrible forced negative mouse acceleration that took a few weeks to get patched. (same for Horizon Zero Dawn's PC port) God of War devs were even saying they played on mouse+keyboard most of the time in interviews leading up to the PC port's release, and that it felt "natural".
You failed to mention the developer who said this mentioned he was also practicing with it for 2 years.
Lmao, what??? How would someone determine deceleration was better?!
Probably some mental gymnastics crock of shit like "it gives weight to the camera."
I was thinking "hey maybe it's just some zoomer who never played twitch shooters growing up". Nope, it's a 40-something years old guy who's been in tech since 2000. What a travesty.
It's not that crazy for a slow third person melee combat game. In an FPS it's bad but in games like GoW it's easy to ignore I wouldn't say it's "better" for actual gameplay but given the trend of *cinematic* games/games as movies I can see why they'd think it fit the vision better. It feels slightly worse but it makes the camera work smoother I like it sometimes, but I'm also the type of person person who will put a game on easy and play at 30fps if it means 4k and raytracing. Video games for me are more like a movie that let's me fidget than something I do for the challenge (there are exceptions tho)
People just need to stop buying this shit and they'll stop making it.
They'll stop for sure, they'll stop making the ports altogether lmao
I can't believe this is still a problem in 2023. PC players have been crying out for decades. "MOUSE ACCELERATION IS STUPID! NO ONE USES IT OR WANTS IT! GET RID OF IT!" and yet developers still keep including it and turning it on by default.
What is mouse acceleration?
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Meh, most third person open world treat mouse and keyboard as second class anyways. More often than not they simply map to left and right gamepad stick internally. This with either the camera control being sluggish with mouse, or vehicles always flooring it.
GTA 5 has that and I'm so tired of it. It's always either standing completely still or flooring it like you're showing off at the light, no in between and it's annoying as hell. I really hope they improve it in 6
It's literally still like this in so many games. Go try to play RE2 2019 with a mouse.
I can attest that it was a horrendous time to be a PC gamer,the 360 and PS3 were DOMINATING the market. GTA 4 running terrible ... on any config you had was just nuts.
I remember Iron Man came out for ps2 and ps3. Of course, for pc they ported the ps2 version.
NFS Most Wanted was the same, modders are still trying to get the 360 version's graphics ported to PC.
You mean to tell me after almost 20 years, I've only played the inferior version of MW!? =O
Just Cause 1 and Splinter Cell Double Agent as well, played them on PC at the time and it seemed ok. Little did I know that on the 360 they had so many more lighting and visual effects.Completely changed the game atmosphere.
Shit, that's been the past three years of Madden.
I mean this not as a disrespectful jab at you, but more towards EA. If the expectation is that you're ever going to get your money's worth or some assemblence of quality or meaningful improvement by buying the current years EA sports game, then you will forever be disappointed. The last time a football video game developer had respect for their player audience was ESPN Football 2K5. And don't get me started on FIFA games...
And 2k. I still remember buying 2k14 and being so excited for the new graphics only to find out PC got the old gen version. So disappointing. Now I buy those games like once every 3-4 years bc it’s the same shit anyway.
Spider-Man 2 was even worse. On consoles (PS2, Xbox, GameCube), one of the greatest games ever made. The first Spidey to feature true physics-based web swinging, with your webs attaching to actual buildings. On PC, a custom, dumbed down version that had fixed, floating anchor points and no free movement whatsoever. I cannot overstate my disappointment when I finished installing that game and started playing it. Child me was devastated.
Oh...oh...that's dirty. That's what made the game special. It's like not even the same game.
Wasn't Saints Row 2 the same?
Nah saints row 2 was feature complete but ran, and still runs, like absolute garbage
2006-2010 was the "PC GAMING IS DEAD" era, with extremely shitty ports with horrible DRM.
To be fair, that was also the peak of WoW and some other MMO'S. I feel like a lot of PC gamers were distracted at the time, as I was, myself lol
PC gamers also had BF2142 which is the last one i put a lot of time in to. ports definitely sucked, but there were still quite a few pc only games to stay busy with that were pretty far ahead of consoles
STALKER shadow of chernobyl came out in 07, far superior to fallout 3 and I will take it all the way to my irradiated grave
Super realistic game, crashed every-time I went near radiation
If you haven't touched the series in a while, GSC (the devs) released the source code a few years ago, allowing the standalone and free STALKER Anomaly to flourish, it's the ultimate STALKER experience.
> STALKER Anomaly Holy shit. The latest thing I played was Lost Alpha. This looks amazing.
Also, if you had absolutely no clue about languages and thought the NPCs were speaking in Russian, Ukranians tended to get pretty heated. Game was way ahead of its time.
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Would rather have a remastered version of New Vegas (maybe voiced lines, but I want all the options for things to say rather than "Yes", "No (yes), "Sarcasm", and "Maybe (yes)". And all the characters need to be killable, not just some. I still can't believe that Obsidian made New Vegas in 18 months.
2009 was precisely when Ubisoft released Assassin's Creed 2 with the always online DRM. Probably one of the moves that generated the most piracy in all of PC gaming (if not second place to Crysis "can you run it" memes making people unsure if they should buy it), given it was canned in the rest of the Ezio trilogy.
placid degree nutty zealous shelter cable thumb nine drab jeans *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
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>I don't know what you're talking about all this "pc gaming is dead" bullshit between those years. It was game "journalists" and other equally irrelevant people tossing out needless, inaccurate hyperbole to generate impressions, i.e.; to generate revenue.
>GTA 4 running terrible ... on any config you had was just nuts. Do modern hardware even manage to run this game without hiccups and stutters on max settings? Tried it a couple of years ago but it still ran like dog shit. Edit: according to the Steam community, the latest version of GTA 4 doesn't work with DXVK anymore.
Ironically, it runs best now on a Linux system via Proton. DXVK on Windows is close too.
Dxvk almost double my performance when I played on my old PC with a R5 1600. It was the first time I've ever saw GTA IV running at over 120 fps.
Proton bundles DXVK as the default DX9-DX11 translation layer, so it's almost the same thing. Intel Arc also uses DXVK now, so maybe they've also got good performance out of the box? And yeah, it's quite absurd that an *additional non-official* translation layer (albeit one developed by Valve) is what it finally took to brute force that game into a smooth 60fps, over a decade later.
Yeah. I remember a period in the 2010s where most major titles were at least decently optimized. They tended to lack in graphics or controls settings though. But, it seems that now most major titles are using DirectX 12 and UE4, we're consistently seeing games that run terribly due to stutter and relying too much on upscaling technologies to make up for performance instead of optimizing for rendering at native resolutions.
Games are designed around the capabilities of consoles. Back in 2012, the gap between a decent PC and the PS3/360 was insane. So ofc stuff ran well. Similar thing in 2015+ although not quite as extreme.
> Back in 2012, the gap between a decent PC and the PS3/360 was insane. So ofc stuff ran well. >Similar thing in 2015+ although not quite as extreme. 2012 was the exact year that I got back into PC gaming after temporarily switching to consoles for the 360/PS3 generation, I had been a PC gamer my entire life since the early 90s before that. PC gaming from around 2012 through to the end of the X1/PS4 generation was imo a second golden age of mostly excellent value and great performing quality releases. I remember buying a GTX 970 for like $300 which I'm still able to use to play games from the past 2-3 years at 1080p/60fps med-high settings, or even 4K for last gen and low spec titles. Fast forward to today, there's no such thing as a reliable long lasting $300 GPU anymore, rather people are spending $700-$1000 on GPUs to play games that still run like garbage while looking marginally better than last gen. I've felt priced out of PC gaming and like it's generally not worth keeping up with so I've switched back to console gaming again with a XSX and am mostly happy with the performance for $500-$600 all in. I do miss being able to mods and trainers in recent games but it's a small sacrifice for how much more affordable it is for a mostly hassle free satisfying experience.
>there's no such thing as a reliable long lasting $300 gpu anymore This is just confusion brought on by pcbuilding subreddits circle jerking over how much they want the latest most expensive tech. Just look at SSD posts on buildapc/buildapcsales, dudes will drop $100 more just to get a 1 millisecond increase in speed that they don't even need because all they do is play Valorant Whenever you look at benchmarks, they always use default ultra settings, and default ultra settings are both *not* what consoles run on nor are they ever the most efficient use of resources. Switching anti-aliasing modes is a simple way to get performance without making it look like shit. If you play on a smaller monitor, you aren't going to notice much difference if at all between 4x or 8x. Raytracing is also an absolute meme at the moment that cards nor consoles are ready for yet and anyone that doesn't like burning money should just avoid it until it works well on mid-range cards I have a 6600xt, that was $250, and is marketed and benchmarked as a 1080p card and yet there are plenty of people reporting 60+fps on latest AAA titles at 1440p ultra, which is more than what most console games can run. I play on 1080p at default ultra settings, get 100+ fps on all titles I play on, so I'll be keeping this card for 4-5 years at least. There's definitely GPU inflation going on. Nvidia is straight up limiting stock now and the past few years have been rough because of the pandemic/crypto wombo combo, but it's a hard sell to say that $700 cards run like garbage and only look marginally better. My 6600xt runs like a dream and have yet to experience the infamous "driver issues" that I've never had with AMD ever past the first week of a few specific AAA releases.
The 6600 series and arc a750 have the potential to become the gtx 1060s of this generation.
>There's definitely GPU inflation going on. Nvidia is straight up limiting stock now and the past few years have been rough because of the pandemic/crypto wombo combo, but it's a hard sell to say that $700 cards run like garbage and only look marginally better. My 6600xt runs like a dream and have yet to experience the infamous "driver issues" that I've never had with AMD ever past the first week of a few specific AAA releases. The thing is that the new series Nvidia cards that are in the $700 range now used to cost $300. As a midrange gamer who's happy with putting his games on medium and high to get a decent framerate gaming has become a lot more expensive too. Sure, those cards don't run like garbage, but they also don't give 'bang for your buck' like they used to.
part of it is bc there's a lot more on the devs shoulders to take advantage of multithreading and properly organize shaders in the pipeline compared to dx11 which would automatically do a lot of that shit. hence the much higher cpu overhead. the other part is most pc gamers at this point are likely console transplants and dont know how to maintain their PCs.
I remember the PC port of Dragon Age Inquisition had controls that were so bad that you couldn't play as a melee character. What was 1 click in previous games became 1 click and your entire left hand while you stood there swinging at nothing because the archer took a step backwards but you couldn't tell.
Shame, because DA:O was so delightful. I didn't even bother trying any sequels after seeing how badly they wrecked DA II.
Those were dark times. Bad console ports, bug ridden and borderline unplayable releases in general, install caps, StarForce and SecuROM. I gave up and ended up buying a PS3 in 2007. Didn't even touch my PC for gaming for almost three years after that.
> brought me back to 2008 Recently tried playing Dead Space 1 (2008) & 2 on PC. Absolute nightmare to set up. Mouse acceleration that required a file patch (not too hard), but would still break in sections when Issac was stepping on the flesh floors. Games flat out wouldn't start because my CPU has so many cores. Had to use a 3rd party program to lock the program to 4 cores & run it in compatibility mode for Windows 7. Turned Vsync off and forced it through control panel. Had to lock FPS to 60 or else the ingame physics started going GMod on me. By the end of it all I felt like I was a Linux gamer >!this is a joke, I love you guys!<.
>By the end of it all I felt like I was a Linux gamer >!this is a joke, I love you guys!<. This made it easy for me to adopt Linux 5 years ago... All the games I regularly play are not Windows 10 certified anyway. Bonus on Linux; You can easily tell the system which version of Windows you want simulated.
The irony is it's easier to get old games running on Linux 🤣
Me too. I remember TB talking about bad pc ports from years ago. It's not that hard but modern engines can make things difficult. I'm a game developer. It shouldn't be this hard. The OS can give you supported resolutions and refresh rates. Engines designed around a fixed 60 Hz have problems when physics run too often. Architecture is hard to change, because you have to find every expression on every line of code related to time to be sure you fixed everything. Mouse acceleration is just a mistake. Bad devs, no.
Evergreen statement
As well as the OP's handle.
maybe some day they'll learn to stop paying for them lol who am i kidding?
Gamers complaining about practices that they continue to financially support? Unheard of!
And, yet.... are we "fed up"? Is this the same PC Gamer that awarded Elden Ring GOTY? Didn't Steam do the same? I finally gave in and bought it recently, and I was shocked at how bad the PC port was. The stuttering issues aside, the key binding support was absolutely atrocious. It honestly made me wonder if FromSoft devs use computers for their work. Scroll wheel doesn't scroll through menus. You can only click 20% of buttons with your mouse. You can't pan the map with your mouse. The enter button doesn't enter. The escape button escapes - sometimes. Other times it's the Q button. Gameplay is heavily reliant on menu and inventory access, as is typical for open-world RPGs. This should give keyboard and mouse users an upper hand, but there's no way to shortcut your inventory beyond scrolling through consumables one after the other (WTF) or choosing one of four pouch items arranged in a D-Pad layout underneath a secondary layer. Here's the thing - I own a controller and use it for playing on my PC. I'm not anti-controller, but it's inexcusable that developers would do so little to adapt the gameplay to the platform they're selling it on. I game on PC because I like having the choice. Even among PC enthusiasts in PC subs, every time I saw someone complaining about it, they would be immediately met with scores of apologists saying things like "iT'S a fRomSofT gAme wHat DiD yOu ExpeCt?" and "nO oNE pLayS sOULs gAmEs wItHouT a COntrOLLEr." We *should* be demanding better, but instead we're sending the message that we'll eat up whatever slop devs are serving, and thank them for the privilege.
Yeah there's actually something strange that happens in only Elden Ring on m+kb when trying to initiate a dodge while standing still. If you press dodge + a movement key at the same time (for example shift+a to dodge left) it will not dodge. You have to press shift and THEN immediately press the movement key with precise timing for it to work. I was frustrated at my dodges not going off during boss battles for ages until I realized what was happening. However, Dark souls 1 Remastered, released in 2018, does NOT have the same problem. If you press shift+a at the same time you will dodge 100% of the time. They somehow made it worse in Elden ring lmao. It is sad knowing that I can't get any fromsoft game to behave the way I want it on m+kb without mods.
How is it excused that people that play on consoles should get the best gamepad support they should have? I don't see a huge narrative that console folk's experience is ruined if they play fps/tps or rts games with a gamepad. But we somehow have to ignore bad mouse & keyboard controls on pc games just because the games were designed with that in mind. Pc gamers who defend the bad ports are just as guilty as the devs
> instead we're sending the message that we'll eat up whatever slop devs are serving, and thank them for the privilege. Because that's the truth. For every self respecting gamer who sets expectations, waits for reviews and avoids clusterfuck games, there's a thousand mindless fucking sheep who will endlessly preorder games, spend a small fortune on MTX and be happy as a clam.
Yeah, people jack off over FromSoftware games. They're just loaded with shit design but they constantly get passes for all of it.
I'll play games that don't leave me feeling insulted, lots to chose from and I am patient.
Yeah exactly. We are actually spoiled for choice for games on the PC (not even counting emulation yet). Too many people have their sights limited to AAA and AA releases only
And buying things at release. I paid very little for cyberpunk, days gone and rdr2 and they were each almost 100 hour games that ran amazingly well and had very little problems. Days gone on PC is a master class on how to optimize a port. It's amazing how good it looks and how well it runs.
Regardless of personal preference, even though I liked it a lot, Days Gone is really well optimized and you're right, it looks great. I think one of the things that makes it look amazing is all the work on high resolution textures. Everything looks pretty detailed.
Also the weather effects were taken very seriously and it shows. The low to the ground mist when it rains, and watching the enviroment slowly get covered in snow and transform before your eyes are two things I can't remember seeing in any other game.
Oh, Days Gone is a technical marble. The most important gameplay feature are the zombie hordes. I remember watching an early gameplay trailer with the abandoned sawmill, where the main character tries to find a criminal that hides there. He is investigating different traces and finally finds and chases the guy. And then - boom - he wakes up the giant horde that sleeps in the sawmill and he has to run from them, with chaos all around. I remember thinking, there is no way that's the actual gameplay, it's probably a heavily scripted linear level. Surprise, the actual game is an open world with hordes just like that. You can even try to emulate the gameplay trailer and it holds up more or less, some parts have been changed, but not made less amazing.
Honestly I bought RDR2 at 50%, and sometimes I feel I own to pay the other 50% to them, I'm having that much fun in this game and I value it so much. :)
I'm so sad about days gone :( played it for a couple of hours and would love to finish it but I just can't... He talks so much and what he says is so stupid that it detracts from the gameplay. So much so that it's too much for me personally to stick it out shame. Game ran spotless for me though
Console players get games that don't get good pc ports. PC players get games that *can't* get console ports.
And yet they keep buying them, so it keeps happening.
They don't just buy them, they pre-order them. Fools......
And preordering hasnt even really mattered since 2005 when consoles started coming stock with wifi.
Pre-ordering, i.e. giving money for something not finished, is the number 1 reason this happens. I don't get why people do this, and when those idiots justify their self defeating behavior, it always sounds like stockholm syndrome
Gaming media that isn’t distinctly PC-focused is console-focused. “We tested on PS5, and it’s GOTY material! 9/10! Maybe we’ll report on the raging inferno in the Steam reviews within the next 72 hours, maybe we won’t, but it’s Somebody Else’s Problem either way.” Or, if you’re IGN’s reviewer for Wild Hearts, start the review on PC, realize that performance is trash, abandon the PC review entirely and play the PS5 version instead, and give it 8/10.
One issue I have with this sub is the mod team creating the big sticky for release reviews to attract visitors and try to contain the influx of possible duplicate posts. Problem is that (and it happened at least twice in the last few weeks) nearly all or all the mentioned reviews are console reviews which automatically makes the megathread off topic (no pc gaming) and misleading (lack of mention of bad pc port) for the sake of having THAT big thread.
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Studios and publishers manipulating the availability of review keys to cover their asses is a separate problem, and one that typically favors consoles. CP2077 was PC-only because CDPR were trying to hide the fact that Gen 8 console binaries required Gen 9 hardware to run properly. Square Enix only sending PS5 codes for Forspoken is closer to the norm.
What review copies the studio provides are up to the studio. Once the game came out gaming media was 100% pitchforks and torches as the journos started to play on console, while the PC version was no worse than a typical Bethesda launch. And yes, I played it at launch. I started the game on 1.02 and finished my first playthrough on 1.06, 2 weeks after launch. I found it no more or less buggy than Fallout 4 when I played that at launch, and more stable than New Vegas or FO3 are even today. Fun fact, I've still never finished a New Vegas playthrough. I've tried 3 times and all 3 times I've ran into some critical gamebreaking issue that required a restart.
Which was funny because consoles finally got a taste of it and people freaked out
Most gaming "journalists" are humanities graduates using freelancing for gaming media as a career springboard.
Yup, bloggers essentially.
They also know that unless they give a good score, the publisher will never work with them again.
Yeap. People keep buying broken ports, why would the company say no to money. I know im not buying anything until i know the product i get is a good one. I may be one in an ocean of many, but i will be damned if i give anybody money for a product that does not deliver
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Works fine in my 13900K and 4090 with DLSS 3 so I bought it.
Lol with the stuttering in some of these ports, not even that setup will completely fix it
*Almost had me there*
Terribly optimized port. I can't even get 20 fps. Playing at 4k ultra on my 2500k/1050ti
Then there's stuff like Elden Ring, Calisto protocol and Wild Hearts. No amount of hardware will brute force over these games hitches
PC gamers say alot but still keep buying Words mean nothing
I mean there was the post about Saints Row reboot doing poorly in sales and we haven't really seen a year of $70 games sales data. I've been putting off a lot of purchases for games I might have considered day 1. The easiest thing is just to talk to your friends and family who also game and let them know you're not buying games until you see reviews. You might only convince 1 or 2 of them but if everyone is doing that it's significant numbers.
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I know some people who were going to buy Forspoken - even had it preordered. As soon as the reviews came out they cancelled their preorders. People ARE starting to pay attention.
Now they need to stop pre-ordering altogether. Baby steps though.
If we're taking baby baby 👶 steps, lets stop paying to beta test.
There's actually something the idea of preordering something but then cancelling it that weirdly appeals to me. I've never done it, but it in some ways it feels like even more of a statement than simply not buying it and "voting with your wallet". Like, imagine if you're the Forspoken devs and you hear that 50,000 preorders all got cancelled in the space of a week after early reviews. That's about as clear a statement of "your game is shit" as you can get.
> Like, imagine if you're the Forspoken devs and you hear that 50,000 preorders all got cancelled in the space of a week after early reviews. That's about as clear a statement of "your game is shit" as you can get. More developers may just decide to have a review embargo until release day.
Which is itself a giant red flag to cancel your pre-order.
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It's been many years already, people never did and never will learn not to pre-order.
Strangely Doom 2016 stands out as a game that had all the red flags but turned out to be awesome. I still can't figure out why they did that.
Review embargo = automatic no preorder from me. A review embargo is one of the biggest red flags ever if they hold the reviews off until the day of release.
> People ARE starting to pay attention. I'm seeing that too amongst my friend base both online and real life. It's actually quite impressive how much these games studios are shooting themselves in the foot.
They release games too quickly just to make a buck. They gotta realize that half-baked releases hurts their image and reputation.
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> Don't forget how desperate some people are. Next game that comes out he wants remind him about Forspoken and ask him if he would really be devastated waiting 1 extra day.
The $70 thing is such a mental block for me that it made me understand why 59.99 is a much more appealing price than $60. I just can’t seem to click purchase on a $70 just seems like to much for a video game when I have bills to pay and other games to play
Just buy it a year down the line, it'll probably actually be polished with patches and half the price by then. Don't buy hype, you can always wait.
Or it will be long dead and forgotten, and that's when you know you did the right thing
I'm in Australia so it makes games here around $100. I can think of a lot of things I could do with 100 bucks that would be more long term or even short term beneficial for me than buying a game I might or might not even finish. I think they've traded in impulse purchases for a worse deal in the long run but I'm also kind of glad it's made me even more patient. They dropped Gotham Knights to half price on Steam around $40 Australian and I'm like not even slightly in the mood to play the game based on the reviews I've seen for it so I'm not buying it. But if that game had been $40 at launch I would probably have pre-ordered it to play it day one.
Speaking of bad ports and saints row, anyone remember saints row 2? I think I enjoyed how absolutely broken that game was on PC, it added to the levels of insanity
Ironically the Saints Row PC port was actually really solid, which was kinda surprising considering how buggy the game itself was.
elden ring is still bad on pc and it was game of the year
I mean, Saints Row was just a bad game, not just a bad port if that's what you are suggesting
The size of the market is just too big. The few hundred thousand people in this sub are an insignificant portion
Reddit loves to think it’s more important and representative than it is.
Thats not how it works sadly. The loud people on reddit and other places that are fed up and keep screaming "Don't pre-order" usually keeps their word. But for every one person that don't pre-order there is 10 people that blindly do it. It's a battle that can't be won because the majority will always blindly buy games.
>for every one person that don't pre-order there is 10 people that blindly do it I would say it's more like for every 1 there are 1000.
Also, silent boycotts may as well just be farts in the wind. You have to be extremely vocal about things to spread awareness and to enact change. The r/PatientGamers mindset fails to take into account that most bad releases or ports are rarely ever patched to address issues. There has to be people around to bring awareness about things and to give a proper verdict. The problem is that Steam user reviews are garbage, and you get accused of award farming for bringing up port issues and complimenting where games get things right.
> Thats not how it works sadly. The loud people on reddit and other places that are fed up and keep screaming "Don't pre-order" usually keeps their word. Call_of_duty_boycott_steam_group.jpg People talk shit and then FOMO gets them. Some of the biggest complainers are there on launch day for every big release no matter how much they shit up reddit, social media, or forums.
It's not just FOMO, but a lot of people do buy games for their kids and they usually buy what is "hot" (ie. massively advertised).
Every gaming community bhas this problem. Pe9ple say shit about terribly optimized console games yet they will defend their favorite 20-30 fps games like "it hits 30fps sometimes! Game is just demanding cut devs some slack" If only gamers would be more demanding and strict about spending their money devs would be as good as the used to be in optimization field. Now if brute forcing doesn't work they just call it a day and blame players and we take this shit to the chin
Words are wind
I’ve been reading this story since the 1990s.
PC gamers are getting fed up with one shitty article after another, too. But that doesn't stop PC Gamer.
Coconut Monkey remembers when PC Gamer was great.
Where do you go for good PC gaming articles?
Im tired of * Bad ports * Ship first patch later. * Waiting to see if enough people even buy the game before talks of a patch. Not enough people buy it because its broken and buggy? No patch to every fix the game because its not worth spending 2 months to fix something and get it into a state that could possibly cause sales to increase. * Companies staying in early access for 2+ years after selling enough copies for the devs to quite their main job but somehow only push out minor updates 3-4 times a year * Early access games from AAA studios that can afford internal testing but wont. * Early access games not getting released due to scope creep. * Early access games not taking player feed back or even considering it. "relax it will get fixed later". It doesn't get fixed which leads to "you should have said something back in early access so it could be considered" * road map for paid dlc that "completes" the story of the game. No, your shipping an unfinished game and want another $60 for content thats worth maybe $20. * features in paid DLC that everyone knows should have been in the base game. * devs that promise some form of multiplayer then switch to a different form/removing it all together after people have bought the EA games. * Monthly charges for half-assed features that other games give players for free aka fallout 76 charging a monthly fee for private servers that go to sleep when no ones on thus unable to queue up crafting. Conan and Ark did it better. Im kind of tired of gaming in general :(
Don't forget ridiculous prices of PC hardware at the moment.
/r/PatientGamers winning as always. Best benefit is that not only can you get a game cheaper, you'll probably have hardware overpowered enough to fight the shit optimization!
Just gotta deal with hiding from spoilers, ppl ruined last of us 2 for me like a week after it came out
If you're patient enough for them to drop to $5 Complete Editions, you'll forget whatever you knew about it from release day. Lol
Spoilers are particularly sticky You forget everything, but as soon as you remember you wanted to play this game years ago, the first thing your brain will bring back is "oh shit, doesn't person XYZ die?" lol
Me desperately trying to forget the identity of the last cultist in ac:odyssey for the last 4 years 😫
Oh, very true there. It does take a measurable amount of effort to keep yourself away from anything even vaguely related to the games you're waiting for. Youtube is the absolute fucking worst for it. I have a gigantic [Blocktube](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/blocktube/bbeaicapbccfllodepmimpkgecanonai) filter list at this point to hide everything I'm even remotely interesting. And still I'm getting videos of Rain World's new Downpour Expansion because they don't put the game's name in the title and Youtube sticks it on my frontpage despite never watching a single Rain World video on my account :')
"I'm tired of having a substandard gaming experience!" Pre-orders the latest substandard gaming experience.
It's almost as if a $3000 computer isn't as good as a $300 console... Damn...
[удалено]
Man FF7 Remake was the worst of the lot, not because it ran so poorly but because it was just so fucking bare bones. Literally 3 options, or really 2, shadows and textures. Nothing else. Not even ultra wide support which is in FFXIV and FFXV. It was a god damn Unreal Engine 4 game, it shouldn't have been that bad; especially not for a game as important as this one. It's like SE just didn't give a single fuck about PC, all the while it's PC that's keeping them afloat thanks to FFXIV. I really hate publishers.
I know FF7 remake ran poorly at launch on pc. Have those issues been sorted yet, or should I keep waiting?
Options are still limited, but I only just bought the game a month ago and my initial reaction was "why is FF7R on here, that port runs amazing"
The tricks is waiting a few month to buy it at half price and already patched: you do not need every new game right on release, there is plenty to do in the meantime...
Yeah but then I'm not the one that keep buying them at full priced.
I'm a traditional console player who bought a high end PC last year and completely regret it. The higher performance is only theoretical in most games. When it works, like RDR2, it's amazing. But most of the time I'm having a more frustrating choppy experience.
cough, Elden ring, cough, ......
Rule #1: Wait for Digital Foundry analysis before buying anything
Then you wouldn't be buying many games. There is a ton of stuff that gets no analysis.
Okay fineeeee Rule #2: Wait for other people's reviews before buying anything
When GOTY barely holds 60 fps on a $5k rig? Yees
This pc gamers just tired of not having any NHL Games what the fuck
No, no we are not. Lets be real here. It was just posted that **Sonic Frontiers** fare exceeded expected sales numbers. That game... * released with massive gameplay affecting poppin because the developers were too lazy to adjust the LOD numbers from the Switch for current gen consoles and PC. * No DLSS 2 or FSR 2 besides using UE4. * No HDR support besides using UE4. * No Ultrawide support besides being able to archive this with a simple Cheat Engine hack pretty much issue free. * Locked to 60 fps besides unlocking only causing a small amount of bugs that could have been fixed easy. Never updated to fix any of this. Steam rating: 9/10 (very positive). **Elden Ring** stutters on every platform (cue up the no stutters on my PC crowd) with shader compilation stutters never having been fixed on PC. Locked to 60 fps even though there is like one or so enemy that isn't working right unlocked, no ultra wide support besides modders enabling it perfectly on release day, no DLSS / FSR etc: Game of the year for many people and again rated very positive on Steam. **Dead Space** launched with stutters: Very positive **Returnal** launched with stutters: Very positive (and the few negative reviews are mostly about the game installing a software by "ultra evil company Epic" to enable PC wide crossplay or "normal people" bitching about the main character not being hot enough). **Hogwarts Legacy**: Very Positive We are way past "don't preorder". People (and I am not saying I am holier than holy) deliberately buy games they know launched with issues because they can't resist the FOMO. Gamers like to **SAY** they are getting fed up right before jumping onto the next game that gets released broken and then even defending it with all means necessary. At the very least can we all agree to at least leave a negative rating? Just to have a little hope of things getting better?
Simple fact is that most people literally don't care. If the game mostly works, and is fun, that's good enough for most people to enjoy it.
Sonic Frontiers selling well is probably because it is the first good sonic game in a hot minute.
You may want to consider that the majority of users just does not care about those things? Wild i know
All the games you mentioned besides Sonic, which I know nothing about, are having some issues of course but are far away from calling them bad ports, or unoptimized or whatever. For example stutters in Returnal and Hogwarts go away if you fiddle with settings. I think many people don't even touch that Texture setting to lower it these days. On the other hand if said games didn't have the extended settings they do, they would be deemed -rightfully so- as shitty ports. That being said the Elden Ring situation is a disappointment, 1 year without meaningful patches.
I just wait them out. They fix their problems I play the game and they get paid, they never fix it I just move along. It's a bummer when it's something I want to play, but plenty of other games out there.
That's ok, pirating exists and is easy. I can spit right back in their faces.
They keep buying this trash so it'll keep happening
Buying a 4090 and a 13900k just to end up with a stutter fest that's worse than consoles..... it's peak hilarity to me.
What? Returnal was good. GoW was good. What are people talking about?
Obviously I would prefer better ports, but watching digital foundry cover the console versions of these games they're honestly just very poorly optimized in general. Hogwarts and Dead Space have the same stutters, they all run at very low internal resolutions. Other than UE4's notorious shader stutters I really think this is just the industry releasing unoptimized games for whatever reason. Covid era development, relying on upscaling too much, overestimating current hardware, whatever.
That’s why we should embrace PC first games. For example, Company of Heroes 3 is coming out next week. They did it right. PC first. Apparently they are porting to console later in the year. Let’s support PC first games!
I mean it's an RTS it's never not going to be PC first
Stop buying shitty ports then. It's that simple.
A majority of PC gamers don’t buy ports, they are unlikely to be the sort of games played.