The Worst PC Ports of 2023 - A DF Direct 'Special'

digital vry is sponsored by the powerful upgradable MSI MPG infinite X2 desktop PC featuring Intel core processors and Nvidia RTX 40 series Graphics hello and welcome to digital foundry's worst PC ports of 2023 yes that's right we're not punching down we're punching up today at the Publishers not really but yes today we're going to be talking about the worst PC ports of 2023 talking about essentially the things that we didn't like that we saw this year in PC ports some ports that fix them over time and others that really didn't and to talk about this travesty today I'm joined by my friend and colleague John linman who's celebrating Christmas quite early this year no one could say that yes the room is on fire in honor of a bad PC ports this year it burned off my facial hair this time so you know uh it's it's that kind kind of day you know and yeah I know what can I say this is this is a video I feel like we had to make this year because right we kind of agreed about halfway through the year that this is probably the worst year in a long time for PC ports uh and there's one company that we'll be getting to in particular that has uh they've had some issues to say the least so Alex why don't you lay down The rules first though because we actually did take certain things into consideration When selecting this list yeah of course so the first things that we're going to be talking about games that we have personally played and most of them we've reviewed in a full form video um we will not be talking about games that we did not play and we did not review in videos so if you find a game on this list that you don't agree with or something like that basically we can only talk about things that we have real experience in the second thing is that we kind of had a minimum thre Monon cut off before we would start talking about games because we still think games in their post-launch patch cycle we should give give them the benefit of the doubt to continue patching until then so there's like a 3-month date to around like September is or so that we're not going to be talking about games after that date uh because they're still technically in their patching cycle and we want to give them enough time to uh make any fixes that are there yeah I mean I I have my thoughts about that as well prod should probably be ready for launch but that's usually a publishing thing and yeah we're going to be nice about that this time because some games did actually improve yeah and another thing to kind of lay a ground rule about is we're not talking about the developers here nope we are talking about the things that were published in this case uhhuh and uh it has nothing to do with the pub uh the developers themselves this is all about what has been published and what is not and that is completely a different realm has nothing to do with the developers themselves so we are not calling out developers here this is just the product and uh the people who put it out okay John shall we get we starting Alex let's start was probably the most infamous one of the year and I want to say it is The Last of Us Part One now the first three games I'm going to be talking about on this list this year actually they have kind of a good story at the end of things but the last of us part one's story in the initial part is not good it launched in with so many issues that we at DF didn't feel like we could cover it properly in a video a traditional video review we were obviously dealing with something that was just not finished so we decided to do like a three-way playr and do you remember your impressions from that playthrough John oh absolutely I mean I tried to play it on my PC as well uh and I was shocked by the severe amount of stuttering the long Shader compilation time the horrible uh CPU performance I mean our our systems are very powerful and yet they were absolutely dying on this game it did not run well and in fact it really didn't look better than the PlayStation 5 version while also running so much worse it was kind of mysterious I would say and then we started to see more from like car I think Rich tested it on a lower a card with less vram like we're talking like 8 gigabytes of vram or so and yeah there is an argument to be made that 8 gigabytes is not enough these days sure but as as this game will eventually prove it it's more than enough for what this should have been and how it shipped basically meant that 8 GB users were left with extremely lowrisk textures like shockingly so so the whole thing was basically kind of unplayable at launch and it reminded me a little bit possibly even worse than uh Batman Arkham oh gosh at launch yeah I mean oh yeah that that's another Infamous one that we have to cover on the channel one time uh like when going back it's fine now but it's fine enough long time to get there um yeah but here yeah like you're saying like the issue with the the texture situation was that we shouldn't expect a game to to have perfect textures on a limited vram pool but 8 GB is still a lot of vram to make good textures with and the textures that were presented by the gamees launch version were just woeful they were just not good they were really sub like Xbox One PS4 level games they were really poor usually I mean they they did they did in fact look like a bad quality PS3 game in terms of textures yes it really did at times it was it was woeful like we said so there were things that I loved about this game like the alleyway of mediocrity as I termed it in the video like this Alleyway that on ayon 5 3600 the game was so C limited to a degree that you just really couldn't understand where like this Alleyway where nothing is happening it's like just sub 60fps on that CPU didn't make any sense but like I said in these first grouping of games here there's a pos positive story here where it took a number of patches yes it did it took to about I would say patch version 1.10 I believe it is uh to the game to get up into a state where it's like actually now this is pretty great um they dramatically increased CP performance I measured in that hell way of mediocrity like a 30% performance increase versus the launch version another thing that they improved that was that probably the most key thing was that textures and 8 gigabyte gpus now actually look really really good they look the same basically as like you would get in that PlayStation 5 version I guess yeah exactly like you know one of the caveats is that they can technically load in a little bit slower uh to fit into that pool Ram because texture streaming is now an adjustable option in the game which was an amazing you know thing that they added in that they didn't have to but they did and they made the game better as a result um long Shader P compilation times went down dramatically without causing extra Shader compilation stutter by that final patch and um you know it's just a like a better running game with less visual errors in it cuz the launch version also had some visual errors in it that's right certain visuals just didn't work properly as well and we were confused by that but yeah the pre-compilation thing was interesting because we were obviously pushing for pre-compilation step I think that's key but there's ways to do it right and ways to do it wrong and I think making a user sit there on a fast CPU for upwards of 45 minutes before they can play that's not the right way to do it and it did not work well in this case yeah I'd agree with that and so here I would say now as of this video we're we're highlighting this game but a positive it started off as like one of the worst PC ports of the year but it got so much better over time through some really dedicated patching and we're proud of the way it is right now shouldn't have launched the way it did but is now a lot better I'd still say there's a little bit of wiggle room here for it to be better like I still think the GPU performance isn't perfect exactly but it's so much better than launch and it's now actually completely playable uh and recommendable I would say for most rigs out there okay John this is a game you covered the next one on the list is one you covered extensively as well and you got a different taste of it I covered it on PC and that is for spoken oh yeah spor foken spor foken as Rich would call it this one was baffling on every platform you played it on at launch um yeah it was I mean even on PlayStation 5 when it comes out this this one absolutely surprised me because I would say Final Fantasy 15 I think we can agree was a very handsome game for release time frame right uh they did some amazing stuff with their GI system uh the whole thing just like it looked really great especially the towns it was a beautiful game uh you could tell a lot of work was put into the material systems the lightings the way everything interacts uh it was awesome so for spoken uses that same technology base as uh the base for for itself right and so you kind of expected something similar in quality or at least well I kind of expected something Superior given the amount of time that has passed and the fact that it was now targeting a more powerful console but it comes along and it's terrible I think the lighting was unbelievably flat the ambient occlusion they had which was based I think it was the kaca which is Kaka the the uh AMD I caao the caao whatever but it looked like the it's it's the worst kind where it just looked like this outline Shader like somebody took a black marker and all the edges of the scene geometry it's really ugly uh and there was like really no like decent like indirect lighting or anything so you'd like walk into these areas they'd be full bright have the outline Shader thing going on from the kaca and then there's zero indirect lighting it's just like glowy specular everywhere that's coming from nothing and it was like blindingly bright and it felt so wrong and then on top of that it did not run well like it was the performance was was lousy especially on PS5 like we were seeing dips into the 20s in there yeah it it was terrible and then we checked it out on PC and my first impression was actually like oh this room's a lot better but it's certainly didn't run that well on many other PCS and then we quickly discovered that a lot of the settings didn't really work at all yeah it was one where like I was like I was like debating like how do I talk about I was like how does the dynamic resolution does it even work it was like I was like trying them back and forth I was like does the vs even work I can't even find evidence of its existence and it's like all these things that weren't working on top of the fact that the game like you would turn on and off like R tray Stam inclusion you'd be like what is this even doing doing and like still it didn't really do anything well didn't wasn't it the case where it only worked in the cut scenes it worked in like some aspect of the cut scene but not like yeah it was totally weird and the thing is like all that baffling performance that was talking about on the PlayStation 5 was also there on PC like if you loaded this game up on a mid-range ryzen 53600 which I showed off in the the video uh my initial video like you would get just like drops below 60 FPS in like that main Town Square area in that first name of the city I forget the name of the city it starts with an A I believe um but like it was just like really bad for the visual return the visual return just didn't match at all with what like your performance was at the time no and I mean some of it was just like they made weird Gish decisions with the game's Lighting systems and just some of the art itself um it really just it had a very strange look to it and it felt like they were trying to go for something sort of eye-catching and unique but it just didn't coalescent to something that was uh Nic looking to say the least not at all so so as a result when you combine that it was it was not good on any platform but like you say you know the PC version at launch felt very sloppy and kind of not complete yet but then miraculously somehow they really they actually took on all of this feedback that was given to them and they I would say greatly overhauled it in many ways uh but some of that just involved stepping back I would argue for instance they brought back the ambient occlusion system that they had developed for Final Fantasy 15 which was a bit coarse but I would say produced significantly better results Within These type of environments so just by re-enabling in that it made the game look better yeah really did but that wasn't it there was other things as well added on so the PS5 version runs better it looks better and then on the PC side Alex you tested it with the later patches yeah and this is one I covered in uh my kind of PC Port update video in the middle of the year and it was obvious to see it was running better on the CPU side of things um the textures were looking quite a bit better that's another thing that the issue was on PC that like you really didn't have good control of the texture option and the the the the textures that would load in in that initial PC version were just like so low res it was just inexplicable once again kind of like the last of us it was like why are these the textures that are fitting in an 8 gigabyte GP right yeah the at the the updated version that I covered they actually loaded in looked really good they weren't the highest res textures the game could possibly display but they were at least approachable and reasonable so that was completely missing in the launch version a lot of the things like about options not working correctly like the vrs option was completely scrubbed out of the game Dynamic resolution uh now I had a more consistent way it worked um unlike inexplicably just not working at launch um and it was just a better running and looking game due to the fact that they changed things like the ssao uh being better rtoo is still a little bit of a mystery in the game it doesn't seem to really affect much of the environment right but you know it was just running a lot better and looking a lot better and they improved the game drastically versus how it looked at launch and it's one that I would say we mentioning it on this list because it started off as one of the worst PC ports that I'd played in a long time and it ended up being really pretty good at the end of things uh so Bravo to the developers who made that game and thank you for sticking with it to the end wish it launched better but it's the way these things are I agree that was a a good turnaround but our next one though um also kind of had it's one more that has a somewhat happy ending I would say yeah uh John this is redfall a game which you once again covered at launch on the Xbox series X and I guess S as well and I covered it on PC and this was one where it launched right after another game on this list and I was just like I can't believe I'm seeing the same issues as a game I just covered last week I cannot believe I'm saying the same issues um on PC at least redfall in in addition to all the visual garishness of and issues that you saw in that console version that JN covered uh issues that were kind of manifesting there were also really manifesting on PC like the poor CPU performance like the reason why the game was locked to 30fps on Console at launch was most likely due to that CPU performance and on PC if you ran the game on a PC oh my gosh like what you would get out of mid-range mid-spec PC was just really Dreadful there's no way you were anywhere near 60 FPS in the game if you turn those settings up in that town area which is which a lot of the game actually takes place in um and if you even drop the settings to like the lowest the game first of all looked really poor and it also didn't run well still in those Town areas like the frame times were just awful on top of a lowf frame rate sub 60 um it was a game that I mean it had it had other things that were a problem in it like the the menu not being too great uh the there was the big I don't know did PC have the problem with the decal system not working no it worked more enough fine on PC but you you remember on Xbox it was uh the decals would load in it would take upwards of 60 seconds sometimes for the detail to load in they use it for large Graphics across the world so you just walk up to like well just about anything and it was just super low res and you'd sit there and wait and it would have to load up yeah on PC it wasn't really that it was more just like you had like the really bad Shadows just like you had on Xbox and there was no way to fix them up uh at all yeah it was a game that just didn't look any way better than the Xbox version in a meaningful way which you would usually expect from a PC version uh especially in things like shadows and yeah it just didn't look good didn't run well fast forward Oliver covered it recently again on Xbox and I mentioned some PC stuff in it and it's now a much much better game um the visual issues with the Shadows were cleaned up the CPU performance is dramatically better I showed it on a core I 9 12900 K running a lot lot better on the CPU and these translate over to the ryzen 53600 which can now actually get a decent 60 FPS in the game which it really couldn't at all at launch and there are some more options in there too one thing though that it did not totally fix up is the traversal stutter that the game has uh but in comparison to things that we'll be talking about very brief you know soon enough here in this video John the traversal stutters are not completely like every 5 seconds or something like that in this game it's not like every like minute or so it's you know it's split splits up the world in a way where it's not always so intrusive it just you know it's something that I wish they really could fix up but in the end it's a lot lot better than it was at launch that's for sure yeah and they also as you kind of noted the game itself has improved uh this is definitely a case where the game clearly launch launched before it was ready despite the delays and it was it was kind of a black eye for them which is a shame cuz Arcane both the Texas and uh Leon studio uh they've produced some of my favorite games over the last decade or so like I really love what they've done and this one was definitely the worst thing they'd ever made yeah but you could still see I mean we've kind of since learned you know that it's a little bit of a victim of what zenax was trying to do at the time with like making these multiplayer online connected Co-op things and trying to force the team into making that probably wasn't the best idea and hopefully they get back to full single player stuff but I can at least say that now there's a decent enough game in here and it can be fun especially in Co-op and it actually does run okay now including the Xbox version by the way which is much much better with that 60 FPS mode so exactly but yeah it's uh it's nice that at least the PC version is competent and very decent now uh which it definitely was not at launch as as you suggested yeah um so yeah that's that's kind of the third positive outcome story I'd say this year where it launched in a bad State and they have indeed turned it around yeah could be a little bit better in some areas like I said with a traversal stutter but it is dramatically better than it was at launch I also want to highlight I this one kind of Falls a little bit into that that little three-month window thing but I did want to say that Bethesda already came and sort of fixed Starfield if you recall starfields PC port at launch I don't think was bad and it wouldn't necessarily go on this list but it is a case of them actually listening to feedback and addressing pretty much all the issues that we raised on the game and it's it's in a very good state right now so uh agreed to me that shows that Bethesda and by that extension I suppose Microsoft and Xbox they are actually trying to ensure that their games are taken care of and are given the attention they need to shine even if they did launch in a bad State and this is really important because the next part of this list these next games oh boy this is bad stuff and Alex I think we should do this in order from uh least bad to worst they're all they're all bad but it's this is this is crazy stuff you Ready's let's get into this okay so this was a little bit hard to order but I decided the the the the third worst PC Port that I played this year is dead space um and the reason for this is because so there's there's a lot of stuff going well for Dead Space amazing visual audio remake of the original game good menu system that allows you to Tinker with things in real time uh something that other games on the list do not have at all uh H yeah looks great sounds great General GPU performance really really good but as soon as you start playing the game on PC you will know it it is like one of the highest rated comments about it in the steam forums like constant discussion about it it's in the title of our video this game has incredible stutter struggle um oh God and and it's weird because you'd think on the surface it seems like it should be fine it's frostbite uh there's a Shader pre-compilation step as the game starts up which is usually always good news um but you get into the game and you realize a lot of it isn't necessarily Shader compilation stutter like there's a handful of them and I point them out in the video that I made on it and on the update video I made on it as well they happen like you know when you start like a cut scene sometimes or when you do it something for the first time it can happen still but most of them are from like the just walking across the game world and it's hard to know without full profiling tools and that's not our job at DF but it most likely is related to the Loading and deloading of the game world around you yeah because uh when the game was released I actually spoke with them and that was one of the big features that they introduced to frostbite that did not previously exist in the engine right was this streaming of of a consistent World loading in new structures unloading other structures as you move through it this like streaming system I mean there's obviously data streaming in frostbite anyway but the way they were doing it and the way they were able to do this seamless world that was new to the engine and I suspect that this being the first attempt at that it's probably somehow tied to it uh and it's just a side effect of the implementation and it is a bummer that they weren't able to solve this because frostbite games in general I say usually do exhibit excellent performance right uh I had just played through Need for Speed uh Unbound and I've only tested on my rig to be fair but that game runs like grease lightning super high frame rates no no stutter like in the in the open world it feels awesome uh this is so much worse and you're right I would say like at at points you think this doesn't seem that bad but it's the problem with the fact that it's just they kind of keep popping up as you move through the game so it feels like you never really shake the stutters anytime you do anything major you get to a new scene some kind of big new thing happens in the game all the stuff that should be drawing you into the world of Dead Space you get hit with these stutters and it's constantly pulling you out of the experience and that is just like on you're saying that even though you're talking from the perspective of a larger rig like if you're on a mid-range rig the size of these stutters is also larger it's proportionally larger uh that's something that I showed off in my video back then and if you're like the ryzen 53600 is usually pretty great for getting that console level performance and in this game you're just nowhere near it in terms of fluidity the consoles also have a little bit of uh like traversal stutter in the game and it usually manifests as like d animation frames and stuff like that um but here on a ryzen 53600 the game is just it's just not at all fun to play and it loses all of the Ambiance and atmosphere because every single time you go near a door and the game has tons of doors that was the original Xbox 360 PS3 you know PC 2008 uh design of the game and every single time you go near one the game will stutter and you can just go back and forth in areas and just constantly having a stutter oh it's such a shame and the reason why I want to call this one out very specific uh along with some of the other ones on this list that we'll be getting to uh momentarily is that the game got some updates post launch but that was it the game was dropped like like a like a hot potato like yeah that oh that really bums me out too because I like this remake a lot um and to their to their credit they did actually fix the console version if you recall it launched on console with um vrs uh I guess the non-hardware vrs variant on PlayStation 5 specifically but it it didn't look great on any of them and it was forced and it had such a detrimental impact on the image quality that it just kind of destroyed the game like especially in dark areas it was just nonsense noisy pixels everywhere and it looked terrible uh and they did actually go back and fix that at no real performance cost interestingly so they were able to achieve the same performance as before on the consoles at 60 frames per second without destroying the image and I believe vrs remains an option on PC and it is a little bit better because it is the higher resol or it's it's Hardware vrs right um but I did think on PC it still had the same problem because it seemed to apply to the pre- upscaled version so if you're like using say dlss rendering it a lower internal resolution it's applied to that lower internal resolution and then upscaled from there and you end up with an an exceptionally nasty looking image so yeah it was just just like for the amount of degradation it added to the image the performance uplift that I could measure on PC was really small it it was really weird it almost feels like it was labbed in some sort of way where it looked good on paper but in practice it just wasn't actually something that was great thankfully they allowed you to toggle that on and off on PC eventually uh you so that so that's that's all good it would have not necessarily been that way at launch um this is just one where it really bmps out because I love the game I love the original dead space I love everything that they did with the Remake visually a auditorally but Etc really great but it's just so and it'll the thing is it won't necessarily ever be fixed at this point in time because they've dropped it no and so in like five years from now you could still be loading the game up on a big PC and because you know IPC increases and memory subsystems are not increasing the same way they did in like the 90s you'll still be coming up against these walls where the game will still stutter most likely and that's really bad uh that's not what you want to see for the legacy of a game so really big shame here that it is the way it is this is also one of those games that has so many of those like homemade fixes you go on all the forms like yeah if I if you go into this folder and rename this to this and then put this file here and then delete this file it fixes all the stutters and then you see it didn't fix mine all below it so there's all these anecdotal point about it fixing stutters and it's hard to know like what like what's going on with any of this stuff and it's all just very frustrating but when you look at conversation of this game on PC forums it is everybody's talking how do I stut yeah and you you kind of seemingly can't do it completely and that's another thing that's gonna apply to the second worst Port that I'm going to be talking about on this list so I famously declared in the title uh of the video the worst AAA Port of 2023 for this game and it's Jedi Survivor and I'll I got to say this one covering this one at launch it was you know after the last of us part one and I just couldn't believe it it was also Unreal Engine game and I just went in with like the worst expectations because they showed off like preview video of this game and the preview footage was like super stuttery and just messed up looking did not look right they did not demo the game off well they were demoing it and then I loaded up and like the first thing I saw when that like ship in the initial I'm talking about the initial launch version you the ship just crosses in front of the there's a massive Shader compilation CER it's the first thing you see in the game but it causes one and then I get further into the game and I realize it's not just Shader compilation stutter that's almost actually like a smaller subset of the issues here like it wasn't Dead Space the biggest issue is just like everywhere you go in the game world especially the more dense areas of the game World later on Cobo you get like just incessant stuttering on no matter your rig no matter of your settings it's just like it's always always present in the game and it does not feel smooth ever this game doesn't feel smooth on any PC I will maintain I feel like anyone that thinks it does feel smooth is simply not seeing the issues because it's not just stutters there's also issues with camera translation and the way it actually moves to the world and just so many other little issues like that that add up to something that feels terrible on the PC and it's so bad yeah it's really upsetting too because uh the game itself is very well made but it seems that way it's terrible on PC and frankly the original game also had major issues on PC and guess what never fixed never fixed I loaded up uh Jedi Order or was Jedi fall in order Fallen order right before I started Jedi Survivor cuz I wanted to talk about the fact that the first game was never fixed and I was playing that game on like a 1200k and I was still finding Big Frame time Spikes all over that game especially like when you get to any of like the more open dark bring up their performance patch on patch in certain areas of the game like in that Cobo stage that I would always bench over and I talked about multiple times uh multiple times I don't even need to talk about anymore it did get better over time but the core issues were still there the stutterin and like the CPU load just not making any sense like you can still load up the game now after all the patches you could turn on frame gen whatever and the game will still stutter at in the exact same areas as it did at launch when you start getting into to the game the CPU performance in the opening credits like stage of the game that like corusant stage it's still just as poor as it was at launch like it's just a game that where they patched it and like the patches they they nominally increased like the frame rate the average FPS but it doesn't really matter so much so if the frame time spikes are as bad as they are so yeah that that's the way it is and it's and it's really sad to see cuz I think there's probably a quality game in here I only hear really positive things about people who are playing through it and ignoring the issues or uh just like taking them and stride but for me as someone who enjoys visual fluidity in their games nowadays uh it's like one of those games that I just really can't play it just annoys the heck me it's uh I'm bummed out too because I like what I've played but I had to put the game down because it was just the performance issues were bothering me and then on Console the image quality was so lousy they fixed it somewhat in terms of performance there but the game just it doesn't run well on anything like the whole thing feels like it's been spoiled by some of these technical issues and that's that's really really unfortunate because I loved the original game and yeah I I wanted to love this game as well but I just can't right now and it's one of those cases where once you see these issues it's just really hard not to be bothered by them right like yeah and I I couldn't do it and as a result this this is definitely one of the most disappointing games of the year as a result of the technical issues and it's become kind of our inner company Whipping Boy for this just because it just man yeah they missed the they missed the targets so much with this they really did and it's one of those ones that like I say in the video I almost think like it makes a mockery of like you trying to upgrade out of its issues Rich made a video about Arkham Knight a while while back about how you can over like a decade later you can somewhat iron out the issues it's still technically there underneath all it's not fully fixed but yeah yeah but like here where like I even show in the video that I made on at the update that even if you like lock the frame time and the frame time graph is producing real new frames like each time and it's like a perfect 60 perfect 16.6 milliseconds per frame the animation in the game is at the same point it would when there's a normal frame time Spike and it's just like you can never get the game looking smooth and I actually honestly have no idea when the game will ever look smooth like really well it may not be possible they never fixed the original and it seems like they've stopped supporting the PC version of this one as well I feel like the only hope is like running this on a more powerful console years later will at least maximize I think it uses Dynamic resolution scaling it should should do that it should allow it to hit the ceiling and also run consistently hopefully hopefully but it's yeah it's not good um yeah this is that's not good and it's like I said just a shame and it's one thing that I didn't like making it my Whipping Boy for the year because I don't like being negative if there's one thing that I need to say about this video this is a uh a negative video with positive aexs but I actually prefer the good story I always want to talk about I always love playing a game and enjoying the technical aspects of it I don't like these types of things either really but I felt we're doing this because of the fact that we don't want to see these these types of releases anymore M and I don't think it's going to necessarily change anything at large but I think it's important to get this out there so people understand that a lot of gamers are affected by this especially in the PC space and it's we need some hope that it's going to get better I think so yeah that's that brings us to our last one and this one this one is Fab fabulous in the sense that uh you made a video of when you first played this you actually were recording the game and something got messed up so it was actually capturing your microphone audio and so the whole video has you making like idle chitchat to yourself in the background but it's actually live reactions to the technical problems in this port and it is fantastic yeah that'll what game am I talking about Alex this is what game am I talking about is wildart son oh my this one's so bad this is okay so there's a reason why I wanted Rich originally when Rich and I were going to be making we're publishing the Jedi Survivor video when that came out and I originally Rich had a different title it was he said it the worst PC Board of 2023 and I said that's not technically true rich I didn't cover it but wild Hearts is worse it's but I said to Rich I think it's able a not AAA so we made a technical consideration there worst AAA Port worst double a port whatever but this is actually just the Flatout worst Port of 2023 so the reason for this is simple Jedi Survivor whatever poor menus uh incessant stuttering that you really can't get rid of it's bad but bad bad it's obviously not good Dead Space incessant stuttering you really can't get rid of also not good but this one the amount of stuttering and the reason and the way it's happening is just almost like laughable like the the length of the stutters oh my God they're huge um you just like start the game up and there's footage running on screen right now you just start the game up you just start like moving forward stutter stutter stutter but nothing changed in the environment why am I stuttering you move forward a bit more to other areas you start like realizing that it is just happening at just like certain lengths of time sometimes or it's connected to certain areas of the world you go through the game just never ever stops stuttering ever the the entire time I play like I I didn't even count the amount of stutters I did in the first 30 minutes gameplay but it's probably in the hundreds like and this is on a uh ryzen 7's uh 7800 x3d like the top-of-the-line processor it has nothing to do with your CPU it has nothing to do with anything um yeah we've not found a way to power through this have we like it's just it's not possible this is just how the game is and it's just going to slap you in the face constantly throughout these awful super lengthy stutters and it it really isn't just like oh here's a 16 millisecond stutter I mean these are like gigantic like 100 milliseconds at points stuff like that it's constant too just like you go across one little room that's probably like 20 by 20 meters across and you just constantly see traversing that room just back and forth you just see stutter stutter stutter stutter stutter it's exactly it doesn't it's not like a traversal thing where it's like it happens you're in the room it's fine it just keeps happening it just Happ in the same room I have no idea what the game is doing I really have no idea what the game is doing some of the back there some of the stutters though I did chalk up to Shader compilation because there's a couple times where you hit an enemy creature for the first time and it's really obviously that or like the boss character slams the ground and it brings up some effect for the first time and you do see a large stutter the game doesn't seem to have a visible Shader pre-compilation step but it's just so stuttery the entire time where I honestly couldn't believe that this game was being sold and I honestly couldn't believe that I was examining a post patched version of the game this game came out really early in 2023 if I'm not mistaken uh was February maybe yeah Tom covered it at the time on consoles it was late February and I think Rich did the PC section yeah Rich did a little PC section in a DF direct for us and I lo the fact that I loaded up the game and I had the exact same experience as he had this laughable stuttery for no reason stuttering you know experience the first time I played the game almost like n 10 months ler actually looking at footage now and it's like it's the case where the stutters are so long like he extended the frame time graph to 120 milliseconds and some of the stutters are so long below 120 milliseconds yeah like these these are anyone is these are visible to anyone I can understand sometimes some people are like I don't see little drops at 33 milliseconds that's totally fine whatever but like these ones are so obvious that they had to have shown up in all the testing for this game before it was published and released it just feels like the whole game is freezing constantly as you play it does not do this on Console by the way not that the console versions are especially great but it doesn't have this problem at all so it is strictly a bad PC Port situation yeah 100% bad PC Port situation and you know I was like Curious like is this the game engine because we've seen this game engine used by team ninja before and it's used in games like Neo Neo 2 um and it's been upgraded over time it's got a lot of great visual features I've always kind of like this engine so this is made by Omega Force right right right right and uh which is different from Team ninja of course but I think they are using that same it's the same technology you can see it in the menus you can see it in all the options too and that they so team ninja released wo long this year running on apparently the same technology uh and has a lot of the same menu options and it's also dx12 well guess what that game one it has a great Shader pre-compilation step before it starts up and it's lengthy enough and it catches every single thing I saw in the first one hour of gameplay zero issues there that game even though it's dx12 does not have this stuttering issue when you move across the game world or do anything in the game indeed it does seem to be using the katana engine as they call that's what it's called Katana engine yes uh you're you're right wo long is a similar I would say yeah similar looking game neither's really pushing visuals to any sort of like new level they look fine I think it's hand they're handsome games uh but Wong does not exhibit these problems whereas wild Hearts has them everywhere yeah it's like I said incest and in Wild hearts and the fact that it is not down to the like the pure engine issue or something like that that they they just have a really bad dx12 port on PC or something really bad dx12 code no it's not just that it's like it's very specifically this version of the engine running in this game and most importantly and this where the call out comes where I said I'm punching up at this video this is a game published by Electronic Arts and if you look at this list of things that we just talked about dead space Jedi Survivor wild Hearts EA's track record this year on PC is so so bad where really even after all this time games are not finished they're releasing an States and the is you buy this and okay you just kind of have to live with it if you miss out on the refund period depending upon the platform you B we're actually watching another EA game right now which is the WRC game that does not that doesn't make the list because it it's still less than three months old but we'll see what happens next year because at this point the game still has major issues the game is shipped with we'll see yeah similar similar to what I'm talking about here but that one is making me worried too because it is another but the whole point of this right here is that for some reason EA's quality control not isn't the people doing quality control but the decision making to say this is publishable and then publishing it is the big issue because none of these games on these list launched in a what I would consider acceptable State a finished State and then they weren't fixed after the fact and you know what Alex here's the big bummer about this people love to you know rag on companies like EA but all of these games are actually good games they made great games here that's the thing that's what makes us so disappointing this is what this is actually the kind of stuff I want from EA and I'm I think the quality level is there it's just that the the actual final release like all of them had somewhat issues on consoles at release but they've been mostly somewhat short up but the PC experience is just bad and I don't think that's acceptable and it needs to change for sure does they're really letting down both uh they're letting down the developers and the the players alike I would say with this yeah because you know it reflects on it doesn't just reflect on the publisher obviously developers get caught up in uh people like calling them out on like social media having really bad Forum interactions on the steam forums and things like that when it's not the developers decision these are all public in decisions and it's you know some of them are inexplicably bad wild Hearts is a completely unfinished game like this should never have been published it's anyone playing this even a complete random person who's never played a game in their life would recognize this as like video buffering eras you'd see like trying to watch a movie on Netflix it just does not look like a fluid experience ever and yeah like John said these are games that in and of themselves seem like they're actually of extremely high quality uh people constantly keep talking about how like wild Hearts is like this really great Monster Hunter esque kind of game and it's really good and they're talking about the console version the PC version is garbage and I played Dead Space twice uh and I Lov it I think it's a fantastic remake like really really well done uh and Jedi Survivor again I've played maybe a third of it and I do like the game but man I just couldn't bring myself to keep going because I ended up playing on PlayStation 5 and it's fine enough there but the image quality with FSR to is so bad uh and I just I ended up having to play in the 30fps mode and it's just I don't know it it really turned me off and I I kind of set it down saying I'll wait for the PC version to be fixed and well here we are here we are talking about the end of the year never never end up happening uh so that's the downer note but the positive note is that we did Cover three games at the beginning of this list that actually have now improved greatly and we're really grateful that they did improv obviously they shouldn't have launch in the state they did but it is actually now in a state where you should definitely try and check them out and actually after Force spoken got fixed up I said in my video I'm like actually now you can maybe try and enjoy the game for what it is which you really couldn't do at launch yep and that's a great thing to actually try and play the game as you know without the technical considerations like the one big issue and a defining feature of every single game on this list more or less other than for spoken to a certain degree is just stuttering stuttering gets completely in the way of the user experience and it's a huge thing it's a big issue on PC just try and not have releases with stuttering in them like I want to while we while we're talking about that I want to highlight some recent stuff that was good I played through Robocop on the PC armored Core 6 games like that these things ran great Allen wake 2 Sonic Superstars even unity game there no less right these games all ran very well out of the gate on day one I know some people may have had some issues on one or the other but they don't have these same large scale issues that that causes problems across every PC right yeah and so I actually feel like the second half of this year has largely improved and even you did the video on the unre unon 5 games and I think those are actually kind it's early days but I think they're largely shaping up better than uh anything with unre engine 4 as of late they are as a result and that's one thing I mentioned in the video like um so things have gotten better towards the latter half of this year year and I think it's because um to kind of just say it like there's been a lot of call out publicly about stuttering issues in PC games and just general quality not just us either like no I'm not talking about us this is this is industrywide It's All Over social media and I think as a result there's been lessons brought into games that are coming out later on that had longer production Cycles than just the earlier part of this year um so I imagine this is going to just as a trend get better going forward but companies Publishers like EA really have to do their part too to ensure that and that's something that I didn't feel was done in EA this year and that's why this video exists that's why this video exists at the end we want to see this stuff get better um but John I think I think we've talked enough we ranted enough for a while um 2022 really bad year for PC ports the first part of 2023 also really really really bad really bad uh but it's getting better thankfully right now and uh thanks for talking to me about bad PC ports John let's go 2024 let's do it 2024 can you mess up Alex even more than 2023 will we be back next year with a sequel to this video please say no not but we'll find out I want I want to I want to have a joyful Christmas time but John uh yes if you did like this video please hit that like button and subscribe to the channel if you're already a subscriber hit that little bell in the corner to be informed as soon as digital Foundry posts a video if you want to support our content than any other ranty like content like this in the future support us on patreon ranty uh we got a lot of content there and only more in the future including Alex's re reaction including my reaction to playing Wilds which may at some point be made public I'm not sure how it is like I said totally genu reac it is a little bit spicy but to say the least I get a little spicy when I see some really bad stuff um but yes if you did enjoy this video thank you everyone and of course Merry Christmas hi happy Holidays happy New Year to everyone watching this when they are MSI MPG infinite X2 PC features powerful Intel core processors the latest RTX 40 series graphics and supports ddr5 memory up to 128 GB with Advanced CPU cooling via msi's own 240 mm all-in-one cooler and system thermals handled by the Silent Storm cooling 2 solution every major component in the system is upgradeable with a toolless design for easy access a tempered side panel and MSI Mystic light RGB adds to the aesthetic and the latest Wi-Fi 6E networking is supported check the link in the video description for full details on the MSI MPG infinite X2 the all new MSI gaming [Music] desktop

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 205,011

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Id: YCnw5zxmMxs

Length: 49min 51sec (2991 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 28 2023