Featured Image Credit: CD Projekt RED, Sony Interactive Entertainment
Topics: PC
PC gamers have rightfully had enough of messy launches, which is to be completely understood. When you’re shelling out potentially £50 to £60 for a new game, you don’t want to then find that game is completely and utterly ridden with bugs and glitches, rendering it unplayable.
We’ve seen that story play out plenty of times in the last couple of years. One of the worst cases was most certainly Naughty Dog’s PC port of The Last of Us Part I. It’s not what we’d come to expect from Naughty Dog. Then again, devs did team up with Iron Galaxy who created the PC port for Batman: Arkham Knight. A port dubbed by many to be amongst the worst ever made. Thankfully, both studios have since made The Last of Us Part I far more playable but how that game was passed for release, I don’t know. More recently, fans have also experienced issues with Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Payday 3 - and they’re saying that enough is enough.
Take a look at the newly released Payday 3 in action below.
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Reddit user SelimSC took to the site to write, “AAA studios have no excuse not to optimise their games properly. I've never seen a clearer example of this [than] going from playing Starfield back to Cyberpunk [2077] for Phantom Liberty. On my average laptop that has a 3070ti, I can play Cyberpunk at Ultra settings with Ray Tracing using DLSS and I'm constantly over 80-90 fps. Also the game looks absolutely gorgeous.”
They continued, “The 120 hours I had in Starfield were absolutely miserable, switching from low to medium and still not getting stable 60fps [...]. I know that Cyberpunk is basically NVIDIA's baby and it gets all of the tech thrown at it, thus it being maybe an unfair example, but still, blaming consumer hardware for your own failure is absolutely not valid in 2023.”
It’s a somewhat fair point, although with a chunk of silly nonsense thrown in. It should be noted that Starfield is purposefully locked at 30fps by developers, unless you’re using a 60fps mod - and spending 120 hours inside a so-called ‘miserable’ game is an odd commitment. Of course, Cyberpunk 2077 has also received three years of post-launch support and released a terrible state, but there is a valid argument beyond this.
“I just don't buy games until I can confirm they run at acceptable frames/stability. Nearly every game gets fixed a few months in,” wrote chakramer, while another user pointed out that poorly optimised games will continue releasing as “people still buy them anyway”. User trip6s6i6x summed up what we’re all thinking, saying, “You got an upvote for the title, and then you lost it with the example.” The OP’s post uses some silly logic but what matters most is that we should all be confident that a newly purchased PC game will perform steadily.