The Worst PC Ports of 2023 - A DF Direct 'Special'
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- Опубліковано 10 лип 2024
- Check out MSI's range of desktop PCs here: msi.gm/MSIGamingPCs
The trend of disappointing PC ports was problematic in 2022 and it's with a profound sense of disappointment that 2023 wasn't that much better. Looking to highlight the issues, John Linneman and Alex Battaglia compare notes on the worst three PC ports of the year - but before that, they share a few examples of PC titles that shipped in a pretty poor state... but did actually improve significantly across the months after their release.
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00:00 Introduction
02:58 The Last of Us Part 1
08:05 Forspoken
14:24 Redfall
20:22 Dead Space
27:52 Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
34:50 Wild Hearts
41:27 Closing discussion - Ігри
EA having 3 games on this list is incredible
Electronic Arse?
I'd also accept Electronic Sharts, though it only really works when spoken, because when read it changes the initialism from EA to ES.
IMO EA is too big to hate on these days. It’s too big of a blanket statement to say EA sucks. It’s like saying ESPN sucks cause your team lost they are just the delivery system at this point.
What's even funnier was that for a while, one thing you rely EA to do well were PC ports. Then Jedi fallen order came out and EA seems to be sinking lower and lower for every year.
@@overseastomI use Excessive Avarice
That's because EA is beyond trash.
I fear that the bad EA PC releases are going to cause a cycle where EA doesn't want to put the resources into the games to get them fixed because they don't see a value, which is then going to cause PC players to not purchase EA games, which is then going to cause EA to justify even fewer resources dedicated to PC versions, and so on.
This only shows how awful ea is, im never buying anything with their name on, ever
This happened in the past with Capcom and Ubisoft, with Capcom releasing awful, awful ports, and Ubisoft launching it full of DRM.
People just kept buying anyway, and they end up straighting themselfs.
But yeah, I'm a little bit concerned about it too.
@@4klassic160 Ubisoft's games run usually quite fine though. Avatar, Far Cry 6, Anno, AC Origins, all run pretty great. Maybe you don't like the game play, but on a technical level they're pretty good on PC, one of the best, if it weren't for their UPlay stuff...
At least they cannot blame piracy now because pirated version still isnt available nowadays, damn even pirate wont care about their game at all.
This is basically what happened with Ubisoft a decade or two ago until someone up there essentially realized they were missing out on a huge market by putting out trash. They just blamed everything on piracy without thinking about the fact slapping terrible drms on trash ports wasn't very enticing to pc players.
Once again, let’s never forget the major tech outlet that claimed Jedi Survivor ran fine on their PC.
It runs fine on MY computer... lol
😬😬😬😬
@@itsuadman You are ignorant and/or not sensitive enough to the problems that were raised.
Who was that lol
There's people on ERA and Reddit, usually with AMD GPUs (lol) who claim the game runs fine on their PC too.
Alex's disdain for pooly optimised PC ports of games is understandable!
And justified lol
Imagine having to cover so many terrible games all on the same year
@@Mene0 Thankfully Alex is the man for the job! His patience and technical skill mean he's very able for it!
It's more than understandable.
I think John is more bugged about this than Alex. Doubt Alex actually plays games for fun, he never seems excited or ever talks about playing games outside of what's strictly work.
Astronomical GPU prices to run games that rarely look any better than the console version, while performing worse.
What a time to be a PC gamer!
That's one of the reasons I just play on console.
Install, play, and move on!
Still running a 1060 6gb living my best life.
That’s why I stopped upgrading at a 1080ti and use my ps5,got a massive backlog of great games on steam I think will last me a lifetime.
@@mrmagoo756 same.
always been like this lol
It's also worth noting that Jedi Survivor and Dead Space sharing the obnoxious Denuvo DRM really adds further insult to injury.
100%
But so does Far Cry 6 (and also Avatar I think) and while it'd be good if it wasn't there for sure (in single player/coop games!), it definitely isn't the source of the bad performance (pirated versions without it don't really run any better...)
I did wonder whether the Dead Space issues were, in part, a result of Denuvo, since they remind me of the issues RE: Village had that were caused by its double DRM. By the way. Wild Hearts has Denuvo too (or did), but removing it (which EA did on Origin, accidentally) reportedly made no difference to performance. No surprise there though, considering how utterly bizarre the issues are with the port.
@@cromefire_ (pirated versions without it don't really run any better...)
^ That's not how it works
@@choggi Well if denuvo really was the (performance) problem, versions without denuvo would run better...
When Alex said he was cranking out his final video of the year, I knew it was going to be about this.
I normally don't dig on worst of lists, but this one absolutely had to happen. Well done, boys.
Alex trying to save PC gaming as always. Thanks!
This year was so bad for PC Ports, even Alexs' Shader Compilation Butler couldn't help fixing them and had to be dismissed.
The fact that two months after Starfield was released it had a patch that MASSIVELY boosted performance on 8 core machines with Nvidia graphics cards (a huge proportion of the PC space) suggests it was simply not polished at all for PC prior to release.
Then tried to blame the player base pcs lol I got a 4090 and it ran like shit
@@Motion_Godlooks shit too outdoors at least.
Remember they were found to have purposely fucked with the profiles so BAR didn't work on NVidia cards. I'll never understand how people think AMD are the good guys, all these companies are scummy.
@@limpa756 yup and i dont know why people get on their hands and knees to praise these companies when in reality all they want is your money
I think that the worst part about Starfield's performance is not even the FSR, DLSS and XeSS part, is the fact that it's a game that was BORN old, with an old engine stretched todo new tricks, with most of it's presentation and gameplay pretty decent, but does nothing better than usual.
And THAT didn't run well. I'm okay with a game that has decent visuals or less than stellar gameplay because they run pretty well, and I'm okay with some games stressing my CPU or GPU a lot if they are something actually cutting-edge in terms of tech or visuals.
But a game not doing well in ANY of those parts is the worst possible outcome.
Good to see that EA hasn't changed at all. I was disappointed that the Dead Space remake still has problems but I'm not surprised since they have such a disposable attitude with their games on PC.
Motive did an amazing job optimizing Dead Space, it’s the Frostbyte engine that dropped the ball here.
@@jebrilBut it still has a lot of stutters. 12600k, 32Gb DDR 3600, 4070 12Gb, M2.SSD is not enough to get even stable 60fps, I have frame dops to 56fps which look like stutters. It happens near the doors or when something is crashing. It's so bad that I can't get smooth game. I played on PS5, it was really blurry game, but it was smooth at the start.
@@dessso4463 Not sure what stuttering you have only one I get is traversal stutters but that's engine issue IMO. If its the same as I think you'll only see the stutters in the same exact areas always.
Jedi Survivor's continued broken state will still confuse me. This is a game running on one of the most common engines out there, like I can somewhat understand how TLOU1 is broken on PC since the engine was never designed on PC, and they made rookie mistakes.
Engine is not everything, there's always a lot more of intricacies there to discover that depends exclusively on the project. And if not enough time is given to the teams to figure those out we get this.
Respawn for some reason can't make Unreal Engine work, I know problems with UE are frequent with other developers but with Respawn, it's always next level headaches.
@@marcelosoares7148 It's like that scientist patrick meme, they managed to use and customize Source to make such good looking and performant games as seen in Titanfall 2 and Apex, but with Unreal they're just lost.
@@artemisDevexactly theres a reason gotham knights is a mess as well
@@artemisDev not enough time? lmao, they had the same stutter issues in jedi: fallen order
Thank you @Digital Foundry for calling out the dead space remake as well as other poor PC ports. Developers need to be better about these ports and we need to hold them accountable for delivering poor products.
It wasn't called out nearly enough, people worshipped this game so hard and ignored all the problems, bizarre
@@BlueFusion2910 especially the r/deadspace subreddit. Full of toxic Fanboys
Hey lads. Great video as always. Fun fact about Arkham Knight. The decision was mostly down to one person. Every other stakeholder agreed the title was not ready on PC. That same person was also fired for that decision, swiftly from what I've been told.
Im surprised that Wo long did not make it in this list.
I'm very grateful for this video. People are aware now and publishers need to be hold accountable. Especially EA, which I didn't clock until it was mentioned. I nearly gave up on PC gaming this year. I'm really hoping for better in 2024.
Friendly reminder that Dead Space on PC remains untouched since February. 10 months of no patches, nothing.
Yeah they don’t care. We’re stuck with traversal stutter till death do us part sadly. Not enough outlets talked about it. I’ve seen footage where people say “see no stutter” but it’s clearly visible they just don’t notice since it’s usually not in combat
So what have you learned? Or are you still going to be buying the next game they release.
I can't get over that because the devs seemed so invested in the game before launch, releasing videos about their progress and everything, and after launch they just packed their bags and fucked off, never to be seen again.
@@krazyfrog yeah it’s weird. Might be financial related? Rumor is the traversal stutter is caked into the engine and is not fixable but no source for that. Seems like if it was an easy fix, it would have been done. No outlets really talked about it though and gave the game 9-10s so this is what we get
We as a gaming community should always scream loudly when something is wrong or great...and it's great when big UA-cam channels comment on it.
It’s such a shame. Dead Space, Wild Hearts, and Jedi Survivor all all games I’d love to play, but I’m not sure I’d be able to handle the stuttering issues (especially the latter 2)
After patching the main stutters seem to happen on Koboh in the town area and near the river. Everywhere else runs smooth for me but I played it on PS5 at 30 fps. 60 fps mode disabled raytracing but still has screen tearing and artefacts. 30 fps mode is actually quite playable and the motion blur is done well.
def do not play wild hearts on pc. not only is the stuttering bad but the optimization as a whole is terrible. i have a 3080 and cant get 60 fps
@@MopantsuI tried 30fps mode and it felt terrible on my high refresh oled display. Totally unplayable. I ended up beating the game on performance mode (with gritted teeth) which runs considerably better on my SX... albeit at a p*ss poor resolution. On my Ps5 it's not stable at all with hitches and screentearing (due to poor VRR implementation) But yeah, loads of screen flicker/flashes when moving the camera in certain levels... this due to the game drawing in culled sections too late off screen. Cutscenes dropping to unacceptably low resolutions at 30fps with visual bugs and hitching. Horrible texture pop in and streaming issues. The game is still a technical mess on every platform. It massively ruined my enjoyment tbh. It's a brilliant star wars game but its practically ruined by a horribly unoptimised experience. Respawn NEED to get there sh*t together for the next game.
My gaming life started on console - Atari, SNES, N64, PS, GC, Xbox, Dreamcast... then I went to college and discovered broadband internet on my PC. WOW. It was an "old-cow, new-cow" scenario. Consoles looked so *inferior* to what I was doing on PC; Skype, Vent, WoW, Crysis, mods, mouse and keyboard, THE GRAPHICS OMG....
Fast-forward through to the PS5 generation and I barely turn on my PC.
Last year I used my decades of PC building experience to assemble my dream PC and construct my dream PC setup. I had bought a house, got my own office, and reached the pinnacle of power and comfort for my PC gaming needs... But PC gaming had fallen flat. I'd felt it for a few years now; "why am I not getting the same joy out of gaming I did just a few years prior playing PUBG, Overwatch, Rust, Ark, League of Legends?..."
I realized not too long after completing my dream setup that not only are many ports to PC horribly inferior to their console counterparts, but every new release had become same-same; all the grinding pointless multiplayer experiences were fleeting and/or cookie-cutter safe bets that encouraged me to reach for my wallet for progression. Windows has become uncomfortably intrusive, GPUs have become prohibitively expensive, even Discord has been doing everything they can to update and feel fresh so that each time I turn it on I'm being bombarded by pop ups that say "look what I can do!"... I really don't care what new tricks that old dog can do, I just want to talk to my friends ffs.
Then there's the troubleshooting... Every time you download a new game and launch you're fiddling with settings, updating GPU drivers to fix problems with the newest game only to have older games break with the new drivers... then there's Windows updates resetting my system settings, my wireless mouse won't connect for some reason, accessory companion software corrupting after an update or losing my key bindings, audio devices need to be reconfigured so I can hear my Discord chats...
You know what happens when I turn on my PS5?
It turns on.
My settings are how I left them.
Everything is up-to-date.
My controller always connects.
The games look and run *great*.
"IT JUST WORKS"
No fuss. Just fun.
The console experience for gaming is 1000x better than PC today. It wasn't the same 15 years ago but the tables have certainly turned. I use my PS5 now more than any other gaming device and it's the most relieving, relaxing, *fun* experience compared to PC or even Xbox. And isn't that why we play games? For fun? To unwind?
This is the kind of dedicated coverage that the video game community deserves. So many developers put a lot of time & effort into making beautifully optimized experiences, and we can commend them as much as possible, but unless we also call out these lazy, greedy games, then nothing will change.
Calling out the poorly made games makes the polished games shine even brighter. Thanks for doing this DF!
100%
You actually brought your reddit avatar to UA-cam?
People have no shame these days
@@spacecoffee6706 I'd argue it's less shameful than engaging in internet culture war dweebery like it's still 2016 but what do I know.
I appreciate that you guys spent the time to highlight the PC versions that launched in a poor state but improved with work and patches. As rough as it is to have games launch in that sort of state at all, at least the devs were able to go back in and fix things up for games like tLoUP 1 and Sporfoken. I have far less of an issue with that than I have with games like Jedi Survivor, when there's a few patches to fix some issues and then the game is abandoned with major issues still remaining, or like Wild Hearts where there's no improvement at all.
Hearing of all the EA disasters, this gives me fear for the next Dragon age that might come out next year. A bad technical launch will kill the franchise.
Dragon Age is already bad vs what it once was unfortunately
Even without it they will inadvertently compared with Baldurs Gate 3 that will further widen the gap and probably made us realise it isnt the same Bioware
I wouldn't get your hopes up. That game has been in development hell for a decade and Bioware is not the same bioware that developed all those great games we loved in the 2000's/early 2010's. I suspect if the next DA sucks (likely) and ME4 turns out bad, Bioware will meet the same fate as so so many other EA owned devs.
I'm worried about anything BioWare makes considering how much talent they've lost. Drew Karpyshyn, Mac Walters, Casey Hudson, Mike Laidlaw, David Gaider, James Ohlen, Kevin Martens, and Brent Knowles are all directors, producers, designers, and lead writers who have left BioWare that have worked on Baldur's Gate, KOTOR, Mass Effect, and/or Dragon Age. They've ship of Theseus'd into a completely different studio at this point with the amount of churn they experienced in the 2010s.
I disagree with giving devs/publishers a 3 month grace period for bad ports. These games come out and cost full price, and are often up for preorder months in advance. They should be playable and worth what people paid for on release, not just 3 months down the line, not just 6 months down the line, and not just a year down the line. At these points games get cheaper, so by releasing a product that is not worth buying on release due to bugs and performance issues, consumers who pay are getting ripped off. If a dev is willing to put their game up for preorder, the least they can do is ensure it works properly on release and not need months of patching to get where it needs to be.
If 2023 taught me something, it's not to buy games on day one. Like, never. And to wait until a game actually runs fine before buying it. I feel bad for having bought jedi survivors at launch, which doesn't run well even after moths from release and it will never do at this point, they didn't deserve any money for that
Please spread the word. Especially younger gamers need to near this so we can break the cycle.
The people that were responsible to release these broken PC ports should be ashamed
they dont need to be, they made money
I heard they cry themself to sleep on their mega-yacht at least once a week
@@Daxer2009 Yup. Clock in, clock out, make the check. Rinse and repeat. I get it considering the current economic landscape, it's hard enough to live out here. But come on. People don't want to be ripped off.
@@spakentruth i also dont want to get ripped off. Thats why I dont buy these games for 70$ anymore and wait for reviews and tech videos like the ones created by DF, also Preordering and putting trust in these Companies is something i stopped i while ago, but there are enough people that buy this stuff Day One so it will just continue
@@Daxer2009thank you. It's easy to suggest "don't pre-order and don't pay $70" but so few people actually follow that advice. It's really not difficult at all. Stop rewarding shitty business!
Did Motive run out of budget to fix Dead Space or are they completely consumed into working on Iron Man?
I want to believe it's the latter. Sucks about the rocky launch, though.
Probably the latter. They said all hands were on deck for Iron Man as soon as Dead Space wrapped
I still remember playing dead space remake and getting to the cutscene on the ship right before going to the planet and suddenly the game dropped from 90fps with DLSS to 4fps and turned into a complete slideshow for the entire cutscene on a 3080TI, 32gb or ram, i7 9700k.
Jesus freaking Christ, that's absolutely inexcusable.
@@Barbaroossa it's wild because the loading stuttering was never that bad for me.
Was inconsistent enough that I got through most of the game without really caring about it.
But then right at the finale, probably because the game had been running for hours and has a memory leak, it just completely shit the bed.
After I got control again I quit out and restarted my PC.
Fixed the issue but it's was BAD.
There are a few other people who have recorded the issue.
This game is especially bad on Nvidia cards for some reason. I played through it with a 7900 XT and only had traversal stutter, but no crashing or massive frame drops.
Omg the horror 😢
@@dennisserino4604 honestly scarier than the necromorphs.
Lmao, the moment I saw Alex's face and then later when he brought in John, I was like, "YEAH, GET 'EM BOYS". While it has been a fun year for PC gaming in general, some of these PC ports really need to be called out for being spectacularly bad.
Hogwarts Legacy on Xbox Series x needs another look at by digital foundry.
Recieved a patch in June and has been broken ever since. Black dot artifacting in the menus. Bad stutter with traversal (far worse than launch), slow loading of textures (fast travel), flickering in certain areas with ray tracing it's really poor and the fact it hasn't been fixed is disgusting.
I assume they have given up on it just like the PC version which got its last patch in June and still has a ton of bugs and issues. And they have the gall to beg people on Steam to vote for them for the best game of the year lol.
What i'll never understand is how no one talks about the horrible LoD and drawing distance on Cyberpunk 2077, there was a mod that fixed it on PC pre 2.0 but they havent updated it yet afaik, it's just so bad once you notice it.
Yes! The Xbox version is completely broken after that patch. On top of the black square artifacts in menus there is a bug where the lighting flashes rainbow colors when the sun intersects with geometry. The PC version isn't perfect but I'm glad I own it there as well. It's insane that the best selling game of the year has been broken for months with no fixes.
The PC is a stutter fest as well. Just so bad
The comment about not being able to upgrade your way out of some of these problems is actually a source of great relief for me. I came into PC gaming in my mid-30s and found it to be a very unwelcoming space. 7 years later, I'm still paranoid about my rig and its performance. It actually feels better knowing that some issues are unresolvable than feeling like I should be spending thousands of pounds on a new graphics card and more RAM. Incidentally, I'm working with an RTX 2080 Super and 16GB RAM which cost me £1,500 in mid-2020. I'm sure many subscribers will find that adorably quaint but I'm generally getting on okay with it.
Dead Space actually got worse overtime. The game just outright crashes the moment you start a new game. Depending on who you talk to the game is now fixed or it is still busted depending on the drivers you were using. The game has overall been abandoned, typical of an EA release
Also kinda surprised Lords of the Fallen wasn't on this list. That game shipped in a pretty bad shape. Shader compilation step broke during one of the early patches. It is better but at the same time it isn't.
its worse now. The traversal stuttering somehow got worse which I didn't know was possible and in general it's just less stable. A travesty of a PC port that'll probably remain completely fucked for eternity.
It came out in October. They said anything after September they won’t list because they can still be fixed within 3 months.
I feel off ripped off by EA for buying Dead Space Remake. No more EA games for me.
@@withmygoodeyeclosed I feel ripped off that I couldn't refund it on steam. had 2.7 hours of playtime and almost all of that was trying to minimize the stutters, steam unfortunately didn't care cuz I was past two hours.
.
the funniest part is the original dead space on PC is arguably an even worse port. There's no comfortably playable version of dead space 1 on PC.
@@shotwell25 It is possible to play the original Dead Space on Steam without any issues. You have to add the mouse fix. It's a simple DLL file you just drop into the game folder. Then you make sure vsync is turned off in the game settings; then go into Nvidia control panel and turn on vsync and triple buffering. The in-game vsync is screwed, but the Nvidia control panel vsync works just fine.
Do these things and the game plays without issue.
Great video! Really appreciate the DF team highlighting how PC ports can improve (significantly), while maintaining a high degree of respect for developers. Everything here is constructive, and I hope that publishers take the cue and learn from what they're hearing.
Pc gaming is in pretty bad shape. After 10 years away I've built a gaming PC this year and I still play most of my games on my consoles
I played the Dead Space remake for the first time earlier this week. I tried it on two different systems, one with a 10900K and one with a 5800x3D. The 5800x3D machine is normally smooth as silk with almost every game I play on it, but this was a rare occasion where a game ran way better on my 10900K system than the 5800x3D one. It hard stuttered on the AMD machine, whereas the stutters (while still noticeable) were way less pronounced on the 10900K machine. It was installed on an NVME on both systems. That game's performance is just weird.
The game played pretty well on my PC, 12600k and 7900 XT. It seems like the game especially hates AMD processors and Nvidia cards.
@@RedEverything - The 5800x3D is paired with a 7900 XTX. If your 12600k & 7900XT did well with it, then I am thinking the game just doesn't like AMD CPU's, regardless of GPU.
So basically ubisoft had the best successful year in pc ports. Pretty surprising and not so surprising in the same time.
It's good Ubisoft isn't afraid to delay something. Definitely got some better management than most other gaming companies. Another company would have released a game like avatar in a broken state. Avatar was originally planned to release in july 2022 and didn't release until Dec 2023. Another company would have rushed the game out and released it much sooner, the quality would have suffered, which more than likely would have prevented game from ever getting to the state it is in now.
Actually, I'm playing AC Mirage and it crashes every 15 minutes. 🥲
@@DaPunkNdFunkI noticed my usual gpu overclock was unstable in mirage, bumped it down by 15mhz, no more crashing.
Man, I really feel bad for people spending a lot of money on PC hardware hoping to crush the consoles on visuals and performance only to get the worst of experiences. That's what has kept me from upgrading my PC in a long time, I just think it's not worth the investment especially when the PS5 is doing a great job, often better than PC. I hope things improve next year, especially considering that performance modes on consoles are starting to sacrifice a lot of image quality and resolution in many games making a PC upgrade almost a must.
it's just a handful of shitty ports though. it's really on the devs cuz there's no technical reason for these games not to run well on high end PC's.
Luckily there’s a lot of quality stuff outside of the AAA studios on PC to dig into. This year was just particularly bad because of a lot of high profile games releasing with these issues.
@@zwenkwiel816It's not just a handful of games though. This video could have gone on for hours. PC is in an absolute state, it's embarrassing.
@@AJ-xv7oh not really, the vast majority of these unoptimized games are just crappy ports of shitty AAA games. I didn't feel like I missed out on much by just ignoring them...
Gotta love how the thumbnail is completely made of ea games
Goes to show the love this company puts into its games
Jedi survivor was solely respawns fault. Stig was offered a longer delay and refused. he's the reason it launched in that state, and I have a feeling that's related to him changing positions in the company
Good one!
This company clearly doesn’t care about PC. It’s all about the consoles.
@@Nice_Places There were drops under 20 fps on consoles in jedi survivor. So I don't sure...
Jedi Survivor is the worst performance I have ever experienced for a console game in the last 20 years@@Nice_Places
It should legit be ILLEGAL to release a game with stutters. You can’t sell scratched Blu-ray’s. Games that stutter are virtually scratched disks. Jedi Survivor is by far the worst culprit of this.
The main issue with the broken and badly optimized games is that there is no holding the game studios responsible. There is no back lash what so ever from them releasing broken games. People always buy the games anyways giving money. The companies owning the platforms don't care at all what quality is released. As long as the game is playable from start to finish platform owners ignore all issues.
EA isn't just abandoning WRC, they're probably shutting down Codemasters next year or at least laying off a bunch of devs. They already expressed disappointment in the sales for both WRC and F1 23.
They buy studios and immediately run them to the ground.
and another bites the dust :(
can't even believe I used to like EA back in the 90's
EA Games, Ruin Everything.
I’m surprised EA is still around, it’s amazing how long bad companies can continue to exist. Then again, “there’s a sucker born every minute”, must be their company motto…
@@MacGuyver85 it's just corporate bullshit man, maximizing profits and shit and then using that money to buy up and advertise everyone else to death
basically their suits are a lot better than their developers...
This is why I have always been a multi platform gamer. I got burned by half baked ports since MK Trilogy on N64, 2D games on PS1, and 3D games on Sega Saturn...
I typically get polished games on console and fill in the blanks with PC and keep tbe PC around for game preservation of older games that dont get resolution/performance patches and an extensive emulation library since we will likely never get 4k 60 fps PS3 emulation from Sony or another Champions of Norrath game or even re-release.
Might be the last (or close to it) vid in '23, so- Happy New Year, you mischievous DF rascals!
I’m curious as to why Hogwarts Legacy wasn’t on here. All this time later I can’t go back to it on PC. It was just abandoned. They just went and ported it to Switch for some stupid reason. Also the community is THE WORST for the “well it runs perfect on my PC so you are objectively wrong” crap. Couldn’t find anyone online who could agree that the PC port was just a $60 insult without some lowlife claiming that they were wrong.
I literally just posted about Hogwarts Legacy before I saw this comment and I absolutely agree with you. I unfortunately just ended up buying it for the PS5 bc the PC version is unbearable to play. Then you go online to look for fixes and the community is just like "runs perfect on my PC, yours must be bad".
Hogwarts had issues but it wasn't as bad as these games. Most people just didn't meet a lot of minimum requirements. Complaining while playing on an HDD or 16GB of RAM.
@@tyler-hp7oq I don’t know if you’re trolling or not but this is exactly what I’m talking about, people assuming it’s my fault the game doesn’t run properly. So many people complaining had 4080s and 32gb of memory and great CPUs and said the game ran way under normal expectations.
Edit: if a game these days needs 32gb of RAM to play then that’s on the game, not the player. Do you do nothing but play games like Icarus that can’t run at a proper frame rate 10 years from now they’re so poorly optimized?
Alex and John didn't play it or do videos on it
@@tyler-hp7oqI have a 4090 64 gb ram 14900k cpu and the game runs like garbage . Developers are just lazy
At what point do developers have to share the blame too? Fallen Order had stutter issues and they only made it worse in Survivor. Even after countless patches they couldn't fix it. The game's abandoned now it seems. Can I expect Respawn to make an even worse sequel later down the line?
I really hope Alex' reaction to the Wild Hearts port makes it onto this channel at some point.
For Dead Space, nVidia has enabled rebar for the game in the last few drivers. But also what you can do it is change your graphics settings. Then close the game and clear the DX12 caches. Then play the game. If you change a graphics setting, clear the caches again. I played this game a few months ago and that seemed to help the stuttering a lot.
Thanks for the tip
Not sure if this is a joke or not....
@@Sairagna No, it helped me out. I swear.
Publishers are mainly responsible, but developers are to blame too. If they hired more or better technical engineers, these issues would be avoided.
It's kinda annoying that the Internet zeitgeist is just to give devs a pass. I blame both. The publisher's launch window is not a surprise to the devs...
@@rocstarang5747 Most of the content creators are man children who has not work in a real adult job in their life. So like 15 year old teenager they are like "corporations are always bad. Screw capitalism." In some cases, yes it is publishers but some cases it is dev teams incompetency.
@@hododod246 absolutely 😂
@@hododod246 But it is sort of weird, in any other development environment you would have 10 testers and every other developer in the office raising a big red flag over these kinds of issues, and obviously devs created these and not publishers but I doubt any developer that respects himself and his work would let these ports slide.
Brother who do you think greenlights/blocks the hiring of these more or better technical engineers?
4080 tuf+137k, i struggled through jedi cuz it was a great game...but i was getting issues i have never seen in 13 years of PC gaming...the main and worst one was the screen would go blurry/shaky and i had to restart the game to reset the issue, which would probably just flare up again in 5-10 minutes. i couldn't do the same with wild hearts. i got to the main city/hub and called it a day.
Great video! Love that you are shining a light on the bad PC releases. My only issue though is that the three month rule is a bit too generous honestly. As a customer, I should be able to buy a working product on day one that performs as expected and not have to wait 3+ months for it to be fixed. Next year if you do this video, consider just judging the games as they launched instead, because giving companies leeway by saying "well you have three months after launch" is just giving them the go ahead to launch something broken as long as its fixed within three months, which is just unacceptable for customers in my opinion.
I just don't think it's an unreasonable expectation to have a working product on release that doesn't require major performance patches.
EA is a disgusting company at this point. I'm done with their bullsh*t and I told them as much on their forum before they perma-banned me for complaining about Dead Space. This was *almost* the year that I gave up on PC gaming completely. The only thing that saved it for me was Lies of P, which is a beautiful experience from beginning to end.
This year was too painful as a dedicated PC gamer, and EA is a huge part of the reason for that.
New years resolution: No more EA games, and no more games period until they've been out a while and stuttering issues completely removed.
just ignore AAA games entirely man. if there's something decent it will reach you eventually and it saves you a lot of disappointment.
I've really gotten into "retro" gaming recently, just downloaded a bunch of emulators and roms and i'm playing all the dreamcast, PS2 and gamecube etc. games I've never played.
even got this cool android handheld for it and everything, plus all the games are totally free XD
EA has been a disgusting company for decades. There's a reason why they kept winning worst company of the year awards.
Current PC gaming is sad, man
@@zwenkwiel816 There are good AAA games out there, like Avatar which is a pleasant surprise (I you know someone who bought AMD HW recently you might even catch it for free), just check whether they are good *before* buying them and definitely don't buy anything from EA...
@@cromefire_ well yeah, just ignore them until they release and if they're any good you'll hear about it.
The Wild hearts part really hurts for me, the idea that we have another monster hunter like game is already interesting and its gameplay wasn't half bad including its direction for endgame grinding. But the fact that it wasn't optimized well plus EA letting go of its support just adds insult to injury
That Dead Space situation is such a shame. I created many tickets to EA support, but they just dropped the support. There was also crashing for RTX users, which was caused by turned off ReBAR. They didn't even liaise with NVIDIA to resolve the issue. It was the users who found out that when they turned ReBAR on in the Profile Inspector, the game stopped crashing.
ohhhh really? I had resigned to turning off RTAO due to the crashes. Good to know this is a potential fix!
@@cheese_crab Yeah, try it out! you must then choose this option in rBAR - Features and Apply: 0x00000001 (Battlefield V, Assassin's Creed Mirage, Lords of the Fallen (2023), Returnal, ............)
Edit: Actually tried this time with Liliums HDR analysis tool and it does turn on but it's washed out trash. Initially I thought that it wasn't working because the green on the geforce overlay was washed out but no it's just really bad.
Dead Space did get added to the whitelisted games for ReBAR eventually. My main annoyances with Dead Space are the traversal stutters and broken HDR which I couldn't get to work no matter what when I wanted to do a second playthrough with my new monitor. I also had crashes at one point when launching the game and it was apparently caused by my undervolt through afterburner or the crashing did at least stop immediately when I reseted to stock settings.
@@Simon_Denmark Oh yeah, the HDR.. It works fine on my C2 but it's horribly washed out on my Alienware DWF. I fixed it with Special K (HDR 10) and it works great. 🙂
Traversal stutters on the other hand...
As always. When support even once been useful?never. Its just called support but its useless service in every company
EA SPORTS(tm) WRC ... from the looks of it that one is never getting fixed either, EA laid off the Codemasters staff that worked on it, just before Christmas.
And of course it has Denuvo like every other EA game, so there is your potential cause for unexplainable stutters, guilty until proven otherwise.
thanks for following up on these games! people won't have to waste time and money trying out these ports hoping they got better. it's also good that such a large channel is holding publishers accountable for doing this to pc gamers.
Im sorry but if Respawn worked with UE4 for almost 9 years and between 2 games managed to get worse I'm not sure it counts as "publisher issue" and not developer one
It's the publisher who publishes the game... if the game is not ready, it should not be published
Shared responsibility.
It's the fact there's 3 EA games on the list why they're blaming the publisher, that's just 1 game.
For some reason, Respawn seems to struggle with Unreal Engine far more than a heavily modified Source Engine...Engine.
Ea probably rushed them like every publisher does to every developer it's not a developer problem this happens to every studio. Those executive trash don't care if it's broken or not they want t their money.
The Dead Space stutters are the biggest disappointment for me. I LOVED Dead Space and was super excited for the remake but... I can't play the game like that. Unless DF puts up a video declaring EA fixed it, I simply refuse to play it. Even free is too expensive because those stutters will drive me crazy.
First half of the game i was reading everything on forums trying to fix stutters, but there was no answer for this problem. I ended up playing on medium settings to make stutter less noticeable and that's it. Btw second part of the game isn't so bad , because there not so many doors.
I'm surprised Forza Motor Sports is not included in this list, since launch its a stutter fest when unlocked fps and buggy when unlocked vsync occasionally going from 80 fps to 40 fps and need to pause to reset !!!! Plus it loses wheel settings on restart
Forza Motorsport is such a bad PC port
I had such shit with Mafia Remake. Sometimes 60 fps magically were becoming glorious 30 fps and staying like that.
The burning fire background is so perfect ... "this is fine" XD
Isn't it interesting that all the worst ones on this list that weren't fixed (Redfall, Dead Space, Jedi Survivor and Wild Hearts) all use Denuvo DRM?
Well done for tearing into EA, they absolutely deserve it. They choose to publish unfinished stuff.
At what point do devs take some share of blame for these issues? I get publishers are the devil or whatever and they decide to release these unfinished products, but everyone is so happy to give devs a free pass every single time there's technical problems in their games and I'm not sure that's helping to solve the problem at all. There has to be some sort of balance.
Also, let's not forget that the devs are WILLINGLY working for these corrupt, scumbag publishing companies. Nobody is forcing them to work for these corrupt publishing companies. In my eyes, the devs are no better than the publisher they WILLINGLY work for.
If you’ve worked in software development at any level you’d understand if devs had their way, stuff wouldn’t be released like this. At the scale these studios work in it’s almost always production and business decisions that lead to this stuff happening (deadlines, poor scoping, poor resourcing and management etc).
As for EA, they just hate PC platform. Here are some example of inferior pc ports:
FIFA RTWC 98- Missing rain, snow, sky effects from ps1.
FIFA 2001- Missing hair physics, dynamic shadows, depth of field
FIFA 2002, 2002 World Cup- Missing depth of field, inferior lens flare, missing water splash effect
FIFA 2003- Lighting looks completely weird, missing depth of field
FIFA 2004- Grass color is noticeably and unbearably dark unlike the console versions, missing depth of field, missing DOF, frame pacing issues.
FIFA 2005- Missing DOF, internal framerate seems to be tied to 30 fps despite the output framerate being unlocked [it just duplicates from internal 30], missing specular effects
FIFA 06- 3D grass removed despite being present on fifa 2005 pc port [3d grass is still present on xbox], missing DOF, missing bloom, missing post process color correction
FIFA World Cup 2006- FIFA 10- All of them are old gen console port instead of next gen port
FIFA WC 2006- on top of that, it has missing 3D grass, missing dof, inferior texture compression, unsaturated grass color
FIFA 07- missing 3d grass, mow patterns bugged out and has weird clipping
FIFA 08- DOF broken despite finally being present on fifa 07 pc port, the football itself has not lighting and shadows and looks flat [the one thing you stare at all the time]
FIFA 10- all the improved graphics from FIFA 09 has been downgraded, grass texture render at low res unless you set shader quality to low
FIFA 11- finally uses next gen engine but is actually a reskinned port of FIFA 10 x360 and all the gameplay changes from fifa 11 x360 are missing. Cloth wrinkle normal maps are incorrect.
FIFA 12- cloth wrinkle normal maps are inverted and looks incorrect.
FIFA 13- inverted cloth wrinkle normal maps, lighting bugs randomly, 3D grass missing despite being present on wii u port.
FIFA 14- Yet again old gen port instead of next gen ps4 version, cloth wrinkle normal maps got significantly downgraded compared to demo [False advertising]
FIFA 18-20- no hdr
FIFA 21-22- Again old gen port.
NFS Hot Pursuit 2- Lens flare from xbox and gamecube missing
NFS Most wanted- old gen port, no widescreen support despite even old gen ps2 and xbox having it
NFS Carbon- no widescreen support
NFS Prostreet- Game ran at unlocked framerate at first. EA actually patched it to make it locked to 30 FPS with no way to disable it from settings.
NFS undercover- Release version was a stuttery mess.
The list will keep going on. Fuck EA and their existence.
Gotham Knights and Callisto protocol where also some real jokes at launch, ridiculous at best
Don't know how game developers get away with releasing games with bad stuttering, let alone like not even fixing it in games like Dead Space Remake, surely they should be made accountable ?, its almost 2024 ffs.
The only way they will be punished is by people refusing to buy their games. Once they have your money they don't care.
yeah they should do it like with cars, if the product isn't up to snuff some controlling authority should be able to force a recall XD
Since when did it become the industry standard to release broken games and then patch it over the course of a year or more?
The crazy thing is...most of these issues from launch have been addressed (to varying degrees)...and if they'd just given a few more months to polish, they would've released with better user reviews, better critical reviews, better influencer support, etc. They gotta start realizing at these publishing and development companies that gamers are caring MORE about quality every single day, not less. Even console gamers nowadays demand far better than we ever did in our youth and I love it. It's certainly effecting sales and the reputation of these companies. And not only the technical aspects of many subpar releases, but also the...honestly lazy design of games like Modern Warfare 3 (Call of Duty notably aren't going around with their usual "Best selling game ever" hype, even they can't stomach a lie that big).
Thank you once more for bringing light on this issue.
I do believe that in the same way if you buy a new car and the engine misfired sometimes, you would get a repair/replacement or if this was not possible, a refund, games should be held to the same standard.
It is only from respectable, reputable sources such as Digital Foundry consistently calling out what needs to be called out, we can hope to end up in a place where a publisher can no longer get away with this criminal practice, as their product would be recalled/refunded 'en masse'.
We would by some miracle suddenly see every PC port running as smooth as butter, or not being ported at all.
That is a preferable world to one where this is acceptable.
The fact that Intel, NVIDIA and AMD are also completely silent on this shows the level of respect they have for gamers and the PC platform in general.
Don’t feel bad for calling out broken products! That’s exactly what we need. We won’t get better games if the bad apples are never removed and people start to understand what good actually means. Otherwise the quality bar will keep getting lower and lower…
I think "Ports" isn't the right term, at least for Jedi Survivor. It runs bad on every single plattform
My biggest gripe with Dead Space on pc was the shader compilation, I’ve experienced some stuttering but nothing on the level some people have mentioned. Definitely developed with consoles in mind and not pc so much.
"I feel like anyone that thinks it does feel smooth is simply not seeing the issues"
This, is probably the case for any an awful lot of people for an awful lot of titles. It's kind of amazing how no matter how poorly a game runs, there are always, always people reporting it runs great for them.
Please more videos like that! The industry must know its "heroes" in order for people not to buy their games
NO Wo Long wtf
And no Forza Motorsport
Frame Generation sorta helped with Star Wars Survivor, except they patches in a older version of DLSS that causes artifacts and blurring. You can fix it yourself just by copy and pasteing the newer version but stills still not great.
Deadlines are important but it's terrible for publishers to push these games at full-price when they still need 6+ months in the oven.
Im quite surprised by yhe Dead Space Remake inclusion. I didn't really experience any stutter. I thought perhaps the DLSS solution could be less aggressive though, it made the game look extremely blurry so I played with TAA instead. I was running a mid range Intel CPU and a 2070 Super
It's so frustrating. I was hoping with a major title like Jedi Survivor they would at least finish fixing the game. I managed to play all the way through to the end on PS5 and really enjoyed it all except Koboh where for some reason it stutters even in performance mode. They still have not fixed screen tearing and the weird artefacts around the character once RT is disabled. Such a shame since the game itself is solid and fun to play.
the console version got virtually abandoned, PC has had some moderate improvements, but they both still run like shit.
allegedly respawn is working on a last gen version which is just...a baffling decision.
I’m playing right now on ps5 and I have only seen screen tearing once on jedha. Haven’t had an issue with stutter either.
Surprised that Starfield didn’t make this list 🤔
Love the way you did this, by trying to lift up the games qualities where possible.
It was something of a slow burn, but DF has become a staple for me. Thanks for all your videos. They make my day. All the best.
A staple of what? Of like, youtube watching? That sentence doesn’t make any goddamn sense lol
Ive seen ppl mod Dead Space Remake and UE games with DXVK and VKD3D to get rid of the traversal stutters. I hope you guys make a video on it one day and how to properly do it/tinker with it and know what filesu need cause it could help tons of ppl enjoy a terrible PC port they otherwise like the gameplay of.
I think that what could really, really help with compilation and traversal stutter is actually frame generation. Frame generation only taxes the GPU so in limited scenarios where you would dip into the 50s, frame gen would ''elevate'' that into a much higher territory.
And sure, fake frames and added latency, but in a CPU limited case I would trade that for near constant stutter. Now with the DLSS/FSR3 mod all 2000 and 3000 RTX users can benefit from this and it's preety huge.
I guess it's nice Bethesda fixed the Starfield performance issues, but it'd be nice if they'd fix the game itself. Taking off, landing, and docking shouldn't be cutscenes. Flying from one location to another shouldn't be done in a menu. Etc. The same gripes I had at launch are still there, they just run a bit better.
Now that both Alex and John mentioned EA Sports WRC is in the three month grace period, I'm really worried about Codemasters and their future games. I don't really know how game releases are prioritized at EA but maybe that prioritization impacts the performance on them, more for the worse than for the better.
at least it looks okay , but performance is terrible and stutters a lot no mather the settings on my pc and also on xbox series S
Forza motorsport should be on that list to
I agree, the game somehow loses an entire 20fps every time you switch to a new track, it's legit absurd.
It's definitely level streaming issues with Jedi Survivor, streaming levels have ALWAYS been abysmal in Unreal since UE3 and they still haven't made it much smoother in the years since.
The issues with Jedi Suvivor completely stopped me from buying it because I had played Fallen Order and it was a chore to play through from a technical standpoint. And I could not believe that nothing had changed in that regard for the sequel.
It ran fine for me from launch.
One of the main reasons i quit pc gaming from 2019 til now (i got back into it this year) was the never ending shitty ports. Its not as bad as the 360 era but still quite bad.
Dishonourable mention to the 4th EA game that should be on this list, Immortals of Aveum. Apparently a 3080 is not enough to run that game at any setting without massive stutters and drops. Still terrible, will never be optimized which is sad because the game actually seemed pretty decent from what I was able to play.
To be fair, it wasn't just a terrible port -- it was worse on consoles.
Yeah that's true, though it seemed like Jedi it was a little more consistent on consoles, at least compared to the massive drops I got. Maybe in 5+ years I'll be able to play it reasonably... @@concinnus
great video! this stuff needs to be pointed out to potential customers!
One of the big reasons so many pc games today have stutter issues but are still released is because most players don't notice, or notice but don't care about stutter. But I've been playing some VR games lately, and having stutter in a VR game is a pretty sickening thing, and thus player tolerance for stutter is greatly reduced in vr, and I think that's a good thing
This year was the first time I had thoughts about giving up pc gaming, I have a top of the range 4090 gaming pc and 2023 was just too much stuttering! Dead space remake continues to haunt me! 😵
A lot of games that I want to play seeems to be only on steam and pc so I have to keep a PC. Fortunately the games I like to play don’t have issues, and I usually don’t play on launch anyway, so that is the saving grace
Right there with you. 13700k with a 4090. I almost gave up. I will tell you this. 2024 will dictate if I upgrade to a 5090 or a ps5 pro.
I have the same feeling. It's really hard to justify spending so much on a PC when most of the time games run smoother on consoles.
I think it makes more sense to do a "worst launches" to exactly highlight the problem, and then point out if any of them have redeemed themselves afterwards.
@21:30 For the stuttering have you tried disabling CFG (Control flow guard) in exploit protection? Maybe stuttering has something to do with the system constantly checking for memory corruption vulnerabilities? I turned it off for God of War and voila... that horrible stuttering on the bridge went away. "Smooth as eggs" - Dave Chappelle
I have a section on my Steam wish list for games that are unfinished in one way or another. There is zero way that I buy these games without at least a 75% discount (and probably >80, if at all). I'm happy to take "you get what you pay for" in the other direction and only pay for the small fraction of the game that runs well between the stutters. While clearly not everyone follows the same practice, I can't imagine that releasing broken games doesn't directly hurt their profitability. (I won't even mention brand damage, since EA has been happy to cyclically demolish any goodwill they build up in a variety of ways.)
That said, I'm really happy that this included the follow ups indicating that TLOU & Forspoken can move out of the dungeon. A "did this ever get fixed" follow up shouldn't ever be needed in the first place, but it's really appreciated.
It's such a shame that none of you guys covered HL's PC version.
What is HL and why did you abbreviate it?
@@stekelly1980Why Hogwarts Legacy ofc.
@@no2war274 what is ofc?
@@stekelly1980 lol you're not too good with abbreviations, are you? (though HL=Half Life of course XD)
ofc= ofcourse btw (and btw= by the way XD)
Alex doesn't like JK lol
Got a ps5 this year and was amazed how fluid games like Hogwarts, last of us part 2 and ff7 remake was. It runs butter smooth and it feels awesome
I think it's great that you guys called out EA at the end of the video, but please don't let Koei Tecmo off the hook. They're like, the Japanese EA. They pack their games to the gills with DLC, produce awful PC ports all the time, charge premium for them, and then continue to charge high prices for them for years. They're a pretty terrible company IMO.
Unless you guys do a “best PC ports” follow-up later, this video should really have featured both the best and the worst. The whole narrative that all PC ports are trash these days that DF kinda tries to push is just not true. Of all the hundreds of games released this year, these are basically the worst.
Agree with this. Look in this comment section (or the comments section of DF’s other videos) - a lot of completely braindead, toxic and misinformed takes because of this imbalanced tone DF has from time to time.