The Current State of PC "Ports"

There seems to be a disturbing trend with PC ports. Over the past few years we've been treated to mostly decent ports of the majority of games coming out on the current generation of consoles, but that's starting to digress back into the way things were before.

I recently purchased Street Fighter V on Steam and ended up returning it within 48 hours after not being able to solve a crash bug. I'm sure Capcom will fix this bug in the near future, so I'm planning on purchasing the game again when Juri is released and I can get the game at a discounted price. I did attempt to purchase it at release, but was disappointed that I can't run one of my favorite franchises at it's pinnacle visual peak.

I never had any issues with Arkham Knight, but it was notoriously pulled from the Steam store and no-questions-asked refunds were offered even after it returned to the store nearly 6 months after release.

But by far, the worst example in this article is Mortal Kombat X! After putting out a decent PC port of a decent fighter they made the choice to stop supporting the PC version with new content. Most of the work is already done. There is a PC port and the content is already being added to that current port. Games are developed and tested on PC long before they are ever loaded on dev kits for console testing!

So the big question why aren't we getting good PC ports?

I'm sure every one of these games and the numerous other examples I could have used have their own stories. Here are a few things I have seen that may be contributing factors:

• Studios often buy large supplies of hardware at the same time. Unless an effort is made to diversify hardware, testing is done on less than a half dozen hardware configurations.
• Testing for so many possibilities is hardware and software is time consuming! Often problems are impossible to reproduce without exactly duplicating the source of the problem. This is especially true of in-house or heavily modified game engines.
• This is my observation and probably NetherRealm's reasoning: PC players don't seem to buy as much DLC as console players. People I talk to, myself included, wait for a "complete edition" to be released instead of being nickle and dimed by incremental DLC.
• Possibly little money is spent on a PC port because the studio is afraid there will be too much piracy? (Though strides in DRM have made recent games uncrackable.)

I'm not sure exactly why we are seeing a steep decline in quality, but we are in danger of taking a huge step backwards. Please buy your PC games, let the publishers and developers of any games you want to see on PC know you want their games, and respectfully be specific about port quality and features you appreciate in your games.

The Strange case of Tomb Raider Definitive Edition

So I am late to the party on this one... but I had a very interesting thing happen with Tomb Raider. I purchased it shortly after release on the PC because I'm generally a PC gamer. It recently was one of the free games on Xbox Live, so I found myself sitting on the couch playing it and confused on if it looked better or not.

After some comparisons and playing both to the same point (my guess is roughly half way through), there are big pros and cons to both. At release PC was far superior to consoles, but something interesting happened... the game was enhanced for consoles and not PC... a game that had already been ported to PC didn't see a patch or Definitive Edition release. The new higher resolution Laura model did not show up, neither did the improved shaders or lighting from the DE (Definitive Edition). The PC version still has better post processing effects, higher texture quality, tessellation, ambient occlusion, hair physics, etc, but lacks the emotion possible in the new facial mesh and rig.

It's very disappointing to not see a PC release of an already ported game by Crystal Dynamics. So why wasn't the DE brought to PC? Well the changes were not mechanical, the DLC was mostly multi-player and most people don't play Tomb Raider for multi-player, at least not in the generic third-person-shooter low rated version that went into the game. The the question is would people pay for the DE release as either DLC or re-release? Metro pretty much did this, and while they were slammed by some for minimal updates, at least they gave the PC crowd the choice and anyone picking up the game late could take advantage of it.

So other than direct sales what other reasons could it be? Right after release (before an early patch) the PC version was plagued with slow down. I don't remember if it was the hair or rope physics, but it took an early patch to fix this. If we look at another example of Batman: Arkham Knight while it always ran fine on my system, it was pulled from the Steam store for months and offered no questions asked returns even after patching. So it's clear PC ports are still difficult at times especially on in-house or heavily modified engines. So maybe Crystal Dynamics thought it was to big of a risk?

So in conclusion the most interesting thing to me is I think I'll be finishing the game on the Xbox One. I'm a nut for lighting, sub-surface scattering, and beautiful shader work! The extra emotion you get from the new model isn't always in frame, but when it is it makes the difference! The post-processing effects on the PC do make in-game (at least without fire) look better over all, but foliage movement adds a nice touch in the DE and a lot of things like tessellation, AO, and higher texture resolution do get somewhat lost in motion. It's a strange day for me to prefer a console title over a PC, but either game is worth the money as a great game! I hope Crystal Dynamics will release the Definitive Edition on PC before it's 10th anniversary!