Gaming

Unpopular Opinion: The last few hardware generations have had diminishing returns while increasing the cost of being a PC gamer drematically. While the DOOM games are generally well-optimized, I just upgraded my whole ass system after 8 years just two years ago and I'm hitting minimum specs to play the new DOOM game at all. Same with Indiana Jones, same with STALKER 2, same with Alan Wake 2.

Of course, we also went from 8gb of video RAM being more than enough to needing fucking like 16-24gb as a standard somehow.

Seriously, the rig I bought to play fucking Bioshock Infinite kept up for about 8 years. I know I didn't go all-out in building my machine but I didn't 10 years ago either when I put my old box together. Honestly current machine feels way more high-end than the one 10 years ago did.

Anyway, kind of feels like a rip-off by the industry to me, and this is the same industry that is pushing for GTA 6 to cost $80-100 because they're not making enough money somehow.

Basically, even if you have a 4090, the stutters and poor fps still exist due to the way the game is designed.

In a way, it's like being back in the NES days all over again. Sometimes the game itself would just push the hardware too much and it would slow down. This shouldn't be happening at all in this environment, it's a joke. It goes well beyond just positive reviews for this kind of stuff.

This is much older than 2023. I remember Fallout 4, the console version was apparently almost unplayable at launch, so Giant Bomb actually lowered the score, compared to the PC version. And even that example isn't when this started.

Similarly, what if the reviewers don't get a specific version, that runs like shit? Like what happened with Cyberpunk, where nobody was able to play the XBONE or PS4 versions.

The thing is, as always, a review is subjective. If the game has problems, but the reviewer can look past them or doesn't care, why should they change the score.

Someone mentioned it already, but review copies might also run outdated code, and reviewers are in contact with the publisher or devs, and they might say some problem is fixed on release. If the reviewer believes them, it probably won't affect the score.

Start reviewing games based on this kind of performance, or start paying attention to someone who are already doing it.

I don't know of any.

Frickin Dead Space remake. I'm playing through it now and even on the lowest settings it was pretty bad. My computer crashed while the shuttle was crashing, which honestly felt kind of apt

I've never beat the original, but my wife wanted to see the game and has never played it. Even after tweaking things to get them running on my computer it's still not super stable. We might have to switch to 2008

The game looks super tense, gross, and scary. Personally, I think it'd be scarier if it was buttery smooth, but I guess there's a certain amount of anxiety to be had wondering if walking through a door is going to freeze the game while I'm being chased by xeno horrors

I see this opinion fairly often, and it honestly confused me. My rig is not a showcase by any means, and I had no issues with sh2 or dead space.

I'm thinking more people need to optimize their OS.

In my experience it's largely been unreal engine 5 games.

The issues with both Doom DA and Indiana Jones is that they have mandatory ray tracing that can't be disabled. I generally think that ray tracing is a often a waste, it's far too resource demanding, other lighting techniques can offer very similar visuals for a fraction of the cost.

I had to refund armored core 6 because the first boss fight stuttered so much. I have a 3080, so not the best but definitely no slouch. No matter what settings I tweaked, it'd always drop to slideshow performance for 1-2 seconds at a time. Acceptable in a cheaper title, maybe, but not on a full price game.

Buddy it's been going on since long before 2023.

Jedi Survivor...god this game performs so bad. 5800X3D and a 4090 and those stutters. The game isn't even that graphically impressive so I don't know wtf is going on behind the scenes, probably some old code that constantly checks for micro transactions.

Often times, the investors or stakeholders at these large video game companies have their backgrounds in Hollywood, or Tech. They then choose leadership who will run the company along the lines of what works well in those industries. This results in optimization being pretty damn near the bottom of the priorities.

What has been most profitable in Hollywood? Not the final quality of the movie, but the marketability. How many people did you get to come see it, doesn’t matter if they loved it, so long as they heard about it, then choose to buy a ticket.

What has worked well in tech? Getting to market as fast as possible with the latest technical developments. Doesn’t matter if it’s a buggy mess and riddled with technical debt, so long as we capture as much market share as possible before anyone else can compete.

Combine these two approaches and what do you get? The fanciest graphics, huge maps, endless procedural fetch quests to make it look big, all so people will preorder it. Oh and it needs to be done in 2 years or else someone else will beat us to being the fortnight of “live service extraction farming sims”.

So lots of demands on what needs to be in it, and no time to do proper QA, let alone optimize it, that will just have to be done in patches after launch.

The cost of poor optimization gets externalized to the customers who need to buy new hardware or run it on settings so low it could be mistaken for half-life.

Digital Foundry has complained about the stuttering issues in all of those games. Jedi Survivor still gets brought up.

I've heard the reasoning before that reviewers typically only have access to a, well, pre-release version. A day-1-patch is pretty common now.
So, as reviewer, you have to decide whether the performance problems look like they might be fixed on release day, and therefore whether you want to incorporate them into your review/score or not.

Throwing another example on the fire: The Last of Us Part I PC port. The people who released that code ought to be brought up on charges for climate destruction.

Not to say this necessarily isn't the case, but are your drivers all up to date? I don't know how often I've heard people complain about shitty performance or weird artifacts in a game only to hear that the player hasn't updated their graphics card drivers in 8 months.

I don't even see the optimising problem as bad probably because I'm used to it. Evil Within for example ran terribly on launch but since then I have upgraded my setup and played through it. Checking the benchmarks just is something you should do on PC. Reviewers usually are pretty out of touch with rest of the world or average gamer just doesn't care about drops and sub 30 framerates.

I feel like a worse problem currently is how games are made with TAA in mind or with forced TAA so you just can't make them look good even with time and more powerful hardware. It's either blurry mess with artifacts thrown in or something that doesn't even look like 1080p on 4K resolution.

i was half-expecting a rant about PoE2 for some reason....

What should they do about it if it actually runs great on their systems though?

A lot of games only play well if you take some time figuring out a certain combination of graphics settings for your own computer. Then there is bugs and stutters that really is only happening with certain settings. Particularly these days with the four common upscaling models, you never know which games are best optimized for which model, but none of them are optimized for running without upscaling.

So for a regular reviewer to really give a game a fair score, should they run at the default settings? Would be unfair to expect them to know how every weird setting impacts the game. Should they try the game at 4+ different systems to make sure there are no performance issues and stutters dragging it down in certain cases? Leaving performance testing to dedicated performance reviewers and just focus on reviewing the game itself might be the best option.