Digital Foundry Special - Worst PC Ports of 2023

PC ports have always presented a negative experience at launch - Batman Arkham Knight, Horizon Zero Dawn, and many more. That's why I never waste money on over expensive PC rigs and never will.

Have to wonder how dumb certain pc gamers are at this point if EA are hiking prices higher (the first to do it I believe) (because they need the money it's a cheap hobby!) while happily giving you dog-shit ports, multiple times in a year.

Saying that I bought two dog-shit Capcom ports in a row so guess one of them.

I enjoy hating on EA. Its a great hobby.😎

But then we have games like RE4R, BG3, CP2077 PL and many others than ran really well on PC and craps a lot on their console counterparts.

It's always a spectrum, not just black or white.

Meh, there have always been shit ports. Not making excuses, mind you, as publishers and developers need to do better; but it seems like people want to make a bigger deal out of this--want to take it as some sort of sign of something--than they need to.

Crap ports come out, we complain (rightfully), they get patched....we enjoy, eventually.

I'd like to see my peers practice a bit more self-control in their purchasing and exercise their "vote with their wallet" habit, but that's asking too much I'm afraid to say.

Yup!

Also this.

Would love an Infamous series port from Sony, but otherwise they can keep most of their titles. Nothing I'd buy unless it was on sale for >$20.

Who needs a video, everybody knows it's TLOU. It's TLOU, right? Oh, it's Digital Foundry, I wouldn't be surprised if they failed to even mention it entirely.

Also could we, I don't know, maybe get a best ports of 2023 video??!?!?! There were a lot of games released this year (to the point I feel overwhelmed, to be honest...a good problem!) and many of those great games were ports.

Would be nice to have some fucking positivity up in here once in a while, you know? FFS

It's a conspiracy by console makers , they pay off devs to release crappy pc versions b/c if they actually optimized, then there'd be no reason to own a console.

Taking off the tinfoil hat... I'm curious as to how many of the ones they list have been 'fixed' post launch.

This^

Console gamers consoling themselves over not buying a gaming PC. 😏

Jedi Survivor is still being updated on Steamdb likely still being patched. pc_patch1_candidate was updated 13 days ago or on December 13th.

https://steamdb.info/app/1774580/history/

Look, this is a clear issue for PC gaming...but it's less than 10% of multiplats and it's a MUCH bigger issue for consoles gaming. They currently run nearly all of their next gen games like crap. So while it's a real issue for PC and I'm not down playing it, it's not a "so I'll go to consoles instead" issue....since on consoles this is far far worse.

Why the return of 30fps console games is inevitable | Eurogamer.net

The fact you can only name a literal handful for each year while I can name dozens that are far better on PC or slideshows on consoles is all that needs to be said.

For example, almost much every major GOTY nominee this year was absurdly better on PC according to your very source, DF. The 4 or 5 games (out of 100s) that were worse are nearly all flops and also ran poor on consoles.

Yet you stick with consoles that do exponentially worse in this same regard?

"Man this 5 star Michelin restaurant messed up one out of nine orders, i'll go eat at the rundown McDonalds with rats running around!"

I'm calling foul on this statement. When it's a 90:10 split (in favor of PC) on the thing you seemingly care so much about (multiplat quality) you would get a high end PC this week.

It's a spectrum, just one that is exponentially balanced in PC's favor.

These cases are bad, and have to be fixed.....but are relatively rare. The 4 games (out of 100s in 2023...) in this youtube ran and still run like shit on consoles too and were mostly terrible flops.

"i can't help but express the fact" lol. sorry to burst your bubble captain big brain hardcore pc gamer but spiderman is derivative, assassin's creed formulaic casual shit. enjoy catching pigeons

Yes, there are bad PC ports......but PC gives me so many advantages that is worth the occasional terrible port.

I rarely buy games Day 1/full price anyway

I have a gaming PC. But not an uber expensive one. I can play Elden Ring, Horizon etc at acceptable settings) on my gaming rig that I bought for about 1 grand last year.

Whenever I consider saving up for an expensive gaming rig, I decide against it after seeing so many buggy PC ports.

When you spend over 2.5 grands on a gaming rig, you expect a flawless experience. But that's certainly not tha case. I prefer casual gaming on PC and play AAA titles on consoles as it's more cost effective.

Yeah this was a really great video as their vocabulary reaches further than "crap" and "shit" that defines 99% of other tubers out there.

They explain in great detail why these ports are bad and even what can be done to mitigate the issues.

Dropping a game on Steam broken and leaving it in an unfinished stated forever is akin to dropping a turd in the toilet and flushing it.

Weird reason. For all the shit PC ports, there are way more console games that run like crap. Also, in many cases the shoddy PC port is better than the console version depite being a shoddy port, thanks to options and mods.

Like Dark Souls, for example. That port was crap, but still better than console versions. Now it's even better after mods fixed it.

Yeah, if you're dumb. When has PC been a flawfless experience? Not even console gaming is.

Explain how playing AAA games on consoles instead of your PC is more cost effective, please. PC games have been cheaper than console games for generations, if you didn't notice.

I'm not sure buying an expensive PC you barely use, then buy console games instead of cheaper PC games is "cost effective".

Yeah completely, it's not like the game in the thumbnail ran at sub 720p/ sub 30 FPS on PS5. As for HZD, well, good on you for admitting the extreme incompetence of Sony First Party. Imagine they couldn't fix a port for years and Nixxes comes in and fix it in a month.

They might be bad ports but theyre likely still better than the console versions.

Hold on, I'm watching my buddy boot up his Xbox Series X and Starfield and getting blinded by the 30 fps with dips. 🤣

My personal experience is that IF you have a bad port on PC, it's usually fixed withing a month or two after launch, but a hardware limitation on console can't be fixed. Prime example this year was Starfield on Xbox and Baldur's Gate 3 on PS5. I never had the low fidelity models or any long load times in Starfield on PC like on Xbox, and I never had performance drops or low framerates in Baldur's Gate 3 on PC like they have on PS5. The bad PC ports of games like Batman Arkham Knight, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Star Wars have been vastly ironed out after release, but if you want no load times in Starfield or Baldur's Gate 3 without framerate drops that are above 30fps, you're stuck with waiting until the next console version comes out and buying a new console variant.

A bad PC port will still run circles around the console versions if the rig is good enough.

Not for Wild Hearts. And apparently not for Dead Space either.

I did not realize Dead Space remake was a bad port are you sure? I thought it was the Callisto Protocol that was the bad port?

Jedi Survivor just got another patch on pc.

It's certainly not great but, they can always get fixed down the road.

^ This is actually a great point. 99.9% of the time a bad PC port is poor optimization and not a hardware limitation. That means they can be addressed rather quickly as opposed to being stuck with poor performance on a console for quite a lot longer.