The double standard of porting between PC and Console

[Roboshi]

Man, you know it's gonna be a can of worms when it involves talking about games based on comparing PC and console, but lets have a look.

Recently I've been looking back on my experiences with Fallout New Vegas, how my first playthrough on Xbox 360 ended with me getting to a point where my enjoyment of the game was being slowly nawed away by the constant glitches and terrible performance. Fast forward a couple of years and I pick it up again on PS3 with the "ultimate edition" assuming that time had given them the opportunity to patch at least all the game breaking bugs and most of the graphical problems.

NOPE! Time (and it's dev) was not kind to the console port of Fallout; NV and with my 3rd attempt to give NV a shot ending in one area getting to sub 1 frame per second. I left it alone.


But here is where the whole "double standard" in the title comes in, the attitude I ran into when talking about this online at the time, and indeed many of you many have in your minds right now;

"it's your fault you're playing the inferior port"

And what do we see in gaming news right now? "The PC port of Arkham Knight is unacceptable" "Ubisoft disgraced by Watchdogs and Unity PC ports"

My question is this; Why were the console ports of Fallout; NV and especially Skyrim not subject to this? Glitches and bugs in the console versions got reported, but they were never big news. Was this a case of simple PC master race-ry "they port to PC we'd better get the best, but don't bother putting effort into the peasantry when you give them something that's ours" OR is it just a case of our current media environment changing to a case where everything is a major talking point?


(Major note; This is of course not a dig at anyone compaling about the AK and AC;unity ports, those were all legit complaints. My point is that people should be able to play their game without glitches regardless of their choice of platform.)

 

[s0denone]

What!?

Why were the console ports of Fallout; NV and especially Skyrim not subject to this? Glitches and bugs in the console versions got reported, but they were never big news.

Because they were Obsidian and Bethesda products. They were filled with bugs and glitches across all platforms, and still have many suchs annoyances remaining, today!

The reason Arkham Knight and Watchdogs received a lot of press was because the former was literally unplayable on PC, while the latter was extremely poorly optimized and almost unplayable on the PC.
That is long story short. There is your answer. Have a nice day.

 

[Elfgore]

What!?

Why were the console ports of Fallout; NV and especially Skyrim not subject to this? Glitches and bugs in the console versions got reported, but they were never big news.

Because they were Obsidian and Bethesda products. They were filled with bugs and glitches across all platforms, and still have many suchs annoyances remaining, today!

The reason Arkham Knight and Watchdogs received a lot of press was because the former was literally unplayable on PC, while the latter was extremely poorly optimized and almost unplayable on the PC.
That is long story short. There is your answer. Have a nice day.

Have you played any of those Bethesda games on a console? They fall victim to the standard Bethesda affair as well as a couple others that are console exclusive. Fallout 3 will consistently lock up every thirty minutes to an hour on the PS3. Fallout: New Vegas once you get all the DLC will randomly drop to less than 1 frame per second. Skyrim will still slow to a crawl if you dare play a single game for too long.

None of those above issues happened on PC when I switched over. The console ports, at least for PS3, are noticeably worse than the PC version. This is not simply an "Oh you, Bethesda" answer.

Edit: Let's not forget how the PS4 port of The Witcher 3 suffers from frequent FPS drops and minute long texture load-ins if you dare move at any decent pace, which in turn stop progress as an NPC needs to be fully textured before you may speak with them.

 

[s0denone]

Have you played any of those Bethesda games on a console? They fall victim to the standard Bethesda affair as well as a couple others that are console exclusive. Fallout 3 will consistently lock up every thirty minutes to an hour on the PS3. Fallout: New Vegas once you get all the DLC will randomly drop to less than 1 frame per second. Skyrim will still slow to a crawl if you dare play a single game for too long.

Yes, I have played both of them on xbox360. I encountered several glitches in Skyrim and Fallout 3, but nothing unwieldy(Or out of the ordinary for Bethesda), while my F:NV game actually had a game-breaking bug occur that required me to reload a save created two hours earlier.
I never experienced the game locking up or freezing, nor FPS randomly dropping to single digits; nor Skyrim slowing to a crawl under extended play (though admittedly, I usually don't have extreme "gaming sessions").

None of those above issues happened on PC when I switched over. The console ports, at least for PS3, are noticeably worse than the PC version. This is not simply an "Oh you, Bethesda" answer.

I found several bugs and odd glitches while replaying F:NV and Skyrim on PC. Fallout 3 I have never played on PC.
The graphics and general performance is overall better on the PC, but that is because the PC/my PC has better hardware than an xbox360, which is an old, old console -- Something with which I don't see the problem.

Edit: Let's not forget how the PS4 port of The Witcher 3 suffers from frequent FPS drops and minute long texture load-ins if you dare move at any decent pace, which in turn stop progress as an NPC needs to be fully textured before you may speak with them.

I don't own a PS4, so I don't know - but I noticed my not top-of-the-line PC having some performance issues with the game. Not particularly relevant, I know, and it might very well be a bad port. I have no idea, so I'll have to pass my answer on this one.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Why weren't they subject to the same treatment?
Because you people don't want to fucking talk about it, neither console owners nor reviewers do ever want to mention gigantic technical faults of the games on their special beloved platform. This shit is why "elitist" gamers constantly fucking berate anyone who isn't making a decent product and anyone who reviews it without mentioning that shit.

If your game is broken you need to make sure everyone knows, because on console of all places it probably means everyone's game went to shit.

 

[DementedSheep]

Well for a start a lot of PC ports are riddled with glitches that don't get much attention. If anything PC gamers in general are too forgiving so long as they can fix it with a fan patch or by messing with the configuration. The ones that do get a lot shit tend to get shit because they break the game and are hard to fix.

Secondly how many people actually have this attitude when it's glitches? because I don't think I've ever seen that as a response to a glitch rather than say...worse graphics due to hardware limitations. Oh I'm sure there is someone who is that much of twat about it (some PC gamers arrogance is insane) but I don't think it's common.

Thirdly it's not fault of PC gamers if console gamers aren't raising a stink about it for something they would.

 

[jklinders]

Your mistake had nothing to do with being on an inferior port. It had to do with playing a title Published by Bethsoft and developed by Obsidian. that is a QA match made in hell or I have never sen one. More to the point. I'm pretty sure every single Bethsoft game from Oblivion up has used modified versions of the same game engine. A game engine that is so bug infested and prone to breaking from various glitches that it is a goddam miracle that any cross platform development that came out the other side with a working game.

Skyrim was almost playable for me (not tech issues, just Bethsoft's really bland writing) but Fallout 3 was a train wreak that had a about a 50% chance of freezing every time I entered or left a building. That was my fault by the way even though their shit game was the only one in my library with that issue. Fallout NV was mostly patched up by the time I tried it so I did not experience that shitstorm firsthand. But come on now,I love Obsidian to pieces but they make buggy games too.


Gah! the entire above was completely off topic but every now and again I am required to maintain my sanity by getting that shit off my chest.

Anyone who says you deserve to get a shitty game because you are playing the inferior port is going to fall under 2 categories. One of them is an ironic hipster PC gamer who heard that exact line from a console player one time too many and was throwing one back for once and the other is an insufferable **** who should be ignored.

Personally i have no problems with the odd hiccup that will come from cross platform development. It's pretty inevitable really. It should tame down since this is likely both the last true console generation and the last generation of Windows. If it doesn't then a stink really needs to be raised.

If your platform of choice is getting a shit deal, make some fucking noise. it's your money these punks are wasting and you only deserve a better deal if you are willing to fight for it right now because all consumer watchdog bodies are asleep at the switch we WE ALL NEED TO WAKE THEM UP.

 

[Jamash]

My question is this; Why were the console ports of Fallout; NV and especially Skyrim not subject to this? Glitches and bugs in the console versions got reported, but they were never big news. Was this a case of simple PC master race-ry "they port to PC we'd better get the best, but don't bother putting effort into the peasantry when you give them something that's ours" OR is it just a case of our current media environment changing to a case where everything is a major talking point?

There were relatively big news articles at the time, big enough for Eurogamer to run several articles on the specific problems faced by the PS3 in attempting to run both Skyrim and Fallout NV (with an interview from the developer about the memory management problems facing the PS3 version of the game).

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-ps3-skyrim-lag
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-does-fallout-nv-lag-explain-skyrim-issues
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-12-06-ps3-skyrim-fix-in-the-works-but-not-for-update-1-3
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-01-10-skyrim-ps3-lag-to-be-addressed-in-patch-1-4
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-ps3-skyrim-lag-fixed

The thing about the two games and the console you cited as an example is that the notoriously buggy Gamebryo engine, running an open world game like Skyrim or Fallout which allowed you to permanently manipulate many thousands of objects within the game world, had real problems on the PS3 which only had 256MB of RAM with which to process and remember everything the player did within the world.

I remember that when the games were released, as well as there being news articles about the poor performance of the games on the PS3 version, there were also discussions about how the game shouldn't have even been released on the PS3 in the first place due to the difficulties it's unique architecture had in running the games, and how anyone who bought the game on the PS3 was entitled to a full refund under the Sales of Goods act as they weren't fit for purpose, and debates about what would have been the better course of action between releasing a broken game that would never work properly on the PS3 due to core fundamentals of the console and game engine, vs. snubbing the PS3 completely and not even releasing the games on it at all due to it's tiny amount of available RAM.

However, as others have pointed out, these specific games weren't subject to the same kind of criticism that Batman Arkham Knight was on the PC, because unlike the PC port of that game, it wasn't really the game that was fundamentally broken, but the console itself which was the problem and those games ran about as well as they were ever going to run on the PS3.

 

[Popido]

I think overall, PC gamers are less afraid to be called "entitled" and voice these issues. Also helps having hardware thats not as limited. If console game drops frames, or freezes, the first thing that gets blamed is the console.

 

[Pseudonym]

I can think of some reasons. For one consoles have, typically, inferior hardware so if a console version isn't good people tend to blame it on that. It also means your average console gamer won't care as much about the graphics or load times. If they did they would be more likely to buy a PC. So console games have an excuse for running poorly where PC doesn't and I think console audiences tend to be more forgiving. One of the draws of a console is how easy it is to use. If you want to have an easy gaming device that just works without hassle you are less likely to complain when it works a little slow or is a little ugly. Complaining would be a hassle which you were trying to avoid.

Not only that but the people with an audience often have their own reasons for playing on PC. They likely own various platforms and ussually the PC port is the best, they likely have a very good PC anyway because it's their job to play games so they will do it well and capturing and editing footage is less of a hassle on PC. So if you screw up the console port you annoy some people but if you screw up the PC port you'll have much more critics and popular figures thinking 'fuck, I bought the best PC I could find and this game doesn't even run properly on it. Bullshit.' Since those are the people whose complaints you are most likely to hear that might explain why bad PC ports get more criticism.

I'll also echo S0denone. By all accounts AC:U and Batman were so poorly optimised they were a massive pain to play even with a top notch PC and pretty much unplayable on anything less. They weren't bad ports in the dark souls sense where there were no keyboard prompts. They were bad ports in the sense that they barely functioned at all. That is why those games got a lot of shit.

 

[CrystalShadow]

Well, for one, I would say as a long-time PC gamer, we are used to games having quirks or being difficult to configure or get running properly. (especially if you've been doing it a very long time.)

Also, for certain kind of problems, the last-resort fix is... Get new hardware. This is especially true when it's a performance/framerate problem.

On a console, improved hardware is not an option, so it's pretty bad if something doesn't work.

PC gamers are more tolerant of bugs, glitches and the like than you might expect.
What we tend to find really obnoxious however, is games that have been ported in a lazy manner, and which clearly have not bothered to make any basic design concessions to what is expected of PC games.
Eg. Locked framerates. UI and control scheme which is badly thought out for keyboard & mouse use.
No control customisation. (so, so, irritating)
Few if any graphical adjustment options (this is the main way PC gamers try and deal with performance issues after all).
Sometimes not even the ability to adjust the resolution properly.

Sure, buggy, glitchy games are not appreciated, and if it outright breaks the game completely, that's bad too.
But when it's blatantly obvious no-one on the porting team even gave a second thought to basic usability on PC's, that gets annoying.

It's one thing to have something that's glitchy, but it's something else entirely to have something that is so obviously not designed with PC's in mind...
It's like, not just treating PC users as second-class citizens, but blatantly rubbing it in our faces that you don't really care about us even a tiny bit, and are begrudgingly making some token effort.

Imagine if you had a console game that assumed you were using a keyboard and mouse, and had some badly cobbled together hack to get controller support into the game?
Would that seem OK?
How about one that gave error messages about stuff that makes absolutely no sense on a console?
Perhaps one using a font that's unreadable on TV's? (This obviously isn't as meaningful with new consoles and HD TV's)
How about a UI that designed in a way that you can barely see what's going on when used on a TV the way most console games are?
(Because with higher resolutions and sitting closer to the screen, a PC game can have smaller and busier UI while still being usable, while on a console that could make it impossible to understand what's going on.)

That's what routinely happens with 'lazy' PC ports.
That's not buggy, so much as total disregard for the audience and the nature of the platform you're releasing a game on.
No effort was put into considering if the features, options and such actually worked properly on PC, it was just blindly copied from consoles.

That's insulting even assuming the game isn't also a buggy mess.

Does that happen on consoles? I guess? Sometimes?
I mean, I have seen plenty of examples with PC games, and almost none on consoles (aside from things which are fundamentally broken, and should never have been attempted in the first place. Like porting an RTS to most consoles.)

 

[josemlopes]

Why were the console ports of Fallout; NV and especially Skyrim not subject to this? Glitches and bugs in the console versions got reported,

Because they were also bugged in the PC version.

 

[kasperbbs]

They were bugged on all systems, all of them, always. People are so used to it that they mostly mentioned those issues with humor, there were articles with top 10 funny bugs on these games. I played them on PC and they crashed, they got laggy the longer i played and i had to use console commands to finish some quests.

 

[nomotog_v1legacy]

It's partly just how the internet responds to people with complains. That is rather poorly. If you had a bad PC port and went to a forum to talk about it, then would blame you for buying a inferior port. This kind of goes for everything online. You could talk about how you got stabbed in the back and people would say it was your fault for turning around.

 

[BarryMcCociner]

You're missing one core factor.

Bethesda courts modders, Bethesda asks PC users to fix their games for them after launch, Bethesda patches the game until a couple months they're done selling DLC.

Oh, and hate to break it to you but New Vegas wasn't a port of anything, it was developed as a multiplatform product from day one.

What you're telling me is because PC users have an opportunity to make the effort to fix game issues themselves, there's a double standard.

Yeah, nope. Sorry, gotta laugh.

 

[loa]

That's because pcs are not fixed to one set of hardware so a game lagging on a beastly machine that should be more than capable of handling it is more noticeable than blighttown lagging for everybody on the 360 version of dark souls which may be excused away with the 360 not being able to handle it with its limited performance.
Poor optimization is just more noticeable on pcs, especially if joe shmoe mods the game to run better and adds functionality that should have been there to begin with on day 1.
Can't do that on consoles.

Oh also vanilla skyrim on pc is a complete joke and barely playable on PC far worse than on consoles if you play with keyboard and mouse.
You basically need to mod it just so it becomes usable.

 

[Something Amyss]

I'm always amazed that people are willing to put up with such broken games, period.