Here's something that's been bugging me for a long time. What does a game developer use to make a console game? A PC right?

I don't think that developer actually used a console to make a game. So why does a ported game can sometimes gone FUBAR? The game was made on PC, it should have no problem running on it.

There are a lof of factors to take into account.

The main ones being:

* Developer skill (sometimes the devs can't optimize for PC even if they use it for developing games, all testing is done on consoles or dev kits, sometimes PC version is outsourced to a minor team -Batman AK as example-)

* Genuine interest on developing a PC version (because several games are made with only consoles in mind, then a PC version follows either by popular demand or just a way to grab some more money -Koei Tecmo ports as example-)

* And the most important one, the gigantic number of hardware/software combos, it's incredibly hard to optimize so it can run perfectly on all, so they focus on the most popular combos then fix issues with others as they are reported.

The PC is just the tool to build the game with. That's like saying "I used my toolbox to assemble a bike and I used my toolbox to assemble a shelf. Why can't I ride my shelf to work?"...

There is no such thing as running perfectly on a PC.

And they blame piracy for poor PC port!!!

Developers don't optimise for PC, they optimise for console. Some things were always harder to optimise on the PC due to OS/API overheads. With DX12 and Vulkan some of these overheads go away, so I assume that it will be easier to port games to these API's (but that won't help for now, because most people won't have these).

From my experience, which is also quite recent, (modern) ports for pc are cr@ppy, buggy, clunky as hell. Delayed and postponed once or twice for months in each case. Built hype on lies (primarily developed for pc and not a port, pc optimized, 60 fps, etc). Some of them don't even have proper options tab at all, leaving you to manually tamper with .ini files and your graphics card's menus... They put in their pockets the preorder money, they get the blind fandom that even go so far as to champion and white-knight out the sh*tty bastard crooks of a developer or publisher, then a terrible product is out with mixed, negative reviews... On the promise it is going to be fixed on the go and guess what, rarely does this happen. Lately, most pc games are ports. And quite a number of them, either terrible ports, or not receiving the same love and support that console versions of the same games do, much like the Mortal Kombat X extra content that is never going to hit pc, even though gamers there payed willingly to support game and devs.

Seriously, people should stop: 1) Preordering in blind faith. 2) Believing anything. 3) Being quiet about absence of demo or testing material before official release.

Arkham Knight and WB, i will never forget you. Namco Bandai, i will never forget you. Eff you all. Thankfully refund works.

They'd use a console devkit (not identical to the mass-production console, but with similar enough hardware for development purposes) as a testbed. Console hardware isn't as wildly different from PC hardware as it used to be, but there are still aspects like e.g. Edit: I should add that the linked presentation suggests doing prototypes on PC, then porting to PS4 shaders, etc. The problem is when you want to port the other way, if you've used any console-specific stuff and need to reimplement it.

In addition to what was already said, I imagine the devs may also use some sort of emulation to speedup the porting effort. Since the hardware is different, instead of recoding the sound system or graphic system or whatever is done in a chip in the console, in the PC they use a software library to achieve the same effect. This can lead to non perfect results, timing issues and so on.

Also, on the PC they can release patches, so they are more prone to rush it. "It runs OK on my system" works on consoles. It is not sufficient on PCs.

It's the same on the consoles these days. Arkham Knight required a day one 3.5GB patch!

Thanks for the link. Just browsing that, partially resident textures (sparse textures, tiled resources) would be a major feature which allows a lot of optimisation on the consoles but is only available for AMD GCN 1.1+ cards and NVIDIA Maxwell cards (and for Direct3D is available only in Direct3D 11.2, which is only available for Windows 8.1 and up). So PC developers can't use it, which results in much worse performance if they do use it for the consoles.

Those day one console patches are usually caused by the fact, that the publisher wants the game a couple of months before it goes to distribution. They need that time to package and copy the game disks and if the dead line has been set, they aren't that keen to hold that process down, so it's easier for everyone to just throw them a release candidate and patch the game on release.

Ouch! I think publishers pay for each game update they release.

I see that the game is out on multiple systems. On what platform did that happen?
Also, scheduled for october 2014, released june 2015... Not a great move there.

Thats why they are called bad ports.

OP: pray tell which games specifically bother you, and what is your beef about the port?


On "visual" performance : Mass Effect 3. My video card is GTX 980, and more recent than the actual game, as far as I know. So the frame rate wobble was a shock. I really hated it.

On actual game-play: Inquisition. Meant for MMO / console fans.

Looting animation. No dynamic hot bar at the bottom - limited eight skill hot keys, what the fouk! Hortonomical time wasters (pick flowers and husband mushrooms) over healing spells. No auto attack, no mouse click to move and attack specifically and loot (w/out that animation),