Elden Ring Seems to Be the Latest in a Long Line of Bad PC Ports

Tsing

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Image: Bandai Namco



Those of you who have been following the reviews for Elden Ring this week have probably been convinced by now that FromSoftware’s newly released fantasy action RPG is capable of turning wood into gold and solving world hunger, but apparently, nobody bothered mentioning that it’s another relatively crappy PC port that plays better on consoles.



Elden Ring appears to be playable, sure, but there are tons of players on forums and social media complaining about a variety of issues, which naturally include the usual inconveniences such as bad frame frames, control problems, and general performance hiccups.



The Steam forums, in particular, are quite the riot right now, with some players complaining about how the game won’t even launch for them, while others just think it’s pretty stupid how...
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Sad part is, rather than courting the PC playerbase, they're giving it the middle finger. Again.

Biggest issue seems to be that they're not developing with PC 'ports' in mind - higher resolutions, higher framerates, wider aspect ratios and wider input device support should always be on the table. That's literally the point!
 
It'll be something to keep an eye on. I'm interested in the game, but we will have to wait for patches. If any are coming.
 
Yea my boss asked me about this. He's pretty forgiving about fun to play games and so am I. So I will wait for his comments.
 
"PC Port" - that is the problem right there. The game should be made for PC to begin with, then downgraded as necessary for consoles. No, instead they try to build three houses on one foundation, of course it fails miserably.

And the fact that nobody is talking about it is exactly why I don't listen to reviews anymore. Even if they are not paid for, they can be fanboys fanboying out. And from software fans are about as bad as kojima fans when it comes to elitism and egoism. They'd never admit any fault with their precious no matter how glaring.
 
I'd say that at this point the industry as a whole should catch up and stop "porting" altogether. The amount of money that AAA studios are now charging, plus how much is invested, for a new game, should warrant full-on individual development teams that optimize for all sides of the fence. There shouldn't be any porting happening in one direction or the other. It's a cheap way to rush things out and obviously only makes the experience worse for whichever platform is on the receiving end.

I remember a while back that when Resident Evil 7 came I was constantly giving praise to Capcom and the same for RE2. It's been a rocky road since and many have reminded me that Capcom has always had a questionable history with its support for PC games. This seems to be another notch in that belt.
 
Peter_Brosdahl said:
I'd say that at this point the industry as a whole should catch up and stop "porting" altogether.
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Hmm.

The major players are all running the same (or, at least, extremely similar) architecture now, it's just differences in APIs and input mechanics that really differentiate between them.

That, and many games are running with major engine backing (Unity, Unreal, etc) -- those are already fairly well optimized for the various platforms. When you see things like Elden Ring, running a semi-custom engine (Seikiro, proprietary to Dark Souls games) that we really see a lot of issues - not a lot of backing to really optimize for various platforms, or titles running on them to find the rough edges to get them polished up.

I can see your point about "no porting" meaning that each platform should have a dedicated development team (and I'm sure to some extent, they do have "a guy" whose job is to optimize for various platforms - as effective as that may be). But I think I would take a different tact - I think it's better to call around a unified API. I'd say OpenGL/Vulkan has been there forever, but it seems to have various issues that have hindered wide-spread adoption. I can't see Microsoft letting DirectX move outside it's purview (although the Proton folks are doing a darn good job of cracking that nut open and that may change Microsoft's mind on that)

I'm surprised AMD hasn't more pushed for this - they tend to gravitate around open source efforts, although it may smack a bit too close to Glide. There was Mantle, which did eventually morph into Vulkan, but that was a few years back and I haven't really heard any buzz about it in a long time - everything today is Raytracing and Upscalers.
 
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Brian_B said:
I can see your point about "no porting" meaning that each platform should have a dedicated development team (and I'm sure to some extent, they do have "a guy" whose job is to optimize for various platforms - as effective as that may be). But I think I would take a different tact - I think it's better to call around a unified API. I'd say OpenGL/Vulkan has been there forever, but it seems to have various issues that have hindered wide-spread adoption. I can't see Microsoft letting DirectX move outside it's purview (although the Proton folks are doing a darn good job of cracking that nut open and that may change Microsoft's mind on that)
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I think that the graphics API isn't that big of a deal - and either Vulkan or DX12 is fine, since translation between the two is fairly solid (i.e., running DX games on Linux). The bigger issues I think are developers restricting their development efforts to consoles, with PCs and the possibilities implied being addressed at the design stage.

A 'port' means that the PC release wasn't a design target. That's the problem that needs to be fixed.
Brian_B said:
I'm surprised AMD hasn't more pushed for this - they tend to gravitate around open source efforts, although it may smack a bit too close to Glide. There was Mantle, which did eventually morph into Vulkan, but that was a few years back and I haven't really heard any buzz about it in a long time - everything today is Raytracing and Upscalers.
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DX12, Mantle, Vulkan are all very similar - not so much due to coordination as much as all having the same basic goal of getting close to hardware.
 
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