Slashdot Mirror
When PC Ports of Console Games Go Wrong
A post up at Gamasutra complains about the lack of effort put into the PC ports of some console games. The author picks on the unimpressively-reviewed Ninja Blade in particular: "Just as a quick guide to what we're dealing with here: when you create a new save file at the start of Ninja Blade on the PC, it warns you not to 'turn off your console.' Yes, Ninja Blade is one of those conversions: not so much converted as made to perfunctorily run on a different machine. In-game, you're asked to press A, B, X and Y in various sequences as part of Ninja Blade's extraordinary abundance of quick-time events. Whether you have an Xbox 360 pad plugged in or not, the game captions these button icons with text describing the PC equivalent controls. Only it doesn't always do that. Sometimes, you're left staring at a giant, pulsating, green letter A, and no idea what to do with it." What awful ports have you had the misfortune to experience?
The new Prince of Persia reboot ensured that I won't buy a PC game from Ubisoft ever again. It suffered from the same "Let's fill the UI with references to console-controller buttons" issue.
Hmm, let's see. USB is a bit of a turd sometimes...
*ducks*
Proud member of the Ferengi Socialist Party.
Jade Empire, Mass Effect 1, Dragon Age, Mass Effect 2 are four that don't seem to suffer from the specific problems cited above at the time I write this.(i.e. bad translation of controls). I don't much like the minigames in ME1, but that's not a console issue.
Fable was fine IIRC. Fahrenheit -- didn't like the control schema, but it was translated properly to PC IIRC.
That's your half dozen right there, and just off the top of my head. (Granted, a lot are from Bioware). The problem isn't universal; some developers and publishers seem to care about doing a decent port and some don't.
When Gears of War's PC port was first released, it was:
1) buggy
2) crashy
3) released A YEAR LATER than the xbox version
The crashy part was fixed, iirc about 2 months after release by a patch.
As you can imagine, the sales for this port were a little slow. Video game companies being video game companies chalked this up to piracy. To them the fact that the game was a shitty port released a full year after the original with dated graphics and all couldn't have POSSIBLY been a reason.
When time comes around to release Gears of War 2 - cliffyB says there's no plans for a port because the first one was just pirated too much...
*.sig
I think the worst example has to be Ghostbusters. The console versions are fairly good and somewhat quirky, if ultimately flawed, third person shooters. The PC version is actually broken. As in, it can't even reasonably be described as "working". If you want to install to a drive other than c:\ you're out of luck. If you have anything other than "generic Windows sound card" drivers installed, you won't be hearing any voices in-game. And some of the early fights are essentially unbeatable without cheating, due to collision detection and clipping issues. Oh, and it does the whole "console controller analogues" thing.
There are plenty of other awful examples. The Prince of Persia reboots have been mentioned (justly so) and I think the more recent installments in the Tomb Raider franchise also deserve a mention. Last Remnant is another good example; Square-Enix titles have never been particularly kindly treated on the PC anyway. Fire one of these up on even a top end PC with an Xbox controller plugged in and it's still very much apparent that you're playing the "second best" version of the game.
That said, there are plenty of decent ports out there. While I know others disagreed, Fallout 3 felt pretty good to me on the PC. Mass Effect 2 likewise feels as though they've spent a lot of time optimising the PC version so that it feels at home on the platform. In fact, there are even a few cases where it is the console version that feels like a nasty port. Pretty much any RTS that makes it onto the consoles can be chalked up in that category. The recent AvP game looks and feels far better on the PC than on the consoles; the Predator is an over-complicated nightmare to control on any platform, but the PC version does work out somewhat less toxic.
What? Mass Effect 2 is horrible in this, especially the UI of your journal and saving and the like. All list-like displays (save files, journal entries) disallow double-clicks, instead forcing you to press some disconnected button to open something. The codex list (a tree-like structure) is worst, something probably working smoothly with sticks and buttons (usually an intuitive affair of 'entering and leaving' with two buttons), but horribly bewildering with a mouse. Weapon loadout choosing actually doesn't even make sense.
Don't get me wrong, love the game, and maybe its GUI is bad on console as well, in which case, port successful!
Most games I can think of that got ported from console to PC, suffers from a lot of issues.
They all have one or more in common:
- Lack of configuration
- Extremely high hardware requirements
- Bad mouse control (acceleration, non-configurable sensitivity etc) Example: Mass Effect 2 got THREE settings for mouse. And it's STILL very high on Low.
- Low FOV
- Difficulty setting too low for PC (it's easier when you actually have a mouse to aim with in FPS)
But these issues are usually something that can get patched eventually.
The most annoying thing about ports is this:
They usually make a direct port of the game. What works on console, DOES NOT ALWAYS WORK ON PC!
On PC, I got an entire keyboard of keys. Allow me to freaking bind actions to em, don't give me 3 "command wheels" or whatever.
Don't make me "tap" a button to perform a action. Who thought of that?
I can go on with numerous game design issues, but I think everyone gets my points here.
When porting a game to PC, there are certain elements you just have to redesign.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
What you say?
If you want to play Final Fantasy VII on a modern PC, don't even bother looking at the PC version - it was a bumpy ride even back when it was new, let alone with modern hardware and operating systems. Buy a copy of the Playstation version (can be found very cheap second hand) and grab ePSXe (or your emulator of choice). The same goes for Final Fantasy VIII. You'll get better, more configurable graphics, fewer bugs and a few useful (if slightly cheaty) extra features like fast-forward and a save-anywhere option.
Alternatively, VII and VIII are available on the Playstation Network for a few dollars each which gets you an electronic copy portable between the PS3 and PSP (though this is probably still less "nice" than playing the original version emulated).
As a games developer, its really pisses me off too.
Thing is the word "port" is a misnomer. Since in development dev kits are rare and expensive so only the more senior guys get them or you have to share.
This means there is (and must) always a working PC build on the go. Yep, all console games start life as PC games, you don't code directly on the console, your in Visual studio. Also a lot of the testing is done on PC as its a hell of a lot easier to debug and for large periods of devlopment your console builds might not even be working. For instance on our AAA title the Playstation 3 build spends half of its time utterly dead. (Fyi the Playstation 3 is a terrible console and is actually less powerful than a 360, the graphics power is especially poor)
So there's no excuse for putting out a bad PC release, its just lazyness. or more likely bad producers and their corporate overlords dailing to listen to the concerns of the designers and pushing out a shoddy product.
One fo the problems also is when the art is created for the console. Art in a decent environment should be compiled together choosing correct sizes, resolutions, compressions for the platform. This often isnt done. This means that a texture that looks nice and crisp on the console will look utter pants on the pc at 1920*1080 as it will be having to upscale the mips.
What should be done is that each platform should have people responsable for it at each step of its production. That would ensure you don't end up with terrabad "ports". Try pitching that to management tho. :(
-Anon because I don't want to be fired. :D
Despite their hard effort (or lack thereof) to make the game piss off PC owners as much as possible, the game was still awesome.
- FOV settings, the fov is related to the distance to the viewer. On a PC, people is near the screen, so the FOV sould be higuer, is just a number, but even 90 million dollars videogames forget to change it on the PC. Out of lazyness, is not modified. (note: It may need to recompile some maps, and edit some weapons a littel). .NET, Windows Games For Live, etc.
- Stupid messages "Don't shutdown the machine"
- Savepoints, but thats parts of the mechanic, and can't be fixed
- Autoaim, thats helps pad users, because you can't properly walk and aim on a pad (seems) so need autoaim. With a mouse, you don't need autoaim. Out of lazyness, is not deactivated.
- HORRIBLE server browsers or lack of server browser. Idiot-box with a single button. Lack of dedicated servers. A whole horrible bad network experience, with not community sense and not respect to the PC values of freedom and user control of the experience.
- The game greets you with a "Press ENTER". This is a arcade saloon artifact from 1982. It has not reason at all on a PC.
- Use of bloated middleware.
- Unoptimized code. Code written for the console, that runs poorly on the pc.
- Smallish maps. Since the consoles are serius ram limits (like 512 MB or less) some maps are really small, and you see lots of "load screens". On the PC proper games use streaming to have not load screens, or the maps are giganteous large.
- Quick Time Events. These things work ok with a pad, on a keyboard are something like a "learn where the A and B key are on your keyboard" minigames. Don't work at all on the PC.
- Weird resolutions. If your game don't support 1280x1024, your game is shit, cause this is a normal (low) resoultion for lots of LCD. This force people to use lower resolutions that looko blurry, and with enormo pixels.
- Lack of configuration options. The console people like FEW options, the PC people like MORE options. Add a FOV setting, and autoaim settings, a resolution setting, a bloom setting.
- Use of the UNREAL engine. This engine don't support things like AA, so you have to force AA on the driver, but it don't work on some engines. Games like Borderlands suffer of this. Unreal could be a decent engine for consoles, but is BAD for the PC, because is optimized for the consoles.
I could continue, but I am wasting my time here. since most of these problems are out of lazyness. Disabling autoaim sould take a well managed company only 1 hour of time, If people don't know you have do disable autoaim for the PC, what the hell are you doing near a "conversion to PC" proyect?
-Woof woof woof!
Every time I see it, I curse both Ion Storm and Microsoft.
The 64Mb memory of Xbox lead to room-sized levels. I had a feeling that game designers were more concerned about advertising this console graphics (oh, look, we have shaders and are not afraid to use them), than actually making a decent game. The six-button controller crippled the interface. The teenager target group lead to oversimplified gameplay (same ammo for pistol and flamethrower, WTF?) and a stupid plot (virtual Britney Spears clone is remarkable).
And despite all that, it ran really slow on my PC, which had four times more RAM and a better videocard than this X-crap.
Wrong.
Mass effect 1 had horrible inventory management on the PC (i.e. still had the 150 item limit, when it should have had effectively infinite) A small adjustment to the amount of items you could carry would have fixed that, oh and a stash/chest ala Diablo 2 (a 10 year old game almost now I think) could have at least gone a long way to prevent inventory hell.
Let's not also forget the convoluted shop interfaces when compared even against console many supremely old RPG's (we're talking 20 years here). It's sad when a game from 1992 (FF4) has better inventory then a game in 2007'ish (mass effect 1).
ME2 did also suffer from console-itis by REMOVING instead of fixing the item system from mass effect 1, they turned ME2 into gears of war now in teh mass effect universe, lets face this fact please.
It was so obvious the game was gears of war reskinned /w slight modifications. There ar etonnes of issues with ports, Mass effect 2 made up for their lack of deeper game options with a comitment to story, cinematics and simple shooter action because they weren't up to the job of a full RPG, and they wanted to hit the mass market of drooling first person/third person shooter fanboys.
Obviously, the orientation of the USB cable is in a state of superposition until you make an observation, collapsing the quantum wave function to a single orientation, thus allowing it to fit....
Knowledge != Intelligence
>>>unblocking 200 ports
Stories like this and the Slashdot summary are why I made an attempt at PC gaming in the 90s, but then quit. Computer gaming was fun in the era of Atari 800s, Commodore 64s, Atari STs, and Commodore Amigas, because you had FIXED hardware that just worked (and worked extremely well - better than the PCs/Macs). No need to mess with drivers or cards or other nonsense. Gaming on those old 8/32 bit machines was plug-and-play easy.
Computers are no longer that easy to use, so I bought my first console ever with the PS2 and Gamecube. Where PC gaming had been a major headache, the consoles once again returned the simplicity that I experienced with my Commodores and Amigas. Plug and play. No headaches.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall