I am.
The PC playerbase can be downright unpleasant at times. Elitist, narcissist, classist, toxin-stuffed wind bags wheezing about their moral, financial and personal superiority over people they know nothing about based only on choice of gaming platform. Honestly, their extreme elements are an antiquated and tasteless lot as trapped within the mind virus of early internet cringe as the entire populace of 4chan. This I say as someone who as been a full PC gamer for the past 2-3 years now. But do you know what else PC gamers are? They are a sector of players so beleaguered by the inadequacies of their content providers that most of us don't even bat an eyelash everytime a perfectly fine game on every other platform is spat out our end as a misshapen abomination of man. For the supposed land of the 'master race', the state of modern ports makes this landscape feel like something out of 'The hills have eyes' most of the time.
It is becoming less of a trend and more of a rule, hardwritten across the laws of physics, that any sort of high effort, big budget PC game has a better chance of falling apart in the hands of PC gamers that it has of being a well formed and full functioning title. When a game does actually function, it earns no praise for achieving that bare minimum working state, but when it explodes in bloody glory: that's when the rage of a regularly disappointed dragon is stirred. Because at this point, is there really any excuse for messing up this often? Why is it that those who on the PC are treated as second-class consumers, charged the same but serviced less? And why is it also the case that in most everyone of these situations, with bad and non-functioning ports, there is never any actual recourse?
Almost everytime, the way that a game drops will always be hard ingrained with the flaws it carries for life. Take Arkham Origins for example, (I wish somebody would, the game kills me!), even today the thing is a mess to get running with any consistency. Splinter Cell Double Agent is sold without a key patch necessary for the game's upgrade system to function. (Which I only realised when starting the bonus mission, myself.) Even Cyberpunk, with it's near two years of dedicated fixes by a repentant developer, still feels janky at times. It doesn't crash like a drunken sailor around riptides anymore, but there's still regular issues of AI going haywire, T-poses in cutscenes, lip synching failing altogether and that god-awful 'Can't save at this time' bug which is a pain in the ass to fix. Is there really no piecing a broken game back together?
Of course, the actual complications of developing for a PC audience plays some significant role in the problems. Consoles are fairly static systems running on consistent OS's with a linear hardware progression. It's easy to see what works on the hardware available and see where the game is at in testing, which is why when Cyberpunk ran bad on consoles- it was clear evidence that QA dropped a massive ball. PC is a more fluid infrastructure with countless dozens of set-ups, hardware improvements, and various hardware manufacturers that all never want to shake hands with one another. You're designing games for a hundred different set-ups at the same time with PC development, which is where the problems can start to set in. Still- some developers can pull it off, so you'd have thought this landscape wouldn't still be a veritable landmine to traverse for consumers in the modern age, right?
But then Naughty Dog publishes 'The Last of Us Part 1', and suddenly we're back in the stone ages once again! Some incredible how, the game that the vultures at Naughty Dog were so utterly indignant was worth re-releasing at $70 that they lambasted us for our very discontent then they turned around the onus on us, for feeling as though Naughty Dog had forced their overpriced deal onto our plates- (You know, the deal which is the only way that people on PC could ever get a chance to play The Last of Us? Yeah, it's not like we were forced to pay that stupid price...) somehow that game is a fiery mess of apocalyptic proportions. Those self righteous pretentious blowhards hopped up on the pricey prestige of their remake of a release of a ten year old game managed to fart out a barely functioning dumpster fire and still had the gall to charge above full price for the thing. For shame!
The game is a horror show. It's freezes up regularly, the engine throws random effects in completely nonsensical cutscenes, the shader compiling sequence has lasted more than two hours for some on less powerful systems! (And I thought the three minute Hogwarts Legacy compile was rough!) The universal image of this latest release of the much squeezed to pulp 'Last of Us' game is the lowest setting rendering of Neaderjoel, a brutish and ugly facsimile of a once beautifully complex and morally delicate character. Naughty Dog have thrown up their hands and gone 'whoops' but as far as I can see the game is still very much for sale, with their limp 'deluxe edition' DLC to really drive home how much of a soulless crash grab this endeavour always was. Another corpse in the house of PC.
Persona is a franchise that similarly is getting it's long awaited port to PC, and as far as I've heard every single port has been greatly received- except for Persona 3 Portable. And why? Well, for some utterly incomprehensible reason, the team decided to port over the version of Persona 3 without the animated cutscenes. Now yes, the animated cutscenes weren't incredible in the original, but they were an attempt to spruce up the presentation of key narrative moments. Without out them the game turns up feeling a little flat in it's emotional moments. Was it really beyond the pale for ATLUS to compile a new version of their game which hadn't been touched since 2009? Was that beyond their budget? Or just beyond their capacity to care now that they've got a Gatcha spin-off on the horizon?
This is the PC landscape, and the other end of the scale to balance out all the grandstanding and eye-rolling 'poor shaming' these people are notorious for. There's an old adage held that a good game takes time and lasts, whilst a bad game takes less time and stinks- or something to that effect- and if PC games took just that little bit longer to perfect I truly don't believe many people would be that upset. There was a time when the 'PC Release' of any upcoming game was looked on as the definite version, but can that really be said anymore in a world where the PC version of games like 'The Last of Us' take multiple hours to boot? There's probably a shifting in quality standards that needs to be addressed on an Industry wide level, if anyone has the compunction to do it.
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