Gamers willingness to submit and Issues with the PC version

So, Final Fantasy XIII came out on Steam on October 9th and the game was not very well received. The game doesn't have any graphical options and it runs very poorly including high end hardware. There has been an outcry (on the Steam discussion forums at least) for graphical options to be patched in as well as for the game to run better.

While this seems like a reasonable expectation, some have come out and stated that we should be happy with what we got as it was only £11. I'm new to PC gaming having only started in April last year but of the nearly 300 games I have purchased on Steam, 99% of them provide me with graphical options and the vast majority run well on my system. Some of these games have been much cheaper than FFXIII. Some users even put forth the idea that by complaining, we would not get a version of FFXV on PC. If this is the state they release FFXV, I don't want it.

To be fair to SE, it has only been a week and a bit since the launch but there has been no communication from them on whether or not they are working on the issues. I contacted them by email and they said they do not have details on whether or not there will be updates to the game. The small amount of contact given in the Steam forums was a Square employee who said he was passing on the problems people were having to higher ups. He has not responded since the first day.

My question is, am I asking for too much here? My short time with PC gaming has been overwhelmingly positive. Even when games have had problems, I have easily managed to google solutions and fix problems within minutes. This current issue is something no one seems to have a fix for. I would dismiss it if it was a problem only I was experiencing but it's a problem a huge amount of the users are experiencing. The first few days after the release of the game, the steam forums were flooded with questions on how to fix the issues with framerate, crashing and resolution. The only pinned thread is 3500+ replies asking for graphical options and better performance.

I worry that some gamers out there are willing to put aside problems with products just because they want them. I remember on the bombcast, during talks about Pre-order bonuses or something, the crew were talking about gamers being taken advantage of because all they want to do is play a game. More recently, a topic was created asking if people were willing to buy XIII-2 even if it had the same problems and a large amount of them said yes(only 250 or so replies to this thread though).

Moving away from Final Fantasy, when Modern Warfare 2 came out on the PC and there were no dedicated servers, there was a group created who were going to boycott the game. I'm sure a lot of you have seen the image of that group with pretty much everyone in there playing MW2. On this site, I recently saw a user had pre-ordered Dragon Age: Inquisition even though they had been severely burned by Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age 2. Even I, who was disappointed by FFXIII when it first came out, went and purchased FFXIII-2 when it first came out. Now I'm writing a bunch of text complaining that there are problems with a game that I don't think is all that amazing to begin with(even though I love it). I feel like the a good number of gamers fall into this and don't take a stand. The only place you really see people saying no is with Origin which I feel is a little misguided.

I have to imagine they will respond at some point as they have 2 more games to sell in this series and I think a significant number of people are not going to buy the next games unless the problems are fixed. I'm probably blowing this way out of proportion but I'm hoping putting this out there will at least help me relax as this isn't something I need to worry about.

I wrote out a decently-lengthy response but decided to delete it. I'll just say that, no, you aren't expecting too much, by any means; games should function properly upon release, and asking a developer to (god forbid) put in some work to make that happen is not asking too much. If you want someone to pay you money for your product, you have to release something that actually works and gives the consumer what they want without hassle.

Also, just for the record, I'm pretty sure GeDoSaTo just updated to include FF13, if you're into that.

Considering FF Xiii was developed on a PC if memory serves and runs on PS3 at 1920x 1080 I don't think you are being unfair at al. My guess is they decided to get up 60 FPS and then decided it wasn't worth the effort to get it to do it at multiple resolutions.

I find the whole mess sad, very big missed opportunity for Square and I'm beginning to doubt they are going to do right by their customers. And the sad thing is if people keep blindly supporting them, they will have no incentive to change. I understand why they do, I very much want FF games on PC as that's my platform of choice, but

I haven't bought FF Xiii yet and generally don't ever pre-order games even from developers I like. This is why.

You're not asking for too much. The staggering lack of options in this release has set a low bar for ports the likes of which we haven't seen in quite some time.

It runs fine on my HP Envy, like 30 to 60 most of the time, a couple dips in the pulse later. A little more TLC would be nice but I had my expectations in check after the PC versions of FF3 and FF4 were so baseline. Kinda feel like they're just taking anything that can be brought to Steam with minimal effort to bring in a little extra cash. SE isnt in the habit of going that extra mile to make a quality versatile user experience because SE fans are by and large huge apologist pushovers. Why put the extra effort in when you know your fans by and large will take it as is?

I think you are right, 15 probably will perform a lot better on PC, but at the same time it's not exactly going to fill PC gamers with a lot of hope before launch that they should put their money down on it given how this version of 13 turned out.

It's hard to tell with Japanese developers and Steam releases. I think most of them who have tried releasing triple-A titles started out with a shitty port, never fixed it, like Dark Souls and Resident Evil 4. Then come next sequel, or over time, they adapt and make fairly okay options available; not perfect but better-ish! Hopefully Konami, who have a simulacrum of PC experience, can deliver a nice MGS5 version.

In my case I like to support first-time efforts if it's something I want to see more of, then let the company know that, as a PC person, I'd love to see more options for my games. I want it running on my gaming PC and my Surface Pro. If they don't provide a better PC experience the 2nd time around I'm hesitant to purchase the product til there's a massive sale. If you mess up a 3rd time, like EA and Origin, I personally dump you and never look back..unless Dragon Age 3 is actually good. Time will tell.

Oh and my reason for disliking Origin (since OP mentioned it at the end) is the fact that their prices in my country are insane. Origin wants $100-120usd for new releases, so my stand against Origin isn't too misguided I think. Steam, as the eternal counter part on how to do things right, does not double the price of new releases in these parts. So yeah, giving EA double the price for ruined franchise sequels is not something I'm into.

@ulquiokani:

Bad ports always leave bad tastes behind. I do think that sometimes we don't need all the fancy choices that are out there, but something as simple as resolution would be amazing.

Origin isn't a bad piece of software in my opinion, at times I like it more then Steam since it does 1 thing better - focus on games. What I hate about Origin? The prices!!!
I pre-ordered Dragon Age Inquisition, for half the money it'd cost on Origin. That is just ridiculous. EA needs to realize that people wont buy retail prices when you're cutting out retailers that used to get a piece of the profits...

Durante put out a patch within 12 hours that solved a lot of problems

I think you should bookmark this thread on Neogaf:

Durante Presents: FFXIII resolution unlocking (GeDoSaTo plugin) released - pre-alpha

Yeah, my biggest complaints with FFXIII on steam are the lack of resolution options, the fact they used the horrible Bink video codec movies from the Xbox 360 version to save space and then doubled the download size by putting everything in there twice, once with English audio and once with Japanese. Within hours, Durante had a fix out for resolutions, and I've seen at least one guy ripping the PS3 movies and re-encoding them to Bink to get less artifacting in the cutscenes.

Another thing to mention is that a lot of people having problems with poor performance on machines that should have no problems with the game are having them because the game is really not that taxing on graphics cards, so they use lower power states which are what causes the problem. Enabling my nvidia card to use high performance when running FFXIII fixed that problem at least.

That is no excuse. The Steam store page clearly states that "Final Fantasy XIII has been optimised for PC, featuring full screen support and running at 60FPS". I see no such optimization, and the game more often than not dips to 30 FPS even on the most recent and powerful hardware. If Square-Enix didn't plan on working on the PC version of this game before releasing it in order to adapt it to the strenghts of the platform, then they shouldn't have made those promises in the first place.

It's too bad that this port is reminiscent of early 7th gen PC ports with little respect given to the players of that platform. Large companies should know by now that those customers expect, and usually receive, a higher quality experience.

Square has always put out pretty lazy PC ports (Eidos games are better - Eidos has a long history of PC games, however.)

We can either be happy that we at least got something modders can put into working form, or we can not buy it and tell S-E not to put FF ports on Steam.

@corvak: The kicker is that Square's non-Japanese division is pretty competent at them: Tomb Raider, Sleeping Dogs etc. Given the age of the game (and its retail price) it probably wasn't financially viable to outsource the FFXIII port to the guys who did the Sleeping Dogs one but seeing no graphical options at all was a bit of a shock.

Is there any kind of New Years honours system in Japan? Durante should get one for services to their PC games industry.

@slag: I shouldn't have pre-ordered but seeing a JRPG is a rare sight on Steam so I went for it. Considering I had played it before, I didn't think this could go wrong.

When I said misguided, I didn't mean people like you. That is just bad. I'm talking about people not even wanting to download free games from Origin just because it is EA.

Durante's fix allows for better graphical options but it doesn't fix issues like performance. My GTX 970 should not be struggling to maintain 60fps on a 4 year old game only running at 720p. I donated to Durante though, he is doing some great work.

Already have, thanks though

To be fair to Square-Enix... It might not have been ideal, but a locked 30fps and 720p resolution is still better than the framerate and resolution of PS3 and 360 versions, making this the closest to a definitive version of the game out there.

That's bad. I didn't look at the store page because FF13 is a terrible game. I just meant that I don't think they'll release a 15 port in as sloppy a state. Of course, I could be completely wrong and squeenix could just be completely oblivious to what is acceptable for a PC release, but I think it's much more likely they just threw this up there with as little work done as possible to squeeze whatever they can out of it.

And especially with the feedback they got from this I can't imagine they'll release something as bad next time. They might just pull out of the market completely and just double down on consoles, but I can't see them releasing 15 in a busted state like that. Maybe I just have too much faith in'em.

That's often why I wait on games. The last time I preordered a PC game was Sleeping Dogs, AFTER they showed off what they had done with the PC version, and how they took care to make sure to do it right.

Fact is though, the "submit/roll over" speech is a little much. People get hyped on something without any research/skepticism, and get upset when ports like this are out. Yes, it's SE's fault for farting out a bad version. But, that hasn't stopped us from throwing money at Capcom for SF4 when that was broken. It didn't stop us with Diablo 3. It didn't stop us with Dead Rising 3. And it certainly didn't stop us with BF4. We got angry on internet forums, yelled at some Twitter accounts, and ran off to preorder the next big game saying "This is it guys! This will be the one!!!!" We're as much to blame here for rushing with cash in hand and posting the Fry "Shut up and take my money!" gif everywhere we go.

Sadly enough, PC gamers often are stuck with what we get since this is often the status quo. It's awful, and yet we repeat history and get mad when the same thing happens (insert Vaas' speech here for dramatic effect). More importantly, game companies know we do this. The fact is, game publishers/companies don't want to invest much in ports since it's a risk that people won't want to play a game 2 years after it's been out (and please spare me on 1080p/60fps....). Why would you invest a lot of time, money, and resources if the bottom line isn't going to pan out? Heck, we should be fortunate to even get the game at all!

I say, let Youtubers be the monkeys who get shot up into space here. Let others rush in, and decide on YOUR value. Maybe if we stop rushing and throwing money at screens, we can make a point. Otherwise, game companies will just keep enjoying their stacks of cash.

My question is, am I asking for too much here? My short time with PC gaming has been overwhelmingly positive.

Absolutely not. You have every right to say that a PC version of a game as old as FFXIII should run and play well and should have at least the bare minimum selection of options.

At the very least, a PC version of a game should have resolution options. You can say that "well, that's a lot of work! You've gotta make sure the UI scales and everything!" or whatever, but you're releasing a game on a platform with millions of different hardware configuration possibilities, not on a platform with one and only one hardware configuration. Why shouldn't that be taken into account? When you decide to put money into doing a PC version of a game, why the hell wouldn't you want to make it at least passable?

And a console game from 2009 has no excuse for not running exceptionally well.

@slag: Hmm, by how well it played on PS3 vs 360, I had always assumed that the reference platform was actually PS3 and ported from there. This would make sense as going from PS3 to an x86 based architecture is no small feat and could very well be why the other versions suffered. That all said this was just based on assumption and even if true doesn't excuse releasing a clearly sub-par product especially when its been what, 4 years now since console release?

Luckily it's been getting a lot better. Still not 100%, and it likely won't be, but we've come a far way from the days of GTA 3. As someone who has played primarily on a PC since the late 80s and has tried to play games with a controller on a TV since I got a second hand sega master system controller, a video card with s-video out and a sound card with a game port, it's ridiculous how good it is to play games on a PC these days. I just hope sales of FF13 on the PC really suffers because of the quality of the port and that they learn that half-assed isn't good enough anymore.

You're not asking for too much and if anything this should make understand that you should vote with your dollars and only get games that put in the proper work. Say no to shit PC ports and try your best to wait long enough for others to play a newly released game to confirm whether or not the new release is a shit port or not.

Not your fault man, Square did you wrong. Did us all wrong really, including themselves.

I empathize with wanting to support JRPGs on PC, especially good ones like Final Fantasy. It's a damn shame Square thinks so little of the PC audience that they apparently can't even put in basic effort for their flagship title.

My memory could very well be be mistaken, but I believe they made it on PC first and then optimized it for the PS3 Cell architecture. But yeah doesn't really matter. This game is 4 years old, they should have offered at least the bare bones screen size resolution options at bare minimum.

The Esc-button exiting the game without any prompt is bewildering (read about it online, maybe something wrong with that users install?).

@slag:

I would assume your understanding is correct: my understanding is that practically every game made in the past several years has been originally developed on powerful PC's, then shrunk down to somehow fit on consoles that had become far less powerful than PC's.

Really, there is absolutely no excuse for the PC version of FFXIII to be this bad, apart from Japanese developers not knowing how to optimise for PC's, as usual.

No, it actually works like that. I think it's amazing. You hit the escape button and BAM! ...desktop.

Holy shit, really? That's amazing. I'd be going after a refund hard if I bought a product in that state. Maybe they should just throw an early access tag on it or something.

You are not asking for too much, but everyone needs to buy this game so that I can get FFXV on my PC. Thanks.