What are things that annoy you as a result of porting?

@gamingmichael: And AC requires you to press forward + free run + jump. All of which you can rebind. All of which have different uses depending on context and combinations. So what's the difference, just that Batman uses 2 same buttons for 2 different actions? I'm still not sure how this is extra customization of uncombining keys, whatever that means.

I'd go with poor performance, controls, and lack of options. Like pretty much everyone else. The whole "framerate locked at 30!!!1!1one" type shit doesn't bother me at all--so long as the game performs at least as well as it does on consoles, and makes allowances for different controls schemes.

Dark Souls, is such a weird example of all the pc port problems. But then the community came around to find solutions, it's something where I question how much can I stomach problems. Especially GFW support makes the game run worse.

I don't care about quicksave/quickload as long as there's some kind of manual save option available, other than that I agree with all points.

I don't like it when they omit an option to exit the game from the menus. While they usually support alt-f4, it's kinda awkward to exit the game that way. The PC port of Burnout Paradise was one of those games.

Oh, and when fonts are like 20x the necessary size because they have been designed to be looked at on a TV from the other side of the street instead of a couple of inches away from the monitor.

Haven't owned a console since 2001...Just bought a PS4 though.

Uncombining keys as in instead of pressing (A) + (B) = resulting action, the resulting action could be mapped to, if desired, its own key.

I dont know, DMC was visually impressive for a UE3 game. And my shitty laptop with a nvidia 330m ran it at ultra with super smooth framerate. It surprised me how well it ran

At the end of the day, badly coded software will bring the highest-end hardware to its knees. The responsibility should be on the developer to optimize their games. Yes, a $400 Dell should not be able to run new games at max settings, but c'mon. There should be bounds of reason.

Shitty optimization, like ACIV.

What were the bad PC ports of this and last year?

Oh it made very good use of what it was working with and the art direction does it a lot of favours. However stock standard UE3 is very very light on system requirements, hell I down sample Mass Effect 3 from 4K and it still holds 60 fps (close to 120fps with SLI). It only starts to put the strain on once developers start bolting on fancy things that weren't originally included in the engine.

AC4 runs fine, especially since it's running global dynamic lighting now along with tessellated foliage and screen space reflections (not to mention all the additional enhancements in the PC version). Turn off the soft shadows and set the god rays to low and a 770 will hold 60@1080 for the most part, hopefully AMD can get some driver path stuff out there for it soon.

As far as I can recall, Assassin's Creed 3 and 4, XCOM: The Bureau, Skyrim, Dark Souls, Binary Domain, Darksiders 2, RAGE, I'm sure there's more, but I can't recall all of them at a moment's notice. Also, yes, I have a powerful PC, so the problem isn't on my side.

Skyrim and RAGE were not from this or last year. And only Dark Souls is demonstrably bad, the rest are just bare-bones.

Honestly, though, ports these days tend to be pretty good. Tomb Raider, Far Cry 3, Alan Wake, Bioshock Infinite, Borderlands 2, Dishonored, Max Payne 3, Saints Row IV, Sleeping Dogs, and Dust: An Elysian Tail were all great console ports. That's A LOT of great ports.

@gamingmichael: I am not saying that it is an either or situation. The more processes you add to make your game look nicer the higher the system requirements are going to be. It's that simple. Sure, you could code the game in assembly language to get more performance out of your game, but generally, prettier graphics = higher requirements. I would rather a developer add the option for something like HBAO and exclude someone from being able to max out the graphics, than to not include HBAO to make everyone happy. That is the whole point of PC gaming instead of going with a console. You have the option for more. Developers can probably optimize their game a bit better, but ultimately the variety of hardware makes this financially impossible for most companies. They can only optimise a game so far and eventually you reach a point of diminishing returns where every percent of extra optimization is exponentially more time consuming than the previous percent.

There are certainly games that are horribly optimized (adventure park sounds like one of em), but most of the time PC gamers cry foul, it is simply because they think their systems are more powerful than they are. Again, just because you spent $1500 does not mean that you deserve to run everything at max. I am not saying that you should ever have to buy the top of the line hardware, I am saying that the whole point of PC's is that there are options. So if someone designs their game in a way that allows people to take advantage of the hardware, they just purchased, then how could that be a bad thing?

Crysis is a great example of that. Sure, on launch day there was an issue with multi-core CPU's, but after day two, when the game was patched to the point where the game ran the way it was designed to, it ran just fine. If you went online everyone was crying about how the game ran like shit, but that wasn't a case of sloppy coding, it was a case of the simulation and physics on the highest setting being too demanding for their rigs. That game used real global illumination, a massive system hog, where every other game was faking the lighting systems. To the average person you could not tell a difference in visuals, but there is a massive difference in both how the light works and the requirements to actually run that. The foliage had its own physics system and the wind in the game interacted with it in a way that no games did, but it came at a high price in performance. So everyone compared Crysis to Modern Warfare and went, WTF? Why am I required to play Crysis at low settings when I can play Modern Warfare maxed out? Well it is simple, it wasn't that Modern Warfare was optimized while Crysis wasn't. It was a case of Crysis allowing "ultra," settings for PC users that just bought new hardware. Doom 3 had the same kind of outcry as Crysis did. Doom 3 shipped with an ultra setting that used uncompressed textures and everyone complained about how they couldn't max out the game with their hardware, despite the massive warning in game that told you that it was designed for high-end PC's and you probably wouldn't notice much difference.

Or you could look at AC4, a game that I mentioned above. People look at their system specs, compare them to the specs of a PS4, then think that they should be able to run it as flawlessly as the PS4 can. The flaw in that thinking is that a PC is not a console. The PS4 version is basically the game running at low / medium specs (no god rays, hbao, soft shadows, txaa, physx, half-res textures, lower world detail, lower draw distance, etc) with 1080p and locked at 30fps. Then there are people with $800-$1000 machines saying that the port is garbage because they cannot max the game out while playing it at 1080p /60fps. The game has extra graphical options that are not included in the console version because they require too much hardware to execute for minimal graphical gain. But apparently having more options than the console offers is apparently a bad thing? That is the kind of belief system that bothers me. It's almost like gamers bought a PC with idea that they were going to get 1080p/60fps on everything. Well, that kind of attitude is only going to end up with massive disappointment. PC's are not consoles, a developer does not have a single set of hardware to code for so they have to code broadly. This means that a PC, as they are currently set up, will NEVER have the requirements of a console. Maybe ATI's mantle will change this, but from what I hear, developers are not interested in it because it adds more work and will significantly increase the labour cost of making games.

This whole requirements thing is going to be really important come Christmas 2014. Every year after consoles are released PC gamers get butthurt about how system specs are jumping up (just think of the reaction to the COD: Ghosts requirements or Watch Dogs requirements). People with anything less powerful than a GTX 770 are going to complain about how they have to run games on low - medium settings now, despite the fact that their system is only a year old. They are going to be forced to make a choice between higher settings, 1080p, or 60fps, and then spend more time bitching online about it than actually playing their games. Right now we are in the cross-gen phase of PC gaming, but in a year developers will find a way to gain more performance out of the consoles and this will make system requirements on PC jump up.

TL:DR. There is a reason PC gaming has a reputation for being expensive.

Edit: Weird... before I added this edit my write up was exactly 1000 words.

@gamingmichael: Alright I see what you mean now.

@monetarydread: Well put.

Just loaded up "Enslaved" and saw my resolution was maxed at 1920 x 1080... Nuh nuh NOPE!

Giant and bloated UI, by far. When a game is obviously made for a gamepad with it's menus and UI there really isn't much that is more frustrating to try and navigate. That's one of the reasons both Borderlands ports suck dick.

Other than that it's annoying with potential performance issues or odd engine issues that don't mesh well with an open system "like Rage's adapating textures".

It also sucks with lackluster options. If I have too strong of a system, then I want to turn on all the fluff and unlock the framerate, or if I have a shitty system I want the options to make it run better without looking like absolute horseshit.

without reading the OP or looking into any discussions that followed on this thread, my answer is INGAME MENUS THAT ARE DESIGNED AROUND CONSOLES THAT ARE DESIGNED FOR CONTROLLERS

is my fucking answer amazing or what?

I understand your points. Here's the thing though. You mentioned diminishing returns, but bear in mind that this also applies to software. In Crysis 3, I have seen benchmarks where a Titan and the next lowest card perform nearly the same in terms of FPS, so the extra cost of a Titan is about the same as throwing some cash into the trash.

In regards to SLI, it is not uncommon for SLI to produce several performance issues that can be worse than using a single card. One powerful GPU is often better than two. Remember bad software can often cripple great hardware.

P.S. You mention 1080p 60Hz a lot. I hope you're not running two Titans at 1080p 60Hx...

My dual-GPU config was a pair of 8800 ultra's back in the day. I am currently runing a 4gb 680 because I do not believe that dual cards are an optimal solution, especially if you are running ATI hardware, then again, that is almost always the fault of bad drivers, not developers. Then again, I never buy games / consoles at launch because that allows time for any problems to be fixed (see Assasins Creed 3, all Battlefield games, Bioshock, Tomb Raider as an example why).

You mention the Titan though, one thing that most people do not realize is that the Titan really isn't a gaming card. It is a rebranded workstation card and almost all of the cost went into GPU compute performance, not gaming performance. Since a workstation card usually starts at $2500 the Titan becomes a great investment in comparison. This is why the Titan is still being sold for its price, despite existing in a world where the 780ti costs two thirds of the price and nets you an increase of twenty percent in gaming performance.

If i had to pick just 1 thing: Locked framerates.

This. Thankfully Bethesda games have a robust modding community who are able to fix all the console-to-pc poorly ported elements.

I know that. :) I mentioned the GTX Titan because I probably had a brain derp when you said you spent over a thousand bucks on GPUs and I also had said TotalBiscuit had two Titans. I'm a tard; my bad! :D

I hate *too good* port jobs. As in Bioware-style - dropping gamepad support altogther. Choices are a good thing - Bioware! Some games, like dialog heavy Bioware RPGs, are just easier to enjoy leaning back with a gamepad on my lap.

Other than that? Just the usual. Bad performance optimization and instability being second to lacking gamepad support, or if controls are hamfistedly turned into clunky KB&M controls (like having unresponsive mouse inputs).

Multiple functions bound to a single key

This. This. This. This. And This.

The keyboard has a bajillion keys on it, why in the world don't they make use of them? I remember when I first started playing ME2, it took me AGES to get used to the retarded space bar, which was used to sprint, stick to cover, and interact with things. I had hoped Bioware would listen and split that shit up in ME3, but of course not, they don't give a shit.

I also hate it when games have horrible menus, like Skyrim as others have mentioned.

Fixed frame rates, no ability to adjust the AA, and sluggish controls/lack of proper ability to bind keys piss me the fuck off.