Phoenixmgs said:
I played Dark Souls and the framerate chugged a bit in Blighttown but it was very playable, it's not like any basic enemies are actually difficult in the Souls' games to where a few less frames would make you die.
Funnily enough, AFAIK, performance issues are the main complaint of Arkham Knight as well, and an issue you yourself bought up previously as a fault in the PC version.
Funnily enough, chugging a bit on a console is a pretty big deal.
Chug a bit on a PC... You're done 60 FPS to 30. Noticeable. My partner, who doesn't game, thinks Witcher 3 runs shit on my PC 'cause its at a steady 27-30FPS thanks to Hairworks, whilst she's used to the games I let her play which run at ~200FPS on my machine [If I weren't to Vsync them anyway].
Chug on a console and you are noticably less than 30. It reaches so called unplayable levels. Framerate in Blighttown was considered a problem by many who played DS, whether you personally considered it one or not.
PS3 users could still play the game, Skyrim PS3 wasn't taken off store shelves either.
PS3 players could play it... To a point. And then it was utterly unplayable.
PC players can play Arkham Knight. It just... chugs a bit through the game, and has a few texture and performance issues that are unacceptable for a PC release - such as the 30FPS hardcode lock.
Honestly, from what I'm hearing, Skyrim was in a worse state at release.
As for Arkham Knight coming off Store Shelves, that's not Steam saying "We won't sell this" and retailers universally deciding the game is in too poor shape to sell - its actually the publisher saying they'll take it off store shelves and doing so, in order to save some face from the negative publicity.
Skyrim didn't do this as Bethesda started working on fixes right away and over the next few months released several patches, each one which extended the amount of time before crash a little.
Arkham Knight, however, reportedly was delayed for so long because these same issues appeared on consoles, and it took that long to fix them, without touching the PC issues that were well known before launch. Fixing the PC issues would likely take as long, and possibly longer considering things like the 30FPS cap they have implemented are using methods that are... kinda shit. As its not something they can even start fixing quickly, its a good idea for them to pull it off store shelves as its not going to see any progress any time soon.
Whilst its probably not so benevolent a reason they took it off shelves - it was taken off because PC gamers just found it unacceptable. And its not because its so horrifically bad that its the worst thing to come out in history, or even recent history. Its got some pretty bad issues, and is the epitome of a rushed console port. Its not unplayable, its just shit. And unlike Bethesda they don't have a huge PC following, and the game isn't easy to make mods for, so they're just not at all forgiven for it - as WB has a kind of reputation for this sort of shit, what with Games for Windows Live being used in Arkham City, and Arkham Origins being a functional but still obviously ported game. Where Bethesda gets let off because they make games that people love and they're always buggy, WB and Rocksteady have a reputation of putting the minimum effort into the PC version - and that gets them fairly big backlash from the PC community when they lower that effort to new lows.
All hardware has failure rates. None of my consoles ever broke besides my PS3. With PS2, all you had to do was clean the lens. I had a launch PS2 that still worked a year into PS360 gen. I'm talking about buying a game and it working. PCs have hardware issues too.
All hardware has failure rates... Its just some consoles have had particularly high failure rates, or known issues. Many haven't, and ironically whilst you're brushing this off as just my experiences and everything having failure rates - that is exactly what it was supposed to prove:
Everything has failure rates. Even on consoles there are games that work for some and just fucking don't for other people. Bugs that only appear for some players. Consoles that die whilst others work.
Software has issues on everything. Hardware has issues everywhere. Whilst you focus down on PC and tout consoles as being basically infallible, that is far from the truth. The two are far closer than you might realise, though personal experiences do, by their very nature, vary from person to person.
The online problems with Sim City and Diablo caused people to not be able to play the game that are basically offline games. Online lag even happened in Daiblo when playing by yourself. Were console gamers unable to play Dark Souls if the online was down? Having matchmaking/mic/etc. issues in MP is different because you can still play the campaign just fine. All online games have very similar issues at launch.
To take a quote out of your book, again, I played D3 and Sim City launch week, and it wasn't that bad. The games themselves were mediocre, but server connection lag and all that wasn't that bad for me. I ended up dropping Diablo after I finished it and felt that the game was just one long grind, and Sim City after I realised how just utterly shallow it was.
Again, demonstrating how little personal experiences matter in these issues.
Online is a pretty big component of many games... MKX for example. Yes, they have a campaign. Like games like CoD, most buy for the online.
That didn't stop people from playing MKX.
Actually, it kind of did.
And, amusingly, the Arkham Knight problems aren't stopping people from playing Arkham Knight. They're just making it unpleasant to do so.
For every rare console instance you bring up, I can bring up at least 10 more PC instances. Are you seriously trying to argue that PC has less issues than consoles?
Outside of your own personal experience, I'm not going to say PC has less issues. These days, they have about the same, and they have for about 5 years or so now. Both PC and consoles suffer from developers rushing games and not checking them, and then errors appearing. Thing is, consoles have a reputation for being more reliable from a time when they were, when there were 7 brands of PC sound card and if you didn't have the right one you couldn't run the game.
Those days are LONG gone. To some extent, consoles these days can have more problems than the PC. Hell, article on RRoDs. Something like a 30% failure rate. I don't think a PC has had that sort of failure rate in the last 2 decades at least.
Consoles are no longer the reliable bullwork of plug and play, will always work. They're just corporate shill PCs, that are consumed by the masses on reputation alone. I speak to a lot of people who game on consoles, and who want to game on PC. They keep gaming on consoles, however, as they always have, and they know their friends will keep doing so. Nothing about reliability, or plug and play, as anyone who's been keeping up with consoles knows that that is becoming more and more of a joke these days as games get bigger and bigger, and disk streaming is no longer fast enough to get all the data the game needs in a reasonable timeframe. Architecture isn't a ton easier to develop for, as its the same as PC architecture - just weaker, so you have more limitations. Variation isn't as big a deal as many make it out to be, because libraries like DirectX and OpenGL are supposed to take care of that, and do a pretty good job most of the time.
I ain't going to argue your personal experience. My personal experience is that AMD cards are pieces of shite and they have not once worked for me to a respectable level, though I know many who claim the opposite.
By and large these days however, a game comes out, its either crappy on both systems, or working fine on both systems. PC gets ports that aren't as good as they should be, but those are normally from predictable developers like Rocksteady, and usually don't present any real issue outside being unacceptable for a PC game release.
Hardware on both fails, and both have driver/firmware issues and patches that break things. Both cost around the same for similar performance too.
Sure, you might find more examples of bad games on the PC... There's also a lot more games on the PC to choose from. Even in the AAA space games like Diablo III and Sim City were PC exclusive at launch [Not sure if they still are or not].
Point of this whole thing is, the whole point you're trying to make, that consoles are these brilliant stable platforms that just work, and PCs are broken and often buggy, is a farce. Its incorrect. Your experience might be that, mine is the opposite. In the grand scheme of things, both are around equivalent these days, and you really had no reason to start this thread beyond wanting to go out PC bashing because you dislike gaming on the PC. Which is cool, your choice. But the premise of this thread? Disingenuous at best. Things haven't been the way you suggest they are for a long time.