Dark Souls On the PC

[Bravo Company]

wow... a 4670K paired with a 5770?

Talk about a GPU bottleneck....

Yeah, I bought the 4670k at release, and didn't quite have the money to buy a new gpu so I decided to wait for the next series of ati cards to come out. Well, Ati decided to just rebrand their 7k series (the 290(x) is out of my budget). So I'm waiting to see what happens, plus buying a new ati card right now is pretty much impossible. Bitcoin/litecoin miners have the gpu market super inflated and/or completely sold out. Haven't been in the nvidia market, never have used one of their cards and I'm rather happy with ati.

Bethesda games are, if nothing else, not utterly fucking broken at release -- Morrowind and Skyrim were at least enjoyable vanilla.

I didn't buy Dishonored at launch, but that game is perfectly playable and fun in vanilla.

Not quite a game of the elder scrolls magnitude, but a solid Bethesda game none-the-less

 

[Ushiromiya Battler]

The port is a joke, a fan mod fixes it supposedly, but honestly paying for something that's completely shit and only redeemed by a fan mod would just leave a sour taste.

I hope you don't play Bethesda games then, if not you're one hell of a hypocrite.

Bethesda games are, if nothing else, not utterly fucking broken at release -- Morrowind and Skyrim were at least enjoyable vanilla.

There's a difference between not liking a game and the game being a broken badly made port. The Dark Souls port is functionally broken.

No it wasn't, it was pretty much exactly the same game just with GfWL.
At least in Dark Souls I didn't experience random crashes, bugged skills, bugged weapons and corrupted saves.
This port was pretty much done better than any Bethesda game at launch.
So yes, Bethesda games are more often than not utterly fucking broken at release.

Did they make a good port? No, but it wasn't broken, contrary to others beliefs.

EDIT:

[I didn't buy Dishonored at launch, but that game is perfectly playable and fun in vanilla.

Not quite a game of the elder scrolls magnitude, but a solid Bethesda game none-the-less

It wasn't made by Bethesda itself, so less broken.
And yes it was a solid Arkane Studios game, pretty fun too.

 

[Rutabaga_swe]

basically; the port is atrocious. It's a slap in the face to consumers. It's also completely unplayable without a pad. UNPLAYABLE.

It's kinda disingenuous to complain about getting smacked in the face when they only did it cause we asked them to

Ok so here's how i see it, the far more realistic way; with the fan outcry for a PC version they saw a viable market. Hence they made a port. It is a really bad port. I appreciate that they are upfront with the fact that the port is shit, but i'd rather they patch it than apologize.

It was patched, like, within a day. What more do you want? Sure it was done by fans, but the thing is, people who work jobs don't live at their company. It's not their fault people chose to do it for free before they had the chance to get orders from corporate to do it, fix it, pack it and upload it to steam for distribution

Why are you making excuses for bad practices on behalf of a goddamn company? If a fan could crank out a fix in a day, what excuse could the professional programmers at Fromsoft possibly have? Again, i love the game and i still play it, been playing it since the original console release, but as big a fan as i am that doesn't make the PC port magically better.

 

[dyre]

basically; the port is atrocious. It's a slap in the face to consumers. It's also completely unplayable without a pad. UNPLAYABLE.

It's kinda disingenuous to complain about getting smacked in the face when they only did it cause we asked them to

Ok so here's how i see it, the far more realistic way; with the fan outcry for a PC version they saw a viable market. Hence they made a port. It is a really bad port. I appreciate that they are upfront with the fact that the port is shit, but i'd rather they patch it than apologize.

It was patched, like, within a day. What more do you want? Sure it was done by fans, but the thing is, people who work jobs don't live at their company. It's not their fault people chose to do it for free before they had the chance to get orders from corporate to do it, fix it, pack it and upload it to steam for distribution

Why are you making excuses for bad practices on behalf of a goddamn company? If a fan could crank out a fix in a day, what excuse could the professional programmers at Fromsoft possibly have? Again, i love the game and i still play it, been playing it since the original console release, but as big a fan as i am that doesn't make the PC port magically better.

Presumably if they were capable of making a one day fix to make the game vastly more playable, they would have done so, even if only to please their bosses. It's likely they simply didn't know how to do it, nor that it could be done so easily. I'm no expert programmer but that certainly seems to happen to me sometimes. I'll be trying to messing with a logical but incredibly inefficient approach to a problem and then my more skilled friends will show me a vastly easier approach. These Fromsoft guys probably just aren't very experienced at PC ports.

Anyway, the port's okay. Clearly if a one day fix can make the port perfectly playable, then the other elements of it being playable were already in place. I don't know the inner workings of the company; maybe one of their employees was believed to be a PC port expert but really wasn't up to par; maybe they were just lazy or rushed; who knows. In the end, companies fuck up sometimes, even when it comes to really simple shit. Sometimes even a great company with a highly skilled production team, like Toyota, can fuck up on the brakes of one of their flagship cars, despite every effort to make it perfect. We don't know enough to lash out at them.

 

[Rutabaga_swe]

Look if they half-baked the PC port and know it they should charge accordingly but the game came out at a normal price with a butchered port. And you know what, if i knew that Toyota had a car with fucked breaks i wouldn't even sit in that car, let alone buy it. I don't care what excuses they or their fans make, a car with faulty breaks will still kill me even if they have the bestest excuse in the whole wide world and the entire company farts rainbows and candy in my face in all other respects.

You know what? If they don't have people that can handle a PC port, then why don't they just stick a few bucks in the hands of the guy who made the DSfix and incorporate that in to an official patch then? I just don't get this defense force attitude. They fucked up and they should own up to it, and by that i don't mean just saying "oh sorry, we fucked up!" but actually fix it. And again, love the game, been playing it since release and bought it twice so don't think i'm just in here bashing for the sake of it, i just don't think their PC port was handled very well.

 

[Fireaxe]

No it wasn't, it was pretty much exactly the same game just with GfWL.
At least in Dark Souls I didn't experience random crashes, bugged skills, bugged weapons and corrupted saves.
This port was pretty much done better than any Bethesda game at launch.
So yes, Bethesda games are more often than not utterly fucking broken at release.

Did they make a good port? No, but it wasn't broken, contrary to others beliefs.

The only Bethesda game you could call broken at launch was Fallout 3 -- which was probably more due to being tied to Games for Windows Live (a shit patching and launcher system if ever there was one) and was also patched many times to remove quite of a few of the early issues.

Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim all played fine from day one bar an occasional bug, most of which didn't do shit to the game play (oh look a random NPC that nobody gives a shit about has fallen through the floor, what a disaster).

Fact is this: the Dark Souls port always was and continues to be unplayable without fan made mods, it's a joke of a port and the only people who would defend it are fanboys.

 

[spartandude]

I do think the PC version gets a but too much shit thrown at it. It was by no means broken (with the exception of GFWL), but i wasnt a good port. It was equal to the console verions in that it was locked at 30fps 720p, which isnt broken but is just not good enough. And yes they should be ashamed that someone fixed it for free with in a few hours while they couldnt figure it out. But it wasnt broken.
At the very least they it was cheaper and had free dlc.

 

[Rutabaga_swe]

At release Dark Souls was 40 wingwangs on steam. Mind that it was about a year old at that point and there was also a discounted console version of the Prepare to Die edition. For the current asking price of like 15-20 bucks, i think it's ok. 40 though? Not so much. Not for such an awful port. There's just no reason why they couldn't have unlocked resolution and framerate, or configured the controls to be playable with KBM. There's just no excuse.

 

[Rutabaga_swe]

I do think the PC version gets a but too much shit thrown at it. It was by no means broken (with the exception of GFWL), but i wasnt a good port. It was equal to the console verions in that it was locked at 30fps 720p, which isnt broken but is just not good enough. And yes they should be ashamed that someone fixed it for free with in a few hours while they couldnt figure it out. But it wasnt broken.
At the very least they it was cheaper and had free dlc.

Sorry, but did you try playing that shit with KBM straight out of the box? Not broken my ass.

 

[spartandude]

I do think the PC version gets a but too much shit thrown at it. It was by no means broken (with the exception of GFWL), but i wasnt a good port. It was equal to the console verions in that it was locked at 30fps 720p, which isnt broken but is just not good enough. And yes they should be ashamed that someone fixed it for free with in a few hours while they couldnt figure it out. But it wasnt broken.
At the very least they it was cheaper and had free dlc.

Sorry, but did you try playing that shit with KBM straight out of the box? Not broken my ass.

I would agree with you if it didnt say on the Steampage that a controller is "Highly recommended". Again its not great but i don't hold this against the game, most flying games are a pain in the ass with KBM, so are alot of racing games.

 

[Rutabaga_swe]

I do think the PC version gets a but too much shit thrown at it. It was by no means broken (with the exception of GFWL), but i wasnt a good port. It was equal to the console verions in that it was locked at 30fps 720p, which isnt broken but is just not good enough. And yes they should be ashamed that someone fixed it for free with in a few hours while they couldnt figure it out. But it wasnt broken.
At the very least they it was cheaper and had free dlc.

Sorry, but did you try playing that shit with KBM straight out of the box? Not broken my ass.

I would agree with you if it didnt say on the Steampage that a controller is "Highly recommended". Again its not great but i don't hold this against the game, most flying games are a pain in the ass with KBM, so are alot of racing games.

I agree, a lot of games are BETTER with a certain type of controller. I hate playing Tekken on a pad, racing games suck on a keyboard and so forth. But at least they are playable. I can play Tekken on a pad, i might not do as well and i might not like it but the controls work properly. The targeting is such utter twaddle in the vanilla KBM setup that the game is essentially unplayable without a controller. It's not recommended, it's basically mandatory without mods. There is a big difference there i think.

 

[Qvar]

I would agree with you if it didnt say on the Steampage that a controller is "Highly recommended". Again its not great but i don't hold this against the game, most flying games are a pain in the ass with KBM, so are alot of racing games.

Actually they only changed the message to that during the black friday sale. Before that, it always implied that you either had a controller or you couldn't play the game.

 

[Alma Mare]

I do think the PC version gets a but too much shit thrown at it. It was by no means broken (with the exception of GFWL), but i wasnt a good port. It was equal to the console verions in that it was locked at 30fps 720p, which isnt broken but is just not good enough. And yes they should be ashamed that someone fixed it for free with in a few hours while they couldnt figure it out. But it wasnt broken.
At the very least they it was cheaper and had free dlc.

Sorry, but did you try playing that shit with KBM straight out of the box? Not broken my ass.

I did. I play it vanilla to this day, 600 hours on it, NG++++. It plays perfectly. It also could run on a toaster. Once you figure out that mouse movements change the lock-on target and therefore you should be careful when locking on while surrounded, it plays flawlessly.

Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim all played fine from day one bar an occasional bug, most of which didn't do shit to the game play (oh look a random NPC that nobody gives a shit about has fallen through the floor, what a disaster).

Bullshit. Both games crash every 20 minutes if given the chance and half the quests still have bugs that either mess your rewards or simply prevent you from finishing them properly.

Fact is this: the Dark Souls port always was and continues to be perfectly playable without fan made mods, it's a joke of a complain and the only people who would whine about it are entitled chimps without opposable thumbs.

 

[spartandude]

I would agree with you if it didnt say on the Steampage that a controller is "Highly recommended". Again its not great but i don't hold this against the game, most flying games are a pain in the ass with KBM, so are alot of racing games.

Actually they only changed the message to that during the black friday sale. Before that, it always implied that you either had a controller or you couldn't play the game.

Ok, fair enough then. That was really shit of them. I still dont think it was 'broken' but that was really shitty of them to not have that warning up for so long if they new KBM wasnt going to work very well at all, tbh i brought a wired controller just for this game.

 

[Qvar]

Ok, fair enough then. That was really shit of them. I still dont think it was 'broken' but that was really shitty of them to not have that warning up for so long if they new KBM wasnt going to work very well at all, tbh i brought a wired controller just for this game.

Read my message again. Before this Black Friday, it said that you HAD to play it with a controller. Something along the lines of "Warning: You need a controller such as Microsoft Xbox 360 to play this game", not the kind of "you possibly want a controller for this" that displays now.

They've toned it down seeing how the DSMfix is working well for many people if anything. IMO they just didn't intend the game to be played on kb&m and they mad eit clear that people were aware of it, so the blame is hardly on them.

 

[Shim3d]

Yeah it's a bad port, but I'm not surprised as it's a Japanese game and from what I hear they're all about the consoles, but it's not unplayable (as long as you have a controller)
I actually prefer it since once you've modded out the resolution/fps lock and added texture packs it's superior to the console versions (which I assume run at 720p and are locked at either 30 or 60 fps idk). Also I modded my death screen to say "YOU DIED LIKE A *****"

 

[Rutabaga_swe]

Let's all go back and watch some Jimquisition;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QCmHd6DsTg

 

[Alma Mare]

Yeah it's a bad port, but I'm not surprised as it's a Japanese game and from what I hear they're all about the consoles, but it's not unplayable (as long as you have a controller)
I actually prefer it since once you've modded out the resolution/fps lock and added texture packs it's superior to the console versions (which I assume run at 720p and are locked at either 30 or 60 fps idk). Also I modded my death screen to say "YOU DIED LIKE A *****"

"Thanks Obama" has to be the best death screen mod ever.

 

[Bravo Company]

Yeah it's a bad port, but I'm not surprised as it's a Japanese game and from what I hear they're all about the consoles, but it's not unplayable (as long as you have a controller)
I actually prefer it since once you've modded out the resolution/fps lock and added texture packs it's superior to the console versions (which I assume run at 720p and are locked at either 30 or 60 fps idk). Also I modded my death screen to say "YOU DIED LIKE A *****"

"Thanks Obama" has to be the best death screen mod ever.

I must replace every death screen for every game with "Thanks Obama" now

 

[Gitty101]

The best advice I can give you is to download DSfix - it's literally essential to get any performance out of the game on the PC. I'd also highly recommend using a gamepad, the game's mechanics do not translate well over to mouse and keyboard.