5: 'Dark Souls'
The PC port of FromSoftware’s hit title arrived 10 months after its initial launch on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, but fans were disappointed. Just like Deadly Premonition, the game was locked at the 720p resolution, and once again, the modder Durante released a mod, titled “DSfix,” to fix the issue. In addition to allowing users to change the game’s resolution, the mod also improved other visual features such as SSAO, anti-aliasing, and unlocked framerates. In the wake of Durante’s work, other modders created their own solutions to other problems within Dark Souls such as support for keyboard and mouse and a faster connection to multiplayer gameplay. Before you play, be sure to take a look at the many guides available on the Steam Community page so that you can explore the terrifying world without encountering any game-breaking issues.
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4: 'Enslaved: Odyssey to the West'
Like other games on this list, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West suffered from the lack of visual options. In fact, the Display Options menu showed selections only for the overall resolution and gamma. If you wanted to make more graphical changes to the game, you had to find its .ini file. In there, you could adjust multiple aspects of the game’s visuals, such as motion blur, detail, anisotropic filtering, and multisampling. The fact that these weren’t available within the in-game settings is a shame. Some players don’t even know where to find the specific .ini file, but at least members of the Steam community created a helpful guide for newcomers.
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3: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
The game was hit hard with criticism due to, you guessed it, resolution issues as well as audio problems and a control scheme that didn’t translate well to the keyboard and mouse. However, the most glaring problem was that the game was locked at 30 fps. You could download a mod that allowed you set the framerate limit, but a higher cap increased the chances of a crash during gameplay. All of these issues are signs of a sub-optimal port, and it seems that development was rushed in an attempt to keep the game’s popularity at an all time high, at any cost.
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2: 'Watch Dogs'
On the of launch day of Watch Dogs, Ubisoft mentioned that it had some issues with its authentication services. This meant that players had to wait a bit longer before they could play the open-world hacking title. However, others couldn’t even log in to Uplay, the game’s distribution platform on PC, or they encountered issues during the download process. We reported that the gameplay revealed some missing textures throughout the world. Most notably, Aiden’s face was completely black, as if he was wearing a mask. The game also had other issues such as corrupt save files, bugs that made specific missions unplayable, and video glitches on Low and Medium settings. It would be months before a patch would arrive and remedy the problems, but by the time of its release, most fans had moved on to other games.
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1: 'Batman: Arkham Knight'
In collaboration with the Iron Galaxy development team, Rocksteady Games’ Batman: Arkham Knight is at the top of this list because of the fiasco surrounding the PC port at launch and the subsequent patches that did little to alleviate the many performance and graphical shortcomings. On launch day, Rocksteady changed the minimum hardware specs and noted that some AMD cards would have some performance issues. Players then found out that the game had a default framerate cap of 30 fps, but the limit was increased by tinkering with the .ini file. Others also noted that the game suffered from stuttering and overall mediocre performance on high-end GPUs.
The studios released interim patches in an effort to quickly fix these problems, but our own testing showed that these did little to solve performance issues at higher resolutions. Due to the ongoing backlash from fans, WB Games eventually allowed players to ask for refunds, and it also admitted that there were some issues that it couldn’t resolve.
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Cast Your Vote!
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