Why does it always feel like the PC version was handed off to the intern five minutes before launch?
Remember when Arkham Knight came out on PC? Sixty quid for a PowerPoint presentation. It chugged like a Victorian steam engine and crashed harder than Batman’s emotional stability. They pulled it from sale for months. Months. Not because of one issue, because of all of them. Broken performance, stuttering cutscenes, locked frame rate, unresponsive controls. The works.
And that was a major release. Big budget. Big team. They still screwed it.
You’d think something like that would’ve been a turning point. A moment where publishers stopped treating the PC version like an afterthought. But no. They kept doing it. They still do. The Last of Us Part I got a PC port and immediately became a glitch museum. Puddles that stretched across entire maps. Characters with eyeballs floating outside their heads. You’d think it was a horror mod.
The issue isn’t just that some ports are bad. It’s that we expect them to be. You go into a new release already checking for hotfixes and community workarounds. You read the patch notes like you’re scanning a crime scene.
Some of the problems are always the same:
- Mouse acceleration you can’t disable.
- Menus that still say “Press X to Start.”
- Broken fullscreen modes.
- Settings that don’t stick.
- Frame rate tied to physics.
- Keybinds locked because someone forgot what a keyboard is.
You spend the first hour trying to make the game work before you even get to play it. And most of the time, the fixes come from the community. Some random on NexusMods will fix the controls in twenty minutes while the official team posts a tweet saying “We hear you.”
If you’re lucky, the devs eventually patch it. But even then, the bar is set low. They don’t fix it to a good standard. They fix it enough that people stop complaining. And if they don’t? They move on and blame “platform challenges.”
No other platform gets treated like this. Nobody ships a console version that fails to launch or has broken controls. PC players, though? We’re supposed to expect it. We’re meant to be grateful when the game even runs.
And sure, sometimes the ports are good. Doom Eternal ran like a dream. Monster Hunter: World improved with time. There are a few outliers. But they shouldn’t feel like miracles. They should be the standard.
The real issue is effort. Or the lack of it. They build the game for one machine, and then act shocked when it doesn’t translate. It’s not even about optimisation. It’s about giving a damn.
These days, when I see “Also available on PC,” I flinch. Because it doesn’t mean I get the best version. It means I’m about to be a beta tester. Again.
Which broken port made you swear off pre-orders?
