LOST IN TRANSLATION

Why is it still difficult to port console games to PC?

- Phil Iwaniuk

If we learned nothing else from Naughty Dog’s PC version of The Last of Us Part 1, we now know that in the year 2023 it’s still eminently possible to mess up a videogame port. We can run the global economy on a decentralised blockchain and climb mountains in photorealistic VR, but good luck getting TLOU to build its shader cache before Steam’s refund window expires.

Prior to that release, you could have been forgiven for thinking the days of borked PC ports were basically behind us. It was absolutely de rigueur throughout the ’90s and ’00s for a critically adored console game to turn up in mangled and mutilated form, and as recently as Dark Souls’ PC arrival in 2012 we were disappointed but far from surprised by a locked 720p resolution and 30fps frame rate.

But things were on the up. Console architecture was coming slightly closer in line with a PC’s componentry ecosystem by the advent of the PS4 and Xbox One, the latter using Microsoft’s DirectX API and both using an eight-core AMD Jaguar APU that bore some similarities to the Ryzen chips found in gaming PCs. And anecdotally, that seemed to be making life easier for the developers of 2013 than it was for their ancestors circa 2003 who were charged with getting the complex infrastructure of lolly sticks and elastic bands inside PS2s and Xboxes to power virtual worlds, and then translate all that over to beige boxes.

MOVING GOALPOSTS