Or in other words, old man yells at cloud. Don’t take this too seriously, I don’t want to offend anyone.
I was recently watching some FF7 Remake / Rebirth technical analysis videos on Youtube, and while I can respect the persons who are doing and sharing these kind of analyses (it is valuable work!), the crowd (i.e. comment section) seems so… Spoiled, to me.
Of course with newer tech we should expect improvements in quality and performance, but the way I see it as a 40+ year old gamer, is that games have always had performance issues. Maybe developers are always too ambitious on whatever is currently possible? idk.
Of course I’m biased. I’ve always played (AAA) games several years after release, as I’ve never had the resources to invest to current gen tech. And I’ve always been satisfied, and I’ve had fun. People have complained forever about Bloodborne being 30 fps, but I’m still happily playing it in 2026 because it’s a freaking great game.
I don’t really know what I’m saying, this is just me rambling… Like for example in the FF7R, if you find 5 textures in a game that are a bit wonky on the resolution side in a 30-60 hour game, that doesn’t warrant complaining or being bitter about it. It seems like anything that isn’t flawless or perfect gets a ton of hate almost like, and it’s so weird to me. A millisecond of stutter here or there doesn’t either.
This ended up being kinda poorly written, I had more in mind when I started writing but I already forgot a lot what I wanted to say. But you get the gist? Anyone else feel like this?
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There was a window of time in the mid 2010’s, around the peak of Unreal 4’s ubiquity, where you could crank games to Ultra settings and not even have to think about it. No time spent experimenting, tweaking individual sliders or toggles, nothing.
PC hardware was relatively cheap, the consoles were powerful, and games still looked amazing, for a good 5-8 years. A generation of players came of age during this time without ever having to learn the vital skills of 1) tempering expectations and 2) tweaking settings. So they now see ANY friction, ANY dropped frames, ANY need to mess with settings, as a personal sleight. The PS5’s “Performance vs Quality” toggles are the ONLY thing they’ll tolerate now.
The worst of us have been like that for ages.
I never monitor my fps. I literally do not care unless it drops to like 20. It’s a game and I’m used to them running at 30.
When Crimson Desert launched, the sub for it was absolutely raided by kids crying that they weren’t getting 60fps every second they played and no joke-
I saw screenshots of dips as low as mid 50’s. No joke, theere were people demanding refunds and sharing methods on how to successfully get them knowing that a dip in fps wasn’t an acceptable reason.
Essentially, they all helped one another lie to get their money back because they lost 10 fos every now and again.
It’s fucking pathetic. Between this spoiled-ass’d shit and their obsessive need to have others validate them- they’re fucking ruining games.
One change I’ve noticed is that while 3D games have always had performance issues, games of the past almost always had graphics settings that allowed the player to overcome those issues by giving up some effects/fidelity/detail. Modern games usually still have settings, but more and more often, those settings don’t make much difference in responsiveness or frame rate.
It feels like some modern developers have given up spending time on optimization, instead expecting players to use upscaling, which in my experience is not a good substitute.
the Genesis/Mega Drive Super Hang-On port runs at a staggering 15 frames per second. when someone else manages to make a game as good as that, we can worry about a 16th frame
Bloodborne’s got an unofficial PC port now. Playing it at 60+ FPS is a night and day difference. Helps a ton with reaction time.
Yeah … up to a point, at least, FPS really does make a performance difference.
I used to think it didn’t. But then I came back to one of my favorite old games now on a rig that can play it at 4k 60fps … and the difference is tangible. I was finally able to 100% the game, beating the toughest levels on the highest, most absurd difficulty settings … and I didn’t even really find it that difficult. I’d been playing the same game for years and years on my other computer with lower resolution and lower FPS, and I never came close to being able to complete those toughest challenges. But a hardware upgrade let me actually complete it for the first time ever. And now I’m a believer, at least to a point.
I’m still pretty sure it’s a very ‘diminishing returns’ type situation when you get much above 60fps, though. At some point, increases in computer performance are going to translate less and less to increases in player performance.
Yeah I don’t mean that there isn’t a difference. I just feel like it’s weird that people are saying that it’s (been for the past decade) unplayable @ 30 fps.
If it only was 30 fps, it would’ve been ok. I still played it and enjoyed it despite that but many areas were painful to navigate with the combination of blur and sub-25fps
The thing is those games could very well run much better (and often will after they’ve been patched a few times) there’s just an over reliance on dlss-style upscaling to cover up performance issues, coupled with games being patchable post launch meaning games are pushed out before they’re ready. This has been made worse by the more recent practice of laying of the entire dev team if the game doesn’t sell well which meaning those patches will never come. Add to that the current astronomical prices of building a top-end system further necessitating the need for optimization and people have quite a few reasons to complain.
I also put the blame on developers focusing on the console version first, then just porting that to a PC version as little more than an afterthought. Often, the game could work far, far better on PC if they’d made it for PC in the first place.
I understand why they do it. They want to reach the largest market possible, and the performance gap means it’s possible do console --> PC port with minimal changes, but doing a PC --> console port would require a massive effort in optimization to get it to run smoothly on the limited console hardware. But I do wish they’d spend a little more effort optimizing things for PC.
That isn’t exactly new though, they’ve been doing that forever. In addition, though consoles are now much closer to computers architecture-wise but developing for console means only supporting a handful of configurations which still makes it much easier.
Yeah I feel this, but I don’t think it’s bad; I want new games to be such a high bar that it’s raised peoples’ expectations, because I get to play those games too. I can still go back and play FF8 and Nox and even Pax Imperia, but I don’t need kids to be able to appreciate those games, those are my nostalgia-bong hits. If they’re all clamoring for GTA6 graphics, it doesn’t detract from my old games.
That’s a good point, thanks for pointing it out.
Yes we are. Because we have options and they’re not good enough.
That wouldn’t be “spoiled”, that would be (rightfully) “entitled”.
I don’t mean to disrespect, but if no game from this smorgasbord of games available today is not good enough, should you be playing at all? :D Like, are you enjoying games if they’re not good enough? I admit that it’s good to always strive for better, but at this point if no game is good enough from a performance point it just seems like kinda weird to be playing at all.
