Why are there so many infamously bad Windows PC ports?

>>11862832 (OP)
Just spotted this on /g/, thanks for spreading my webm friend

>zoomers just realizing that consoles had better 3d hardware than pc until the mid 2000s

Vista games aren't retro

>>11863048
That’s not what this is you stupid fucking asshole.

>>11863057
>THAT'S NOT WHAT THIS IS
>video is clearly a graphical comparison

>>11863059
A shitty 2007 (late 2000's) port of an original Xbox game has nothing to do with whatever the fuck you were talking about.

>>11863059
It's a bad port with numerous broken effects that was rushed out at the beginning of the 7th gen to promote Windows Vista. It has absolutely nothing to do with Xbox having more powerful hardware than PC's of the time, which is obviously not true at all.

>released in 2007
>that means it was made in 1 day in 2007
>ignore the fact that it was announced in 2002

>>11863048
>until the mid 2000s
damn I wonder when Halo 2 for Vista came out?

>>11862832 (OP)
>posts one of the worst ones as if they were all like that

>>11863048
>-oomerposter not understanding the topic at hand
Many such cases.

>adapt game made for a platform with consistent hardware to a platform with wildly varying hardware
>it isn't exactly the same
w-whoa...

>>11862832 (OP)
Lazy devs. Computers can recreate any effect a console can make. At anytime in the pc vs console race, PC was always capable of recreating any console game. It's a dev skill * production cost/production timeframe equation

>>11863073
>ignore the fact that it was announced in 2002
Wut? Halo 2 Vista was announced in 2006.

>>11862832 (OP)

Ports to PC before the plug and play era were always a bit hit and miss, as there was little consistency in hardware and drivers, meaning it was difficult to predict how your game would turn out on one of 1000 different hardware combinations.

Better ports included:
Final Fantasy VII
Tomb Raider
Wipeout
Shadows of the Empire
Resident Evil 2
Psychonauts

And then post 2008 when every console basically became a gaming PC, multiplats were the norm.

Halo though was a rushed job.

>>11862832 (OP)
You still get this shit to this day. Just, incompetence trying to manage to get some DirectX / PowerPC shit over onto modern hardware without compromises. Sometimes it's budgetary, the port team(s) may have been strung together and improvised, or they outsourced it to save on manpower and cash; other times you get shit from the following generations that intentionally had their PC settings toned down on their ass ports so they didn't outshine the "need" to buy the games on console instead. And sometimes you just straight up had fucking morons.

The 90's had great PC ports
The 00's is when everyone gave up on PC

>>11862832 (OP)
PC GPUs haven't had any worthwhile new features for a decade, but from 2000-2010 we went through like 3 different shader pipelines and 3 major releases of direct X.

PC gaming changed fast and often.

>>11863320
What are you talking about?
There was a fuck ton of crappy arcade DOS ports.

>>11862832 (OP)
PS2 and PC had rather different hardware. As a result, when making ports, they turned off all effects, and the games looked like shit as result. E.g., take Vice City where they removed trails, similar thing with San Andreas.
Halo is unexcusable though, but I assume it was just a rushed shitty port made on a $100 budget in a month.

>>11862832 (OP)
PCs in the early-mid 2000s had radically different hardware from consoles other than the OG Xbox, and there was a huge rift between the capabilities of low-end and high-end hardware. Intel graphics back then didn't even support goddamn Hardware T&L.
There also wasn't a concerted effort to turn PCs into a streamlined, console-like platform until Steam got popular, and that was met with resistance at first. There was GFWL too, which everyone hated.
There's a bunch of factors, but I think it's easy for people to forget how terrible most early-mid 2000s PC hardware was since games like Doom 3, Half Life 2, and Far Cry existed.

Tomb Raider series: all better on PC
Resident Evil 1-2-3: all better on PC
Dino Crisis 1-2: all better on PC
Final Fantasy 7-8: better on PC
Mega Man X3-4: better on PC (zero loading times or input lag)
Alone in the Dark A New Nightmare: better on PC

That's without mentionning another plethora of multi plats that were also better on PC. Even Turok 1-2 were better on PC.

Have you ever seen a PCfag laugh at consolefags for having a shitty version of Doom, Carmageddon or Command & Conquer? Of course not, it's always the contrary that happens for some reasons... the reason being the trendy "retro gaming" hobby is all about consoles so they feel the need to dismiss what they don't know to reassure themselves that they're not missing out. It's basically a form of console war faggotry.

>>11863424
>Final Fantasy 7-8: better on PC
no

>>11863424
>MegaMan X3 on PC
Ishygddt

>>11863048
Then how come PC's had better 3D hardware even as early as 1978? I'm confused.

>>11863048
Then how come PC's had better hardware even as early as 1978? I'm confused.

>>11863097
>FF7
>Better ports

>Shadows are big blobs instead of gradients
>Lower battle framerate than PS1
>Fucking PC MIDI tracks instead of the original PS1 synths.

>>11862832 (OP)
Back in the day (2000s) many PC ports were lazy low-budget efforts done by a B-team or outsourced to some third-party small company.
Consoles were at their strongest at that time.
PC ports in the 90s were okay/good.
I think the PC market also changed, in the 90s you had to be able to afford a computer. In the 2000s more people could afford one and the market got more casualized. In the same way you had so many shovelware console games that ran on Renderware in the 2000s. I think many devs didn't care.

>>11862832 (OP)
PC used different hardware and software compared to consoles. That's it really, wouldn't be until the HD era when game development tools became a lot more ubiquitous and cross-compatibility between platforms became the standard.

Devs were told not to give a shit about PC, back then the attitude was "You're lucky we even bothered giving you fags a PC version".

>>11862832 (OP)
AAA came completely focused on consoles during the release of the Xbox, because Microsoft forced all the PC devs onto the Xbox.
This attitude still goes on today in the AAA space. If it weren't for Steam PC gaming would still be dead.

>>11863783
Steam didn't save shit except indie slops
MMO's are what saved PC gaming, when MMO's exploded in popularity during the 00's it brought a lot of people and money to the PC gaming market
this new growing market was exploited by greedy developers porting their shitty console slops to PC and evnetually it lead to PC gaming domination
hell even mobile gaming (which deader than PC during the 00's) BTFO consoles now thanxs to online and gacha slops

>>11862832 (OP)
They're mostly from that era, there was a mess of APIs out there, controller support was an inconsistent disaster, not to mention the games were often originally developed for the PS2 which had quite a different architecture than an x86 PC.

>>11863861
Steam is literally the only reason AAA devs even acknowledge the PC.

>>11863048
That's backwards. PCs had the technological advantage over consoles since 3D accelerators (some will even say earlier than that because of Doom), and since then console-to-PC ports were notorious for being technologically backwards, reviewers often complaining about shit like being locked to 480p when 1280x1024 was commonplace. This only stopped a problem in mid-2000s, because in PS360 generation consoles took the market lead and became the focus of developers.

>>11863680

I think that all depends what system you played it on, and therein lies the problem.

mind the majority of pc gamers couldn't even run games like that either...tho most retro PC gamers will lie and pretend the high end was in any way representative of the platform of course.

>>11862832 (OP)
PS2 had hardware that let you do shit like real-time framebuffer effects at virtually no performance cost. This just straight up wasn't possible on PCs, so implementing those same effects on PC (or Xbox) required re-engineering them from scratch and often devs just didn't bother to try doing it at all.
Xbox GPU was based on a Geforce 3, which had a few specific tricks like W-buffers that while also available on PC only ever worked on a few series of Geforce cards. This is why Splinter Cell 1 has such fucked up shadows on modern hardware, and why the initial release of MGS2 on PC didn't run on ATI cards at all. So for the sake of compatibility, sometimes devs again just skipped implementing these features entirely resulting in missing effects on PC.

>>11863097
Halo 2 was. Halo 1 on PC was pretty sick, it added weapons, added the banshee to multiplayer, and was made well before vista so they couldn't force upgrades to an abysmal OS to play it. Wee babbs who hated the strength of the pistol absolutely despised that version.

>>11863887
>Steam is literally the only reason AAA devs even acknowledge the PC.
Because in the age of digital content distribution, it is the biggest market they have.

>>11863935
Only the sound part, and the midis are missing channels so they never sound as good.
The framerate is baked in, though the battle framerate isn't lower, the menu framerate is.
You can see the ugly shadows in any modern port, as they are all based on the PC version.
Also they added silly mouths.

>>11862832 (OP)
was this a "jumping the shark" moment? chief had no guarantee his plan would work, it just did. he could've jettisoned the empty bomb alone, but somehow by holding onto it, he can steer it into a covenant ship?

>>11866496
>was this a "jumping the shark" moment?
no it was iconic and cool

>>11863959
This post will probably be ignored, but the actual reason is right here. Lazy b-teams doing the ports can't be bothered getting graphical effects working on wildly different architectures. Same reason that the xbox has a few inferior ports of PS2 games despite being massively more powerful.

>>11866496
hell no, it was used as a teaser two years before Halo 2 came out although the graphics were prerendered and MC flew outta the air lock without a bomb

>>11867000
There's another version of this cutscene where it was based on an early engine of Halo 2 where it used stencil shadows like Doom 3.

>>11862832 (OP)
Lighting didn't translate well
Happens with a lot of console ports

>>11863959
Kinda weird to see a post like this on here. I know a guy who worked on the PS2 and he mentioned some crazy stuff they did abusing this hardware quirk

>>11862832 (OP)
This is bullshit, it didn't look nearly that good on Vista at release.

>>11862832 (OP)
>Why are there so infamously bad ports?
Maybe it's time to remember some of the atrocities committed to PC games on their way to consoles. Quit being a disingenuous retard.

H2 Vista was a great port if you take away GFWL. It ran at 60FPS. CE port was the real abomination.

>>11863424
I liked AITD New Nightmare and the higher res character models and framerate are great on PC, but the music is terrible compared to the PS1 version. I dont know if its because it made use of midi soundcards from that era or not, but something was up on the GOG port at least.

>>11867415
>It ran at 60FPS
Not on any PC that had Halo CE's recommended specs. Same engine, ported from the same console, same target framerate, yet worse optimisation.

Has Project Cartographer fixed the issues like the MC collection did?

Capcom had some consistently awful PC ports back in the 00s.

>>11867496
I'm not sure. They did do some crazy stuff like restoring splitscreen, which even MCC doesn't have on PC.

>>11867496
>>11867552
QRD on Project Cartographer

>>11862832 (OP)
coz porting games is difficult and usually severely under budgeted

>>11862832 (OP)
Because PC Gaming was seen as a niche side thing mostly just for FPS and flash games and wasn't seen as a serious primary gaming platform up until like 2009.

>>11869001
Not true pre-2000. Microsoft intentionally killed PC gaming because it competed with the Xbox, then Valve came in and grabbed all the money they left on the table. The PC use to have gigantic budget AAA exclusives that could only run on their hardware and Microsoft left a huge black hole.

>>11867554
Project Cartographer is a modification for Halo 2 V (the original Vista disc release) that restores online play and adds additional features that are not present in the base game

>>11862832 (OP)
Complete anarchy in game development, we got proper controller support only after xinput introduction

>>11867537
They all were bad - MGS1-2, FF8, Resident Evil... they were done very cheaply by some barely competent contractors just to see if PC market was worth it.

>>11862832 (OP)
because your shitpost webm is showing a game that was designed for console first?
and ports were mostly done by idiot 3rd parties?

>>11867537
most nippons have been crap at porting their games to PC since forever....

>>11870984
MGS1-2 and RE1-3 ports were fine.

No, I don't care if there is a small graphical effect missing.

>>11870063
WoW, Crysis and Oblivion happened in less than 2 years and made people look back at PC, but hardware then became a issue because Nvidia and ATI, then CPU's with Pentium 4's being garbage and AMD's own AthlonXP, 64 and Dual Core dancing on top of Intel's incompetence til they managed to make the first gen C2D and C4's.
Which also brought another problem because said games above were made in a period devs thought that CPU Clocks would rise even more and not become dual or quad cores, and the reason of why those games have some notorious issues til this day related to CPU performance.

>>11870984
Resident Evil 1 was done by Westwood

>>11867537
what's wrong with their ports?

piracy and low sales

>>11871127
They are less than ports, more like custom emulators with hardcoded settings for almost everything, They are technically run, but with vertex jitter and missing effects, with a configuration menu that runs separately

>>11863048
Not really, PCs were already faster when 3DFX, NVIDIA and ATI GPUs started hitting the mass market in the late 90s, the issue is that most PC didn't have 3D accelerators so PC game makers couldn't make having a GPU a requirement.

>>11871738
>PC game makers couldn't make having a GPU a requirement.
Pretty much this, if a studio took the risk back in 1998 and made their game with a Pentium 2 and Voodoo 2 as requirements, it would have mogged all consoles in the market including the N64 and in higher resolution (240p vs 480p).

>>11871130
Piracy doesn’t affect game sales

>>11871738
The problem was more that direct X and their drivers barely functioned in the late 90s.Unless you owned one of the exact cars the game was tested on the odds were it was not going to work.

>>11871807
The only resolutions that mattered were 640x480
800x600
and 1024x768
>>11871807
>the N64
A complete irrelevance for adult gamers who had PCs and PS1s

>>11871058
Consoles also started using multicores , IIRC even before gaming PCs used them, and dumb devs got confused about how to use them which caused many console games to have poor performance.
It's not just a problem for PCs.

>>11863680
>>Fucking PC MIDI tracks instead of the original PS1 synths.
MIDI tracks are superior if you had a soundcard and some high-def soundfonts. i never got the stupid hatred for MIDI. even today, MIDI is superior with the right software synth; don't even need a soundcard anymore.

>>11866494
>silly mouths
that i never knew.

>>11862832 (OP)
don't care, Master Chief Collection is great

>>11862832 (OP)
Devs didn't put effort into porting a lot of their games