2022 was a rough year for PC ports. Between stuttering performance issues and infuriating user experience problems, I was almost broken as a reviewer for Digital Foundry. To start the year with a fresh slate, I thought it would be a good idea to put together a checklist of sorts for best practises in creating a PC port. In generating this list of dos and don’ts, I’ve called on my experience reviewing hundreds of titles across my four years at Digital Foundry.
The list is definitely not exhaustive as I am trying to focus on the important core aspects of a PC port. There are plenty of other best practises I can suggest beyond this – no launchers from within launchers, for example. No sign-ins to other online platforms to launch a game on Steam would be another. I’d also like to see some kind of industry-wide standardisation in presenting recommended specs that actually informs the prospective buyer of the kind of system they’ll need to run the game well – the current system is meaningless without the context of resolution and performance expectations. Clearly, there’s a lot to address – but my focus here is simply in delivering a strong, competent PC port.
Some of my suggestions are more technically rigorous, others are low hanging fruit: but most importantly all of them are feasible and I have examples to back them up. I’d also recommend watching the video – when everything comes together in a well-deployed PC port, it’s like poetry. The Days Gone settings menu is astonishingly good, for example. But for our first point, we’ll kick off with the big one.
