where was the job done well?

There’s nothing more frustrating than a bug-ridden game, but even worse, a title that doesn’t run well for lack of optimization and that you know has no performance issues in a box. of 300 dollars which is almost ten years old. And worst of all, it seems that computer game users are completely sold on the misdeeds of many development studios.

The problem of bugs in PC games is problematic

It must be taken into account that the more complex a video game is, the more failures will eventually occur due to its emergence, which has to do with the interaction of the different elements of the game with each other. A lot of the bugs you see in a lot of games are a product of that and mostly due to a very short period of quality control or not having invested in what is usually called QA, moreover, whoever writes it could be talking about horror stories of code so badly written where the parts of the code that should consume, say a number, 100 in resources take up a million.

On consoles, independent publishers or third parties send the games to the console manufacturer and license them, and if SONY, Nintendo or Microsoft finds that something is not working well or the quality levels are not met, the game just doesn’t come out. The last time this happened was the Cyberpunk 2077 controversy and we’ve already seen what happened. What is the problem on PC? Well we don’t have any of that because we’re no man’s land so we see a lot of garbage that’s not only poorly optimized but also full of bugs and no one takes responsibility for it when it happens product and it is extremely negative for the platform.

The last straw that broke the camel’s back was SONY’s ill-intentioned conversion of its Last of Us so users would get desperate and buy a PS5 instead of upgrading the PC. The reality is that if someone released a game with these conditions on their console, they would reserve the right to veto the release.

On PC, there should be hardware profiles for games

Currently it is possible to create a game for Xbox Series and PC and for both versions to have almost the same code. Of course, if we leave out things like the shaders already compiled for RDNA 2 on both consoles and the reference to specific units not found on computers. Usually, 98% of the source code and 99.9% of the hardware of a game for the Microsoft console are identical.

However, one of the things that makes developing on Xbox easier than developing on PC is profiles. Although Series S and Series X are closed hardware, the era in which almost metal programming no longer exists and is rather a thing of the past and what is done is developed with hardware profiles in mind.

And what do we mean by that? Well, to creating different hardware specs as the scale on which games should be programmed at different resolutions and graphics qualities. Let the end user know that at least if their PC meets these requirements, they will be able to play the game under a number of conditions without worrying about performance.

How would that work?

Very simple, thanks to a benchmark included in DirectX, you can test your PC to find out if it meets the requirements for running games in the different profiles, which will be renewed every two years, with the launch of new generations of graphics. cards. In this way, the material rotations would be perfectly controlled and the dissatisfaction due to poorly made games would be reduced.

Is it possible to do this with a wide variety of materials? Well yes, making every component have an internal score that only hardware makers and Microsoft itself would know about, not game developers. The idea would be to ensure that the game will work and therefore be optimized.

This in turn would require the creation of a certification committee among the developers to ensure that the game would run on all PCs that fit that profile and not only be well optimized, but with as few bugs as possible.