I just bought 3 games on Steam from the Square enix sale
Sleeping Dogs
Kane & Lynch
Kane & Lynch 2
This isn't an isolated thing for me, or something that has just happened to me on my current computer. and plenty of games play fine for me (recently Arkham Origins, Tekken 7 and Dead by Daylight) But a game just downloading and running for me is absolutely hit and miss. compared to on console where I've never had an issue.
I'm not someone that will try and convince you that PC gaming is as simple as console gaming - for the amount of options it gives you,
it can't be. While your experience is unfortunate, and I hope you find a solution, I also don't think it's typical.
Some games do have problems, but if it's happening frequently and across many different games, it generally points to hardware issues - whether it's faulty, or has been overclocked without proper testing methods being carried out to ensure that it's stable.
I downloaded all three of these games from Steam to test, and both
Sleeping Dogs and
Kane & Lynch 2 ran without a hitch. Didn't have to do anything, and
Sleeping Dogs supports 21:9 out of the box. None of the crashes you described.
Kane & Lynch 1 required that I drop in a fix for it being a GFWL game, and then it ran without issue.
A config tweak later, and it was
running in ultrawide on my monitor rather than 16:9. Less than five minutes of work for a game that's 6-8 hours long, and this is on a fully updated version of Windows 10.
I know that "works fine for me" is not really a helpful statement, but it's just never been typical for me that games randomly crash all the time or won't start like that. I'd never game on PC if that was a frequent occurrence.
The main thing I would say is that if you want the least amount of headaches it's generally best to stick with NVIDIA GPUs, but games still shouldn't be crashing all the time.
But you illustrate an issue which some people ignore--all of those games work right now with minimal effort on console. And by minimal, I mean, put in disc/start game, update and play. The fact that you can't universally do that for every PC title, or that you need different logins is ultimately what holds it back from being more widespread here.
It's easy if you have an Xbox One and the games you want to play are on the backwards compatibility list. You can't play PS3 games on PS4 at all.
And aside from minor enhancements from the backwards compatibility, they basically play the same as they did on the 360 at release.
It's typically less than ten minutes of work to get most games up and running to a modern standard (1440p, 4K, ultrawide if possible etc.) in large part thanks to sites like
PC Gaming Wiki and
WSGF.
In less than five minutes of work I had
Kane & Lynch up and running at 3440x1440 @ 100 FPS. Play it on Xbox One and you'll get something like 720p30 upscaled. (but now with 16x AF and triple buffering)
I do understand that some people really don't have an extra 5-10 minutes to spend, or just want to play a game without doing anything else first, but it's generally not a complicated process and once it's done you don't have to do anything more for that game again.
Getting some older games working is a lot more involved, but it's still rare that it's more than ten minutes of work, and the point is that you
can get them working on a modern PC - usually with much higher performance and image quality than when they were new.
I can still play games that I bought 25+ years ago on a PC that I built this year.
With consoles, you mostly need to rely on old hardware and converters and the end result is not as good as it was back in the day - or you end up having to buy it again if the game was re-released.
I had a PS3 back in 2006 but if I bought a PS4 today I wouldn't be able to play any of the games I bought for it on PSN - and many of those like
Outrun and
Afterburner are unlikely to ever see a re-release due to licensing issues.
Since backwards compatibility is not a general-purpose emulator, it's unlikely that
Outrun or
Afterburner will be added to the Xbox One's backwards compatibility either.
Ah yes, good to see the GFWL is dead myth is alive and well.
GFWL marketplace is dead, GFWL isn't.
Though true, it is a lot more reliable to just bypass GFWL than get it running on Windows 10. Invasive DRM hurting the experience of paying customers as usual.
This thread title reminded me about my visit in the Forza 7 demo thread, where people started posting .ini settings and such.
It's rare, but some ports are completely messed up, and
Forza 7 is one of them. It is
extremely rare for a "bad port" on PC to end up worse than the console version of a game though.
Forza almost seems like sabotage, since the original Xbox One hardware has no problem running the game locked to 60 FPS, but I would assume that
Hanlon's razor applies, since this is the third time they've had that problem and did largely fix things for
Horizon 3 in a recent patch.
The thing is, if a console version of a game runs badly, you generally have no recourse. That's just how the game is. I've seen a lot of people complaining about how poorly
Observer runs on console recently for example.
Things are changing a bit with the PS4 Pro/XB1X, but generally you don't have the option of revisiting a game a few years later with faster hardware and running it with much better performance and image quality than you had previously, and with consoles the games do still require a patch from developers for full support of the new hardware.
