Iron Galaxy cannot be trusted; the failure of their PC ports
- Ryan G
- Apr 30, 2023
- 2 min read
The release of The Last of Us Part 1 on pc was met with almost universal criticism. At the time of it's release, March 28th, the game was slammed with 'mostly negative' reviews. Reviews mentioned crashing, 'PS1' textures, poor cpu/gpu optimization, the list goes on. To the unaware consumer of pc ports, this isn't the first time Iron Galaxy released unoptimized games.
Batman Arkham Knight was ported to the pc in the middle of 2015 and was possibly the most notorious PC port release ever. Some have even compared the release to Battlefield levels of bad quality. (When talking about the game at its release) for starters, the game was capped at 30 FPS at all times with no way to change it. There was a constant motion blur active with no setting to turn it off. The game's settings were limited to only textures and shadow quality with anti-aliasing. The mechanics of the game were also broken as many npcs, missions, and the batmobile were bugged. Fortunately, since the time of release, most issues were addressed and the game is able to run fine now.
Moving onto a more recent PC port developed by Iron Galaxy, Uncharted Legacy of Thieves Collection. Like Arkham Knight, this game was riddled with bugs and graphical errors day one. Now when I say something like poor cpu or gpu optimization, it means that the game uses more cpu power than gpu power. Now, this obviously changes on the fly with loading areas in a game but notoriously, the cpu was almost always taxed at all times when playing the game. To this day, my gpu is still (sometimes) not allocated the correct amount of recourses so my cpu takes the brunt of the blow. Even now, Iron Galaxy have seemingly moved on from this port with the latest patch releasing late December of last year.
Now we move onto the latest of their buggy releases, The Last of Us Part 1. Upon release TLOU was yet again met with universal criticism. Many users have reported crashing to desktop, long shader compilations, buggy textures, and stuttering. Thankfully a new patch was released the 26th of April claiming to have fixed many issues with the game.
Here are some of those patch notes
Optimized CPU and GPU use throughout the game
Fixed a crash that may occur during shader building
Fixed an issue where, on first boot, players may experience longer wait times to load into the game
Fixed an issue where skipping cutscenes during a critical load may cause the game to hang
These are just some of the notes, you can read the full patch here.
I hope that, in time, people start to see the pattern here. While, they have at least done some sort of effort to fix their games, they will still release unfinished games. This may be chalked up to just deadlines but the case still stands. Any time Iron Galaxy is involved in a pc port, you should be skeptical and accept the fact that you may have to wait to play an anticipated pc port.
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