One discussion that has been very slowly bubbling up for the last week has been over the video settings, or lack-thereof, in the latest PC games. If there is one thing that really irks PC gamers it is creating a game with consoles in mind first and then poorly porting it over to the PC as an after-thought. Sadly, the latest victim is with what some people often refer to as “advanced video settings”.
I’m sad to report that my latest love-affair, Darksiders II, which is otherwise a fantastic gaming experience overall, is the main culprit of the newest disappointment amongst the PC gaming masses. There is no borderless window, anti-aliasing, low-res textures, lower shadow resolutions, viewing distance sliders, nothing. All you get is V-sync, gamma and the basic resolution adjustment.
This is literally all of the video settings for this game
That’s a downright travesty. There is literally no way to actively adjust the game settings in any way, not even in a configuration file on the backend. Now a lot of options missing from PC video setting screens will fall under the category of “not really that important”, but a lot of this is extremely basic stuff. I’ve said a number of times to friends that I expect borderless windows on every new major game at this point.
I would at least expect a simplistic version of a texture slider. But without any of that I foresee quite a bit of issues with lower-spec PCs. How am I going to run this on my refurbished garage sale laptop running Ubuntu linux now?
Rage was another game to draw PC gamer angst with surprisingly little options on its settings screen
All joking aside, lets face it: PC gamers are not treated the way they once were. If this happened for literally any game back in 2004, it would have been such an uproar that the core gaming masses would have rebuked the game into the ground. This is one subject PC gamers need to actually be very vocal about, because I sense that many developers don’t realize the need for these settings until its really late into development.