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Port Reports are a series of quick first impressions of the technical aspects of a PC game. For an up to date account of Splinter Cell: Blacklist’s fixes and improvements, please visit its respective PCGamingWiki article.

 

Now I'm sure no one here needs a background check on Ubisoft, as that alone could take up several pages. We'll just look at Blacklist's predecessor, Conviction for a little foreshadowing and a bit of history (as Ubi's games swing wildly in technological capacity, the previous game would be the best indicator). Conviction was incredibly frustrating, to say the least. It ticked enough boxes to trick you into thinking it was a good port but as soon as you got in game, 98% (not a hyperbole) of people would tank down to 30FPS regardless of everything and anything. And that was the problem. The 2% that did get 60FPS spurred the rest to start committing acts of voodoo on their machines to try and find the secret recipe. Worst part is, the framerate just felt terrible, not like normal 30FPS and I can't put my finger on why. It's not like 30 in other slow paced games, like Hitman: Absolution or ARMA. The question remains, where did it all go wrong?

 

First, it starts of with little things.

Port Reports are a series of quick first impressions of the technical aspects of a PC game. For an up to date account of The Bureau: XCOM Declassified’s fixes and improvements, please visit its respective PCGamingWiki article.

 

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is a port, this is very apparent from the moment you arrive on the menu only to be warned about the game using autosave (a fact that you will be reminded about every time you launch the game) and to see the mouse cursor stuttering along across the screen. The issues, unfortunately, do not end there. The game was tested on an Intel i5-3570K and an AMD 7870 XT GPU.

Port Reports are a series of quick first impressions of the technical aspects of a PC game. For an up to date account of Saints Row IV’s fixes and improvements, please visit its respective PCGamingWiki article.

 

Saints Row 2 was an infamously bad PC port that suffered from random massive frame rate drops, buggy gameplay, frequent crashes, low sound quality and lacked any of the DLC released on Xbox 360. By contrast, Saints Row: The Third was a more well-rounded PC port, although it did not escape its share of issues. This included poor performance on AMD or ATI based systems (somewhat ironic given that the game’s title credits were plastered with the AMD logo).

 

When I approached Saints Row IV, I was slightly fearful that we’d see a return to the game-breaking Saint’s Row 2 bugs – largely because the developers Volition have moved home to Deep Silver, a publisher with a history of producing notoriously buggy PC ports like Dead Island and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. However, many of these fears can be put to rest because the game feels relatively polished – largely thanks to the fact that it uses virtually the same engine as Saints Row: The Third. In fact, they are so similar to each other that they look virtually identical in places, and even the same field of view hacks work in Saint’s Row IV as well.

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