Should Critics Take PC Performance Into Account?

There have been a slew of games lately that have had good scores but bad performance. Should critics take this into account when writing their reviews?

It’s a harder question than some might give it credit for. What is bad performance? Since making the switch to PC, one of the things I’ve noticed is that bad performance is one of the most subjective things around. I’ve seen too many people bragging about 4090s before furiously ripping something apart for not running on extreme settings at 4k with raytracing at 120fps. Those are just not attainable goals on the latest games, or on many games with raytracing. The fact you spent so much doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get perfect performance. Those hard-to-reach settings are future proofing, and it shouldn’t be so hard to just turn down a thing or two. Especially when some settings make so little difference to visuals but give a huge hit to performance.

Playing with settings is part of what you do on PC. Most critics probably aren’t sporting the latest and greatest graphics cards. That’s not a problem. The most common cards are still in the 3060/4070 range, and it takes a good while to get better than that. Most critics know they’re going to have to turn down some settings, and that may disguise some of the issues that are reported. And on top of that, there are so many different set-ups in terms of hardware and software, plus setting variation, that there’s a possibility the critic doesn’t see anything but the great game. That’s okay.

But clearly there is an issue here. There are too many examples of critics missing the general feel towards something that doesn’t quite work the way it should. What’s the answer?

Critics Should Be Harder on Performance

We’ve all been there. Back in October of 2010 I have New Vegas an almost perfect score. Some commenters questioned that. “Have you played it?!” Well, I had. I’d played it and I’d fallen in love with it, despite the occasional Deathclaw flying through the sky. That was the extent of my negative experiences, and honestly it was more funny than negative. Games used to be allowed to be a bit janky.

But there’s an area of compromise here. Critics are supposed to represent their audiences. Audiences are increasingly having issues with modern games, for a variety of reasons too complicated for this articles, and they want to know if your 10/10 game will even begin to run on their system. They can wait for the Digital Foundry analysis, but that’s probably overkill for the vast majority of consumers. They just want to know if you had any problems. That’s regardless of promises about day one patches or uncertainty around how prolific a given bug will be.

Over the next few years, I think this area of PC gaming will be a thing of the past. Genuinely. Games are already pretty good at figuring themselves out, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that only got better as the platform continues to grow at rapid pace. That won’t solve people grumpily turning everything up to max, and it won’t stop actual shoddy ports. But it’ll solve part of that equation.

Critics must argue for or against their opinions. That’s the difference between a review and a forum post. Performance increasingly needs to be part of that.