January 18, 2010

poor porting

I had almost abandoned Dead Space to my "so frustrated I will never play it again, let alone finish it" bin, which due to it being a digital download from Steam, simply meant it would drop off my Favorites list...

Then I fired it back up yesterday for one quick go. I was amazed at how utterly terrible the interface felt, not believing I'd endured several hours of it previously. It was worse than I remembered. "There's no way this is proper." I said to myself. Perhaps it needed to be played with a gamepad (due to poor control scheme porting), like a GTA game (driving a car with the mouse? Ha!) or Ghostbusters.

Nope, it just needed vSync turned off. Load times went from 30+ seconds to near instantaneous. All moving and aiming sluggishness and acceleration problems disappeared. Suddenly, the game was fun.

How could such a critical flag be:

  • Implemented poorly
  • and Exposed to the user for configuration
  • and Defaulted to "on"

    ??

    Granted, vSync is a standard graphical flag, but never have I seen it impose such a drastic penalty on all aspects of a game by being on. 2000% longer load times? How does it even factor in to that???

    Posted by blaine at 20:59 (-06:00)
  • Comments

    I had the exact same issue. It's a very atmospheric game, but that VSync bug? Fail.

    Posted by: Mike at 19 January 2010 10:27 (-06:00)

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