Bad ports don’t necessarily mean bad games, but they’re inexcusable nonetheless. From the lazy to the straight-up weird, poor ports can cost companies a pretty penny in sales and reputation. Below, Twinfinite lists 8 terrible ports that were practically unplayable.
8 Terrible Video Game Ports that Were Practically Unplayable
Dark Souls PC
Back in 2012, gamers were enthralled when news that Dark Souls: Prepare to Die would be coming to PC. After the game reignited popular interest in non-linear storytelling and challenge, fans spitballed about the improvements a PC version would make. Sadly, the port was, at best, shoddy. Even though Dark Souls didn’t exactly run perfectly on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 – Blighttown was plain nasty to wade through – the PC port made those versions look pristine.
Having performance and graphical drawbacks in every possible way, the version was made salvageable by a fan-made patch which cleaned up its horrid framerate issues. Mainly due to the efforts of the game’s player-versus-player community, the title enjoyed a healthy number of players on Steam for the following years. Despite all of the FPS, durability issues, and miscellaneous bugs, the port stayed popular. Dark Souls on PC was a rare case of a terrible port being saved by the quality of its contents.
FromSoftware and Bandai Namco never really learned from this affair, though, with 2018’s Switch port being less than admirable. It was better than the PC port, but, well, that wasn’t hard.