Capcom pleased a lot of people when they announced that they would be bringing Dead Rising 3, the third entry in the zombie action series that had been released exclusively for Xbox One last November, to PC as well. However, any squeals of delight that there might have been soon turned to baffled groans, as everyone realized that the PC version of the game too would be running on a locked 30 frames per second.
It turns out that there is no real technical reason for this limitation of the PC port- it just appears to be general, characteristic apathy towards PC gaming from the publisher at large. A developer of the game wrote this on NeoGAF:
“The main problem with our engine is that it’s custom and in-house but we don’t have tons of resources (we make only one game series). And DR3 was developed over a generation transition to boot. All those factors together mean that we can get games out the door and design them mostly how we like, but the code incurs technical debt.
So stuff like this happens when something like 60FPS isn’t considered in advance, but the engine is too hard to change– you have to basically rewrite large components, then push out extra QA. I’m guessing the higher-ups don’t think PC is enough of a priority for an expensive drive like that. I’d fix it myself, but I get terrified whenever I get into the entrenched code for the core of anything.”
He maintained that the PC version would nonetheless be the definitive edition of the game, pointing to the simple fact that it will not struggle on PC hardware as it did on the Xbox One hardware- but this is still sure to leave a sour taste in PC gamers’ mouths.
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