Gadgetory

welcome back to hard Rome boxed a couple of days ago you might have seen my video discussing the best PC games of 2018 and there was some absolute rippers in there including Forks at Horizon for which our community crown as the overall best PC game of the year but while there were lots of enjoyable games released on PC this year there were also a ton of very disappointing games and we're going to go over some of them across five categories in today's video once again we asked the wonderful members of our discord community to chuck up some recommendations and there was an overwhelming number of nominations for one game in particular so let's get into it we're starting off here with the big one the worst PC game released in 2019 now we could go and find some terrible obscure game released onto steam that no one played and declared that the worst game released in 2018 but that doesn't seem right sure there are lots of awful games released every year that no one pays much attention to but to truly earn the crown of the worst PC game of the year it has to be something a lot of people played the overwhelming majority of our community nominated fallout 76 as the worst game of the year and I can't think of a better title to win this coveted award fallout 76 was not just a very disappointing game at launch it was also outright bad a game that really no one asked for or wanted since the game was announced the community has expressed nothing but disappointment that the next fallout title was a weird broken multiplayer cache crap there was perhaps a little bit of hope around launch that it might be a good or interesting game but that was quickly dashed when people actually went and played it for that 76 is bad in a number of ways as a big fan of the Fallout series personally the biggest problem to me is the lack of NPCs which leads the game world empty and devoid of character or life there are enemies around the place you occasionally run to other players or you can play as a group but some of the best parts of previous Fallout titles were the intricate interesting and well-written quest lines none of that is present in 476 this means that when you're exploring the game world you're unlikely to run into any sort of meaningful quests which just makes the game boring on top of that for that 76 looks bad it runs like crap and it's filled with technical issues ranging from broken quests to bugs to network issues and crashes Bethesda's creation engine is one of the worst still in use by a major game studio in 2018 and I reckon a lot of the problems with the game came down to its developers needing to spend a huge amount of time just integrate multiplayer into the engine by all reports this was a massive technical challenge and I wonder how the game would have ended up if the developers spent less time on that and more on actually improving the in-game content I could go on about the problems with for at 76 but the end of the day it was criticized by reviewers it was criticized even more by gamers and it has quickly received price cuts to 2 or this negative feedback plus there was that duffel bag controversy so throw that in there too and for that 76 becomes the deserved winner of worst PC game of the year to be honest parts of Music's could probably take out a number of the categories in this video but when it comes to optimization I think it's just edged out by another highly disappointing game released this year Just Cause for Just Cause 4 sits in a special group of PC games released this year that doesn't run particularly well on PC you can throw for at 76 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey in there as well we've ruled that Assassin's Creed Odyssey though for this award because well perform it sucks some areas of the game do look spectacular and we ruled out for that 76 because it looks like garbage and runs terribly but does run noticeably better than just cause for with jessyca's port you hit with the double whammy of a game that doesn't look amazing but also requires an NVIDIA GeForce r-tx 2080 TI to consistently play above 60 FPS at 1440p while no card we benchmark averaged 60 FPS at 4k to make matters worse some areas of just scores for s graphics have been noticeably downgraded since Just Cause 3 was released back in 2015 particularly the water effects most other aspects to the graphics look the same as well so it's not like just cause for has compromised in some areas to improve others yet Just Cause 3 was playable on a gtx 980ti at 1440p with frame rates over 60fps and it's not like Just Cause 3 was particularly well optimised at the time fast forward to just calls for and that st. GPU is good for just 45 FPS on average at 1440p for very similar visuals I don't think there's any way to describe that sort of result other than a massive fail on the part of Avalanche Studios short it does in the game runs better on consoles with Avalanche doing some work to get there apex game engine running better on a very weak CPU but even then the resolution of the game on consoles is not great and it's clearly come in the expense of PC gamers who Avalanche basically forgot to optimize the game for the state of just goes for on PC in 2018 is simply not good enough and that's why it's taken out our award for worst optimised game of the year there's only one real standout candidate for the worst graphics category and that game is again fallout 76 this is a major triple-a title released in 2018 from one of the world's biggest game studios and publishers yet it looks absolutely terrible as we've mentioned earlier to have his terrible performance to match for that 76 reuses a lot of assets designed for fallout 4 again that came out in 2015 and at the time didn't look all that flash fast forward three years and with very few changes made to the presentation of the game for that 76 looks even worse relative to other games released around the same time some aspects of the lighting system are the only graphical effects that look half decent in the game occasionally you can spot some nice vibrant foliage and volumetric lighting and other times you're left with unimpressive geometry rough textures a poor material surface simulation system terrible shadows lackluster water bad anti-aliasing and Bethesda's typical janky animations this looks like a 5 to 7 year old game visually yet it was released this year on top of that the game is rife with technical issues ranging from launching with the 64 FPS cap which has since been removed but the game still stutters bizarrely above 64 FPS it does not properly support ultra wide monitors some areas of the game like the map inexplicably perform like garbage they've also been widespread reports of crashes and other issues so fall at 76 is a clear winner in two categories this year hopefully with Bethesda's upcoming games they completely rebuilds their game engine from scratch because the creation engine they're using right now is fundamentally broken and flawed at this point worst stability is a little different to the other technical categories we've just been discussing we've talked about the worst optimization or how a game runs relative to its output and about the worst graphics but I've included an extra category here for the game with the worst stability began that crashed the most when we played or simply refused to run for bizarre reasons and that game was Kingdom Come deliverance now this game isn't bad per se in fact I played the entirety of it and quite enjoyed it there's a lot to like about the medieval setting the quest design and the punishing combat system but the game was not shipped in a good state in fact despite the game receiving several patches while I was playing through over the course of a month or two it never seemed to become stable enough for extended periods of game clay instead Kingdom Come deliverance would crash roughly every hour sometimes more often that on my system and it wasn't just me that experienced these issues various forums are filled with reports of just how unstable the game was on PC to make matters worse the game included a highly restrictive save system so when the game did crash you were almost certain to lose a lot of progress this basically force game is to install mods to fix the save system simply so they could save often enough that crashes would have less impact on progress now I'm not 100% sure how the game is holding up these days I've heard there have been even more patches since I last played that have improved the situation but that's not stopping Kingdom Come deliverance from featuring in our worst PC games of 2018 list the simple fact is if a game is buggy broken or unstable when you launch it to the public and begin charging real hard-earned cash that's completely unacceptable game is simply shouldn't have to put up with broken or unfinished products at launch developers should delay the game and get it right before they start selling this last category might sound a bit familiar to our worst game category but hear me out here when 476 was announced a lot of people immediately thought it wouldn't be any good multiplayer fallout built in the creation engine with the same graphics and systems as fallout 4 yeah that pretty much is going to suck as what a lot of people are thinking but I feel another category is appropriate to capture the most dissapointing game of the year the game that looked cool when it was announced the game that was highly anticipated by a lot of people and one that ultimately did not deliver when it was released there were a lot of games that I felt fit this category in 2018 but after discussions with that community the ultimate winner is seeing thieves developed by rare sea of thieves was supposed to be the big Microsoft exclusive game for the first half of 2018 in the announcement footage and subsequent demos it looked very promising you know a cool multiplayer game where you sail around the high seas act like a pirate pillage stuff shoot others with your flintlock pistol and more than water simulations particular were absolutely stunning but on least the games simply lacked content all this talk of a true pirate simulator you can jump into and have fun with friends turn out to be a bit of a bust with almost zero variety to missions or enemies there were always a few questions before launch about you know what you would end up doing in sea of thieves and the developers were a bit cagey about the goals and objectives as if it was you know some big secret for players to uncover but in the end it seems the developers weren't really hiding anything and despite the game being in the works for four years Co Thieves wasn't much fun after the first few hours other games are considered for this category include the remarkably show at Far Cry 5 battlefield 5 that launched effectively unfinished and just calls for but those disappointing of that bunch is definitely sea of Thieves hence it's the deserved winner here and that pretty much wraps up this video overall I think 2018 was a bit of a mixed bag for PC gaming a few great tiles but also a few disappointing ones a lot of these best games turn out to be console exclusives like God of War spider-man and Red Dead Redemption - which as PC gamers can't play unless we also own a console hopefully there's a few more multi-platform winners in 2019 as always you can subscribe for more Hardware on box content because it's supporting us on patreon to get access to our discord and monthly live streams and I'll catch you in the next one