The Problem With Porting Games

Controls and camera angles

Other common complaints about PC ports of console games are the controls and the camera angles. PC gamers expect to be able to play most games smoothly with the keyboard and mouse, and they also expect a first person point of view, rather than a third person or over-the-shoulder view. This contrasts starkly with console games, which generally have to be controlled smoothly by a static gamepad, and often need slightly different camera angles to make this smoother.

With regards to camera angles, Beaver says that it isn't actually a hard job to move a game from a third-person point of view to a first-person point of view, but it's a lot of work if you do it the other way around. “It's always more difficult to go from first-person to third-person,” says Beaver, “because essentially you now have a character that's dragging a balloon behind them, and that balloon is the camera. It can get caught on geometry, and it can snag and get caught up in objects, and that becomes the bigger problem. If you're going from third-person to first-person, that's pretty much a subset of the camera work you already have, so it would be relatively easy on a PC to go straight to first-person perspective.”

So why do so many console ports still have third-person camera angles on the PC versions? Again, this appears to be because the game was designed from the start to incorporate a third-person view, to the point where it's an integral part of the gameplay. In the case of Dead Space, Beaver explains that “it was important that we didn't go to a first-person view on the PC because Isaac [the game character that you play] was our avatar and he was also often a victim of the violence and carnage, and we wanted you to see that”.

Unfortunately, the third-person point of view with changing camera angles doesn't lend itself to playing with a keyboard and mouse, but this is just one area where it's difficult to achieve a balance between different controllers. “Trying to get the controller mapped over to the keyboard or vice versa is almost always where games are going to fall apart when porting over to PC,” admits Beaver.



Visceral wanted Dead Space to closely mirror the gameplay on the consoles in the PC version, and according to Beaver, this meant locking the controls in the PC version. “The UI producer was also in charge of the PC SKU,” says Beaver, “so he was in charge of making sure that the controller mapped well to the keyboard. When he was working on that he found that we couldn't really keep keyboard remapping, which is pretty traditional on games – you can claim whichever keys you want. We had to have a separate keyboard layout in place and lock it in because the controls are very specific, and we had a lot of unique things happening on the controller, and once we mapped them to the PC keyboard they needed to stay in place. But it was very successful so I think it worked.”

Meanwhile, Telltale has taken a slightly different approach to multiple controllers. Making the jump between the PC and the Wii wasn't hard, because the Wii functionally has a cursor, making it practical for point-and-click games such as Sam & Max and Strong Bad. However, a new control system had to be developed for Wallace & Gromit if the games were going to run on the Xbox 360 as well. Telltale's way around this is to develop all its games on the PC first (Bruner says there are no console dev kits at Telltale), but work with multiple controllers in its in-house development software, called Tool.

“When you're working in the Tool on the PC,” says Bruner, “the Tool has an abstract notion of this crazy Frankenstein controller, which has a keyboard, a mouse or two, two analogue joysticks and a bunch of buttons and accelerometers. So, from the Tool's point of view, you can code for all the different inputs that the Tool supports. We're trying to come up with a control scheme that's successful across all platforms. We don't want to end up making two or three different control schemes that we have to get right, as opposed to one that works in a lot of different contexts.”

Getting this balance between three very different styles of controller is hard work, and Bruner admits that Telltale's results so far haven't been perfect. "We haven't been completely successful on all fronts,” says Bruner, “particularly with Wallace & Gromit. We came up with a really nice control scheme for the console, and it didn't work quite as well on the PC, but we already have some new things that we're tinkering with on the PC.”

With their fixed architectures making life easier for testers and game developers, it's easy to see why so many games are developed primarily for consoles. However, it isn't all rosy in the console development camp. Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony can, and do, impose significant limits and rules regarding how developers can use the console hardware.

Richard Carrillo, who was the assistant producer responsible for the development of the PC version of Dead Space, points out that, on a console, “if you touch the memory unit you have to have a message come up, and heaven forbid you touch the Internet. There's also a gigantic proliferation of screens that are needed to tell you exactly what's going on”.

“We have to test for all the compliancy issues,” adds Boz. “Even something as simple as making sure that the X button or A button is Confirm, and that the O button or the B button is Cancel. Plus the Start screen has to be up for so long before the Start button is available for you to press and go on and licensing data has to be on the screen at certain times for specific durations.”

Conclusion

An inherent problem with multi-platform game development is the inevitable tension between the fact that much of the code is ported, whereas the core game itself is always going to be geared towards one platform. Economics dictate this platform will increasingly be a console, so as PC gamers it's likely that we're always going to have to put up with issues such as limited save games and strange camera angles. However, it's often worth persevering with these if the game is good enough to shine through and you should remember that not all multi-platform games are bad. Fallout 3, Call of Duty 4, Mass Effect, Dead Space, Psychonauts and Beyond Good & Evil all appeared on consoles as well as PC, but it's still well worth playing them on the PC because fundamentally, the games are great and the developers took care to make sure the code wasn't compromised.

What's more, PC gamers are now at least being taken seriously by multi-platform developers, and we're now getting a lot more in the way of advanced graphics options. So, the next time you complain about a PC game being a “port”, think about the reasons why the game isn't quite what you expected. Are the camera angles and limited save points really a product of lazy porting, or are they essential parts of the game experience? There's a stereotype that says that PC games should have a first-person view and a fully featured save game system, but there's no reason why you can't make other styles of game work on the PC. Be open-minded – there's a whole new world of fun from all sorts of different games, even if they don't have exactly the same control system as the one you're accustomed to using.

Read more on the games mentioned in this article:

• Dead Space
  
• Red Faction Guerilla
  
• Sam & Max