Do you know what's worse than making a bad game? Taking a great game and giving it a s**t port!
Dark Souls is not only one of my favorite PS3 games (yeah I know it's on X360 too) it's probably my favorite all time game if not in the top five. I was ecstatic when I heard one of my favorite game was getting a PC port on Steam. Dark Souls PtDE promised to come with the Artorias the Abysswalker DLC and have all content intact. I got the game when it was on sale and all hopes I had for the port were dashed as soon as I booted up the game. I was confronted with four dreaded words that I never want to see in a game: "Game for Windows LIVE".
For those who don't know GFWL is one of the most irritating and broken pieces of crap you could damn a perfectly good PC game with. I've seen this stamp of death on BioShock 2 and Fallout 3*. Getting games to work with the thing was insane because even if you have a Windows LIVE account and put in the correct details it would constantly fail to log you in. Binding my Windows LIVE account with my Xbox LIVE is a joke too, it's meant to carry over my achievements but it's not like I care anyway. Let me play the game! If you fail to sign in the game
will not save just so Microsoft can twist the knife in the wound. You can set up an offline account, but then you can't access Dark Souls servers and you can't use the online capabilities.
That aside the game essentially needs a game pad due to hilariously crippled mouse and keyboard controls; which just makes me wish I was playing console Dark Souls. Of course the resolution was absolute crap on my 1080p monitor so I go to the options menu and find that
the maximum resolution is 720p! That is not acceptable! My PS3 on HDMI defaults to 1080p! You're telling me the console version is more HD?! Why in the name of Gwyn's giant flaming crank did someone decide to limit the games resolution?! There of course exists an unofficial patch that adds 1080p as an option, but in that case why wasn't it an option to begin with?!
I started playing and started to run into issues with lag, which is to be expected, but the lag seemed to be never ending. Then I found it wasn't a lag problem, the game caps at 60 FPS. Why? Well why does the piece of crap only go up to 720p? I don't know... Another problem was the render distance. One of the cooled Dark Souls features is the ability to see other areas from a long ways away and even being able to spot things like death spots in other zones. Here the render distance is so low I think you had better vision in Silent Hill.
Overall: Prepare to Die didn't port Dark Souls, it neutered it.
*Patch available at the Fallout Nexus for removal of GFWL