Videogames really end whenever you stop playing them. If you love them, maybe that's after New Game + or a replay with every character option. If you hate them, maybe that's after half an hour of frustration and a checkpoint that's on the wrong side of an unskippable cutscene. That's how it should be anyway, but sometimes we just have to see the credits of a game we're not enjoying, whether out of sheer bloody-mindedness, or because we're reviewing it and feel obliged to, or we just have to know how bad it can really get.

Hate's a strong word to use, especially for a videogame. And yet, sometimes they really do shit us to tears. This week's PCG Q&A asks the question: What game did you finish despite hating every minute of it?

Samuel Roberts: Final Fantasy XIII-2

I finally beat this Square Enix RPG last weekend, after reaching the game's finale (and one of the many endings) when I reviewed it back in 2015. Hot damn, I did not like the last few hours of that game. I went to one area to grind for hours, then returned to the final stage, overcame some terrible platforming puzzles and killed the same boss four times. There are some clever systems in FFXIII-2, like the ability to level up monsters and have them fight alongside you, a little like Pokemon. But past a certain point, the game is all busywork. It's all collectables, experience points and backtracking. I wanted it to be over so bad, and now realise why it took me over three years to return to the damn game.

Now I'm deliberating whether I want to put myself through Lightning Returns, the final game of the trilogy. The problem with XIII-2 is its characters aren't endearing to me in the way that FFX's or XV's are. This was like playing bad anime. It wasn't all bad by any means, but the finale tested my patience.

Phil Savage: Kane & Lynch 2

OK, maybe I didn't hate every minute of it. In fact, I enjoyed IO's second Kane & Lynch for its first half an hour, thanks almost entirely to its distinct presentation. Pretty soon, though, I was just hate-playing—sticking around in the vague hope that it did anything worthwhile. It did not. My overriding memory of the game was an endless procession of cover shooting, with no pacing or variety or anything to hold your interest. Just hours of crouching behind walls, shooting people, broken up only by the occasional cutscene in which the two protagonists shout at each other. The very best thing about Kane & Lynch 2 is that it's only four hours long, and so at least the misery didn't persist for long.

There remains a dedicated cadre of game critics—Andy Kelly is one of them—convinced that Kane & Lynch 2 is good. And, assuming they're not just having a mass hallucination, maybe there's something I'm just not getting about four hours of shooting a gun and nothing else. At least there was a happy end: IO returned to Hitman, which was good.

Tom Senior: Warhammer 40,000 Gladius—Relics of War

If I hate a game I never tend to finish it unless, of course, I'm reviewing it. The last review I remember turning into a grueling slog was Warhammer 40,000 Gladius—Relics of War, a well-meaning attempt to turn the Warhammer 40K universe into a 4X strategy game. You do technically explore, expand, exploit and exterminate, but the combat focus was a poor fit for a hex-based game lacking in tactical depth. The units have stat differences, technically, but that didn't seem to translate into any meaningful battlefield dilemmas. I was just shepherding dozens of units around the map hex by hex, turn by turn, and any fun I was having in the beginning faded into a haze of repetitive drudgery. In the end, I was pretty happy to get it off my hard drive.

Jarred Walton: The Crew 2

I don't normally play games that I'm not enjoying, but after doing the performance analysis of The Crew 2 and ranting about the idiocy of framerate caps, rubberbanding, and social networking as a type of point system, I kept playing it. The driving mechanics are okay I guess, once you get used to them, but in general there are just so many things I didn't like. And the storyline was like a really bad movie where I couldn't stop watching, and every time I'd lead in a race only to be passed near the finish because of a small driving error, I'd yell at my PC and at the developers. The ending was as meaningless as I'd expected. "Hooray, you're the king of Motor City, USA" or something trite like that.

Probably the real impetus for my continued play was my 8-year-old son, who wanted me to unlock all the ultimate vehicles—especially the helicopter. Then he was very upset that I couldn't use the helicopter in any races, or upgrade its components. Get used to disappointment, son. Especially in mediocre games.

Jody Macgregor: VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action

Even with the undocumented feature that lets you use keyboard instead of mouse controls, the bartending is boring. I could be generous and assume it's supposed to be, as a comment on how routine bar work is, but I don't feel generous because I didn't like the rest of the game any better—not the characters, or the writing. I stuck with it because people recommended it to me and I didn't want to let them down, but VA-11 Hall-A was really not for me. 

The Final Fantasy XIII trilogy is a bizarre series of games, with each sequel clearly fashioned around the reactions of its fanbase. Final Fantasy XIII, which I reviewed last year, was a cloyingly linear affair with a brilliant combat system—by contrast, direct sequel Final Fantasy XIII-2, released on consoles in early 2012, is so freeform in structure that it s sometimes hard to keep up with what you re supposed to be doing. While it s a better game for the most part, it comes with a whole host of new problems, and is almost as bad a port as its predecessor.

Set a few years after Final Fantasy XIII, Lightning, the moody hero of that game, has vanished into the realm of Valhalla, which in this game is famed for its spiky-haired rulers and prolonged QTE sequences. It s up to her sister, the impractically-dressed FFXIII supporting character Serah and a displaced Valhalla native called Noel Kreiss (a straight-to-DVD Squall with the dumbest name ever) to look for her. Instead of XIII s near-endless shiny corridors, an initially confusing time travel concept guides XIII-2 s structure.

Opening a time gate (sigh) in the first region of the game opens up the Historia Crux, a menu screen which lets you select which environment you d like to go next and tells you what year it ll be when you get there, sort of like a halfway point between a timeline and a fast travel screen. Environments tend to appear more than once in different timeframes, separated by up to hundreds of years, and story beats frequently rely on you going backwards and forwards between familiar places to mess with cause and effect.

It comes with a whole host of new problems, and is almost as bad a port as its predecessor.

It s a refreshing but convoluted structure. Usually your progress is slowed down by needing to obtain an item or two from another part of the timeline, and it s hard to catalogue exactly what s going on in your quest line—it wouldn t hurt to have a button that prompts a go here next, genius message. When you re progressing at a decent pace, poking through new time periods, fighting giant bosses, exploring big environments and quickly figuring out where to go next, XIII-2 is classic Final Fantasy and deserves to be lauded as such. But then there are big stretches with unskippable battles and dreadful 90s-era switch puzzles that expose a developer that s blatantly out of its depth. XIII-2 is one of the weirdest Final Fantasy sequels—it feels like a team trying to give their audience what they think they want and only half getting it right.

I would say you need a pre-existing history with Final Fantasy XIII before you even consider buying XIII-2, whether you liked it or hated it. The story is truly awful, far worse than XIII s, with interminable cutscenes and two lame protagonists that never feel like leads in the way that Lightning did in XIII, or indeed Cloud and Squall did in the earlier titles. Noel is a walking and talking spiky-haired nothing in big pants, while Serah is so boringly polite that she almost makes a case for why every Final Fantasy hero needs to be a miserable and broken human being (yay RPGs!). While I never enjoyed the story of XIII-2, which piles on new characters without any effort to create emotional investment in them, the tone of the world is really laid back and pleasant, particularly in the first half of the story. Towns, explorable environments and interactive NPCs all return to the series, having been nixed by XIII, and they re all welcome staples.

There are some obvious improvements to the pacing, too. Unlike XIII, which holds your hand through the first ten hours as it tediously explains how the battle system and progression work, XIII-2 gives you the ability to start levelling up each of your character s job roles right away. The combat, which automates your party s attacks as you tactically change their job roles in battle on the fly, is functionally identical to XIII s. Instead of a third party member to battle alongside Serah and Noel, players deploy monsters into their party as allies that have their own classes and attacks. You can even team up with the series signature giant bird, the Chocobo, as it mauls creatures in the face with its mighty beak. It s no deeper than a bit of menu management, but it offers lots of flexibility in battle strategies.

It s a shame that with this excellent combat system comes some really bad examples of quest design. Chasing after sheep to collect wool marks a low point, and one asshole near the start of the game asks Serah and Noel to transcend time and space to fetch his niece a flower that only grows in the winter—I had to complete the former, but the latter is such an obviously tedious bit of filler that I didn t bother. A weak story means that most of the quests lack a bit of energy.

Further problems stem from rough stabs at variety that do not pay off. Intrusive boss fight QTEs, which were on their way out of mainstream games when XIII-2 originally released on consoles in 2012, are now so oddly dated that they ve become gaming s Ugg boots or Timberlake trilbies. One poorly-judged and irritating platforming sequence near the story s denouement feels like it belongs to a different game entirely, while the newly added dialogue options are an entirely pointless concession to the success of contemporary Western RPGs that only highlight the bad dialogue.

There are further caveats with this port, too. Unlike XIII s original 720p-locked release, XIII-2 does have a bare minimum range of visual options: resolution settings, anti-aliasing and shadow resolutions. The obvious unaddressed problem is framerate. It s a little cheeky that the Steam page boasts about 60fps when achieving that is so infrequent on even a moderate rig. I d say XIII-2 is playable on my GTX 780-equipped home PC, but annoyingly slow on my mid-ranged PC at work, regularly dropping down to around 20fps at 1050p with mid-level anti-aliasing and shadow settings. Durante s assessment covers the issues with this port in-depth, but for those seeking out the definitive version of XIII-2, this really doesn t feel like it.

XIII-2 is a complicated and inconsistent sequel, then, and one I can only recommend to a subsection of the series audience. It is better than XIII. This fixes a lot of its predecessor s structural problems, focusing on the airtight combat and sensibly dialling up the exploration, but tries its hand at a bunch of new ideas that entirely fail. This feels like a game crafted around a survey of unhappy fans and, as such, is one of the oddest Final Fantasy entries to date.

Each week PC Gamer s writers stumble out of the snow, gather by the fire, and recount tales of the horrors they ve seen. (Plus some nice stuff.)

THE HIGHS

Samuel Roberts: Metal Gear rocks on PC This week I saw Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes running at 4K on Andy Kelly s PC, while he was reviewing the excellent port for us. Look, the framerate might ve been a bit rubbish running on his GTX 970, but just for the detail on Snake and the weather effects it was worth it. Konami s price point for the game at $20/ 17 was very well-judged, I think, and to sell Ground Zeroes for even less as part of the opening of the Steam sale is even better. I picked up Ground Zeroes and Revengeance for under $20 this week. If this is Konami s way of doubling down on its commitment to PC, I commend them. A fantastic port, and the promise of The Phantom Pain next year—all we need now is a simultaneous release with the console versions, as well as ports of the older games, and Metal Gear s home will be on PC from now on. 

Chris Livingston: Farming Stimulator While I suspect Facebook won't buy it for $2 billion, it's still nice to see another niche gaming gizmo appear: plans for a Farming Simulator controller are in the works. It'll feature a steering wheel-turning knob and a side panel with a loader control stick and programmable buttons. Some virtual farmers out there are going to be very excited.

As a fan of oddball sim games, I hope to see more speciality controllers in the future. I definitely could have used a specialized controller when I pretended to be a San Francisco bus driver, maybe something with a ticket dispenser built into the dash and a defogger switch. When I was a tow truck driver it would have been nice to have had a controller with a few levers on it, or at least a dedicated switch for calling my insurance agent. And, when I made the poor decision to to run a circus, I definitely could have used a custom controller with a single button that read "Do Not Run A Circus" on it. Coulda pressed it immediately and played something else.

Wes Fenlon: Durante rules on Final Fantasy XIII Whenever I can get Durante to lend his expert analysis to PC Gamer, I consider it a good week. I loved his critique of Final Fantasy XIII and XIII-2, because it highlighted the performance issues of the ports and actually explained what causes those issues. His analysis of Dark Souls 2 earlier this year explained why that game was a great PC port, and it warmed my heart to see From Software learn so much, and so quickly, after the first terrible Dark Souls port. The FFXIII games perform more poorly than Dark Souls 2, and offer far fewer options.

I hope that by pointing out these issues, publishers like Square Enix will see that PC players care about options and performance and expect a certain level of quality that's worth investing a bit more time and effort to achieve. Valkyria Chronicles outperformed Sega's expectations in just a few days on Steam, and you can bet it wouldn't have sold as well if it hadn't been a fantastic PC port.

Andy Chalk: Larian Goes to Canada Larian Studios dropped some unexpected news on Thursday: It's opening a new office in Quebec City. That's a big step for a small studio from Belgium, but one it's able, and in a way forced, to take thanks to the success of Divinity: Original Sin. The hit RPG was an ambitious undertaking but studio boss Swen Vincke has his sights set even higher, saying in a blog post that his goal is to create increasingly "dense, highly interactive worlds" that offer a level of freedom approaching that of pencil-and-paper RPGs.

I've been a Larian fan for years, and so I can't help but feel some amount of sympathetic trepidation at the prospect of such a big, bold move. But I also admire Vincke's determination to seize the opportunity that's presented itself, and to be perfectly honest I love the whole "little guy wins big" angle of its success. Larian is my kind of studio, making my kind of game, so it's exciting on a personal level to see that resonate with such a large audience.

Tom Marks: They see Notch rollin , they hatin I don t care what any of you think, all y all are haters anyway. When I heard that Notch, creator of Minecraft and newly made billionaire after selling to Microsoft, had bought a $70 million dollar mansion in Beverly Hills out from under Jay-Z and Beyonce I was absolutely ecstatic. That s incredible. That s the most amazing and hilarious piece of news I ve possibly ever heard. Who cares if it s over-priced, over-sized, and overseas? The dude has $1.7 billion dollars and, until this moment, has been nothing but humble.

Ok, technically it s $1.63 billion now, but even when he was only a plain ol multimillionaire he wasn t flaunting it. Just look at his rig from four months ago. Notch bottled lightning with the success of Minecraft, and then made all the right decisions to keep that success rolling. He made his own fortune and has actively tried to stay out of the limelight since.

He s only a celebrity because the internet liked him and the character they made him out to be. I, for one, wish him very well and hope he s happy in his giant mansion with his giant candy wall. Do I hope uses some of that money for good? Sure, but it s his money and nobody is allowed to judge him for what he spends it on. Also, now that he s in LA, I am eagerly awaiting Notch photo bombing the paparazzi and the surely inevitable reality show. 

Tim Clark: Is this seat taken? Hopefully you ve been enjoying the hardware guides we ve been posting since the site relaunched. There are plenty more planned for the new year, including some substantial rig-building stuff. In the meantime, though, I ve been testing chairs for a couple of weeks. We ve written about standing desks and why sitting can be pretty bad for you recently, but I ll be damned if my butt is going to go unsupported by conventional furniture. So I ve been looking for the best chairs at a variety of prices, with an emphasis on comfort and support over extended sessions. (Though do try to have an hourly stretch. Yes, yes, I know, I m not the boss of you…) So far one seat feels close to revelatory. Which is to say my back no longer hurts like Satan is trying to insert a USB stick into my spine the wrong way up. The full results will be published in mid-January, but I think it s safe to say the chair isn t over yet.

THE LOWS

Chris Livingston: Witcher switcher In regards to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, CD Projekt Red made an announcement this week about a new playable character, Ciri, which is great news: she looks and sounds like a badass. Still, every time I think about the series, I get focused on the one thing that makes me less interested in playing it: you can't design your own personal version of Geralt. We've heard that you can style his hair and beard a bit in Wild Hunt, but that's not nearly enough for my tastes. Not nearly!

Am I just spoiled by the character customization in other RPGs, like your Dragon Ages and your Elder Scrolls and your Mass Effectseses? Maybe. But being able to put your own personal stamp on your character's looks is an important aspect in role-playing, in my mind nearly as important as tailoring their skills and abilities. I wish The Witcher would finally get on board. On board!

Samuel Roberts: A port in a storm I love Durante s ongoing port analysis work for PCG. This week he took a look at the release for Final Fantasy XIII-2 and the updates made for FFXIII that enabled some pretty basic graphics options, and it s as I suspected—even with the improvements in visuals, the framerates continue to disappoint. Here s why that sucks from my perspective: when I reviewed FFXIII and gave it a fair and low score, I penalised it due to the quality of the port. I want Square Enix to keep releasing Final Fantasy games on PC—but I want them to be better than the console versions, not worse. The Final Fantasy XIII trilogy can t be played on PS4 and Xbox One so these console versions will only collect dust, but on PC they will be around forever. So why not release ports that can stand the test of time? I get the sense the improvements made to the visual options are a gesture of wanting to get things right, but there s still some way to go.

Andy Chalk: Assassin s Creed: Unity patch delayed It's easy for me to be dismissive of the Assassin's Creed: Unity debacle because I don't actually play it, but the delay of the fourth patch to the troubled game earlier this week was infuriating. Not because of the extra wait—bravo to Ubisoft for not shoving something out the door solely to meet an arbitrary deadline—but because of the statement that led into it: "Rigorous quality control is of paramount importance to us, and your feedback over these past weeks has indicated that it is important to you as well."

It is perhaps the most contemptibly ridiculous thing the publisher could have said at that particular moment in time. If 2014 has taught us anything, it's that quality control is most assuredly not of "paramount importance" to Ubisoft; Unity is obviously the poster child of a launch gone wrong but Watch Dogs, Far Cry 4, and The Crew—that is to say, just about every major game it released this year—suffered from a varying amounts of damaging bugs. We all fall into slumps now and then, and maybe Ubisoft's annus horribilis was just a (long) streak of (incredibly) bad luck. But telling the world how committed you are to quality control when you're struggling to fix the patch to fix the game that's still a mess after three prior patches doesn't make you look conscientious. It makes you look silly.

Wes Fenlon: Sportsfriends, minus Bach Sportsfriends was supposed to arrive on the PC aaaages ago, but it's just squeaking onto the 2014 calendar with a release today. Now we know at least one partial reason for the delay: despite their best efforts, the developers haven't been able to get Johann Sebastian Joust's PlayStation Move controllers to work on the PC. And, according to the devs, they'll never be able to. On the bright side, Joust works on Linux and OS X, which is as good an argument for SteamOS as I've heard yet. But it's a shame that one of the highlights of a really unique local multiplayer package won't be available to the majority of PC players. Ah, well. There's always Hokra.

Tom Marks: Boldy too scared to go I want to play Elite: Dangerous. I really do. I want to get completely sucked into that universe, make my way through the stars, and learn to master the controls of my ship. But I am too scared to do it. Elite just seems so big and imposing that I feel like I d never be able to get a foothold. Its scope is both exciting and intimidating. I d love to take part in that experience, and I don t think I d be bad at it, but there s something about knowing the first 20 hours of a game are going to be learning the basics that scares me away.

I m probably painting the experience with too broad a brush, and I m honestly a little bit ashamed for not steeling myself and diving headfirst into Elite. I ve been watching livestreams of other people playing and it looks simple, but then I ask myself how long it took that person to make it seem easy? Why are they doing that thing they chose to do over any of the other countless options they have? Where would I even begin? I don t doubt Elite will envelop me eventually, but it might take easing into it with my friends to not startle me away.

Tim Clark: Haters The whole now you see it, now you don t… Oh, huh, it s back saga that went on with Hatred on Greenlight this week felt like an unedifying episode for Steam. I also suspect it only stores up a problem for Valve further down the line. Someone initially decided the game s content crossed the lines of taste and decency, and therefore had no place on the service, but later that same day the civilian slaughter sim received a reprieve, seemingly after an intervention from Gabe Newell himself.

My read on this is that Valve doesn t want to position itself as moral arbiters of what s acceptable in terms of violence. Presumably so long as the material doesn t breach any laws, the firm is willing to host it. But isn t it odd, then, to be coy about sexual content? I imagine the developers of the (not especially sexy) intercourse- em-up Seduce Me, which was pulled from Greenlight in 2012, would have something to say.

As for Hatred, I m not sure refusing to host it would have qualified as censorship, as the angrier commenters immediately claimed. Running a publishing platform doesn t oblige you to provide a home for every game in existence, much in the same way as deciding to throw a party doesn t mean you re obliged to invite the neighbourhood nutcase. (Related: I haven t been invited to *any* parties this holiday. QQ.)

I think the real issue, for Valve, is that the idea of taking a zero touch approach to this stuff isn t tenable. It s easy to come up with increasingly extreme game concepts until you arrive at one which no company would rightly want to be associated with distributing. What we saw this week was Valve struggling to decide where that line is going to fall. (Aside: Just me, or does the animation in Hatred actually look quite slick? Pity whoever s doing that couldn t have found something, y know, not vile to work on.)

Peter "Durante" Thoman is the creator of PC downsampling tool GeDoSaTo and the modder behind Dark Soul's DSfix. He's previously analyzed the PC ports of Dark Souls II and Valkyria Chronicles for PC Gamer.

When Square-Enix announced ports of all three Final Fantasy XIII games (XIII, XIII-2 and Lightning Returns) to PC this September, it came as a surprise. The last Final Fantasy released on PC excluding a few recent mobile ports—was Final Fantasy 8 in 1999. Would XIII s port be any good? Square Enix promised support for a 60 fps framerate, but those mobile ports, like Final Fantasy III, haven t exactly been promising. Sure enough, when Final Fantasy XIII was released on PC in October, it was limited to 720p and had other performance issues.

Since then, Square Enix promised to patch XIII and to support various resolution options at 60 fps with XIII-2, released on December 11. This article will investigate the quality of XIII-2 s port and Final Fantasy XIII, devoting particular attention to the controversial performance impact of the December patch.

The state of Final Fantasy XIII pre-patch

At release, everyone skeptical of Square Enix s PC ports would be proven right. Final Fantasy XIII was locked at a 1280x720 rendering resolution, with no graphical options at all to speak of. Interestingly enough, the game also defaulted to using 4xMSAA, but more on that later.

Soon after release, I stepped in and provided a GeDoSaTo plugin which enabled support for arbitrary rendering resolutions.

The screenshot above was taken right after I first got arbitrary rendering resolution support to work. I continued extending the plugin to add support for higher-resolution shadows (you can see how necessary that is on Lightning s arm and face in the shot above), higher levels of anti-aliasing and forced anisotropic filtering for UI elements.

What I could not fix was unstable performance and hiccups down from 60 FPS down to 30 on many systems. My current working theory is that this is related to the engine trying to perform some kind of frame pacing, but without access to the source code that is hard to ascertain.

The graphics options of FFXIII and FFXIII-2

After a few weeks of silence, Square-Enix announced that they would provide a patch adding graphic options to FFXIII, and that FFXIII-2 was to offer those options at release already. The resulting launcher screen is shown below. As both games ended up with the same options, I ll simply show examples from FFXIII-2.

Resolution lists everything your system supports, shadow resolution goes from 512 to 8192 , and anti-aliasing starts at 2x (due to the way the game renders transparency e.g. on hair, no AA at all is not supported) and goes up to 16x. If this selection of graphics options sounds familiar to you, that feeling is no surprise: with the exception of the missing anisotropic filtering, it s the same selection as that offered by my GeDoSaTo plugin. Not only that, but both games even feature the same bug when rendering at 2560x1440 which occurred with GeDoSaTo. If you have a monitor of that native size, your best option is to apply at least some downsampling, either using your driver facilities or GeDoSaTo.

To be clear, I m not complaining about this selection of options, or about taking inspiration from my work—that s great. But with the relative luxury of source code access making more comprehensive changes much easier to accomplish, and professionals working on the game, wouldn t it be nice to go beyond that?

Regardless of the provenance of these options, the real question is how effective they are. Let s have a closer look.

Shadow resolution

The shadow resolution setting affects the resolution of real-time rendered character shadows. The following image shows a comparison between the moderate 1024x1024 and maximum 8192x8192 settings.

Shadows are notably more detailed, but more importantly—and sadly not visible in the image—they are far more stable in motion. However, the implementation of shadow resolution increases is somewhat half-baked. Using higher resolution shadows results in increasingly harder shadow boundaries, as the soft shadow filter is not being adjusted to match. Therefore, I d suggest using a resolution in the 2048 to 4096 range.

Anti-aliasing

While the settings screen shows a range of 2x to 16x MSAA , what is actually on offer at the higher levels is CSAA—understandable, as no hardware exists which actually supports 16xMSAA. In any case, it is extremely important in this context to note that unlike the vast majority of higher-end games over the past half-decade at least, Final Fantasy XIII and XIII-2 are pure forward renderers. What this means is that, unlike in most recent games which opt for deferred shading in order to support modern post-processing effects and a large number of lights more easily, hardware MSAA is both effective and relatively cheap in terms of performance.

If you look at the comparison image above at full resolution, you can easily see the difference between the two settings. Two types of objects are particularly affected by the AA level:

• High-contrast edges at an angle close to vertical/horizontal, for example the horizontal edge between the wood and the white area in the image. With 2xMSAA, there is only one intermediate (grey) step in the staircase, while 16xCSAA is perfectly smooth.
• Transparent objects such as hair. The FFXIII engine uses a so-called alpha-to-coverage technique to render such transparencies, which render them with less flickering and more detail with larger sampling counts. This is particularly apparent in motion.

Due to the relatively low performance impact and significant image quality advantages, I d suggest using the highest quality anti-aliasing option supported by your hardware in these games.

On the next page: analyzing the performance of Final Fantasy XIII-2 and the FFXIII patch.

Performance analysis

Final Fantasy XIII s performance has been a hotly discussed topic since its release. While the game is not particularly demanding in terms of hardware and can be rendered at high resolutions even on modest systems, many players experience frame rate stutter and drops below 60 FPS directly to 30 FPS in various circumstances, seemingly unrelated to hardware capabilities. As I explained earlier, I believe this problem to be related to the engine trying to perform some frame pacing on its own (and mostly achieving the opposite).

Some expected the patch to improve this situation, but reports since its release have been mixed. Some claim that it fixed or at least mitigated the issues, while others feel that performance actually decreased. I don t believe in feelings when it comes to quantifiable data, so I performed a rather extensive set of benchmarks to find out exactly what is going on.

Performance impact of the FFXIII patch

I chose three locations in the game to benchmark both pre- and post-patch, each representing a different gameplay scenario:

• Chapter 1: Into The Vestige—Skybridge 103: Exploration with lots of NPCs in a narrow corridor, running the full length up and down once.
• Chapter 6: Sun-dappled Flight—Sun-dappled Trail: Running up to and fighting the first party of enemies to completion.
• Chapter 10: What Fal cie want—The Fifth Ark-Upper Traverse: Running up to the first cutscene, that scene, and roughly 15 seconds of battle.

I measured each of these scenes using the new performance tracing functionality of GeDoSaTo, twice pre-patch and twice post-patch. As there are some random factors (especially in battle), the individual runs are not 100% equivalent, but the variation between each set of two runs was less than 4% in all metrics.

The columns in the table above with the delta ( ) symbol represent the interval between consecutive frames in milliseconds.

As the summary in the table above indicates, there is no statistically significant difference in performance before and after the patch in any of the scenes I tested. As such, I believe it can be stated with confidence that there were no performance changes one way or the other introduced by the patch at all. To further solidify this point, the following chart illustrates the frametimes of the chapter 10 measurement sequence in patched and unpatched state:

The two spikes above 33ms happen at the start of the cutscene and the start of the post-cutscene battle, respectively. As we can see, not only is the overall performance incredibly similar (showing a distinct switching pattern between ~16 and ~33ms frame times, thus 60 and 30 FPS), even the individual spikes during exploration and the cutscene are a rather close match. This continues throughout the opening part of the battle, diverging a bit later on due to battle randomness.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 performance

Sadly, FFXIII-2 suffers from the same performance pattern that we could observe in its predecessor. The engine still seems to be dead-set on providing either roughly 16ms or 33ms frame time intervals, and jumping between them from time to time. However, in my testing so far, the overall performance is a lot more stable than for FFXIII. The following chart contains frame time traces for an exploration and a battle sequence, and the game achieved an average of ~58 FPS during each of them. However, this average does not fully capture the repeated spikes to 33 ms frametimes, which prevent smooth-feeling gameplay:

One positive aspect regarding both games performance is that—in my experience—they never drop below 30 FPS, outside of the occasional loading of battles or cutscenes. And those cases usually occur during a black screen transition and therefore aren t noticeable. The same is true for the few spikes up to 50ms visible in the frame time plot.

Therefore, by using an external tool such as the GPU driver to limit the framerate to 30 FPS, a very consistent experience can be achieved—and for people who are less affected by the occasional drop, the 60 FPS support should at least be usable in FFXIII-2.

Controls, audio and tweaking

Both FFXIII and FFXIII-2 support keyboard and mouse controls. These can be remapped, and while the button prompts don t switch automatically between controller and keyboard, there is an option for it in the menu. Though these controls work well enough, this is not a case of, say, Valkyria Chronicles, where the inherent nature of the game made them preferable to a controller.

In terms of audio, FFXIII-2 seems to be affected by a bug related to the number of audio channels offered by your driver and sound hardware. On my system, I ve observed the following:

• 2 channels (stereo): everything works fine
• 4 channels: some voices and sound effects come from the entirely wrong direction
• 6 channels: everything works fine again
• 8 channels: consistent white noise from some channels drives you crazy

As such, at least until/unless this issue is patched, you should probably set your audio driver to either 2 or 6 channels, and let it up/down-mix to your actual hardware configuration.

Finally, the most applicable external tweaks to perform on the game are forcing anisotropic filtering, which I d consider essential, and—if you value consistent performance—lock the framerate to 30FPS using a tool like Nvida Inspector or Rivatuner Statistics Server. My preference would of course be to also use GeDoSaTo in order to get image quality to the best standard afforded by your hardware via downsampling, and take some HuD-less screenshots of the games beautiful locales.

Conclusions

With the release of Final Fantasy XIII-2 and the patch to its predecessor, Square-Enix delivered exactly what they said they would—graphics options—but no more than that. The intermittent performance stutters remain unsolved, and the selection of options only covers the bare minimum.

Personally, I find it both flattering and somewhat worrying that the graphics options they did decide to include match the ones I implemented (by means of an unauthorized interception method without any access to the game s source code, and within a couple dozen or so hours of hobbyist work) so closely. Is there really no interest in the company to give a single graphics programmer a month or so to develop some highly meaningful features, such as better shadow filtering or a higher quality depth of field implementation? Perhaps fix whatever causes the engine hiccups?

It s a shame to see such an incredibly beautiful game world with so much effort put into its art assets neglected to this extent. Of course, the situation now is already vastly better than the locked 720p without any options offered at release, and these are obviously the best versions of each game to play by a huge margin, but much more could be achieved with a bit more focused effort.

Square Enix announced earlier this month that Final Fantasy XIII-2 is coming to Steam in December. Today the publisher expanded on that news a bit by revealing that the game will boast PC-specific visual options and nearly all of the DLC released for the console versions of the game.

"Licensing and contractual restrictions" mean that not all of the DLC created for Final Fantasy XIII-2 can be put on the PC, now or in the future. But everything that can be will be bundled with the game, and it's an impressive list:

Coliseum Battles

• Omega (from Final Fantasy V)
• Gilgamesh (from Final Fantasy V)
• Ultros & Typhon (from Final Fantasy VI)
• PuPu (from Final Fantasy VIII)
• Lightning & Lieutenant Amodar (from Final Fantasy XIII)
• PSICOM officer Jihl Nabaat (from Final Fantasy XIII)

Outfits for Serah

• Summoner s Garb
• Beachwear
• White Mage

Outfits for Noel

• Battle Attire
• Spacetime Guardian
• Black Mage

Outfits for Mog

• A Wondrous Wardrobe

Scenarios/Story DLC

• Sazh: Heads or Tails?
• Lightning: Requiem of the Goddess
• Snow: Perpetual Battlefield

According to Square Enix, the PC edition of Final Fantasy XIII-2 will run at 60 fps, offer selectable resolutions including 720p and 1080p, and support both English and Japanese voices with subtitles. It certainly sounds like it's getting more pre-release love than its predecessor,the less-than-spectacular FFXIII. Final Fantasy XIII-2 hits steam on December 11.