Increasing file sizes and glitches galore at launch: Are modern games overlooking optimisation for the visual spectacle

Games like Wuchang: Fallen Feathers show how poorly optimised launches remain a major issue. From bugs and glitches to heavy file sizes, unpolished releases waste power, time, and money. Better optimisation could improve play, reduce energy costs, and ensure sustainable gaming

At the end of last month, I was trying to review 505 Games’ Action Role Playing Game Wuchang Fallen Feathers on my PC. My first few hours with the game were extremely challenging as there were several bugs and glitches.

I encountered everything from frame drops and input delays to issues with camera movement. Realising that the game wasn’t in a playable or reviewable state, I quickly moved to find another, but the entire incident got me thinking about how poorly modern games are often optimised.

Lots of reviewers have written reams about the challenges of playing games that haven’t been optimised, like Cyberpunk 2077, Battlefield 2042, or even Sony’s attempts at adapting their first-party games like The Last of Us or God of War: Ragnarok for PC.

It is difficult to understand how games which have been made available for sale and have gone through exclusive porting cycles struggle to be playable on launch day, especially given the price point and the buzz surrounding the launch.

Common sense would dictate that wasting such a moment is a strong no-no, but as is increasingly the case, most games are at their best only a month or two after their launch.

For example, in the case of Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, the game has received five updates since its launch on the 23rd of July. Despite all the updates, players in the community feel that they have been unable to fix all the issues.

Returning to the issue at hand, a poorly optimised game not only offers a shoddy play experience but also consumes more power (electric and computational) and overloads gaming hardware in counterproductive ways. I witnessed the challenges firsthand with both Cyberpunk 2077 in late 2020 and when The Last of Us was ported to PC. Secondly, for players, poor optimisation also brings data and internet bandwidth challenges.

Poor optimisation isn’t something that only plagues broken games; it is also visible in games that work smoothly, whether in the form of superfluous hi-res textures and assets or the efforts of an overzealous design team pursuing visual fidelity that is extraneous to the core experience.

At a time when we are beginning to discuss the need to make games sustainably and to think of the environmental costs of gaming as a practice, it is paramount that we put good game optimisation at the top of our agenda. By reducing install file sizes and the internet requirements of software patches by even 10 percent, imagine how much energy we could be saving for watching reels and doom scrolling?