The third game in the Mafia series arrived on PC today and by many measures it has been a hot seller. However, the response from the community has not been what the developer hoped, with a large number of reviewers and commenters downvoting the game for being capped at 30 frames per second. So much bad buzz has been generated from this, that the developer has already promised a patch sometime this weekend.
If the last generation of consoles and their ports were defined by brown and grey color schemes, the current one must surely be heavily twinned with sub-1080p resolutions and 30fps caps. While the PS4 Pro and Xbox Scorpio may finally put that to bed, a number of games have released this generation with graphics and frame rates far below what PC gamers are used to.
And that is what makes it so frustrating for them when a clear console game ports jumps over to PC with the same limitations. There’s little preventing a game like Mafia III from running at higher than 30fps and at higher resolutions, but fans have found it does neither. Complaints slate it for stuttering to under 30fps at times, that it seems to be upscaling 720p resolution, to terrible quality textures, lighting issues, objects clipping in to one another and a long list of bugs.
Related: Hands On: ‘Mafia III’
Unrelated to the performance issues, but perhaps indicative of the lack of experience of developer Hangar 13 (this is its first game), is the issues with AI, autosaves not working correctly, and a number of crashes reported by Steam reviewers.
Fortunately it does seem that Hangar 13 and publisher 2K are looking to fix as many of these problems as they can. A statement was issued saying that a frame rate unlocking patch would be made available this weekend, along with a number of additional graphical options which should help PC gamers enjoy a better looking experience.
“We currently have a patch running here at the studio that includes 30, 60, and unlimited frames-per-second options in the video menu, among other improvements for the PC version of Mafia III,” reads Hangar 13’s statement. “We’re verifying the patch now to ensure everything is working as expected. If everything goes well, we expect the update to go live this weekend. We will be keeping the PC community up to date on the status of the patch throughout the weekend and thank you for all the feedback!”
Although this may not be enough to stem the tide of poor reviews the game has received, it may mean that Hangar 13 is able to recover something post-launch.