From Digital Foundry's perspective, the state of PC game launches in 2025 was arguably better than what we've seen in recent years. We can only guess why - perhaps game publishers are taking global PC sales more seriously, or maybe studios are taking informed criticisms from enthusiast channels like ours to heart.

That doesn't mean the year didn't have any PC-specific gripes - far from it. So we end 2025 with a look back on six of the most notable PC ports, with half on the naughty list, and the other half worth celebrating for what they get so right. The below results are not formally ranked.

2025 PC Ports: The Digital Foundry Naughty List

The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered

A key theme through the bad-game half of our list is non-preventable stuttering. In the case of June's Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered, this issue is doubly troubling because the same issue burdens the game's original PC version on 19-year-old PCs. Bethesda and porting studio Virtuos did not see fit to "remaster" away the game's long-standing stuttering issues on PC.

If anything, stuttering appears to be worse in this remaster on modern, high-end PCs than on circa-2006 hardware, likely down to Unreal Engine 5's own particular issues in this area layered upon the original game's. Wide-open outdoor traversal feels far too compromised for a game of this vintage.

Worse than that, we're disheartened by the lack of patches and updates to these confirmed issues, with Bethesda issuing its last ES4OR patch in July. The remaster may have been described as a "shadowd rop" when it surprise-launched in June, but with such little post-launch support, the term "ghost drop" may be prove appropriate. We are hopeful for a turnaround of some kind in the near future.

The Outer Worlds 2

Obsidian Entertainment launched two first-person RPGs this year, and the first, Avowed, ran pretty well on PC. The same cannot be said about October's Outer Worlds 2. The generally solid performance on its Xbox Series X version led DF to test the PC version on a slightly superior Ryzen 9 5950X CPU system with near-identical visual settings, only to find the PC build tanked on a performance basis - and the frame-time story isn't much better even for high-end systems.

Additionally, the PC version launched with a noisy, splotchy hardware RT implementation. That has since been moved into a separate option toggle thanks to a patch, but we still find issues with RT either being too punishing on a performance basis or having noticeably unattractive shadows and other attributes at more performant settings. Similarly, turning on upscalers to reach better frame-rates leads to noisy image quality, due to how they play poorly with Unreal Engine 5's Lumen and Virtual Shadow Map (VSM) features.

And while OW2's shader compilation stutters are milder than other PC games, its use of asynchronous shader compilation and visibility skipping still leads to egregious first-time loads where large swaths of textures, geometry and effects are either downgraded or missing - in crucial moments of the game's campaign, no less. This PC port's blemishes make it hard for all but the most diehard Obsidian Entertainment fans to immerse themselves in its character-filled open world.

Monster Hunter Wilds

To Capcom's credit, the team behind Monster Hunter Wilds finally got around to addressing our many complaints about its abysmal PC port before year's end with a decent patch, and they've suggested additional patches will land in January and February of next year, but even some of the latest fixes are lacking. That doesn't forgive how long MHW was sold on PC platforms with no answers to its atrocious issues - and even after its latest patch, MHW's texture quality is still too low for GPUs with 8GB of VRAM.

Where exactly does all of its performance go - even with unloaded textures as draped across generally feature-less deserts with ray-tracing disabled? Why did Capcom select ray-traced reflections as a toggle in a desert biome generally bereft of water, when ray-traced shadows may have made more sense? Is a recent geometry downgrade to character models a tolerable step towards righting its PC performance? And why did consumers have to rely on a community-made texture-decompression patch for so long?

We're not sure, but the Monster Hunter series' jump from MT Framework to RE Engine clearly went wrong somewhere for its PC porting team - with performance issues on consoles not faring much better.

2025 PC Ports: The Digital Foundry Nice List

Assassin's Creed Shadows

AC Shadows is a year-end favourite at Digital Foundry in part because of how well it scales to various platforms, and the PC version continues Ubisoft's recent tradition of going above and beyond for an enthusiast audience.

We get specular lighting in the global-illumination solution to render convincing real-time reflections on surfaces. We get support for multiple upscaling and frame-generation solutions as combined with dynamic resolution scaling. We get incredible weather effects. And its highest-end visuals take into account modern PC performance maximums for the sake of balanced performance.

That incredible technology stack is the cherry on top of beautiful art direction, real-time cutscenes that look pre-rendered and a dedicated engineering effort to support and patch AC Shadows through the year. Instead of possibly launching this game in a messy state at the end of 2024, Ubisoft made the tough call to delay into 2025 - and thus propelled a surprising Assassin's Creed comeback to the top of our year-end list.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2

While KC:D2 missed DF's general best-graphics list for the year, this RPG lands on our PC ports list for achieving something few other open-world games this year could: a lzero-stutter experience, with even lowly PC hardware able to lock to 60fps. No matter how populated the game's cities are or how many invisible loading-point boundaries players may cross in its gorgeously rendered prairies and forests, KC:D2 rigidly holds its frame-time line when v-synced to 60Hz at respectable settings.

Warhorse's robust scalability has us wondering whether we might even see a decent port to Switch 2 at some point. What's more, KC:D2's lush, organic geometry and assets enjoy far more temporal stability than comparable open-world representations on other popular engines. Grasses and tree branches fill out the game's world from the nearest grounds to the furthest horizon without apparent fizzle.

Doom: The Dark Ages

Initial public outcry about Dark Ages' "forced" ray-tracing may have come from worries that RT would prevent this game from running well on lower-end RT-compatible hardware. As we quickly learned upon id Software's latest FPS launch, that concern was poorly placed.

The fact is that Doom: The Dark Ages' RT-filled action runs at levels that far outpace the competition - not just on a performance basis but also in terms of RT coverage and stability. An RTX 2060 GPU cannot play nearly as nicely with an RT-enabled UE5 game as it can with D:TDA. It's even verified for Steam Deck - pushing its base RT configuration at 30fps on that power-limited platform.

For those with performance to spare, a path tracing update that came months after the initial launch further grounded the game's lighting and shadow model to add appreciable light-bounce boosts, making it a game that also scales into the future on more capable kit. The final flourish? Loading times that are so blistering fast that your PC might load The Dark Ages faster than Doom prequels from the 1990s - seriously, test it for yourself. Real-time lighting has loading time advantages over lighting-based asset streaming, after all.