? The "Missteps" of 2025: What Happened to Optimization?

[_Neptunno_]

Hey everyone!!

After checking out last year's best-optimized games, I came across an article on DSOGaming that shows the other side of the coin: the technical disasters of 2025. Honestly, seeing some of these cases makes you want to cry, especially considering the hardware we're working with these days

Here's the list of the ones that have crowned themselves as the worst-optimized games of 2025:

Rise of the Ronin: We're starting strong. A game that graphically doesn't justify its requirements and inexplicably crawls on ultra settings. It seems the PC port caught them off guard.

Double Fine’s Keeper: The bane of GPUs. Not even an RTX 5090 (yes, you read that right) can maintain a stable 60 FPS at native 4K. Unreal Engine 5 has completely gotten out of hand for them.

The Outer Worlds 2: A disaster for CPUs. It only maxes out 4 threads, so unless you have a processor with IPC from another planet, forget about playing with Ray Tracing. It doesn't scale well on multi-core systems at all.

Monster Hunter Wilds & Borderlands 4: Two heavyweights that launched "broken". Monster Hunter has needed half a lifetime of patches to become playable, and Borderlands still has performance issues that are impossible to pin down.

Oblivion Remastered: The one taking home the grand prize. A total disaster that seems to have been left to its own devices by Bethesda. It's still running terribly months after launch.

Special mention goes to Vampire: Bloodlines 2, which, besides running poorly, brings the worst case of stuttering I've seen in years. It's frustrating to see them release unfinished games banking on DLSS or FSR to save the day.

Out of all of them, the one that hurts me the most is Oblivion Remastered. It's one of those classics I've been meaning to play properly (yes, I tried it back in the day and it's amazing despite its age), but it's a real shame how they've wasted such an opportunity to bring a legend to life with all the modern improvements. It seems they just dropped it and left it to fend for itself... what a pity.

Unfortunately, many remasters suffer the same fate today; thankfully, some pull through and you can tell there's better work put into them (within their limitations, of course), like the classic Tomb Raider ones, otherwise we'd be in a tough spot.

Inspired by: DSOGaming - Worst Optimized PC Games of 2025.

Cheers.

[pos_yo]

Completely agree... And people blame Unreal Engine 5 as if it were the only cause. Is it a demanding engine? Well, yes, and quite a lot. But we can also see gems like Expedition 33 or Black Myth: Wukong that run wonderfully even on a Steam Deck. Obviously, they are demanding games if you want to max out the settings, but let's face the fact that playing on Ultra is completely unnecessary. From my experience, I'd say that last year I made the jump from a RX6600XT to a RX9070, but I spent nearly a year with the RX6600XT and a 1440p monitor, and I could play perfectly at that resolution even though it's a 1080p card from three generations ago. Obviously, I had to use upscaling and lower the graphics settings. I had to spend some time tweaking the graphical options to get everything fully optimized for gameplay, but that's how I played The Last of Us 2 on that card, and I enjoyed it a ton on medium settings with FSR upscaling set to Quality.

[cobito]

This happens with software in general. For me, one of the most glaring examples (it's not a game) is Slack. I don't know how it fares now, but when I used it back around 2019, it was just a simple group chat with a few extra features (nothing special). The program is built with Electron, which, essentially, is just Chrome running web applications. Slack used to consume 1-2 GB of RAM back then. It has functionality similar to mIRC (with some extras, a modern interface, better security, etc.). And mIRC ran quite smoothly on a 486 at 66 MHz with 8MB of RAM.

I can understand that modernizing a program involves increased resource usage, but going from running on 8MB (including the OS) to requiring thousands of megabytes (for the program alone) is completely out of line. And that's not even mentioning that on a multiprocessor system clocked at thousands of megahertz, it sometimes still doesn't run very smoothly.

And then there are absolute absurdities like Office 365 and Windows 11, but I won't go into that because I'd lose my temper.

With games, the issue isn't as straightforward because, unlike general-purpose software, complexity has been constantly increasing since the beginning of time. It's absurd to claim that a shooter like Far Cry 7 should be able to run on a machine only slightly more powerful than one needed for a shooter like Doom. But I'm absolutely certain the hardware it will require will be outrageous. Or maybe I'm wrong, given the hardware crisis we're currently facing.

At the end of the day, this is purely a financial issue. On one hand, people seem willing to spend hundreds of euros periodically on hardware capable of running these resource hogs (especially considering that GPUs, besides reaching astronomical prices in the mid-range, are one of the few things still evolving at a steady pace). On the other hand, in development, it's several orders of magnitude cheaper to use something like Electron than to build a custom framework or graphics engine from scratch, which would be the most efficient option.

Even today, there are still examples of development efficiency. I can think of 7-Zip and Notepad++, both built without using third-party frameworks, which makes porting them to other systems extremely difficult, but their resource footprint is comparable to software from the late 90s. That's exactly what you'd expect from software that offers functionality similar to programs from that era.

When it comes to games, I'm a bit out of the loop, but since it's a nearly purely commercial space where open-source software is practically nonexistent, it's probably even worse, as money dictates everything else.

[_Neptunno_]

What a great reflection, @cobito, I agree with you point by point, honestly.

I'm also a fan of 7-Zip and Notepad++. They're lightweight, effective, and even as the years go by, you never see or feel them as outdated. That said, there was quite a stir with Notepad++ not too long ago due to a fairly serious vulnerability, but given the program's cost, we can't really get too upset.
However, with Windows 11... sometimes you just want to pull out a katana!! I'm a long-time, dedicated Windows user, but every day they erode my trust a little more with so many "crazy" updates.
I get the feeling their QA team isn't well compensated or they've just been on indefinite leave... man.

And as for games... not much more to add. I can understand (and even get excited about) a title like GTA VI requiring 6 or 8 cores to unlock its full potential... even asking for 32 GB of RAM, 16 GB of VRAM, or taking up 250 GB (which would already be insane), but those are the kinds of games that 'have the right' to demand that given what they offer.

But seriously! For a simple remaster or port to run worse than the original from back in the day, when CPUs were 1st or 2nd gen Core... or even older... it's just unbelievable.

@pos_yo nice 6600X!! Definitely on par with the legendary RTX 3060 Ti, very solid GPUs especially for 1080p. Even today they can still hold their own pretty well for folks on a tight budget

Cheers!!

[krampak]

@_Neptunno_ said in The "Nonsense" of 2025: What happened to optimization?:

but every day they're eroding my trust more and more with so many "crazy" updates.

We're running into more and more problems every day because of Windows Update. It's not just because things break overnight after an update (we have a Word export/conversion feature that stopped working a while ago due to an Office update), but also because suddenly the machines start doing weird things, running slowly, and throwing inexplicable errors—all due to pending updates. Just install the damn updates, restart, and everything works fine.

[_Neptunno_]

@krampak The thing is, I hate those damn updates. How great it was back with Windows XP and Windows 7 when you could actually disable them for real!

Yes, I know that for security reasons it's important to stay up to date, but I have the feeling that we live in a crazy world where there's nothing but constant patches: Windows, Android, Steam, PS5... oh my god. That meme about only having 15 or 30 minutes to play and spending it all staring at a progress bar is pure reality. It's not funny because it's actually true, hahaha.

It's happened to me more than once: you sit down with whatever free time you've got and you can't squeeze in a game because of some issue like this. And the worst part is that it seems like, since things are developed poorly and in a rush, the rush just gets pushed to the patches. Basically, today's mindset: why bother releasing the program properly the first time, if we'll just fix it later with a 20GB update

Cheers!!

[cobito]

Since you're talking about updates, I'll share my thoughts.

Aside from the fact that current software, regardless of type, is painfully poorly optimized, overall quality has taken a nosedive. I have two theories (unproven, at that).

The first is the Internet era. Before the Internet became widely popular (in the early 2000s in Spain), developers had to be extremely careful with what they released, because what shipped was the actual final version. Distributing an update came at a high cost. I remember that for some popular games, updates were distributed on magazine CD-ROMs. That meant access was limited, and not every distributor could afford to use that channel. In other words, it was an exceptional occurrence.

Now that the Internet allows you to update any program at any time with files of any size, it has become very common to directly release alpha versions. You'll find absolute garbage riddled with serious functional and performance bugs. The worst part is that this practice seems widely accepted nowadays. You install something that breaks at the slightest provocation or runs poorly, and just think, "Well, they'll release a patch eventually." And it's not just that—patch releases themselves have turned into major events in some cases, with people waiting for specific fixes or performance improvements announced by the current PR team. Some call it "versionitis."

The second theory is the AI era. I believe the embarrassment Microsoft has been making of itself lately with Windows 11 updates is related to this. From where I stand, it feels like the practice of using AI to generate code that is never properly reviewed is starting to become widespread. And given Microsoft's push with Copilot, I wouldn't be surprised if this approach (using AI for everything, rather than the part about not reviewing the resulting code) has actually become company policy.

So now we're in a perfect storm: developers and distributors aren't afraid to release subpar software because pushing patches is so cheap. On the other hand, a new development paradigm—one that no one has been trained for and no one has prior experience with—is being exploited on a massive scale with zero oversight.

The AI issue will likely sort itself out over time. But the "ship a beta and patch it later" mentality? That's here to stay.

[Yorus]

Honestly, I can't say much about games since I rarely play older titles. But I'm constantly dealing with Windows 11 at work. The latest issue is that the standard USB ports (not the USB-C Thunderbolt ones) have stopped working on some of our Surface devices, which has also taken out connected peripherals like webcams and Bluetooth devices. All the users report it happened after an update, and I still haven't found a quick fix. Whenever I try to uninstall the update, it just rolls back automatically. After a bunch of repairs, reinstalls, and restarts... it eventually works again, but it takes ages. Honestly, between the Surface hardware and Windows 11, we've got the perfect storm.

And as you know, there have been other issues too, like printer or audio problems following certain updates. At home it works fine for me, but I only use it on my gaming PC. For everyday tasks, I stick to a Mini PC running Linux Mint.