My fellow esteemed internet semi-stranger,
Excellent post! I have to say I agree with just about everything you say, and even the parts where I disagree aren't so much disagreements as they are difference in opinion
I believe saying that converting a game to PC "as an afterthought" is unfortunate is actually being very nice about it. More likely, it's a quick cash-in attempt.
I don't think we should be happy or even content "to be getting the game at all". If a company wants to sell their game to a different audience, we (the consumers) shouldn't give them a free pass for being generous but expect them to make a serious effort and judge the product as a whole accordingly..
I haven't played HNR and I don't think I will, at least any time soon. However, knowing my preferences, I imagine if I did play this it would probably be with a controller. Any opinions or impressions I develop about the game would be through using the controller. Unless I'm trying to objectively analyze the game for a review, which I generally don't do, it would be silly for me to judge a game by a feature that is irrelevant to me.
I understand and respect yours and joxer's decision not to support the game or the developer because of the M&K issues. It's just not a decision that I share.
Your ray of sunshine, alas, is my anathema. Multi-platform by its very definition caters to the weaknesses of all platforms and to the strengths of none. Thoughtful design around this fundamental problem may - at the cost of certain restrictions - significantly alleviate this, yet all versions are going to suffer from the decision (unless one is the "leading platform", turning all others essentially into ports).
I don't think I explained my "sunshine" statement very well. Allow me to clarify.
As I see it, there are three scenarios when it comes to console games on the PC.
1. Console exclusive, no PC release
2. Console release, followed by a PC port at varying levels of quality
3. Simultaneous PC and console release, aka multi-platform
In my opinion 3>2>1
Scenario 1 is not desirable for obvious reasons.
Scenario 2 is better than 1 but still not ideal. Why? Well at the console release date, the game is complete minus bugfixes and maybe some balance patching. All the major and fundamental design infrastructure is done, hardcoded and optimized for console. When it comes time to port to PC, months or years down the road, most of the lead designers/top level talent are long gone working on other projects. So it falls on the overworked and underpaid mid/low level designers/interns to do all the heavy lifting on the port. Their job is not to re-design the game for PC, it's to emulate the game on PC with as much fidelity as possible. Aside from some minor tweaks or content additions, there often is no room to improve upon the console version and plenty of minor discrepancies that aren't easily solvable. I don't know anything about designing or programming games but I do have some limited experience coding GUIs for remote operating electronic test equipment. There have been several instances where I've been asked to add or adjust a seemingly minor issue with a GUI only to have to rewrite the entire code due to how I first wrote it. Now I'm not saying this is what happened with joxer's tooltip complaint with HNR, but it's certainly possible. Or it could just be a lazy port
All these reasons, in my mind, make Scenario 2 not the ideal method. Which brings us to Scenario 3…
I think that we can agree that in a multi-platform PC/console release the bottleneck for both hardware and control designs is going to be the console. So, for most major design decisions the limiting factor is going to be the console. But, as you mentioned, thoughtful design choices geared towards the PC release at this stage of development can bypass or alleviate some of the limiting factors of the console side. This is where my Skyrim example comes in. By planning a simultaneous PC/console release, the developers were able to incorporate early in the development methods to utilize the greater hardware capability of the PC as well as inserting the extensive modding tools. If Skyrim had been a console release with a PC port, I don't think that would've been possible.
I'm first and foremost a PC gamer. Most of my favorite games, the games I think are the best designed, are PC exclusive and wouldn't port well to console. In my perfect world, all the games I want to play would be designed for and released on PC only. Consoles wouldn't exist because they wouldn't be necessary. But we don't live in my perfect world, we live in the real world where games are designed and released for consoles, or PCs, or both. For the games that are released for both, I think my Scenario 3 is the best current option for PC gamers.
Hopefully this rambling response makes some sense. I cannot verify the sanity of its author.