Dark Souls fixer Durante opens PC porting studio
Good news for future PC ports!
Peter "Durante" Thoman, the tinkerer whose unofficial tools have helped improve wonky PC versions of console games including Dark Souls and Deadly Premonition, has officially founded his own company dedicated to porting and polishing games. He's consulted professionally on several PC ports since rising to fame and adulation, including The Legend Of Heroes: Trails Of Cold Steel and Rez Infinite, but his new PH3 Games will make a real go of it. Thoman doesn't name any games they're working on now, and of course they're only one studio, but it's good to hear he's out there, doing his thing.
"We provide renowned high-quality ports, as well as consulting related to performance aspects: optimisation, parallelisation, refactoring and tuning," says the company's site. All that technoguts stuff. Rip those guts out, tighten them up, cram 'em back in, as we IT professionals say.
Durante explained in a forum thread, "The process has actually been on-going since September last year, but we just very recently got the final bureaucratic ids required to consider it fully complete (Austrian bureaucracy is an art form)."
He added, "Expect some more ports from us in the future!! (And contact us if you need a high-quality PC port ?)"
PC ports in general have improved a huge amount in recent years, with some now being the best version of the game, but too many games are still a bit of a technical mess when they come to PC. While I'm less fussy than many, I do grumble when a game wants to run in blurry 720p on my 21" 1440p monitor (which, handily, is one of the issues Durante's mods targeted). So good, go on, nice to see another experienced person formally enter the field.