Combat feels realy good, especially for a first person RPG.
Game performance is awesome. Sure, it's doesn't have all then fancy graphical stuff but who cares.
Not everthing is groundbreaking, but that's not a big deal. The core gameplay works, that's what matters.
Yup, I'm enjoying it. It has some nice exploration, which I like, the combat is ok, the writing...well, I have not encountered a cringeworthy dialogue yet, but it's nowhere near the level of what they should be able to do. No "My face is tired" moments for now though.
Graphically it's fine. No stuttering on an rx6800 +7800x3d.
BTW Save often and using manual saves. I had no CTD's up until now, but once for some reason the whole Embassy (main plot area) didn't spawn. The building was there, but I could clip through it and it was empty inside Reload fixed it.
I'm giving this a go (having finished KCD 2 the other day and needing something to fill the gap till Monster Hunter Wilds).
It's actually much better than I expected, nothing amazing, but fairly serviceable. It seems to have decent exploration, ok combat and surprisingly non-cringe writing (if quite dry/unimaginative). Animations are very janky and low budget, and the graphics in general feel dated, but I was quite prepared for that going in.
The character development system is decent, which surprised me since from the previews, it sounded like they had gone out of their way to dumb things down. Every level up has felt quite significant in terms of power increment.
Definitely not worth the price tag (I sailed the high seas) and very much a low budget AA game (as was quite obvious I think from the previews), but I think worth checking out for RPG fans.
Game looks decent enough for what it is, but are you kidding me about the gameplay? Feels floaty and bad. Slugging shit with greatswords in skyrim felt way better.
Game looks decent enough for what it is, but are you kidding me about the gameplay? Feels floaty and bad. Slugging shit with greatswords in skyrim felt way better.
Playing on hard, enemies aren't too spongy, hit decently hard in return and give a decent challenge. I don't really care too much about the animations.
I routinely play RPGs that are 30+ years old, graphics are a luxury anyway lol.
Man, I must have gotten a defective copy of pillars of eternity then, cause I didn't see any 9/10 script. I mean fuck, that shit was dry and boring, horrid writing. Sure it was more competent then what you see in this, but fuck me was it dull.
As for the video, well... one game was made by gamers for gamers, the other was made by activists masquerading as game devs to preach to the unwashed masses. Although I will give them this much, for all the shit some mental devs were spewing, the game seems surprisingly lacking in wokeness, at least so far. Some of it might be all the dialogue skipping, but still... I expected far worse.
I'll be sure to preface all my sentences with in my opinion from now on, just so nobody can disagree then. What do you mean? Of course it's your opinion. Who else's would it be? Doesn't mean shit, plenty of people have bad/wrong opinions, or at the very least what others view as bad/wrong opinions.
Avowed's low frame rates but smooth-feeling gameplay makes me wonder if we PC gamers worry too much about the numbers
I've been spending a good chunk of my time recently testing the performance of new game releases on various PCs. Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, Civilization 7, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and now Avowed. Hour after hour, day after day, constantly running benchmarks over and over. All to get a raft of performance numbers to give you an idea of how well they run across different hardware configurations. But the charts and video clips don't really tell you the full story, because they can't show you how a game feels to play.
And in the case of Avowed, it's quite an important thing because, for the most part, it feels really smooth. Not always, of course, and not on every PC that I tested it on, but the experience is far nicer than the performance numbers suggest it should be. For example, on my Ryzen 7 5700X3D and GeForce RTX 4070 test rig, it averages 68 fps at 1440p, with the High quality preset and no upscaling.
Pretty decent, right? Not amazing but not bad, either. However, the 1% low frame rate (the fps that the game is faster than, 99% of the time) is just 34 fps. That's a big difference to the average performance and in lots of other games, you'd notice that quite easily. Not so in Avowed—in fact, it feels smooth as butter on that particular PC, with those settings. Only the odd bit of traversal stutter spoils the picture.
And it's got me wondering if we, as PC gamers, worry too much about performance. Or rather, focus too much on the performance figures. Yes, I know that makes me a big ol' hypocrite, given that my job here is to test stuff, produce charts with lots of numbers, and then judge the products on the basis of those figures.
There's a big difference between the performance of hardware and that of a game, of course. It's not like one can go 'Ooh, this CPU feels like it's running really fast.' It either is or isn't, and the only way to be certain is to run tests and get numbers. For games, it's different—unless it's a competitive one, especially if it's going to potentially be a source of income for you. But even then, surely it doesn't matter how fast it's running, as long as it feels okay and doesn't prevent you from achieving your desired goals, yes?
The obvious issue here is that feeling is subjective, and something that feels okay to me might be excruciating for someone else. But I don't think that, in the case of games, it's so subjective that my opinion is completely irrelevant. After all, I'm in the fortunate position to be able to check out a game across more PCs than most gamers come across in years of owning a computer, so I can at least comment on relative feel.
I often come across comments in discussions about a particular game or piece of hardware, where the gamer will say something along the lines of 'It has to run at 120 fps for me or I'm not interested.' Without wishing to sound like I'm denigrating such opinions, that's something I just don't get—on my own gaming PC, I really don't care what frame rate I'm getting and I never bother to check the same metrics that I collate for performance reviews. It's literally a case of firing up the game, playing it as is, and then tweaking some settings until it feels great.
Avowed really is a perfect example of this. As with all games that I do performance analysis for, I spent a couple of hours getting to a point where I could carry out repeated test loops to collate and average data. Actually, I played past that point just to see if there was something better to use but depending on how much time I have, that's not always possible. Anyway, after the said hours of working through Avowed's opening stages, I came away feeling really positive about the game, marvelling at how well it ran.
Then I started to collate performance data across all my test rigs and was somewhat surprised to see how low some of the numbers really were. A 1% low of 34 fps compared to an average of 68 fps should feel a bit janky—not quite stuttery, but certainly not smooth. And yet it does in Avowed. It actually feels worse if it runs too fast if that makes any sense.
I know I can't abandon performance charts and just write meandering prose about how a game feels at 1080p Medium, but I do think that sometimes it's worth leaving the numbers to one side for a moment and reading everything first. It's akin to ignoring a game's review score until you've absorbed everything the reviewer has said. And having just realised how few people are going to do that, I guess I'll be doing hours of testing for performance figures for many more years to come.
For myself, though, I'll just keep going by feel. Maybe I should invent a feels-per-second metric? Ugh no, that's just another number.
Or maybe the devs could, you know, try to do some actual optimization?
boundle (thoughts on cracking AITD) wrote:
i guess thouth if without a legit key the installation was rolling back we are all fucking then
DigitalFoundry already showed that Avowed stutters like almost all other UE games do. Some more, some less. Very few don't stutter, for example the System Shock remake. So whatever the writer considers smooth, I certainly don't. KCD2 at 100fps+ I consider smooth to the point of being flawless.
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He says how numbers don't matter, he just adjusts settings until it feels great
60 doesn't feel great to me, nor will it ever anymore (except handhelds). I understand someone who says they want 120 right off the bat
And that's what feels great
So if that's what it comes down to... then no shit. And good luck coming up with a 'feels' metric that takes into account input lag, frame times, mouse acceleration etc.
I've yet to try this game but I do have the yarr version downloaded.
It's a shame that the game took the typical safe and semi-lobotomized route devoid of any surprise because, on paper, the setting and its level design would definitely have the potential to provide immersive-sim-like vibes. Alas, one can tell this is the same Obsidian that made The Outer Worlds with all that entails. I didn't hate that game, however, it was an underwhelming production also considering Cain and Boyarsky's involvement. I've been isotesting the Awolands in Paradis for some hours and for every positive, there's at least one big BUT(t) that spoils the experience:
- the environments look pretty BUT their interactivity is minimal, the faces are clay-like and lifeless à la Starfield, there are no basic AI routines beneath the game and NPCs don't react to anything the player does which is unacceptable for an RPG released in 202X
- the combat and general mobility are responsive BUT also extremely gamey with that underlying bling-bling inspired by MMOs/mobile devices, and the less we talk about the UI the better
- the exploration is there with a nice dose of verticality BUT the loot is quite mundane and encounters are on the rinse 'n repeat-y side
- the Pillars universe is an interesting one BUT its implementation here is rather barebones in terms of fungicalyptic main quest and committee-approved dialogues. There seems to be some C&C in place, though I don't know how (if) it will affect the later sections yet
If I had to describe the game so far with one reaction it would be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯/10, which is about what I expected. It's nowhere near as miserable as Veilguard (the undisputed lowest point in the genre as far as I'm concerned) still, there's little incentive to progress unless one turns off the brain and embraces the durr in the most classic disposable subscription-oriented consoom&forget way.
Stormwolf wrote:
There is also a mod which supposedly improves frames and people seem to praise it
It does indeed reduce traversal stuttering for me, making it almost unnoticeable. The framerate itself is always >100 here anyway with the Green Goblin's trickeries enabled and the latest DLSS manually replaced so at least performance-wise the game behaves as intended.
- the environments look pretty BUT their interactivity is minimal, the faces are clay-like and lifeless à la Starfield, there are no basic AI routines beneath the game and NPCs don't react to anything the player does which is unacceptable for an RPG released in 202X
- the combat and general mobility are responsive BUT also extremely gamey with that underlying bling-bling inspired by MMOs/mobile devices, and the less we talk about the UI the better
- the exploration is there with a nice dose of verticality BUT the loot is quite mundane and encounters are on the rinse 'n repeat-y side
- the Pillars universe is an interesting one BUT its implementation here is rather barebones in terms of fungicalyptic main quest and committee-approved dialogues. There seems to be some C&C in place, though I don't know how (if) it will affect the later sections yet
NPC's actually DO react to what you do, at least to some things. They will comment on you stealing their stuff from chests in front of them. They don't care about anything else, like you throwing grenades at their feet, but you can't hurt them anyway, so why would they xD ?
Combat is pretty weak, but apparently the newest patch changed it a little bit.
Exploration is loads of fun, the problem is what you find is either a legendary, or crafting ingredients.
There's actually a decent amnount of C&C, even for non quests, like instances where you meet npc's talking and they listen to you. It's not considered a quest, no xp even, but later you can see the outcome.
If they marketed this as an AA it would be a really solid one, the problem is it's supposed to be AAA and it's clearly not.
if UE had to calculate prop physics like Source did in 2004 you'd need a nuclear power plant and two hangars filled with racks of nbidia's priciest machines
things are inefficient by design
- the environments look pretty BUT their interactivity is minimal, the faces are clay-like and lifeless à la Starfield, there are no basic AI routines beneath the game and NPCs don't react to anything the player does which is unacceptable for an RPG released in 202X
- the combat and general mobility are responsive BUT also extremely gamey with that underlying bling-bling inspired by MMOs/mobile devices, and the less we talk about the UI the better
- the exploration is there with a nice dose of verticality BUT the loot is quite mundane and encounters are on the rinse 'n repeat-y side
- the Pillars universe is an interesting one BUT its implementation here is rather barebones in terms of fungicalyptic main quest and committee-approved dialogues. There seems to be some C&C in place, though I don't know how (if) it will affect the later sections yet
NPC's actually DO react to what you do, at least to some things. They will comment on you stealing their stuff from chests in front of them. They don't care about anything else, like you throwing grenades at their feet, but you can't hurt them anyway, so why would they xD ?
Combat is pretty weak, but apparently the newest patch changed it a little bit.
Exploration is loads of fun, the problem is what you find is either a legendary, or crafting ingredients.
There's actually a decent amnount of C&C, even for non quests, like instances where you meet npc's talking and they listen to you. It's not considered a quest, no xp even, but later you can see the outcome.
If they marketed this as an AA it would be a really solid one, the problem is it's supposed to be AAA and it's clearly not.
Still a fun game though.
The biggest issue is the price.
A game that isnt even that great costs 70 buckorinos for early play.
This is the worst offender for me personally. Now everyone's gonna do it because people live in FOMO land.
NPC's actually DO react to what you do, at least to some things. They will comment on you stealing their stuff from chests in front of them. They don't care about anything else, like you throwing grenades at their feet, but you can't hurt them anyway, so why would they xD ?
Combat is pretty weak, but apparently the newest patch changed it a little bit.
Exploration is loads of fun, the problem is what you find is either a legendary, or crafting ingredients.
There's actually a decent amnount of C&C, even for non quests, like instances where you meet npc's talking and they listen to you. It's not considered a quest, no xp even, but later you can see the outcome.
If they marketed this as an AA it would be a really solid one, the problem is it's supposed to be AAA and it's clearly not.
Still a fun game though.
I simply find it difficult to excuse so many lazy concessions when games from 20-25 years ago already provided deeper systems and immersive mechanics with immensely weaker hardware -- it's ineptitude coupled with a dose of heavy and convenient watering down by design. I'm genuinely glad there are still several companies that focus on single-player games, but we shouldn't turn a blind eye (..or two, or three like Blinky) when standards get so visibly lower.
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