Gamers Hungry for Lords of the Fallen on Steam; Optimization Breaks Their Teeth [Update: Patch]
The new Lords of the Fallen cannot boast an ideal launch on Steam. The game is plagued by serious technical issues, especially those related to performance.
Update - new patch
The devs have just released a new update, numbered 1.1.191.
The patch primarily resolves a number of problems that caused the game to freeze. Some elements of gameplay balance have also been improved, and several bugs have been fixed. In addition, virtual keyboard finally appears on Steam Deck .
Previous news
Yesterday marked the launch of Lords of the Fallen, a soulslike action RPG representing a reboot of the 2014 game. Unfortunately, PC gamers' joy at the launch was largely spoiled by technical issues.
- Due to the low level of technical refinement, player reviews on Steam are mixed - at the time of writing this news, only 50% of reviews are positive. This poor result is still better than the one from a few hours after the release, when only 33% of players praised the new Lords of the Fallen.
- The authors of most negative reviews complain precisely about technical issues. Below we quote some reviews from Steam:
"I strongly recommend waiting until they fix - the first launch and crash with Unreal's "favorite" error window. The second time around it launched, but DLSS 3 is poorly implemented - you can see ghosting on the character. Other than that, it looks OK, but even at a high frame rate (about 80 fps) the game runs as if not very smoothly, slightly tearing. (...) The thumb down is only for the technical condition, if they want to use customers as beta testers, then I'm sorry, but they have to expect such negative feedback."
"Another broken title that can't be played normally because crash, crash, crash. If I can't play this game normally later this weekend, I will demand a refund!"
"I recommend waiting for patches, because at the moment it's hard to play."
However, the technical issues have not caused players to abandon the title. They are gritting their teeth and continuing to play. In fact, the activity record for the day of release was an impressive 43,075 concurrent users on Steam.. This result more than twice as high as the one achieved by Lies of P (19.1 thousand). However, it is far from the achievements of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty (75 thousand) and Remnant II (110k), the two other big soulslike launches of the year.
How to deal with clipping
The developers are already working on fixes, and for now they have published a guide on Steam, on how to reduce performance issues. In addition to the standard advice such as "choose recommended settings" or "update your drivers" there was information suggesting that the culprit may be the poorly implemented PSO mechanisms of Unreal Engine 5, which in the case of this game improperly organize the cache.
Therefore, one of the ways the devs recommend when tackling the issues is to go to the "...Users\USER\AppData\Local\LOTF2Saved" folder and delete the ".UPIPELINECACHE" file. Then, in the Steam client, right-click on the game, select Properties, then "Installed files," and then use the "Check integrity of game files" option.
If that doesn't work, then on Steam, in the game's Properties, in the "Startup options" section, add the "-nopsos" command. Unfortunately, this method will cause the game to cut slightly for a while every time you enter a location where you haven't been before. After that, however, it will work normally.
In turn, the players advise that the game's global illumination and reflections options should be set to medium, because on higher settings ray tracing is activated.
