I made the sad mistake of buying this game last night and I'm here to warn people who might be thinking about buying it for the same reasons I did to not do it.
Here's why I did:
- I wanted a graphics whore game to replace Metro: Last Light (whose graphics are amazing, but the game itself sucks)
- I read this thread and took from it that the game has some downsides but is generally fairly good
- I watched several videos and I read several reviews from sites that I used to trust like PC Gamer where it seems to be generally respected
- I just wanted a new good-looking game with some semblance of decent gameplay behind it
Here's why I intensely dislike it so far. These are mostly technical issues, which defeat a large portion of the decision to have purchased it in the first place:
- The graphics are actually quite ugly in-game. I knew going in that this was a console port, but not all console ports seem to look as good in review videos online but as buttshit ugly as this one on your own screen. While you're treated right away with some of the distracting features like DoF and motion blur, lens flaring, etc., it just takes a moment of staring at the actual objects in the world to see that they're all fuzzy, simplistic, and very console-like. The game is just generally not crisp like a Metro is, even with AA disabled. It's a muddy mess, along with its very last-gen textures. I was immediately turned off.
- The game engine is very quirky. Again, I went in knowing what I thought was enough about the game to expect some consolitis, some amount of non-optimization for PC, but it's pretty jarring when you first boot up. Your FPS can vary wildly just in the opening menu and only after some careful tweaking of the SLI bits in Nvidia Inspector was I able to stabilize things. Now the framerate is solid, but there are still inexplicable framerate dips even though I'm running 4GB VRAM in my 760's. It just feels sloppy.
- The characters in the game aren't done very well. You would think that a game that relies on SUPER ZOOM mode when you're talking to "NPC's", sort of like in Skyrim, would take extra care to make sure that things like lip-syncing (which is laughably bad) and shadowing around things like noses and elsewhere would be a priority, especially in the beginning stages of the game. They're not. I really feel like the thing is just best played on a PS4 where you're far enough from the screen to not really give a shit. Just more ugliness.
I haven't even made it to the outside yet, so I'll keep going, but I regretted this purchase about 15 minutes in. I keep telling myself never to buy anything that's been ported, but it seems like that's all we're getting anymore.
So just fair warning. Wait until there's a demo or just pass on this one if you're looking for a pretty game.
Update: As of the newest patch, 1.4.0, the game's performance has been improved. Gone are the random drops in FPS, so a much smoother experience can be had, distracting less. The graphics quality hasn't improved, but at least now the game feels responsive at all times.
Update 2: Yeah, this patch helped dramatically. I can see much improved CPU usage across all cores now, and unless I'm crazy, the game even looks better now. I may have judged too harshly too quickly.
