Once again, the gaming year is rich in events: in 2023. the news “someone bought someone and then fired half of the development staff” was replaced by “an absolutely unplayable game at release”. No matter what month, there was always a new champion in terms of the number of negative reviews on Steam or Metacritic. The PC versions of games were the most unlucky, but there were also those whose simultaneous launch on all platforms was lame on both legs. You might think that once again a careless publisher banned the transfer of the game in order to meet the deadline before the end of the financial year. These are all interesting theories and I will summarize my thoughts at the end, but I was interested in something else: which of the developers finally brought the matter to the end and corrected the shortcomings of their brainchild.
Testing is not very representative: I only consider PC versions of games, and my video card does not meet the latest fashion trends. However, my requests are more modest: 1080p resolution at 60 frames per second. But modern video cards should already be capable of 4k at 90-120 frames. I also additionally load my system by launching one browser with 50 tabs, and in the other watching some stream on Twitch in 720p resolution. I hope that this will be enough to reliably assess how playable the projects have become.
The Callisto Protocol
A game from the same developer, the same Dead Space, and which does not need too much introduction. The Callisto Protocol was not released in 2023., but closed 2022. in December, and I see it as the very game that started the procession of games that were broken at release. It is called the very, very first AAA game with a swing at the graphics of the very, very next generation. And as a result, Glen Scofield left the studio he founded Striking Distance, probably based on the results of the minutes of one of its meetings.
Those players who made it through technical thorns got bogged down in gameplay. The combat is boring, the dodging is primitive, the enemies in crowds hit you painfully, the plot is “well that”, one boss for the whole game, popping up 4 times in a row, well, the genre is like “horror”, but something isn’t scary, it doesn’t matter. And here there is good news: all patches after critical patches at release already contained improvements to the gaming experience. We simplified battles with several enemies, they began to attack from behind less often, changed the camera angle in battles, now the protagonist and his opponents do not climb out of the screen, accelerated animations for healing, reloading, changing weapons, even simplified the two-headed one at the minimum and medium security levels. Some of the players did not like such innovations and soon the developers added a difficult mode. Well, the icing on the cake was that they allowed you to skip cutscenes, and also added auto playback of audio logs, and even moved them to other rooms so that their sound would not interfere with plot conversations and other game moments.
In case you didn’t notice, all the gameplay fixes do not in any way affect the main complaints of the players, which I described a little earlier. Well, maybe fighting against the crowd didn’t hurt so much. All these “problems” are the core of the game, it was designed this way, it cannot be fixed. The game turned out to be more boring than advertised. It’s just that now it evokes positive emotions.
Forspoken
A game from the same developers of the long-suffering Final Fantasy XV . It seems like they learned to work with a proprietary engine from Square Enix and now they had to show everyone how to make games with next-generation graphics and gameplay. But for some reason the players decided to quickly forget Forspoken .
The first thing the developers warned about is that to play on a PC it is advisable to have an NVMe SSD, and only on it will the revolutionary Microsoft DirectStorage accelerated loading feature work. It’s scary to think how the game works on the HDD. Nevertheless, at release the technical condition of the game did not greatly concern the player community. There were no emergency patches on the second day, news reports were not full of headlines about the complete failure of the development team, the game itself was not called a disaster in reviews. Even if you look at the contents of the patches, there are some minor little things: fixed the HDR mode, corrected several objects and the work of light sources, updated FSR to 3.0, and other minor changes. But one SSD was not enough, a newer video card is still required – I managed to run the game at almost stable 60 frames only on medium settings and DLSS in the “Performance” mode – optimization for supported video cards was not delivered, alas.
Some might say the main problem Forspoken — the plot, but the gameplay causes the most criticism. Of course, part of the fault lies with the authors of the script: they give you a huge open world, but first they delay in obtaining abilities to explore it, and then they lock you in an invisible corridor – follow the quest markers strictly, take a step to the side – and we will load you at the checkpoint, it’s good at least you can skip cutscenes and character dialogues. Among the nice bonuses added with patches: the ability to disable the chattiness of the bracelet, options for switching target acquisition, disabling receiving damage from your own magic, jars for resurrecting the main character in battle. A new attack was also added to the combat part, but the spells were not changed at all, and this was not required – the combat is exciting and dynamic. True, sometimes the heroine, instead of dodging to the side, jumps into the air and freezes in a beautiful pose, saying “look how beautifully I can die” – this is a little annoying.
It seems like they didn’t abandon the game, but it seems like the authors could have done more. In due time for FF XV remade the final chapter entirely, but here it would be enough to remove the stupid corridor restriction and rewrite the introduction: otherwise not very smart bandits found Frey in New York in a couple of hours, and the entire guard of a small settlement of 1000 people cannot find the most dangerous demoness anywhere. And why didn’t Frey take the bag with the money and go look for the cat with it?? And that dubious move with the little girl. Oh, that’s it! I didn’t mean to touch on the plot..
Wanted: Dead
A game from the same developers, the same Ninja Gaiden . Although it hasn’t received many reviews, the concept and picture attracts attention. The game is bright and colorful, and crazy in its own way, as is often the case with the Japanese. The technical characteristics of the game are modest, so there were no problems with performance; this is important for a dynamic game. We simplified the graphics, the characters look plastic – a reasonable decision, in general I would like to praise. I turned the graphic settings to maximum and still got a stable 60 frames. So why did the game die before release??
The problem is the gameplay. The developers of hurricane slashers are making a new game and the trailer shows how a girl with a katana flutters from enemy to enemy, covering everything and everyone with blood. Dynamic action is a success. But it doesn’t play so fast. The heroine is in no hurry to carry out commands from the player: she slowly raises her katana to block, parrying can only be done in training mode, when enemies do not attack from 5 sides at the same time, knocking down our ward, and she, in turn, again does not willingly rise from the floor. My favorite moment is reloading a shotgun: the girl slowly, concentrating all her attention on the weapon in her hands, methodically inserts cartridge after cartridge into the clip. And this animation cannot be interrupted either by a katana attack in close combat, or by a block, or by a pistol shot, wait until all 7 cartridges are in the clip – then you can do what you want.
The presence of firearms in the game is also doubtful. It’s clearly here to diversify the gameplay, but you can fire a clip into the head of an ordinary enemy, and he won’t fall. And the notorious impact from shooting and hitting the enemy is not felt. In this context, I’ll mention the difference in controls on a keyboard and a gamepad: it’s more convenient to shoot with a mouse – everything here is according to the law of 3rd person action games. But as a result, melee attacks have moved to the keyboard and please first adjust their mood to yourself, and then try not to break up the keyboard by hammering two buttons. On a gamepad, everything is exactly the opposite: close combat is directly created for the gamepad, and the sight when shooting even with auto-aiming is useless, the enemies either sit behind cover and it’s not easy to target them, or they run away to the side and you can’t keep up with the aim stick – there’s no talk of any dynamic acceleration. It’s more likely that you’ll be overtaken from behind and cut into pieces than you’ll shoot someone far away.
The game was released on https://senatorcasino.co.uk/mobile-app/ February 14, 2023., and already literally December 20, 2023. received my first patch, just about 10 months later. The list of changes is not long: a couple of technical optimizations, a problem with freezing in some parts of the game, the brakes were removed when selecting a chainsaw, and a few other little things. But there are no changes in the gameplay, adding smoother mechanics, responsive controls – no, with this patch the developers directly say: our game was perfect from the very beginning. Not a bug, but a feature – I can’t judge them, they are artists, they see it that way.
I have to admit that adding the game to this list was my oversight. I ventured to assume that the developers will consider that their brainchild has shortcomings that should be corrected. Or they will listen to the opinions of players who bought the game and left mixed reviews of the game on Steam. Of course, the authors promised to continue improving the game and adding new content in 2024., but no specifics were provided. And who will remember this game in a year?? Fans of Japanese game? I’m sure they went through it at the release and were absolutely delighted.
The Last of Us™ Part I
A masterpiece that needs no further introduction. Video game icon status. Two hundred awards. Game as a work of art. The best cinema from the world of interactive entertainment. A beta test that lasted 10 years, and it still wasn’t enough. The release of the PC version of The Last of Us™ Part I, so anticipated by adherents of the Orthodox platform, was overshadowed by the crooked hands of mediocre developers, and the testers were clearly under mushrooms.
According to the established tradition of 2023, the first hotfix for the game is released the very next day; it removes stutters and adds additional diagnostics when the game crashes during the initial compilation of shaders. The next day they released another patch in a hurry. And a week later, owners of NVIDIA RTX 30xx series cards were advised to update their drivers. The first month, April, was basically rich in patches, specialists from Naughty Dog And Iron Galaxy respect. Fixed crashes here, there and much more, improved CPU and GU performance, accelerated loading of shaders, added new items to the graphics settings menu, improved DLSS and FSR 2 functions. Then, every next month, major patches were released that continued to improve the performance of the game, fixing minor bugs at certain stages of the game such as unloaded textures, broken lighting and sound effects, the operation of Xbox and DualSense controllers, photo mode. The latest patch is dated August 23, 2023. and fixes a minimal number of problems since the game’s release, as if hinting that that’s all.
When you first launch the game, it compiles shaders and displays two separate bars – for the main game and for the Left Behind add-on . In my case, it took about 7 minutes, half of which was cleverly hidden behind the initial brightness and accessibility settings settings. I don’t know if this is due to patches, NVMe SSD or both, but at release the compilation took about 3 hours. Afterwards, you can finally go into the settings and be stunned: I’ve only seen so many separate graphics settings items in games before Rockstar. The game determines how loaded the video card is by the system and applications, and sets the settings exactly according to the available video memory. And looking ahead, I’ll say that it’s advisable not to change anything else – the game knows itself better. In staged scenes, like the prologue, the frame rate remains almost stable at 60, but in dynamic scenes, depending on the behavior of enemies, it drops to 40-45. Honestly, I attribute this to the fact that the game was originally developed for 30 fps PS3, because these 40-45 frames did not seem critical to the gameplay. Frame loss doesn’t seem to matter when the crosshair even on a mouse moves from side to side. Later I played with the settings, set the recommended GeForce Experience, DLSS won 10 frames, a nice bonus, but for some reason the hair of all the characters turned to straw. I returned it as it was – nothing changed, restarted the game – the same thing. The only thing that saved me was rebooting the entire system.
Probably, if I had launched the game at release, I would also have had an unflattering opinion of the developers’ mothers. But after studying all the patch reports and personally seeing the wonders of automatic selection of graphics settings, I can conclude that the team did a great job. IN Naughty Dog really believe that the only ones they are inferior to are Rockstar, a similar approach to porting games to PC and their quality is noticeable. And this, damn it, is really worthy of respect.
The Last Case of Benedict Fox
In April 2023. The Last Case of Benedict Fox was released . The game is not the debut for the young Polish studio "Plot Twist", but for people from other famous studios and industry veterans who worked on Dead Island, Dying Light, The Witcher, Cyberpunk 2077, For Honor, Watch Dogs 2 and Hitman (information taken from their official website), this game should become a calling card, thereby declaring a new player in the video game entertainment market… Okay, this is not entirely fair, I already used this introduction is in the review of this game here on the blogs. I won’t repeat it, but it’s worth briefly going over this chthonic horror. In the afterword, I suggested that in a couple of months from release the game will be fixed. Am I wrong?
It can be said that the game had no technical flaws: autosaving did not always work as it should and there was a risk of losing a couple of hours of progress, and the board with the investigation (read: a summary of the storyline) had not yet loaded. But both were fixed somewhere in the first two weeks of the game’s release. There were also small glitches during autosave – they were also fixed, and also reduced the frequency of occurrence. Sometimes you run along an empty corridor, where there are no enemies, and the game freezes twice in a row.
But the game had many more gameplay flaws. Again, I won’t go through everything, I’ll go straight to the ones that were fixed. Yes! Surprise, surprise, they fixed it, and quite a lot. I don’t even know where to start: with a double jump or smooth control of the hero? For me, these two problems were the main and equivalent ones. The double jump now does not depend on whether there is a ceiling above the hero or not, his Companion will push off the floor with its tentacles or will be attracted to the nearest wall. And the jump itself has become higher, allowing you to jump over crowds of enemies, the hero moves faster, responds more quickly to button presses, clings to ledges. Knife strikes in melee are also faster, as are drawing a pistol from a holster (I don’t know about the latter, I didn’t notice any difference). Well, the AI of the opponents was also corrected… partially.
The last patch for the game was released at the end of June 2023. and the next one, according to the developers, will be ready sometime in early 2024. We are waiting for final changes to the AI of enemies, new quests and puzzles, support for ultra-wide monitors and maybe something else tasty will be added. Yes, I can’t help but note that there is no Russian language in the game and there are no plans to. Overall, I’m pleasantly surprised: on the technical side, everything is smooth, many rough edges have been polished, and the game continues to improve. Former developers Cyberpunk 2077 in the end they didn’t disappoint.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
The same sequel to Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, a major release of the long-awaited game from a famous studio with a rich history. With the release of the first part Respawn There weren’t any major problems, but the release of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor turned into a problem the size of a galaxy far, far away. Fans probably played the game at release, but how are things now and maybe even they should replay the game and feel the difference?
Almost all patches contain lines that are already commonplace for this year: “improving overall performance”, “increasing frame rate stability”. Moreover, the improvement in performance with and without ray tracing is separately mentioned. The lines are passed almost verbatim from patch to patch, only occasionally adding that they also fixed save failures and various game crashes, added DLSS support, which was not there at the start . In the latest dated October 10, 2023. Notable edits include another improvement in reflections when ray tracing is disabled. More mention is given to gameplay fixes, or rather bugs that interfered with the game: animations did not work, immortal opponents, the hero fell under textures, interactive objects crashed. There were no changes to the game mechanics; the parry windows were not enlarged, as was the case for the original.
Well it could be worse. Each launch of the game is accompanied by a compilation of shaders, but in other games the primary one was enough, yes, it lasts about 30 seconds, but every time it breaks the mood. At maximum settings you can get floating 40-45 frames, but it’s unpleasant to play, drawdowns are constantly present, then you move to a new location, then fresh enemies jump out. Ray tracing eats up those 15-20 frames, but adds pleasant brightness to the landscape. The game consists of spacious locations, reduce the drawing distance, reduce the quality of textures – getting 60 frames is not a problem. DLSS is consistently useful, in the “Quality” mode it wins 10-15 frames, but it worsens the picture, if you run forward headlong you might not even notice. In the release version, cutscenes dropped to 30-35 frames, regardless of graphics settings, now the situation has improved – they drop to 40-45, but only at the beginning, slowly returning to the maximum value. This problem also existed on consoles, I don’t think they could completely fix it there. Another nice bonus is that the game never crashed to the desktop, and at the beginning there were a lot of complaints about this.
I never understood the sacred meaning of grainy pictures. But in Survivor it can cover up the work of DLSS
Without them, all distant objects look sharper
I repeat – this is not the laziest work on bugs. You can only remember the former technical problems if you played it yourself at the release; there are almost no complaints left about the game. Don’t forget that the game is built on the well-worn UE4. Apparently it was stuffed so heavily with graphics improvements that they themselves could barely cope with the optimization. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor very beautiful game, and it’s time to give it a second chance, it’s a pity it’s still a mediocre soulslice.
Redfall
And again a game from famous developers, this time from the same Prey . No, different, 2017 . Studio Arkane has become more skilled in recent years, but still hasn’t strayed from its successful formula – a first-person stealth action game with guns and superpowers. Now the story revolves around vampires, takes place in the present day, and, oh yes, supports full-fledged co-op for 4 people. Everything seems to be fine, but trouble came out of nowhere.
The long-awaited release for many studio fans turned into an ominous nightmare. Redfall was scary to watch; top-end video cards couldn’t cope even with low graphics quality. In the blink of an eye the game quit Star Wars Jedi: Survivor from the pedestal of the worst PC port. Frequent crashes, disconnections in online sessions, boring AI of enemies, bugs blocking progress on quests – the list is not complete, but it is enough to discourage any desire to play “this”. Even Phil Spencer from Microsoft’s gaming division acknowledged the game’s problems, and Redfall seemed to be available on the Game Pass service immediately at release, and this could ultimately have a negative impact on the fate of the studio. But the developers vowed not to abandon the game and a week later they released the first hotfix, followed by a full-fledged patch. There are two more in the fall, the November one was the last one in 2023. If we talk briefly about these patches, then… Wow!
They fixed everything! Maybe not everything, but it plays like everything and Redfall almost the best game of the year. My configuration on “Ultra” settings produces a constant 60 frames, without a hint of sagging. I can’t even tell you how many frames DLSS or FSR 2 adds.1. The picture is indistinguishable from the studio’s past games – this is how a game should look and work, without changing the engine from year to year. Shooting and explosions are juicy, and the dynamic change of day and night works for the atmosphere. I don’t know if there was RTX at the release, it’s not there now, it would not have been possible to achieve such smoothness with it. Brilliant work on bugs, at least from a technical point of view. Let’s talk a little about the gameplay.
Here again we have a great example of working with the game community. Many gameplay improvements are clearly made based on player feedback. The AI of simple dummies has been improved, vampire attacks are more effective, mini-bosses have been strengthened, enemies appear on the world map more often and are much more diverse, new vampire nests have been added, full-fledged stealth has appeared with an instant kill from the back, and in the weapon description it is clearly written “with a silencer”, if one is installed. There are still a lot of interesting things in the patch descriptions, I can’t even single out which of these is a really important improvement, but it seems to me that I have listed the main ones, and only for this the game can be forgiven a lot and given a second chance.
I didn’t play the whole game and couldn’t see all the innovations myself. I also haven’t tried the game in co-op, I can only guess how fun it was. But if you were worried about the game and your heart ached for the studio Arkane, then I hope I brought you good news.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum
New game from former developers of the Deponia quest series . In fact, I don’t know if anyone from the development team of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was involved in Deponia before, after all, the games are of different genres. But the developers are really former – the development department Daedalic Entertainment closed and some people were fired . One of the biggest failures of this year: the terrible technical condition of the game and so-so gameplay. I won’t analyze what led Gollum to such a fatal ending, but whether the game’s authors were able to finally smooth out the corners or not is interesting.
The first, and also the last, patch for the game was released at the end of July 2023., exactly a month after the news about the reduction of development staff. I haven’t found any information about whether there will be more patches. The list of fixes turned out to be impressive, and as such there were only one or two technical fixes, and they mainly related to errors in applying DLSS settings. But the bugs critical for passing have been fixed: the carriage and the small cart. I couldn’t help but wonder: “At least someone managed to beat the game at release.”?». Fixed a dozen items that would not load, closed doors, and standing NPCs, the same number of situations leading to softlock, several unplanned “game over” screens during cutscenes and stages with escaping from pursuers, many glitches in quest chains and their markers, incorrect camera angles in a whole bunch of locations, and a few other minor clutter that didn’t break the gameplay, but distracted attention from immersion in the game.
I didn’t check whether most of the game’s problems had really been fixed; I didn’t finish the game, I just wanted to see how things were going with performance. For about an hour at the starting location, I restarted the game over and over again, changing graphics settings and trying to find the perfect combination of beautiful pictures and stable frame rate. The result was interesting: if you disable ray tracing, the game runs at 60 frames with constant drops by a random number from 1 to 30, regardless of the texture detail settings, anti-aliasing, etc., and the picture looks the same. Ray tracing lowers the available frames per second to 30, and the game itself begins to drop them to 15 in its characteristic manner, while the rays only add reflections to the water surface. Dynamic resolution performs very well: DLSS raises the frame rate to 55 frames. By the way, all this does not affect cutscenes in any way, they run on the engine and are always 30 frames or less, regardless of graphics settings.