It’s 100% an astroturfing campaign. Doesn’t matter if it looks good or bad, it’s still getting awareness out there about the game which generates clicks and probably makes more money than the game itself.
Well it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, but Randy Pitchford is really good at providing ammo for these types of headlines. Guy needs to learn to keep his mouth shut sometimes.
This has been there already with Ubisoft games. It wont end well for the IP and also, the main problem is Randy Pitchford. That problem wont be fixed any time soon.
I played the first one but after that the formula felt pretty samey and I was bored of it. Would a fourth Borderlands game even be good if it wasn’t laggy?
I swear I have no idea why they let him talk. He doesn't even own the company, surely someone at 2K could just go... you know... shush.
I don't even think the BL4 thing is that bad, on the face of it. There is really no need to make it worse.
"We have been made aware of some performance issues in certain systems in our new release, we'll be looking into performance improvements in future patches". It's not that hard. At this point just copy/paste whatever the other thousand UE5 games said, go fix the wonky precompilation boot step and stop digging a hole.
Hell, it's even easier than that, because they have actually pretty much put that out. All he really needed to do was shut up about it.
UE5 is a shit engine as of now, but what can be expected of a company run by someone just as insufferable? Epic took the advent of tech like DLSS and frame generation as an excuse to disregard performance and functionality.
All you have to do is pick out any UE5 game that exists and Google that + “performance.” Even meeting the recommended specs for Rogue City, I still had to find specialized configs to get the game the game stop crashing on launch, and even then, those specs were based on using upscaling and frame generation. In reality, “recommended” was about 25fps at 1280x720. That used to be, and realistically should be unthinkable.
AND EVEN THEN, the engine’s built-in settings for upscaling and frame generation caused even more crashing. Ultimately, I had to disable it in-game and turn it on in my driver settings because of the busted-ass engine. This is a problem with the state of gaming, and people like Randy, Tim and their supporters are only exacerbating it.
The engine’s not the problem. Personally, I have only played a single game on UE5 that had shit performance on my aging PC (I can’t even use DLSS), and it’s an early access, independently made, survival crafting game. It was never going to perform well or even be finished.
I really enjoyed the game, but hit a difficulty spike that just totally stalled the experience for me. No fault of the game but I just couldn’t figure out if I wasn’t leveled enough or lacked the skill. I’m willing to admit my reaction times aren’t what they use to be.
I’ll give it mad points for helping make turned based combat finally click for me. It was never my bag, but this one really worked for me.
What difficulty setting were you playing on? I think Story mode post nerfs should be manageable even if you get hit a lot - at least as far as main story goes.
If you want to give it another shot, invest in HP and Defense, bring a healer and build Maelle as a tank with Egide to give yourself a lot of margins and sort of grind out encounters safely. There aren’t many DPS checks - if any.
Late game you can stack so much damage on Maelle that she one-shots everything, if you like.
Its a great game and worth trying to finish. Now as far as the optional superboss… Yeah, that’s another story.
I was shocked to learn that Maelle can one-shot that superboss as well. I would not have beat him otherwise: I spent literally weeks pounding my head against the wall, trying to beat him more conventionally.
I couldn’t beat it “fairly” either, but approaching it as a puzzle fight where you’re trying to figure out how to deal with its bullshit is also kind of fun. I ended up stunlocking it, which in itself you can do in several different ways. The game has a lot of fun things you can do with builds.
I really enjoyed using Lune as my main damage character. I did this somewhat out of necessity in my first play-through – because I didn’t beat the final Gestral tournament battle with Maelle – after discovering the power of the combination of Elemental Trick with a high critical rate and Elemental Genesis and did it from the start because I enjoyed it in my second play-through.
Lune was by far my favourite to use mechanically, the stains system just made for such fun planning of rotations. There is a lot of fun with various weapon combos too, like the Potierim support build that applies Greater Slow. I personally used her as AP and buff battery with Typhoon giving everyone max AP and refreshing greater versions of all buffs every turn. And then I used Braselim with Storm Caller and Lightning Dance to farm a tier 3 Gradient every turn.
The Genesis build is AP efficient but once you have 9 every turn it gets outdamaged by Lightning Dance (single target) and Hell (AoE). Though you wouldn’t guess so going by the astronomically poor and unclear skill descriptions.
I didn’t get Medalum either but honestly you don’t need it. The one shot builds only need it pre Cheater to start in Virtuoso, after that you can just Last Chance anyway.
I self-inflicted some pain like that for me as well.
I got close to the end of Act 2 and my friend said that the difficulty was too easy and I was breezing pass everything and to switch it to Expert. Well guess what. I didn’t level, upgrade or put my Pictos in a way to deal with it. So most of my boss fights turned from a close-win into 45 minutes of me dying a lot. Like, I’d be one-shotted so often.
I then took some time and then cashed in some Lumina for stories and then actually put some strats in and went through the skill tree. I think it was worthwhile in the end but it totally changed the experience for me.
Another possible option if you’re on PC is using the mod that makes dodge/parry window bigger or smaller. I haven’t used it but I know people who have and it can really change your enjoyment of the game.
If anyone hits a wall at about the midpoint of the game, I found a really good place to grind. Right after you get Monocco, there is an area you can go to called Frozen Hearts. If you immediately go and start to explore, you’ll soon realize this is a late game area that you are massively under leveled for.
HOWEVER, the first enemy you see is a Danseuses, and if you start the battle you’ll fight 3 of them. It will take a little bit, but they only have like 3 different attack patterns, after a few tries you should be able to learn them and parry/dodge them consistently. Once you have that down, you’ll be able to beat them without getting hit and they give a MASSIVE amount of exp. Then just head over to the nearby flag, heal up, and do it again. I stayed there for about hour fighting them repeatedly and bumped everyone up by like 10 levels.
The tricky part is memorizing their attack patterns consistently, I died a lot until I got it down. But the flag is really close by, so you can just keep throwing yourself at them until you do. Don’t bother trying to fight any of the other battles in this area, all the other ones have enemies that will outheal any damage you can do.
There’s a quest danseus in the area that will allow you to practice without penalty, unfortunately it’s a bit high up in the area so getting to it without knowing how to defeat the danseuses would be pretty tricky.
This often happens to me in RPGs because I’m missing some combat mechanic or fundamental.
It’s made me want to design better optional tutorials for those games to help people discover certain strategies. Eg;
“Hey, you have many different tuning macguffins on this character, but it means their stats aren’t built to any one strength. For an example, try using 8 yellow macguffins to build them for taunting/defense so they can use their self-heal unique, and build up stun on enemies each time they’re attacked.”
Those things feel so witty to discover, but many RPGs now build up and prioritize so many systems it’s understandable people aren’t quickly attuned to them. What often gets me is thinking I’m not making the right decisions mid-combat, when my menu decisions around equipment/abilities are completely wrong.
No fault of the game but I just couldn’t figure out if I wasn’t leveled enough or lacked the skill.
Even the hardest boss in the game can be killed with one shot on normal difficulty with a correct build and the right turn order.
I say that because while learning how to parry and dodge are important, pictos and equipment can more than make up for inabilities in the middle-to-late game.
Overall, pictos are arguably the most important thing in the game.
I wound up playing the game through twice, once on normal difficulty and then again on story difficulty (I just really enjoyed the game and wanted to 100% it and had missed a couple of the only missable achievements).
Don’t feel bad playing it in a lower difficulty level, and then try to learn when to parry attacks. There are often visual and audio cues.
A lot of the difficulty when playing the game as intended (at normal difficulty) is learning the pattern of when to press the parry button. You can learn this more easily on story mode because it’s more forgiving. Counterattacks are very powerful throughout the game, and only happen if you learn how to parry.
Maelle being powerful also has a lot to do with the weapon she wields. If you didn’t beat the last Gestral arena fight with Maelle, you might want to restart the game and do that, because that weapon will carry you all the way through the regular end game (though you might need a better weapon to 100% the game).
You can beat the main story using Lune’s abilities for your main damage pretty easily. The one-two punch that I found very useful (after building around it) was using “Elemental Trick” followed by “Elemental Genesis”. With Elemental Trick, you can produce 4 stains in a single attack if you get your critical rate up. One easy way to make critical high is to use the Critical Burn picto and make sure to keep around a burn on one of the enemies to attack with Elemental Trick. Once you have the stains you need (4 critical hits, one of each element), Elemental Genesis can one-shot a lot of enemies throughout the game. It’s great because it’s a multi-hit attack and a multi-enemy attack. It works very well before you can do over 9999 damage in a single hit.
Well, now that everyone who want to play day one bought it, the only remaining market are the people of !patientgamers that are waiting for a sale to buy it.
And considering it is on the game pass, 4.4 million is quite good.
It was more like an oopsie moment during the Zevent weekend at the start of September. As the event takes place in Montpellier (same city as Sandfall), that the opening concert had some Clair Obscur music and most of those streamers living in Montpellier are already friends with the devs (they were invited in the studio for a huge party).
So a few devs went to the Zevent to offer gifts and answer questions and that’s when Antoine Daniel asked about sales. The answer was 3.3 and 4.4 at the same time, then they looked at each others and said "officially 3.3, in reality 4.4).
But they did not stated when those numbers were achieved.
ign.com
Aktywne