Lords of the Fallen gets an early Steam reviews thrashing over performance, but don't write it off yet
No one who's suffering from technical problems in a game is fond of the guy who chimes in to say, «Well, it's running fine for me,» but I have no choice but to be that guy here, because Lords of the Fallen is running fine for me. Sorry, I'm sorry!
It is not running fine for everyone: The just-released action RPG isn't faring so well in the early Steam reviews, where it currently has a Mixed rating, largely due to players complaining about low frame rates, stuttering, and crashes, with some saying they can't even get to the main menu.
Our Lords of the Fallen reviewer Harvey did encounter a small number of crashes himself, but that was over the course of 30 hours. Another of us crashed more frequently, while I and one other writer at PC Gamer haven't seen any crashes, although we've only just started the game.
After first launching Lords of the Fallen, I did experience single-digit frame rates in menus and right after loading into the starting mire, but I recognized this as the first-launch stuttering that often occurs when when a game has turned all your PC's might to the task of precompiling its shaders. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which goes through a long shader recompilation process every time you update your drivers, wisely sticks a message at the top of the screen while it does this so that players know why it's running at 5 fps, and that the situation is temporary.
It's of course possible that something else is causing long-term frame rate problems for players, but if my shader compilation diagnosis is at all correct, Lords of the Fallen could possibly take a cue from CoD and somehow indicate to players that they're only in stutter hell temporarily.
After that early stuttering cleared up, which didn't take
Read more on pcgamer.com
