Lichdom: Battlemage has made it to the consoles..Sub 20 fps, Oh dear! *Update: Fixed*

[Notional]

Lichdom Battlemage has been on the PC since 2014. It's made on CryEngine 3 and encorporates the second generation of AMD's TressFX (the first version to introduce the master/slave hair strand principle, that made TressFX so efficient in Rise of the Tomb Raider (third generation)).

 

 

In the game you play as a mage, who can create their own spells, attacks etc. in first person.

 

Well it has now been launched for PS4 and XBox One, and the results are insane. Playstation 4 never reaches 30fps and will mostly run sub 20 frames. Yes you read that right, SUB 20 FPS. XBone is even worse, with glaring screen tearing in every single scene.

 

Quote

There's no beating around the bush here - Lichdom is a game that rarely manages to deliver a frame-rate north of twenty frames per second. In fact, the PlayStation 4 clocks up an average frame-rate of just 15fps across the run of play, with dips as low as 10fps. On top of that, frame-time latencies can be astonishingly high with some remarkable stutter. We've run the rule over a multitude of titles since we started frame-rate testing console games back in 2008 - and we're pretty sure we've never seen anything quite as bad as this.

 

Despite this pathetic performance, at least the game has fast level loading. It only takes more than 2 minutes, but at least you won't need to reload the entire level when dying.

 

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WARNING: Watching this video might cause simulation sickness due to very low frame rates.

 

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My take on this:

 

I cannot fathom how Sony or Microsoft could sign off on this release. The performance is unacceptable. This was originally a game made with the help of AMD to test out the second generation of TressFX, and was a fairly interesting take on a magic genre with customizable magic powers. However this console version should never have been released.

I wonder if there is a problem with CryEngine 3, producing complex/nice looking graphics on consoles, or where the massive bottleneck is on this release. All I know is that I feel queezy from simulation sickness after watching this youtube video in full screen. UGH!.

 

*Update*

The devs seems to have fixed the horribly low FPS as mentioned here.

Higher FPS, lower loading pauses (still high), this patch seems to actually make the game playable. The XBone version is the best, as the PS4 version has unlocked FPS, causing hitches and what not. Maybe it will be fixed in a later patch still?

 

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Sources:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-lichdom-battlemage-is-the-worst-performing-game-weve-tested

TressFX gen 2: http://www.slideshare.net/DevCentralAMD/tress-fx-the-fast-and-the-furry-nicolas-thibieroz

Game:http://store.steampowered.com/app/261760/

 

[Zodiark1593]

Metal Gear Solid on the 3DS also had horrendous framerate, dipping into single digits at times.

[dragosudeki]

I don't think Sony or Microsoft sign off releases for their consoles. Though its pretty amazing that we get a Batman AK scenario for the consoles. And people are saying that optimizing for one set of hardware is easy. I think what literally happened is that they took the game, toned down the settings and literally just released it as is with not much work done (or maybe its 20fps locked or something because 'cinematic'). I suspect more optimization problems like these will appear with the PS4.5/K due to the compatibility.

[The Benjamins]

That video felt so cinematic.

[xAcid9]

1 hour ago, Notional said:

 

My take on this:

 

I cannot fathom how Sony or Microsoft could sign off on this release. The performance is unacceptable. This was originally a game made with the help of AMD to test out the second generation of TressFX, and was a fairly interesting take on a magic genre with customizable magic powers. However this console version should never have been released.

One of the game that use AMD's TrueAudio as well, one of 2 games. 

[Orangeator]

Well that proves it... Console cannot run PC games. Lol. I think it is pretty obvious what happened here, the dev's decided to lower the res on the textures in the game then port over to the consoles. Hahaha. 

[Snadzies]

Naw, man.

The human eye can't even tell the difference between 15 and 60fps anyway.

[Pesmerga]

[lightningterror]

1 hour ago, Snadzies said:

Naw, man.

The human eye can't even tell the difference between 15 and 60fps anyway.

More like 10 and 60 (since It drops to 10).

[suicidalfranco]

i don't understand where is the problem. feels like watching a movie 

[grayperview]

https://www.bundlestars.com/en/bundle/all-stars-6-bundle

 

£2.29 with nine other games for PC, that should run at a decent frame rate depending on your PC.

 

£38 on shitbox and psbore, running at sub 20fps....

[Notional]

4 hours ago, dragosudeki said:

I don't think Sony or Microsoft sign off releases for their consoles. Though its pretty amazing that we get a Batman AK scenario for the consoles. And people are saying that optimizing for one set of hardware is easy. I think what literally happened is that they took the game, toned down the settings and literally just released it as is with not much work done (or maybe its 20fps locked or something because 'cinematic'). I suspect more optimization problems like these will appear with the PS4.5/K due to the compatibility.

I thought they had to? Sony apparently demands that games support the new Neo fully, if they want their games released. But who knows. Either way this game should not have been released in that state. They could have just made it 720p or something, and most issues would have been solved.

3 hours ago, Orangeator said:

Well that proves it... Console cannot run PC games. Lol. I think it is pretty obvious what happened here, the dev's decided to lower the res on the textures in the game then port over to the consoles. Hahaha. 

Probably. It's a small unknown dev. They probably did not have the ressources or skills to optimize the Cryengine 3 or their game properly for the consoles.

[Orangeator]

6 minutes ago, Notional said:

Probably. It's a small unknown dev. They probably did not have the ressources or skills to optimize the Cryengine 3 or their game properly for the consoles.

Yeah, that is the problem with consoles. If Sony and Microsoft would just put actual real hardware in their systems dev's wouldn't be stressed with the task of shitting on their game so consoles can play. 

[Misanthrope]

Eventually you'll get just a booklet for you to flip through it to simulate motion. 

[Notional]

2 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

Eventually you'll get just a booklet for you to flip through it to simulate motion. 

#StillBetterThanArkhamKnight.

[Trik'Stari]

So I guess we can call this "Ultra-cinematic"?

[Notional]

2 minutes ago, Trik'Stari said:

So I guess we can call this "Ultra-cinematic"?

It's artistic slowmotion like 300

[VerticalDiscussions]

So friggin fabulous. Woah, that game looks a lot like Skyrim anyways lol. Even ENB heavily modified Skyrim runs better...

[Misanthrope]

4 hours ago, dragosudeki said:

I don't think Sony or Microsoft sign off releases for their consoles. Though its pretty amazing that we get a Batman AK scenario for the consoles. And people are saying that optimizing for one set of hardware is easy. I think what literally happened is that they took the game, toned down the settings and literally just released it as is with not much work done (or maybe its 20fps locked or something because 'cinematic'). I suspect more optimization problems like these will appear with the PS4.5/K due to the compatibility.

Actually I'm pretty sure they do at least to get the game past the DRM which would be otherwise impossible. 

 

Now I can expect a free for all, no curator system like Steam to get these turds in the store but Microsoft and Sony put their name on the game cases and such I'd expect bare minimum of a standard not this. 

[Trik'Stari]

4 minutes ago, Notional said:

It's artistic slowmotion like 300

All they need to do is crank up the motion blur!

 

Although I assume it's already at 100% since this is a console game.

[Misanthrope]

46 minutes ago, Trik'Stari said:

All they need to do is crank up the motion blur!

 

Although I assume it's already at 100% since this is a console game.

But that requires... You know... Motion. 

[sof006]

Oh sweet Jesus thats horrendous. I can see a whole suite of patches coming to "fix" this... and by fix I mean mess with the settings. 

[Doobeedoo]

It's so sad... can this crap stop and shitty ports along with it.

[Xorbot]

2 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

It's so sad... can this crap stop and shitty ports along with it.

Welcome to the Unity generation of games.

 

No, I don't mean that this game was made with Unity (it was clearly made with CryENGINE).  What I refer to is the generation of game developers where you can take a very inexperienced programmer, if any at all, and jam and mash scripts together to output "indie games".  Sure, this may work for a 3-sprite game consisting of pixels.  But when it is time to develop something that rivals what Crysis 1 did in the year it was released, you can no longer mash together a bunch of C# scripts downloaded from various posts in the Unity forums without any programming knowledge.

[cryon1cang3l]

That game is made by Xaviant, a small studio on the east coast USA. They have a second game, The Culling - it is in early access right now and it got a decent amount of people playing it. So expect them to focus hard on that game instead. Nobody will care about a port for a pretty old (but great) game from PC.