Lords of the Fallen, a PC game bearing similarities to the Souls franchise, underwent a major upheaval when developers Hexworks released a crucial performance patch. This development comes in response to the game's initial 'Mostly Negative' reviews on Steam, credited largely to technical issues that have been plaguing the players since the game's release.
Hexworks introduced the patch, version 1.1.191, to address four main issues which were triggering the game crashes, a chief complaint in the flurry of disappointed reviews on launch day. Strangely enough, one of the primary issues wasn’t associated directly with the game but rather the players' end - outdated graphics card drivers. The game, designed to run on the latest Unreal Engine 5, was incompatible with numerous graphics cards that hadn't been updated to support it.
Hexworks pointed out in their Steam blog: ‘We’ve observed that the majority of crashes result from outdated drivers,’. To rectify this issue, a pop-up has been added in the game, instructing players to update their Nvidia or AMD drivers if necessary. Apart from this, other graphics-related issues causing the crashes have also been addressed.
Many crashes were occurring due to inadequate frame generation stability. This feature has now been temporarily deactivated until it can offer a more reliable experience, especially for the 40-series Nvidia GPUs. Additionally, the game was not optimally adjusting the graphics quality to correspond with the capabilities of “certain 30 and 40 series GPUs”. This led to crashes even when the game was set to auto-detect graphics quality. Unfortunately, the problem was further exacerbated by gamers pushing their hardware beyond its limits.
The game now has improved automatic settings detection which should operate seamlessly post-patch. For those still experiencing instability, the developers have recommended that players let the game's AUTO-SET feature to choose the most fitting settings for their system, especially when issues related to VRAM are encountered.
Yet another significant game-breaker was a devastating error coded into one of the game's first cinematic sequences. Once a major hassle to players, the glitch should be largely a thing of the past with this new patch. For the very few who might encounter the issue post-patch, Hexworks advises adding ‘-nopsos’ to the game’s launch line in Steam. This would disable the faulty shader compiling calculation causing the error.
The improvements made go beyond stability fixes. Issues related to game balance and performance have also been addressed. An anomaly causing the “lingering VFX from the Barrage of Echoes eyeball explosion” during a spell casting session, which was known to impact game performance, has been resolved. Furthermore, game balance tweaks were made, including nerfs to enemies to lessen the game's punishing difficulty, and projectile hit direction adjustments to prevent player's unnecessary reactionary turns.
Boss characters, such as Ruiner and Spurned Progeny, have been modified to maintain challenging gameplay, while also reducing aggravating one-shot kills in higher levels. Among players, parrying kicks will no longer be possible, providing more combat options during player versus player battles.
The arrival of performance improvements coincided with changes in Lords of the Fallen’s reviews on Steam. The formerly negative reviews, now over 5,000 in total, have evolved into a 'Mixed' average with over half of them being positive at the time of writing. Bolstering this is the developers’ recent declaration that the game will never be making use of controversial anti-piracy tech Denuvo. Considering these evolutions, Lords of the Fallen could well be on the path to a redemptive journey among its players.
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