In the console version, this game is ugly

Interesting. The current pop in rate is pretty atrocious and it seems (to me) something like you suggest could be reasonable but I also understand if the developers don’t like to put limits on themselves they might have problem keeping. But at least internally they should do some tests like that just to see if their product lives up to a reasonable standard. I personally think the current patch 1.6 is a bit below minimum standard but as I sad before I’m very happy with the severely reduced rate of crashes and progress halting or altering bugs compared to when I first played the game during mostly the 1.2 - 1.3 patches.
Hopefully next patch will clean it up some.

That is where candor comes in. If a SaaS vendor screws up your app’s performance to address another problem, you expect them to disclose such (if they are in fact aware of it). In this case, we got the words straight out of the co-founder’s twitter account. WH knew and chose not to disclose

I fully understand there are trade offs to be made. Even in regulated industries dealing with software, there’s an understanding of this (eg risk based validation perfectly fine per US FDA, EU EMA and Japan PMDA). The important thing is that when tradeoffs are made, share that info with impacted clients/functions

Yes, we have no SLA or quality agreement with WH so they are under no legal obligation. That said, if they don’t show more respect, they’ll lose customers’ trust, goodwill and eventually $$$

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Think many if not most PS4 users could’ve lived with 1.5 popin levels

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I kind of understand why they don’t wanna do that but I do hope they understand the issue is sever enough and need reifying. Rendering this slow is too sub par to pass and will really hurt the games reputation if it’s not fixed in later patches. Might even be worth a bit of game instability for it to happen.

I came to think of one thing that is probably related. the game have stopped stuttering like it did before in crowded areas. Wonder if they now just let the rending catch up as it go along whereas it previously let the game freeze up a little while things rendered. For myself I’m honestly bit unsure which I’d prefer. These load/rendering freeze up so common in other games I barley think of them much but this extreme pop ins I don’t think I ever seen. Sure games like fallout 4 and Conan exiles can have it with player built stuff but even there its usually about limited draw distance not pop ins like these here.

I did not play 1.5 much but up to 1.3 maybe 1.4 I had no pop in issues I noticed, just a little stuttering here and there but that’s something so common on consoles and weaker PCs I barely think of it :stuck_out_tongue:

That game has load zones. This one doesn’t. For software engine nerds, that seems to be a big deal from a technical perspective.

I didn’t buy FO4 or KCD for the technical widgets. I bought them for user experience.

FO4 had popins for me when crossing sanctuary bridge and then FPS hits were much worse than anything ever experienced in KCD. So, in KCD, I get popins as the performance issue. Fine. I can deal with it up to a point.

You appear new here. I’ve been harping about KCD change management and release communications with WH PR, QA, etc. since early days post-release. They still haven’t learned a basic strategy that helps SaaS vendors get over rough patches with their clients… share info, be as transparent as practical.

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True it is a big deal from a technical perspective.
I’m new as a poster. I did visit the forums a lot when I played the game after release but I never made an account and tried participate here then. I did write them a very, very angry and ranty email about their original save file management system and how it could accidentally corrupt all save files in a whole playthrough if the game crashed during saving because all saves was in the same file and they where (obviously) not compartmentalised properly if that could happen. That along with some… “improper” suggestions about some of their staff I was very, very angry after losing a whole playthrough like that :stuck_out_tongue:

I’m still not convinced about the reliability of the KCD save system. Part of it seems beyond WH’s control. FO4 had quick saves / save corruption issues for way longer than I expected for a large company like Bethesda

Schnapps appear to be the KCD equivalent of quicksaves

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Honestly I don’t expect that much of Bethesda at least not quickly. They did fix the ps3 version of Skyrim even if they took them over year but I don’t think they ever manage to completely plug the memory leaks in that version of their engine. Think Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and last gen Skyrim all suffer from it, just a matter of how much. Probably why I like fallout 4 so much. Not because its a “better game” only because it actually worked without constant crashing.

I’ve heard about others having issues with the schnapps, never happened to me though only save related issue been that aforementioned crash during an autosave that corrupted the whole library.

Got crashes. Used to get them frequently. Still do when I play and push memory with settlement builds and NPCs … and of course mods

Get some too with KCD when I keep pushing forward and don’t save. This is rare nowadays

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With mods fallout 4 is another matter, lots more crashed then. Pure vanilla and dlc I rarely had them even late game. The older Bethesda games (of the same kind) all been horrible compared to Fallout 4 in that regard. The only issues I ever really had with Fallout 4 (performance wise) was when I pushed it with excessive settlement building and in downtown Boston where it could stutter a bit. Nothing that bother me personally much though.
KCD have in my opinion in terms of pure stability improved during its life time way more thanolder Bethesda games ever did.

I have hopes for this studio and future patches and dlc and even future games.
Maybe I’ll be disappointed. we’ll see in the months and years to come.

Per their behaviour, WH want a different game but not yet convinced they want a different post-production vendor-customer relationship than Bethesda, EA… The difference will come from mgmt if it exists

The game hasn’t disappointed me. The performance is unsettling less because the game itself and more because of a failure on the human side of things. Ashes could be sublime. And, making changes could make KCD one of the best RPGs ever

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Completely disagree. You also have to take into account that Warhorse Studios had a small budget developing KCD than Bethesda Game Studios games so I understand with the smaller team comes a longer time to fix the problems but the complete unawarness on their part is completely unacceptable compared to Bethesda fixing bugs and the time it took them to address problems. 1.6 dropped and the character was not getting dirty or damaged at all so it makes you wonder how they did not catch this during testing not to mention all of the other bugs and problems. Talmberg missing with the new DLC. How did they not catch this?

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I was referring to game stability as in not crashing and having game breaking bugs.
True this game still have some of that. But if you compare how the game work now even if the slow rendering and ugly clipping still exist and have even gotten worse the game don’t crash nearly as often and don’t have nearly as many game breaking bugs as it used to. The stability of the game is much, much improved over the last 5-6 months though granted some of that seems to have come at the cost of graphical performance, especially in patch 1.6. Never have I played a Bethesda Elder Scrolls or Fallout game that have cleared up this much in the same amount of time. Quite frankly most of them still have sever instability issues late game years later that’s never been fixed by Bethesda themselves. Fixed by modders yes but that don’t really count and it sure don’t help people on consoles much either. So far I think War Horse is doing better than Bethesda especially so given their size.
Maybe I dodged a lot of issues this time cause I started a new game from scratch with hardcore mode. Not a single crash and only one bug that resulted in lost or altered progress.
One progress altering/halting bug in a whole playthrough and not a single crash? That have never ever happened to me in any Elder Scrolls or Fallout game playthrough ever even if done years after original release and I have done quite a few of them over the years.
This game in 1.6 is now quite stable considering how it started, looks like shit due to the rendering issues but that is another matter and one I hope they can fix without tanking the stability again.

The game never crashed on me during the 1,5 version. 1.6 did not improve squat.

As mentioned previously in the thread I never played 1.5 much so can’t really relate to 1.5 to 1.6 performance changes. Anyhow the point was now vs release and that still stands.

I am sure you are correct, but give WH a few more updates and we will be back to alpha stage of the game!

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Well just because one patch take a step back in some domains I fail to see why that would indicate a complete regression of everything going forward. We’ll see maybe they end up disappointing me too but its far from that yet.

Blockquote
I did write them a very, very angry and ranty email about their original save file management system and how it could accidentally corrupt all save files in a whole playthrough if the game crashed during saving because all saves was in the same file and they where (obviously) not compartmentalised properly if that could happen.

Blockquote

That would do it!
(Holy rapunzel, batman)

Well that figures out the save issue, for me.

I had suggested on these forums that the Save issues could be drive fragmentation related. Whilst I believed that wouldn’t be highly likely, it fit with what we were seeing (it was at least possible).

I dismissed it, personally, as it would have to be some serious drive fragmentation, to much up save games.
Assuming they were typical ‘individual’ files.

In the last week with increased reports of players ‘loosing all their saves’, I started to contemplate what could be happening.

The natural, obvious answer is that the game has one file per playline (or maybe one file total; would explain the ‘resume feature’ muckups with ‘save and quit’).

One file, that increases with size with each additional save…

Oh my.
(Bad)

@warhorse
Either make a dummy file, 10x bigger than needed when game first installs, or, better yet-
Allow users to use a thumb drive for game saves.

The thumb drive option is worth considering, from a technical point of view, and if I was the dev I’d see if streaming wave (music) files from the thumb drive reduces CPU overhead for decoding compressed sound tracks.

Put users music and saves on a thumb drive (music removes need for hard drive to seek and track elsewhere whilst loading textures etc). Wave files removes cpu processing, which for old machines due to thermal throttling might have a hard time running all cores flat out. (Any headroom being appreciated)

Best thing is users saves games could write to a thumb drive (game might have to pause cause users will plug in some shitty drives)

Otherwise, if ye on the system drive, you need to use one of sony’s partitions for game saves and have the data copied to/from the ‘save’ partition on game startup and close.

One large save file?
Found your major error!

Steps to fix this will help SO MANY systems in the wild.
You do realise about seek times on drives, yes? Imcremental data writes?
The concept of a tabula rasa, and then what your game install and patch process does, yes?
One large save file that goes everywhere (and must be read from everywhere to be ‘decoded’ is mad to make work. Maybe not for product testers who obviously play this game differently (stopping after 100 hours?..)

One file…
Hahahhahah
Oh my!

Users: make off drive backup of save data (copy to a thumb drive)
Uninstall KCD (/or make off drive backup of game)

Clean install latest version of KCD.
Restore backed up save files to the system.

Play game.

(Report back so others know…)

Obviously can’t fix any given ‘per patch state of the game’, but can make game optimal to perform in your system :wink: