Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
My current biggest gripes with the game. Graphics, (not performance) and world
Highborn
Member, Alpha Two
This will come form a place of love and me wanting the game to succeed.
This is not for the systems for the game but graphics and client side.
First of all: I understand that optimization comes LAST, and therefore this is not meant to pointed towards performance, if mentioned it's just to make a point but not the goal. We don't have gpu drivers etc etc.
Computer used is a 7800x3d & 7900xtx, 32 gigs of ram. My computer is not left for wanting, nor am I using a below minimum spec / no longer supported hardware. OS is windows 11, lastest patch, latest drivers.
Big problem with the game is graphics. I'm not talking about performance but graphics.
Quite many of the settings don't do anything Just flat out, besides shadows and global illumination does nothing. AT ALL. Low and medium work, nothing else.
Trees have halos at night. Stand near one and look at the moon though the tree or the night sky. Also you can't turn f**** AA off, enemies are glowing like a tree or look has texture corruption whenever they're targeted. (I've tried reinstalling and even messing with GPU driver options, nope). Not sure what kind of botched AA is in the game but it needs to be ripped out stomped and spat on because it's garbage. (It's actually more of an UE issue probably. I want to say I'm not a graphics engineer, nor do I claim to be one, but i do have a CS degree. I just barely know enough to know i don't know anything at all).
Options client side not doing anything. Textures don't have ANY meaningful change. Actually no change at all. Not in performance not in looks.
Furthermore, as time went by word tiles are not only not getting better, but actually getting worse. More holes in the terrain due to misalignment, nodes having oil spill this week, Node crafting stations got rescrubbed for no reason and due to this, hilariously the building signs are wrong. Steel bloom has doors randomly closed or open. I assume the word os made of tiles for optimization reasons, weather it's to make the game or performance, I don't know but it's jarring, immersion braking and prone to this Swiss cheese situation. If it's not for purely performance reasons it should be done away with and baked into one big contiguous world.
Mobs bugging through terrain with knockbacks, and then randomly bugging back, spells pulling mobs thorough walls.
Even as a player there is a place on 1st floor (or 2nd floor, if you call the ground floor the first) there is a window that you can just...walk behind. Mobs being pulled by accidentally is a HUGE issue and is actually a massive softskill for mages and rangers.
This weekend caravans randomly having both water and ground states becoming totally inaccessible, and flickering. Some don't flicker just look silly having both states and had to be destroyed.
Many of these are not "it's alpha bro" but actual regressions from week 1 and 2. The world becoming more and more fragmented with holes, and targeted mobs having corrupted textures were not a "feature" in week one. In the second part of the video the griphon turns purple/pink is and transparent. What?
Many client side things have been totally left to rot. The holes in the terrain are totally inexcusable. Random waters in places (as in you start swimming and get a breath meter for no reason), (between urisne and haclyon) water getting randomly deleted in places. Whoever places these is just negligent. It really would not take a lot of time to check when placed. Last time i check Unreal supports you pressing a button and hopping into game to look around. Maybe doesn't work with a project this scale? Why doesn't QA catch these? These are the easies things to stat pad performance with and making yourself look useful.
Global illumination is a total joke, as you tick it up, not only does it eats more and more performance but the game starts to look worse and worse. This is a real problem. Why is there fog for no reason? Why does Global illumination introduce fog?
Cinematic global illumination puts me from 120 fps to 25. (I assume it's ray traced).
View distance straight up does nothing. Like AT ALL.
I can live with textures not having different LODs at this point of development, but.... Nanite and Lumen are not the solution.
Speaking of lumen...
Night and Day cycles are totally borked. In SB they for quite a long time double spawned mobs (haven't checked last weekend), while in Carphin it either makes everything giga dark or flashbang. The random light spots during the night cycle were less annoying as they could be handwaved away by saying "clouds and moon" but this... what? This is supposed to be a vertical slice and I understand this was mostly a network test but those kinks have been ironed out a month go.
I have to give flowers too.
Yes server side issues have been solved, less and less crashes and the game is more and more stable and the game test is not about figuring out which bard spell AOE crashes everybody. Client is not stable. Game breaking or exploitative bugs have been fixed real fast. Devs are responsive, accessible and work fast.
ps:
Now, I'm not sure what is ratio of hardware vendors of the player base, (but I can assume) however I'd like to IMPLORE and beg Intrepid to please pretty please engage AMD for some of these issues. Texture corruption was not a thing in the first one and maybe second weekend. It's good that these things have been caught early, however there's a need for driver support. I fully understand that there'll not be any perf optimizations at this state of development, I'd make no sense (I'm in IT myself so i get it), but maybe some low hanging fruits could be ironed out driver side (or even render pipeline side) without making everything worse for people who use other vendors products and/or sniking uncountable manhours into it.
past ps, and slightly unhinged rant on upscalers. It's my pet hate with the gpu industry, and don't really expect anybody else to share it.
I also generally, and genuinely think that upscaling methods should be last on anybodies mind regarding performance. It makes exactly 0 sense. First you downscale so the lower internal resolution uses less VRAM, but because it'd look bad you run some algo to upscale it. But it somehow also needs to be at least partially higher resolution for AA, then it get's downscaled. It just makes no sense. Yes it unburdens the devs and people can have objectively worse hardware, but the result is quite frankly a disgusting slop of a mess on the screen most of the time even without frame gen. It has been one of the most disgusting cons of the graphics industry. A good raster system, optimized textures and gpu pipeline will result in better looking and better running game. Intrepid obviously cares about looks and feel, so not sure why was DLLS put into the game.
Ray tracing is mostly a con, but if done well it can look really good. It's just also something that mostly can be solved with rasterization so OR specialized hardware... yea. (remember this?)
This is not for the systems for the game but graphics and client side.
First of all: I understand that optimization comes LAST, and therefore this is not meant to pointed towards performance, if mentioned it's just to make a point but not the goal. We don't have gpu drivers etc etc.
Computer used is a 7800x3d & 7900xtx, 32 gigs of ram. My computer is not left for wanting, nor am I using a below minimum spec / no longer supported hardware. OS is windows 11, lastest patch, latest drivers.
Big problem with the game is graphics. I'm not talking about performance but graphics.
Quite many of the settings don't do anything Just flat out, besides shadows and global illumination does nothing. AT ALL. Low and medium work, nothing else.
Trees have halos at night. Stand near one and look at the moon though the tree or the night sky. Also you can't turn f**** AA off, enemies are glowing like a tree or look has texture corruption whenever they're targeted. (I've tried reinstalling and even messing with GPU driver options, nope). Not sure what kind of botched AA is in the game but it needs to be ripped out stomped and spat on because it's garbage. (It's actually more of an UE issue probably. I want to say I'm not a graphics engineer, nor do I claim to be one, but i do have a CS degree. I just barely know enough to know i don't know anything at all).
Options client side not doing anything. Textures don't have ANY meaningful change. Actually no change at all. Not in performance not in looks.
Furthermore, as time went by word tiles are not only not getting better, but actually getting worse. More holes in the terrain due to misalignment, nodes having oil spill this week, Node crafting stations got rescrubbed for no reason and due to this, hilariously the building signs are wrong. Steel bloom has doors randomly closed or open. I assume the word os made of tiles for optimization reasons, weather it's to make the game or performance, I don't know but it's jarring, immersion braking and prone to this Swiss cheese situation. If it's not for purely performance reasons it should be done away with and baked into one big contiguous world.
Mobs bugging through terrain with knockbacks, and then randomly bugging back, spells pulling mobs thorough walls.
Even as a player there is a place on 1st floor (or 2nd floor, if you call the ground floor the first) there is a window that you can just...walk behind. Mobs being pulled by accidentally is a HUGE issue and is actually a massive softskill for mages and rangers.
This weekend caravans randomly having both water and ground states becoming totally inaccessible, and flickering. Some don't flicker just look silly having both states and had to be destroyed.
Many of these are not "it's alpha bro" but actual regressions from week 1 and 2. The world becoming more and more fragmented with holes, and targeted mobs having corrupted textures were not a "feature" in week one. In the second part of the video the griphon turns purple/pink is and transparent. What?
Many client side things have been totally left to rot. The holes in the terrain are totally inexcusable. Random waters in places (as in you start swimming and get a breath meter for no reason), (between urisne and haclyon) water getting randomly deleted in places. Whoever places these is just negligent. It really would not take a lot of time to check when placed. Last time i check Unreal supports you pressing a button and hopping into game to look around. Maybe doesn't work with a project this scale? Why doesn't QA catch these? These are the easies things to stat pad performance with and making yourself look useful.
Global illumination is a total joke, as you tick it up, not only does it eats more and more performance but the game starts to look worse and worse. This is a real problem. Why is there fog for no reason? Why does Global illumination introduce fog?
Cinematic global illumination puts me from 120 fps to 25. (I assume it's ray traced).
View distance straight up does nothing. Like AT ALL.
I can live with textures not having different LODs at this point of development, but.... Nanite and Lumen are not the solution.
Speaking of lumen...
Night and Day cycles are totally borked. In SB they for quite a long time double spawned mobs (haven't checked last weekend), while in Carphin it either makes everything giga dark or flashbang. The random light spots during the night cycle were less annoying as they could be handwaved away by saying "clouds and moon" but this... what? This is supposed to be a vertical slice and I understand this was mostly a network test but those kinks have been ironed out a month go.
I have to give flowers too.
Yes server side issues have been solved, less and less crashes and the game is more and more stable and the game test is not about figuring out which bard spell AOE crashes everybody. Client is not stable. Game breaking or exploitative bugs have been fixed real fast. Devs are responsive, accessible and work fast.
ps:
Now, I'm not sure what is ratio of hardware vendors of the player base, (but I can assume) however I'd like to IMPLORE and beg Intrepid to please pretty please engage AMD for some of these issues. Texture corruption was not a thing in the first one and maybe second weekend. It's good that these things have been caught early, however there's a need for driver support. I fully understand that there'll not be any perf optimizations at this state of development, I'd make no sense (I'm in IT myself so i get it), but maybe some low hanging fruits could be ironed out driver side (or even render pipeline side) without making everything worse for people who use other vendors products and/or sniking uncountable manhours into it.
past ps, and slightly unhinged rant on upscalers. It's my pet hate with the gpu industry, and don't really expect anybody else to share it.
I also generally, and genuinely think that upscaling methods should be last on anybodies mind regarding performance. It makes exactly 0 sense. First you downscale so the lower internal resolution uses less VRAM, but because it'd look bad you run some algo to upscale it. But it somehow also needs to be at least partially higher resolution for AA, then it get's downscaled. It just makes no sense. Yes it unburdens the devs and people can have objectively worse hardware, but the result is quite frankly a disgusting slop of a mess on the screen most of the time even without frame gen. It has been one of the most disgusting cons of the graphics industry. A good raster system, optimized textures and gpu pipeline will result in better looking and better running game. Intrepid obviously cares about looks and feel, so not sure why was DLLS put into the game.
Ray tracing is mostly a con, but if done well it can look really good. It's just also something that mostly can be solved with rasterization so OR specialized hardware... yea. (remember this?)
Glory to all Tanks
Glory to Arioch
Glory to Winsted
For my mana addicted brothers:
For the Glory of Quel'Thalas
Glory to Arioch
Glory to Winsted
For my mana addicted brothers:
For the Glory of Quel'Thalas
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