5/29/2023 0 Comments Lichdom battlemage more enemies![]() Still, we're happy that the developer has taken the time to address its faults. After all, Xaviant's Lichdom Battlemage really isn't a bad game - it remains pretty cool on PC - but the console ports have gained a negative reputation as a result of the botched initial release. Hopefully the situation with Lichdom will help the two companies avoid situations like this in the future. Similar to Lichdom, the game ran very poorly on consoles. This isn't a new relationship either - prior to the release of Lichdom, Maximum Games and Bigmoon released Alekhine's Gun on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One as well. The origin of this title on consoles is particularly curious - having been originally created by Xaviant and released in 2014, the game was picked up by Maximum Games and ported by the Portuguese development house Bigmoon Studios. In two months, the game evolved from a virtually unplayable mess into a fairly decent offering, making it clear that perhaps the developers should have been given more time to get the game right before it was released. With titles like this it's always interesting to watch how things unfold. APB Reloaded on Xbox One now takes point as the worst-performing console title of this generation. That still puts us at around 90 seconds to load a level, which is still too long, but at least the game doesn't have to reload upon death. The developers have made efforts to tackle this issue as well and have managed to shave off thirty to forty seconds per load. It felt like an eternity and made it very difficult to jump in and out of the experience. Loading times were another sticking point in the original release - starting up any level meant waiting more than two minutes, whether you were gaming on PS4 or Xbox One. This highlights an interesting point, namely that native rendering resolution is only one factor that defines in-game image quality, and it's not always the most important. The more significant issue is actually the lack of decent anisotropic filtering - textures are blurred at oblique angles. ![]() The reduced pixel-count alone can't explain anything up to a 3x improvement in frame-rate.Īnd the good news is that Lichdom Battlemage still manages to look reasonably clean at the reduced resolution. While the resolution drop certainly has a positive effect on performance, it's clear that a lot of additional optimisation was carried out as well. ![]() So how has the developer managed to produce such an enormous boost to performance? One of the sacrifices concerns resolution - both games now operate at 1600x900 as opposed to the full 1080p of the original release. Don't believe us? Take a look for yourself: Lichdom sees enormous performance improvements, and a pretty solid experience on Xbox One at least. There's also some intrusive hitching and stuttering that seems to crop up regularly during gameplay, and this really needs addressing. Of course, this is a substantial improvement over the original game, which could drop as low as 12fps, but the experience still feels sub-par. This leads to situations where you're getting nearly 60fps in less demanding areas while still dropping into the mid-20s during major battles. PlayStation 4 doesn't fare quite as well - the boost in performance is massive, but the frame-rate is completely uncapped and highly inconsistent. You'll still run into some light tearing here and there but it's now one of the best-performing CryEngine games on Xbox One. On Xbox One, the game is now capped at 30fps with an adaptive v-sync solution in place and actually manages to maintain its target frame-rate nicely. It's a miraculous save that seemed out of reach at the time of release, but there's no doubting that some serious optimisation work has yielded remarkable results. That's right, Lichdom Battlemage has been completely renewed with a monumental performance boost across the board. In fact, there's a night and day improvement. A couple of months on, a patch designed to address these problems was released and we can confirm that the game is much, much better now. It launched on consoles in April with an average frame-rate under 15fps. It's hard to think of a game with a more infamous reputation than Lichdom Battlemage.
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