I just wanted to commend Croteam
I just wanted to commend Croteam
So, Croteam, the creators of the Serious Sam series as well as the Talos Principle game have just announced the sequel to the Talos Principle, The Talos Principle 2, is set to release a little over a week from this post, about 9 years after the first game came out. I was always a huge puzzle fan and so I loved the first game, as well as its story, so I've been looking forward to this ever since it was announced like a year ago. Just recently the team released a demo for the game, which is also quite astonishing in this day. I know the occasional game has released a demo here and there every other year or so, but I think I remember the last demo I played was Skate 3's back in 2010. I'm not quite old enough for it, but I do know that it wasn't that long ago where every game had a free demo. Sometimes they were shit, sometimes they were totally unique experiences, but they all allowed you to at least experience some part of the game before you bought it.
I don't know how to word this more properly, but it just felt so nice actually being able to play a game before it comes out, without having to be a famous youtube reviewer or having to attend a ridiculously expensive convention. I don't want to be too optimistic here, but I'm far more optimistic for the release after playing this demo than I have ever been for most other AAA releases that only show trailers and developer promises.
And not only that, but it also advances the story in a pretty spectacular way. The original game has multiple endings but the canon ending is sort of a cliffhanger and they expand on the story in that direction, so if you're a fan of the original and want to get a head-start on the game's story then I highly recommend checking it out.
Anyway, I like it when studios are at least semi-transparent like this. It's nice to see them put out something tangible that people can interact with before choosing to buy something. Who knows, maybe the full release will be the usual buggy mess next week, but after playing the demo I don't get that feeling as much.
edit: and to top of it off, even on medium settings this game. looks. amazing. It felt like something you'd see created by Cyan (another puzzle game company), not by the people who made Serious Sam
edit2: here are my key takeaway from the demo, marked in spoilers because well they are kinda spoilers:
Talos 2 is very promising in terms of gameplay, the first one is one of my favorite games and I played through it many times, and I've already played this demo 3 times.
This one is more ambitious, the environments are bigger, there's more content, the art style is fantastic, BUT... I can't help but feel a deep sense of technical jank that is shared by many players. The game is a constant state of desperately loading stuff and stuttering due to shader compilation, and you can feel all of it every time you turn around or walk in a new area. Even on ultra with native upscaling, the game only looks good if you stay still, as soon as you move you get smears from every object, the grass stops moving, you can clearly see problems with lighting like shimmering and bleeding, the water and vegetation have no physics whatsoever (the first one at least had water ripples), and despite using raytraced AO they're still using those horrible screenspace reflections (the first one had actual reflections). To top it all off, settings don't always apply correctly until you restart the game, and sometimes the game reverts them to whatever it feels more appropriate for your hardware with no indication whatsoever that it's happened. I've yet to see an UE5 game that doesn't have these issues, that engine just... doesn't look good in motion. To quote AVGN, it feels like driving an old beat up car, you're always afraid it's going to break down.
Also, one of the developers said they don't want to support Linux, not even through Proton, then another one said they'll try to get it to work. Get your shit together, the first one had a native port!
This is based on my experience with a 5800x, and a 6900xt, in 1440p, so your mileage may vary and I know they're hard at work to improve the situation.
So yeah, respect for croteam for making what it's undoubtedly going to be a great puzzle game, but shame on them if they release it in this state.
sounds like you're a bit more of a gamer than i am
Try Immortals of Aveum, it's a full UE5 game and runs really good for my bare 6800XT at 1440p->2160p. I even have recordings of my game play up at 60fps on YouTube.(you can look for the same ID I use here.)
Honestly without going into too much detail, UE5 developers should limit the options available to gamers if they can use the config then game literally runs ugly like what you mentioned. My work place is doing engine upgrade so I am aware of all those things but honestly, it can be done proper but we do have to take away those finer controls. Because some settings turn off features that another needed to run properly. There are "wrong" config default value from UE5 source that cause excessive smearing cause their temporal super resolution upscale is still consider beta at 5.1-5.2, how would players know what presets works together to avoid bad combination? Devs should just interlock cvars or provide basic presets only in this case, otherwise there will be videos after videos claiming UE5 looks bad and perform bad under whatever combination they run into. Those combination aren't suppose to be used together.
That said, I haven't played the demo yet, but it is very likely that TP2 aren't fully UE5. I will update my comment once I played the demo.
Edit: found source, @dosse91@lemmy.trippy.pizza try reset your graphic settings and only apply the big preset but not other detail settings individually, it should make your experience better.(oh, and just in case, don't set AA quality to Epic.)