Lords of the Fallen's most difficult boss is... performance problems on every platform
The one thing Lords of the Fallen players on all platforms can't stop talking about sadly has little to do with the content of the game.
Lords of the Fallen has officially been out for a few days, and the initial reception from players has been fairly negative. Although there's a lot to like about Hexworks' first project, not least just how next-gen it looks, the main problem everyone seems to be running into is just how poorly it runs.
Performance woes affect PC, PS5, as well as Xbox Series X/S - though the extent to which they do on each platform varies.
On Steam, the PC version started out with a Mostly Negative user review rating, though it has since gone up to Mixed, so things have evened out a bit. Performance problems, and even crashes, have been all over player complaints on the Steam forums and elsewhere.
Hexworks initially shared some basic troubleshooting information, but the studio's strangest recommendation was for players to leave the graphics on Auto-Set and not mess with individual settings. That one in particular was a bit puzzling considering how customisation and performance tweaking is one of the best things about playing on PC.
In just a few short days, the developer rolled out several patches, and it particurarly made note of an update to the Sentry crash-reporting tool in a blog post, encouraging players to continue choosing to send reports whenever the game crashes.
This is a similar story on PS5, albeit without much of the crashing. The game's framerate on performance mode hardly ever locks to 60fps, and the game's subreddit is full of complaints about the uneven performance, random stutters - particularly in certain boss fights, and a host of other image quality problems, such as textures failing/taking too long to load in.
But no platform has had it worse than Xbox, where the game appears to have simply shipped with an outdated build. All of the problems mentioned above have been significantly worse, to the point that Hexworks put out a statement to let players know that the Xbox version will be updated "to bring it to parity with other platforms."
The Xbox version has since been updated, but it's not clear if it was brought to the same level as PC and PS5. To its credit, Hexworks has already released several patches in just a few days, but that does not excuse the experience players have been having on day one.
Lords of the Fallen is a large game, so it would have been much better to see people talk about mechanics, balance, boss design and so much more to do with the actual game, rather than how it runs.