Recent reviews by Quilltacular

Fantastic game, tons of fun and content. Highly recommend if you like story-driven games and/or DnD (unless you don't like turn based games, as it is turn based).

TLDR: Without the performance issues, this game is 100% recommend. With the performance problems, wait for it to be fixed, go on sale, or just buy it on PS5 which is where they spent all of the time because Sony paid them money for timed exclusives.

The performance is **TERRIBLE**. In the prologue, the game worked great with Nvidia's recommended Ultra settings for most things and High for RT at 99%FPS between 60-70 (which, frankly was unexpected as I have a 3070 Ti). And then Hogwarts.....

Once I hit Hogwarts, the cutscenes dropped to single digit frames and the gameplay becomes a picture book. This is true using Nvidia's recommended settings **or** Hogwart's Legacy's recommended settings via the hardware scan. And I haven't even hit Hogsmead yet, which is apparently even worse for performance.

There are some improvements you can do:
- replace the outdated Nvidia DLSS version that comes with the game, helps performance a bit
- if you have an AMD Ryzen CPU, disable SMT (hyperthreading equivalent) helps a bit as for some reason more threads available **decreases** the performance of the game (likely they greedily use at least one thread per core and evenly distribute work between the threads regardless if the overhead of distributing work/collecting results is higher than the performance gain of multi-threading)
- open the menu when your framerate tanks and wait for a little bit, usually your framerate will recover pretty quickly. It seems like their world chunk loading/unloading is very poorly done so if you stop the game engine from having to think about anything else, it runs through it's backlog and sorts stuff out.
- Enable hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling, Windows search for `GPU` and make sure you restart your PC
- Mess with the `Engine.ini` file (which is a *totally* normal thing to need to do)

Credit to `FriedBongWater` on Reddit for this (link: https://www.reddit.com/r/HarryPotterGame/comments/10zeh67/pc_performance_tips_this_got_rid_of_low_fps_dips/ ), which I'm pulling in here so after game updates I have a single location to reference for changes I made:

- Navigate to `${USER}\AppData\Local\Hogwarts Legacy\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor` and backup `Engine.ini`. Add the following to the bottom of the file and save it:

```
[SystemSettings]
r.bForceCPUAccessToGPUSkinVerts=True
r.GTSyncType=1
r.OneFrameThreadLag=1
r.FinishCurrentFrame=0
r.TextureStreaming=1
r.Streaming.PoolSize=3072
r.Streaming.LimitPoolSizeToVRAM=1

[ConsoleVariables]
AllowAsyncRenderThreadUpdates=1
AllowAsyncRenderThreadUpdatesDuringGamethreadUpdates=1
AllowAsyncRenderThreadUpdatesEditor=1
```

Also, it shouldn't take 1-2 minutes every time you start the game to build the shaders. This is a solved problem: implement a freaking shader cache. Sure, you'll cache miss sometimes but you can just look at Darktide for an example of the startup improvements that having a shader cache allows (and at the point where *Darktide* is doing something better, you need to be concerned because as much as I want to love that game.... yea....).

[Note: The `Engine.ini` file changes seems to have sped up building the shaders considerably, drolpping from 1-2 minutes to 30-45s & has made Hogsmead okay with the FPS sitting in the high 20s to low 30s with occasional dropped frames but it is way less choppy.]

If you're buying this game because it's "Star Wars with Dark Souls/Sekiro combat", DON'T!

The combat feels bad and clunky. Respawn tried to make a Souls-style Star Wars game with their own twist and it completely falls flat. The best description I've seen of the combat is a mash of Dark Souls and the Witcher 3, which is pretty accurate. Unfortunately, it fails. And this is coming from someone who has 100% all Souls games and played W3 blind on the highest difficulty (and it was kinda too easy tbh).

Blocking and parrying is unresponsive due to input lag (intentional input lag maybe? I can't quite tell). Parry also doesn't interrupt the enemy attack sequence so if you miss one parry in the sequence, you are now stunlocked until the combo finishes. Unless of course one of the other spam of enemies starts to hit you, at which point you are once again stunlocked.

The stunlocking issue would be annoying but not terrible if the dodging mechanic was good. It isn't. The quick dodge doesn't get you far enough away from attacks or give enough i-frames to be useful and rolling takes you so far away from the action combat becomes: run in, hit once, roll away, repeat. The input lag also applies here in incredibly frustrating fashion.

And then there are the auto-targeting enemy attacks that track you with perfect accuracy, which is it's own whole thing of bad design.

Hitboxes are also not correctly rendered along with the textures (the trigger to write this was dying to an attack where the entire animation hit the ground a foot to the left of Cal), which is utterly essential to this style of game.

I don't find the exploration as bad as other people who don't like the game, but the big slides that show up all the time feel very gamey, out of place, and are poorly done. One in particular where it's incredibly difficult to make the corner which adds nothing to the game besides frustration.

Summary: Unlike other Souls-style games where it is difficult, but is also generally fair; this game is not difficult, but is generally unfair. If you got the Souls-style fluidity of combat into Fallen Order, it would be fantastic, if too easy.

And it's a shame as I wanted to love this game.