MrH

I'm also about 10 hours in and have done very little combat, but I'm still enjoying the game a lot because I'm happy nerding out with the story, but I would like to hit some stuff lol.

Deadfire has been running great for me up until now, I've just entered Queen's Birth and it's very choppy, it's running at about 50% of the frame rate as the rest of the game thus far, is this a known problem area? If so I hope the devs are working on optimising it because it's instantly noticeable and it makes exploring it unenjoyable.

She has just said this line about 15 times in a row, can we please get an option to reduce chatter, or at least have it more varied? I really like the voice acting but it's very repetitive.

I think they're awesome, I just wish there were more of them.

I was disappointed she dipped out so fast.

I really like it.

It'll have a differing impact depending on what the person is used to really, for me I'm used to gaming on a PC capable of 144Hz gaming which is ridiculously smooth, so 30fps feels really terrible to me, whereas 30fps is perfect for a guy who has been playing at that fps his whole life, it's why console gamers generally swallow a lot of poorly made games without even noticing something is wrong. The genre does help lessen the problem a little though, but it's still not acceptable to ship a game that doesn't run well on a £1500 PC.

Yeah my friend also has really bad performance in Battletech. I can't think of a single Unity game I've played that ran well.

I don't know anything about game development, but I do know Unity engine games almost always have poor performance from my experience, I wonder if it would have been viable to spend some of the backer money on licencing a superior engine? I assume it wouldn't be an easy task changing engine, but it definitely would have been good for the game IMO. State of Decay 2 has moved from CryEngine 3 to Unreal Engine 5 so I guess it's possible. It's been a long time and I'm sure Obsidian is made of very different people now, but they have just never been good with engines. If these are the same people who were working on Fallout 2, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights 2, KotOR 2, Fallout New Vegas, Alpha Protocol etc., then I think it's about time they should consider investing in some talent that can improve and optimize the engines they use. I'm seeing this pattern where they are only able to achieve good performance when they use an already developed and optimized engine for a sequel or very similar game (Icewind Dale, Fallout 2, NWN2, KotOR2). With Pillars, Tyranny, and Alpha Protocol, they licensed Unreal and Unity and did all the work themselves. Those games turned out with very poor performance. Of course, I'm not a developer and I have no idea if any of this makes sense. It's just a pattern I noticed. I love Obsidian's games (almost unconditionally at this point), but engine-related things seem to be quite a weakness for them. And with all the success they've been having lately, I was really hoping they would make a point to address this common complaint for Deadfire. Performance is often an afterthought for some developers it seems, but it has one of the biggest impacts on my enjoyment of a game, if a game is good but super choppy it's hard for me to fully enjoy it, it's like there's a devil on my shoulder constantly whispering in my ear "this isn't right, it feels so sluggish doesn't it?" :D

I don't know anything about game development, but I do know Unity engine games almost always have poor performance from my experience, I wonder if it would have been viable to spend some of the backer money on licencing a superior engine? I assume it wouldn't be an easy task changing engine, but it definitely would have been good for the game IMO. State of Decay 2 has moved from CryEngine 3 to Unreal Engine 5 so I guess it's possible.

I played PoE1 with a GTX 970 / 3500k @ 4.3GHz / 16GB DDR3 1600MHz / 60Hz screen and it was pretty bad, I never held 60fps during combat regardless of settings. I recently upgraded to a GTX 1080 / 6700k @ 5GHz / 16GB DDR4 3200MHz / 144Hz screen so I'm hoping I can maintain at least 60fps, but with a 144Hz screen 100 - 144fps is ideal which is what I get in every other game. However after watching itsmeJP I know it won't be possible.

I've been watching some streamers play, most notably itsmeJP who has the best PC money can buy (SLI GTX 1080ti / i7 6800K) and he cannot maintain even 60fps (which is the minimum these days with 120Hz and especially 144Hz becoming so popular), I've seen him drop as low as 24fps and in general he's sitting around 35 - 45fps which is really awful considering his hardware. If the best PC money can buy can't play this game properly what chance do the rest of us have? If Steam is to be trusted the average user is using far, far less powerful hardware so it'll be interesting to see the experience most people end up getting. I'm hoping the build the streamers are currently playing isn't the build we'll receive tomorrow, because if it is I'll have to hold off playing until it's patched.

Being fully voiced is the thing I'm looking forward to the most, the lack of it really hurt the first game IMO.

Absolutely brilliant, I was hoping they'd do full VO but I wasn't expecting it. It's so, so important for me. Hype levels just increased massively.

Earlier than expected, how much will performance be improved from the current beta build? And is more voice acting coming in for quest NPCs?