I posted this in the steam forums, but figured I’d post them here as well.
Did a full playthrough of the public beta earlier, regrettably I’ve forgotten some of the specifics of a few bugs, I’ll try my best to be specific in each case.
First, PC specs:
Laptop, Windows 10 64 bit, Intel Core i7-4710HQ 2.5GHz, Nvidia 840M 2GB VRAM, 12GB RAM
Performance over 80% of the game remained at 60fps, I had vsync on, played with everything on ultra minus resolution at 1280x720, no AA, no Motionblur, no noise filter, lens flares or Chromatic aberration, but all the lighting and shadows and textures at the highest the menu allowed (minimal autoexec tweaking during this playthrough, just made sure all the threading options were on, the heapsizes a bit bigger and parallaxmap on).
- The Inbound Train ride at the start had lower Fps, 35-45, consistent though, and it had the biggest bugs, lighting and shadows were flickering as has been reported already by many in this topic.
- Anomalous Materials was solid with little issues, however, the environmental design doesn’t account for the new dynamic lighting, meaning that being brightly lit with light sources coming from every direction, you end up not seeing almost any good examples of the new lighting and shadows until everything has gone to sh*t. Instead all you see is the blobby shadow in the beginning, making the environment and characters appear “flat” in detail.
- In We’ve Got Hostiles!, I had textures flickering a lot, decals like on concrete the numbers painted, and some spills and other details added on top of the environments were flickering like they did not know how transparent they should be, flickering between 80% and 30% transparency, not on and off. every few seconds.
- Old issue but worse in the public beta, once I get in the elevator in “We’ve Got Hostiles!” to the surface into the large warehouse where marines attack me in force and a mortar fires at the building, with a circling plane, and I need to run to the bunker underground, the performance dropped the most in this part of the game, to 20-25fps.
- The only other two places I specifically remember having lower performance were the Gargantuan fight in Surface Tension, when you get to the mortar controls, though not as bad as I remember it being in the Mod version! And right at the end, in Lambda Core, the moment the scientist begins the procedure to activate the portal to Xen, all those lighting effects were a bit too much, but fps didn’t drop below 40, so that’s something.
(There were other places where fps dropped, but they were small, never lower than 40, usually to 45, and I noticed a trend with open outdoor areas, though not the canyons, maybe because of the lower detail less lighting? Oh right, the rocket launch sequence, not as bad as it used to be though, earlier playthroughs fps dropped to 25, this beta only to 35, stayed again around 40fps. And another one I just remembered, your first encounter with assassins, that hangar had really low fps.) - Vortigaunt and Alien Grunt textures were oddly low quality compared to all the other ones, don’t know why. Human Assassins also suffer from the same flat low res look. Maybe a rendering problem with shadering?
- Marine Shotgun sounds remind me of the long jump module sounds, I think they’re not supposed to sound like that.
- Still a few physics props that don’t quite behave as they should.
For instance, in Unforeseen Consequences, when you go down the the long ride with the big lift and headcrabs start falling down on you for the entire trip, there’s a small flooded area at the bottom, and if you throw some of the props laying around into it, they don’t even sink like they should if they were heavy, or float, they just drop down in the water at the bottom like there isn’t any water in the way.
Another example is the I think first encounter with a Vortigaunt, as you need to get by a locked door (a scientist is hiding nearby who soiled themselves), and you need to go to the sewers below to raise the water so that you can climb up on the other side of the door. When the water start raising up in the sewers, all props, the dead zombies, float unnaturally right at the surface towards one direction, in the North-East sense.
Really loved what you did with the Gluon gun, one of my new favourites that massive beam of death. Hivehand also felt more satisfying to use, can’t quite nail down what you did with it, but better!
A few places had very memorable mood lighting now thanks to your lighting upgrade.
I remember in Residue Processing seeing the shadow of a burning zombie on a wall in a burning room in the start of the plant, looked great. Also the Questionable Ethics mood lighting right at the start with the green godrays. Oh, a scientist who had been locked inside a small room in some kind of server room with a bunch of vortigaunts around, who lets you in and opens up a door to a really cold room, the lighting on that scientist was fantastic.
Apart from that, not a lot bugs I noticed, the flickering light/shadows return mildly in Blast Pit, the train rides there, also miss my dynamic flashlight, but overall a very pleasant experience.
One last note, body ragdoll physics could use some “oomph” to them, when you deal the killing blow with something like a Glock or MP5, enemies just kind of “fold” in on themselves, just drop at the spot, more like someone disabled them instead of shot them. There has to be some achievable good middleground between the massive impact of a shotgun blast and this current state, right?
Shooting a zombie, only to have it fold in on itself, and the headcrab corpse come loose, but also fall straight down, clipping through the zombie and hitting the ground before the zombie has, just looks and feels a bit unsatisfying.
BUT OVERALL, this version felt like a massive improvement over the 2015 steam launch version I played way back.
