Lords of the Fallen

[Tombstone]

We made it to the "base" in our co-op game, had a tough time of it with the first boss woman but beat her on the 6th or 7th try. Really enjoying it so far. Will continue tomorrow evening as its our group VR day tomorrow before we can do some more normal PC gaming

 

[Tombstone]

I'm liking it so far, just soloing as the condemned which is definitely a harder start, but feel like making good progress so far. Dual-wielding broken buckets was funny!

Couple of things I haven't worked out, when you're in the land of the living and you get one of those enemies with the little ball thing that you need to take out before you can kill it, how do you actually do it?

On my game if I target it, and then pull on it using the lamp, it doesn't seem to die, and then the enemy just rejoins it and goes invincible again, am I meant to attack it? not really sure maybe I didn't read it carefully enough in the tutorial bit.

I found the only way to kill it was to rift into the umbral realm and then take it out.

Also not sure what the bar is underneath the health/stamina, is it mana?

You have the right idea with the lamp, the little healing orb is in the umbral, use your lamp to see it and then absorb it in the same way that you absorb blisters (left mouse button in the case of K&M), you dont need to fully rift into the umbral

The bar under health/stamina, is your ranged weapon bar, blue bar for mana or "sectioned" bar for ranged ammo

 

[Tombstone]

Yeah it's weird just doesn't seem to work, will give it another go though when I jump back on later.

I'm grinding out some levels before I tackle the boss again, I'm trying not to use the iron guy you can bring in for the fight as well.

Be sure to hold the button down for a bit, it takes a while to fully destroy it

 

[Tombstone]

Do the memory fragments do anything except for show you stuff btw? I figure they don't.

I think they're just for lore

 

[Tombstone]

How's the story for the game, is it well presented or similar to Souls games where they don't really tell you what's going on and you get snippets from items you recover?

There are a few cutscenes which tell you whats happening , some items continue the lore and the NPCs tell you quite a bit

 

[Tombstone]

Alright this is annoying and seems like a silly thought out solution, but the new patch disables Frame Gen, which I have been using fine for 5-6 hours before now.

Steam :: Lords of the Fallen :: Patch v.1.1.191

Build Notes

steamcommunity.com

Going to tank performance a bit without that on. Should default to off but let me run the risk of crashing by turning it on if I want to.

It only just occurred to me to replace the 3.1 DLSS that the game installs, with 3.5 DLSS, so I've just done that and will give it a go now and see if/how that affects performance/visuals. Though I'm happy with the performance still anyway, so its more out of curiosity

 

[Tombstone]

I worked out what I was doing wrong with the umbral parasites by the way, I was using L2 to use the lamp, but then R2 trigger to try to get it, needed to use L2 + R1 instead.

Make sense, I thought maybe you were doing the soul suck thing rather than the blister suck thing, but didnt know what the controllers use for that, in my world its left mouse button while holding the lamp rather than right mouse button

 

[Tombstone]

Gained 10fps by switching out the 3.1 DLSS for 3.5 DLSS

EDIT: actually, no scrap that, putting on 3.5 actually broke the DLSS, so I was simply running at a lower res. Will put the original 3.1 DLSS back on

 

[Tombstone]

Trying to enjoy it but the fps tanks from 100 all the way down to 30 when killing an enemy making taking on mobs a challenge.

Whats your specs? I dont drop below 60, whats more surprising though is that my other half, playing with a GTX1080 @ 1080, gets a reasonably steady 50fps on mostly High. That surprised me a lot.

 

[Tombstone]

7800xt
5800x3d
32gig ram
Temps all fine running 100 FPS ish at 2560 but whenever I kill anything the FPS tanks to 30ish for 2-3 sec.

Weird, wonder if its an AMD issue, all the people I know of who are getting decent performance are on Nvidias.

 

[Tombstone]

Just went to play and have been vac banned, must be related to the anti lag + amd driver.

Can't say I'm happy, first amd GPU I have had in years and I get banned due to a driver issue.

Well if all AMDs are getting banned, thats bad news for millions of people

 

[Tombstone]

Still liking this so far but if I have a few non-performance related issues, it's that:

1. Those temp vestiges don't feel well balanced, they seem rare to get/expensive to buy, and often I'll use one only to find a normal vestige just around the corner.
2. The level design is simply not as tight as say Lies of P was, which frequently gave me shortcuts and ways to bypass annoying areas once I'd cleared them. In this game I often find myself going back through areas and there aren't a lot of shortcuts opening up.
3. Attacking enemies can sometimes find me zooming off the edge after them, even with a standard attack. Have to be real careful around edges.

I think the only issue I have with the game so far is the same issue I have with almost all souls and souls like games, the lock on target. How damned hard is it for these games to simply lock onto the mob that I'm looking at or is the closest to me, when I press lock on. Its the one thing which drives me nuts about the genre. The number of times I press lock on target and it locks on a mob 40m behind the one directly in front of me, or worse still, spins my camera 100 degrees and locks me onto god knows what in a completely different direction.

 

[Tombstone]

Oh and a second thing , which again is common in the genre. Animations that lock you in, its particularly noticeable on the Warwolf class where I quite often die because I perform a move and then cant do anything until its animation has finished, resulting in me getting hit whilst the animation is ongoing.

 

[Tombstone]

That's pretty understandable given the genre if you think about it. If you get hit mid-animation, it means you miscalculated and made a mistake. You don't get to cancel out of animations in these games for free, if you could you'd literally have a get out of jail free card on you all the time. You attack at a wrong time or overextend, you get punished for it. It has always been like that, just a part of the mechanics.

Fighting games are the same for the most part, for example.

Yeah I get why the genre does it, its a false difficulty. Instead of simply improving AI or the inherit abilities of the mob, you make it so that if theres an animation going on the player cant do anything to break the animation. The player cant feint with a move and then reverse the move into another attack in the way that a real life swordsman can because they are locked into completing the entire original move animation first.

So I see why the games do it, its just something I'd prefer not to see (would rather that the AI is improved or that the mobs difficulty is down to clever use of heals and consumables by the mobs - but we arent quite at that level of gaming AI yet, mobs are still heavily scripted rather than intelligently adaptable)

Isnt spoiling my fun with the game though, got 11 characters on the go and have played 22 hours so far since it released on Friday morning

 

[Tombstone]

it would be kinda funny if they let you animation cancel but you paid the price in stamina for doing it. Basically use stamina to put inertia in to your weapon, then depending on the part of the swing you're at use a percentage of stamina to cancel. It would completely wreck button mashers though as they keep animation cancelling swings in to other swings. The enemy would be allowed to do the same though or it's not fair so it's just massively upped the difficulty of judging when it is and isn't safe to attack

Skyrim in VR basically allowed unlimited animation cancelling as huge 2h 20kg swords acted like lightsaber tracking the hand controller. You could have 10 x the DPS and also block mid stroke completely ruining any balance as the AI obeyed the original rules

That would make quite a lot of sense actually yeah, stamina usage for having to adjust your body rapidly, I'd be up for that.

 

[Tombstone]

Can't agree it's false difficulty.

I describe it as a false difficulty because its a mechanic forced onto the player in order to make a fight more difficult, in my definitions, real difficulty is improved AI, mobs using consumables and heals and mobs not having to follow a script anything which mechanicly restricts the player is a false difficulty imposed to counterbalance the lack of the aforementioned AI/Consumable/adaptations, how often do we see guides where it says X always swings her sword three times, then is open to a hit and then she will do an aerial attack, now imagine how much better that would be if X reacted to the fight and your attacks and didnt always swing the sword 3 times, pause and then do an aerial attack. What about if sometimes she swung her sword 1 time and then did an aerial attack, or swung it twice, didnt pause, immediately did an aerial attack and then swung the sword a 3rd time - that would be real difficulty. Sadly, as I say, we arent yet at the point of adaptive AI, so instead the bosses have these scripted set move patterns, which once learned, can be beaten by a player almost every time, with any class. Take the first boss in this, Pieta, once I learned her patterns I was able to beat her first time with every class. I'd like to see the challenge of adaptive, unpredictable AI but we arent yet there.....but we will be at some point in the future, once AI develops more, we'll get mobs in games which can think , move and react like a human and that unpredictability will make for some truly challenging fights.

Or in summary, I'm still waiting on that time in gaming where I get my Jurassic Park - "Clever Girl" moment, where I can acknowledge that the enemy mob has out-thought me

 

[Tombstone]

You got a glimpse of that in ER already when some bosses could cancel combos midstring and respond with a different move with you having no ability to tell. In Sekiro, for example, they also can but it's more sensible because you can react.

Needless to say, it wasn't too well received for obvious reasons, some of which I already pointed out.

Adaptable AI in the way you describe makes sense only when you can react to the AI performing those branching moves, and that makes it nothing else than additional patterns to read. If you can't react to them - there you have your false difficulty. Enemy doing things that you can't do anything about except guess and hope for the best.

Just like bosses reading your inputs in ER to punish you for healing which is a way better example of false difficulty than not being able to cancel your attacks because you still have control of when you attack and the mistake's on you. Unfortunately, every game imposes rules by which you play to keep things simpler and it's not going to change anytime soon.

EDIT: And no, that wouldn't be "real" difficulty. It would be pure guesswork and a great example of false difficulty.

The only way you can have consistent difficulty in such games is relying on reactable patterns to test one's reflexes, pattern reading and decision making under stress. If your enemies can switch those patterns on the fly in unpredictable and unreactable ways, you're just guessing and either being lucky or dying for it. This maybe makes it more realistic but is also completely nonsensical for these games.

not sure I'd like to play a souls like with every mob having terminator AI

How would you even be able to balance it with the different abilities us humans have? maybe it keeps a consistent difficulty to take you down to a sliver of health just before the next bonfire?

The way I see it, with the unpredictability and better AI, is that it would make it more like fighting against other humans - who arent scripted like current enemies - but without the annoyance of having to deal with the idiocy of other humans personalities

 

[Tombstone]

Further I get into the game the more I am enjoying it and I was already enjoying it a lot from the start, its got some epic vistas in it

 

[Tombstone]

I really want to play this on K&M but I'm find it slower if i have to hit V to run and then F to jump, plus when I want to use the light having to bring the little pinky back to CRTL feels a little stretch
So tonight i shall be using a controller

I set the jump to be a thumb button on my mouse, makes jumping with a K&M easy

 

[Tombstone]

I'm still very much enjoying it, even with 11 characters on the go, there's only one thing left now thats still bothering me (I've gotten over the other issues now) , is the target lock is cack. As it so often is in these games, its just dump. Can be stood on a platform, target is right in front of me, click to lock on and it locks onto something 60m away in a different direction instead of whats right in front of me. I've died A LOT because of the lock on. Aside from that issue though, having a blast with the game, played 39 hours now so far according to Steam, which given that it released 4 days ago is pretty good