Lords of the Fallen developers Hexworks are still busily carving a path through the game’s various bugs and performance issues. The latest Lords of the Fallen update, Patch v.1.1.207, is a thrilling litany of technical gremlins that have now been tracked down and slaughtered.
Amongst other things, the developers have turned off collision detection for an entire library, to avoid tanking the frame-rate when you – for reasons best known only to yourself – attack the books. In other news, the game will no longer crash itself in “revenge” when you hit walls too often (a rare, and rather amusing-sounding bug – best be wary when looking for secret rooms I guess). Hexworks have also identified the source of a crashing problem when playing Lords of the Fallen on Steam Deck, though the fix for that particular issue hasn’t yet passed QA. Oh, and they’ve made the continue button “sexier”. Look, don’t ask me, I just work here.
Lords of the Fallen’s Steam user review fortunes have improved since launch, but the game continues to have a difficult time of things on Valve’s platform. With 10,515 user reviews now published, the consensus score currently stands at Mixed. The game has sold well, however, or at least, well enough for publisher CI Games. The latter’s CEO Marek Tyminski Xeeted earlier in the week that “we are pleased to confirm, following the release of Lords of the Fallen, that CI Games is well positioned for the future games in our development pipeline (Project Survive and action-RPG Project III).”
It’s getting harder to pick out a common thread linking the negative reactions on Steam, but crash bugs and performance issues still feature heavily. Other players are finding the game’s balancing uneven – a few are drawing comparisons with Dark Souls 2 at launch. Here’s our own Lords of the Fallen review with Ed’s account of the highs and lows. And here are today’s patch notes in full:
Stability
Fixed a crash that could occur when the soulflayed character is destroyed while the player has not yet finished the soul flay pull animation.
Fixed a crash that could occur when the GameThread timed out waiting for RenderThread after 120 seconds.
A failsafe has been added to prevent an access violation crash in DirectX. The suspicion is that the RHI texture is deleted before FD3D12DynamicRHI::RHIAsyncCreateTexture2D returns.
A sneaky bug has been fixed where lower supported AMD cards could crash when using 32-bit wave operations in shaders instead of 64-bit.
We’re now calling TerminateOnGPUCrash() when the GPU has actually crashed, not when it’s unresponsive, to get better information on Sentry in case of crashing.
Fixed an issue where the wrong descriptor was passed to the d3d12 Resource constructor, resulting in asserts when getting resource allocation info for shared buffers.
Fixed a crash that could occur when an actor in the process of being soulflayed was destroyed before the player could finish the pull animation.
Fixed a very rare crash that occurred when continuously hitting walls. Occasionally, the wall would take revenge and crash your game.Optimization
The 4000 books on the shelves at Bramis Castle now lack collision to reduce memory usage.It was gardening day on the Fief, and several trees have been optimized.
Certain UI textures have been optimized to load more quickly and reduce their VRAM usage.Multiplayer
Fixed an issue where the audio from the host could sometimes not be heard by the client when in spectator mode after dying.Gameplay
In some instances, when using the lamp to traverse certain platforms in Axiom, falling would trigger the fall animation twice. Now it only triggers once as intended.AI
Fixed enemies that could sometimes be spawned in a T-pose at the lower part of the manse.
Tweaked the navmesh on a small section of Lower Calrath to help AI navigate better in that complex environment setup.
Trapper’s traps can now be destroyed with ranged options such as arrows, grenades, magic, and more.Quests
In one of the character’s quests, there was a big door that would disappear. Now, when it disappears, it does so with style, as we’ve added moth particle systems to the disappearance.Collision
Collisions on some umbral platforms in the cistern have been fixed to improve the navigation of certain enemies.
On the Fief, during our gardening day, we’ve improved trees that needed better collision detection.
We’ve covered a ground hole in Pilgrim’s Perch that was causing players to fall through it. It wasn’t visible enough and felt unfair.
We’ve fixed the collision of a small wood platform in Lower Calrath that was causing Bringers of Stillness to fall through it instead of lurking from the shadows.Audio
We’ve added a new (slightly sexier) sound when pressing “continue” in the main menu.
The Exclusive Section of the Collector’s Edition now has a specific song.Steam Deck
We’ve identified the issue causing the game to crash on Steam Deck in the latest builds. We have a fix, and as soon as it passes QA, we’ll publish it tomorrow. In the meantime, please ensure that you’ve updated your Steam Deck software to “Stable” (not “BETA” or “Preview”). Additionally, you can work around the issue by booting the game on your PC and resting at a vestige to get rid of the red eye.
Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
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