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Grotty fantasy Soulslike Lords of the Fallen – which I have been cautiously looking forward to, despite Ed’s efforts to temper my expectations – is getting its chainmail-wearing arse kicked by Steam players. It seems to be selling well, squatting at third on the platform’s global top seller charts by revenue, but the user review consensus tells a different story. There are 1,320 reviews at the time of writing, and they are Mostly Negative, which is quite the showing for a game’s first day on sale.
As you might expect this early on in the game’s life, the problems are chiefly technical: low frame-rates, stuttering and crash bugs, with the occasional Positive review hailing the game’s ‘buttery-smooth’ performance, emerging from the Negative verdicts like a thumbs-up from a lava flow. All of which is in keeping with Ed’s thoughts on the game’s technical sturdiness in our review. “Performance is quite poor across the board, with frequent frame drops even on low settings,” he wrote, noting that the review build was being patched “constantly” throughout his time with it.
Developers Hexworks have quickly banged together a guide to avoiding some of the worst bugs, which you should probably check out if you’re planning to wander the realms of Axiom and Umbral this weekend.
Tip number one is simply to use the “auto-set” option under the graphics tab. Tip number two is also straightforward: update your graphics drivers to the latest version. Tip number three is as follows:
a. Go to: “X:UsersMYUSERAppDataLocalLOTF2Saved”
b. Delete the *.UPIPELINECACHE file
c. Right click on the game. Select ‘Properties’ – ‘Installed Files’ – Click on “Verify Integrity of Caché”
And, er, that’ll hopefully do it. If you’re still facing technical issues, you can send a diagnostics file and a GPU Debugging Log to the support team at publisher CI Games via support@cigames.com, letting them know how many hours you’ve played and the steps that led to the bug in question.
How do you get hold of a GPU debugging log? Elementary, my dear Watson! Head to your Steam settings and enter the command “-gpucrashdebugging”. When next the game crashes, navigate to this address in file explorer: “X:UsersUSERNAMEAppDataLocalLOTF2SavedLogsLOTF2.log”. Then, email the logs you find there to CI Games. As in many games, you can also send info about a crash direct to Lords of the Fallen’s bug database using the pop-up crash notification.
Going by the Steam forum reaction to the advice above, I’m not sure it’s the answer to Lord of the Fallen’s prayers, but that’s what patches are for, I guess. Technical woes aside, the RPG is fairly well-regarded, though it’s no Elden Ring slayer. “At times, there are flashes of a grand adventure to cleanse a kingdom of rot,” Ed wrote in our Lords of the Fallen review. “But there are just too many little annoyances that prevent the journey and its umbral counterpart from ascending into Soulslike royalty.”