Shroud of the Avatar - RPG Codex Review

Shroud of the Avatar has been reviewed by the RPG Codex.

On the outside, the first thing a player is bound to notice is what is customarily called a “technical mess”. The game's framerate is abysmal, often dropping down to 20-30 FPS in city areas on my I7-4790k with Geforce 980 GTX, a machine that is no longer top of the line as I write this review, but is strong enough to get 60 FPS in games that look much better than Shroud of the Avatar. It becomes even more incomprehensible when you try to analyze what's killing the game's performance. In the busy scenes that trigger the slowdowns, I tried setting the graphics quality to low and there was absolutely no improvement. Meaning the bottleneck was my CPU, which is astonishing considering nothing much happens in the game physics-wise (can I even say nothing at all? I'm not even sure I ever saw basic gravity effects), and in terms of AI the NPCs only need to do some pretty basic pathfinding (and that's only a very small number of them) and follow simple scripts (far from the Ultima VII-style living world that we were promised). I think it may have something to do with the scene being large, and the CPU needing to take care of objects that are extremely far away because of poor optimization?

Who cares! This game is an unoptimized mess. And I'm not sure they'll ever be able to fix it, considering people were complaining about performance years before it launched. Portalarium are clearly aware of the problem - that they do not address it says a lot about what you can expect from the game in the future. Release 54 supposedly featured numerous speed improvements, which went entirely unnoticed by me and even worse, introduced a new bug that made the game ignore my resolution settings, resetting it to 1080p during map transitions. Thanks for that.

But is it pretty, at least?

Well…

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