The abyss of the darkness

Beyond the Beyond: Update 113: Bonus material, pt. 5

Welcome back. At the end of the last update I posted a teaser screenshot. Now what was that?

1. Manually targeting monsters in battle rarely works. Fighting one enemy in a group and the game decides to swap your targeting to something else? Good luck getting it back until after you've killed that second foe. Particularly egregious against bosses who are huge damage sponges.
2. Likewise targeting items on the ground to pick them up is extremely finicky. In order to pick up any drop the player has to find and maneuver over a few pixels next to the item to get its name to highlight. It's neither fun nor exciting doing laps around a gold drop or potion trying to find that tiny activation area. It gets especially bad in indoor areas where chests sit on boxes, next to walls/pillars, or there are other obstructions around them. The steam version handles this with mouse-over and of course the PS4 doesn't natively employ a mouse so it had to be changed but the implementation is lacking.
3. Spoken dialogue does not sync with dialogue windows. The text scroll is far too slow. In fact it's so slow NPCs can finish the spoken portion of their script and then move on to walking around or doing other things while the window is still trying to catch up! For a player trying to read the dialogue this is aggravating.
4. Frame rate issues are rampant. If you hate lag you are going to have a very bad time with this game. The laggiest times I've seen aren't even in combat, thankfully. One of the laggiest spots seen thus far was a single vendor and a teleport by the water where the game just starts struggling for no good reason. It's embarrassingly bad.
5. Texture/model popping is also rampant and may factor into the framerate drops. Nothing quite like walking down a dirt path bordered by grass and seeing the grass flicker in and out of existence. Apparently this is after a so-called upgrade to the graphics. Frankly I'm hard pressed to see how this is an improvement.
6. The magma golem might spontaneously disappear. It isn't dead - it's lifebar is still intact - but it's nowhere around. Eventually it reappears. Eventually. It can be resummoned but that takes time and mana and in combat both of those can be in short supply.
7. The game might just up and crash. Remember to save often!
8. When the player has one or more pets and is stationary said pets don't remain stationary. Instead they wander around a bit on a short leash. This is a problem when they hit NPCs because the entire screen shakes. The most common NPC a player might be stationary next to? Vendors, of course! Have fun trying to shop while your pet is trying to move through an NPC and failing causing the game to act like it hates everyone with motion sickness.

Beyond the Beyond: Update 111: Act 5 Bonus Material, pt. 3

In the last update I covered a few more things from the manual and then took an extremely detailed look at one scene in the game. In this collection of bonus material I'll be covering events within the game. Keep in mind I'm going to be doing a lot of bouncing around various tests with different party setups and different event flags. With that said, let's roll!

Beyond the Beyond: Update 109: Act 5 wrap-up and Bonus Material, pt. 1

This update and those that follow will cover not only extras from the game's fifth and final act. Since the game's plot has concluded there's no longer any worries about spoiling anything and thus longer-spanning issues can be broached.. First though I must, like all previous wrap-ups, go through the act recap. I didn't include many summaries at the end of updates because there aren't a whole lot of events in act 5 to summarize.

Beyond the Beyond: Update 107: Resolution (Ending)

When last we saw the team they'd just beaten up an alien! Go team!

Beyond the Beyond: Update 105: Legacy of the Agreement (The Abyss pt. 5)

The grinding's all done - as in I've reached the limit of what I'm willing to stand - so let's get this descent into the Abyss going again. The plot isn't going to... well actually it will sit around forever waiting for me to get there because we're on RPG Time but I've run out of ways to delay this. Anyway with that said this game is fast coming to a conclusion.

Beyond the Beyond: Update 103: Another Side, Another Story (The Abyss pt. 3)

When last we saw the team they had just exited the Abyss having made the long walk down to the Statue of Light at the bottom. That's half the task completed but the other half will be just as time consuming.