I'm not really calling it anything, just saying that it makes for a bad first impression. Can't say whether it really is a problem with optimization, but going by the reports of WinterSnowfall up there, it looks like it's mostly a matter of inaccurate/ exaggerated system requirements. Which is common these days, but usually not this extreme. Makes you wonder why they release system requirements at all, when the information turns out to be so useless.

Once enough people have tried the game and written some proper reviews, that should clear up any confusion about the requirements and performance.

Is this better than No Man's Sky?

As far as I can tell you're not supposed to mention NMS in this thread, or some people might have an allergic reaction.

More seriously, they seem to be completely different games. So, uh... depends entirely on what you enjoy in a game? This seems to be more of an Action game, while NMS is primarily a slow-paced exploration game.

I understand what you're saying to an extent - a game has to stand on it's own merits and you can't really take into account things like the size of the team that made them or their budget. But when you compare the Witcher 3 to The Signal From Tölva you do have to consider those things as you're comparing a game made with a AAA budget and a massive team of developers with an indie game made by a team of 3-5 people built on top of Unity.

The Witcher 3 was built on a custom game engine designed by CD Project just for their games. With their large team of skilled programmers, they're able to customise it precisely to their needs. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the engine driving the Witcher 3 had over 100 person years of programmer effort spent on it. An indie developer can't really compete with this so, if they want to make a game that looks like it was made this century, they will turn to one of the prefab game engines such as Unity or Unreal.

Once you've made that choice, you're pretty much at the mercy of the engine. Sure, you can still write inefficient code of your own and you can fundamentally misunderstand how the engine works but even if you use it in a perfectly reasonable manner and just push it too hard, you can't easily (or at all) make changes to the underlying engine to suit your particular needs as the engine source code isn't generally available (at least, I believe, not with a standard Unity license). And even if you do have the code (like with Unreal) the chances of you knowing how to optimise it for your use case isn't great because you didn't write it and you're probably not a rendering expert or an expert at implementing a script interpreter or at implementing A* path finding or rigid body physics simulations or...

There are of course things you can still do like understanding the limitations of your tools or scaling back your ambitions but overall, when people complain about the "unopimized mess" of indie games made with prefab engines like this, I wonder if that person really understands what they're saying.

The bottom line is that we either only have AAA 3D games and 2D pixel indie games or we accept that smaller teams with interesting ideas will usually need a leg up with an engine like Unity or Unreal and that may result in higher system requirements than you would like.

OK, thank you for the informations.

I did ask because NMS was at first announcement as mix of different genres (exploration, adventure...) and there was also planned to future some (at least) battles in space if not on ground.

Let's keep in mind that it's peculiar to calculate hardware requirements, espcially with small dev teams: not enough available configurations to make enlighted tests.
Here's an interesting video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ2KTRn4BMI

FYI, Playdead is an indie studio and they've made INSIDE with Unity AND they had access to the source code.

But not every programmer on every indie team is that good. Also, INSIDE probably doesn't have most of the system developped in Tolva. Each game, like each team, has its ups, downs and quirks...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ2KTRn4BMIHere's an interesting video:

FYI, Playdead is "indie" and they've made INSIDE with Unity AND they had access to the source code for some optimizations.

But not every programmer in every team is that good.

Also, INSIDE probably doesn't have the same systems as Tolva.

Teams, as much as games, have their own sets of strength, weaknesses and quirks.

Yep, as I said, I think it is possible to get a source code license for Unity but I don't think most developers have one. I thought it cost quite a bit of money but I may be wrong. I think for Unreal you can get source code access for free if you sign an NDA or something like that. But that's millions of lines of somebody else's code, written by some of the best people in the industry. Realistically, most programmers would struggle to do much with it.

I know very little about Unity really as I've been working on my own game engine for a long while now but am considering giving up on it and just using Unity because, no matter how many (free time) hours I put into it, it will always be a couple of decades behind the current state of the art. And I just don't have a thick enough skin to spend years of my life making something incredibly complicated only to receive thousands of "you suck" drive by reviews on every game forum on the Internet. Although I'm sure that will happen anyway given how people react to everything nowadays!

At least using an existing engine will cut on those costs, ahah.

I've never had problems with Unity games either but I know some people do.

UE4 does seem very efficient. I would use it but it's not really designed for programmers; it's more for 3D artists and level designers who can create a complete "AAA quality" looking game without writing a single line of code.

When I last reviewed it, their tutorials and videos seem to be mostly geared towards using their proprietary "Blueprints" visual scripting system, their programming documentation was a couple of revisions out of date and I saw one forum moderator discouraging a new user from writing code in favor of using Blueprints.

And this is the way the industry is now - most games have a ratio of 1 programmer to a dozen or more artists so the tools tend to reflect that.

Well, considering the image quality (low res textures, low res shadows) the game runs quite poorly. I could play Shadow Warrior 2 on max settings with constant 30fps, but not this game. It's too demanding for what it is. Hopefully there will be some patches in the future.

At least it's better to inflate the requirements than doing the opposite no?

Unity's C# is more accessible than Unreal's C++ too.

You have a lot of crass unoptimized Unreal games too, the engine isn't the issue.

Based on the promo video, it looks extremely repetitive, which does bring to mind that game we're not supposed to mention.

REALLY early impression, maybe an hour or two in. Some of this info may not be entirely correct, due to reasons.

Looks pretty good. And yeah, I can see where - graphically speaking - some might make a connection to NMS.

Encountered a bit of a puzzle-ish element within a building. Nothing complicated if you remember that the robots are equipped with a feature that helps you figure it out. Maybe more puzzle stuff later.

The background lore - what little I've seen so far - has my curiosity piqued. Seems like 'civilization' is basically robots. Some intelligent, others more drone-like. You get little snippets of the story in these information relics (for lack of a better term) that you find, and can read later at a base. Thought it was funny that one conversation you find is a recording of a conversation you were part of at the beginning of the game.

Checkpoint-ish saves? Sort of? You don't have a set character, per se. You can jump into other robots using the map, so quick-travel is a thing in this game. And you don't have to be at, say, a portal to do it. Just access the map, hit a key, and you can take over another robot at select locations you've 'conquered'. So you can save any time (looks like you get just one slot, but I don't think that will be a problem in this game) and when you re-enter the game you'll be at some major spot like a base. From there it looks like you can use the map right away to pop into another robot near where you want to go.

The scanner feature is kinda cool. Think of it as something like toggled infravision, which can help you find things you might not see otherwise. Makes sense from a robot standpoint since I wouldn't expect them to see the same way that we do, or be held to our own vision limitations.

Someone mentioned the robot's 'speech'. It works as sort of an emotive thing, and fairly useful in combat if you pay attention.

Performance. Yes, well. It runs fine so far on my laptop, maxed out. But that's with a GTX 1070, i7-6700, and 24GB RAM. The fans were kicking it pretty high, though.

hmm, the trailer with the voiced walkthru made it seem really non immersive, and sort of boring, with a great concept like this I cant understand why. anyone play it yet and are you having fun?