Greetings,

I noticed Brian Fargo on Twitter yesterday recommended going into graphics options and clicking Auto Detect. He basically said, due to an oversight that graphics always default to Ultra.

I clicked auto detect and it set my game to "Medium" - not terrible, but you could definitely see it wasn't looking great, so I set it to "High" and it seems to be the graphics I want without the performance hit of "Ultra" settings.

YMMV but just be aware until they patch it, the graphics settings are kind of borked, and the reason for a lot of problems with the gameplay right now.

I'm having similar problems, graphics on Ultra look nothing special but lag more than Monster Hunter World on ultra on my computer, but that's weird: I have the ultra setting, the medium setting, and "poor high priestess something" in between, but the gap in quality between ultra & "high priestess" is such I believed it was a joke of some kind, it looked like some mid-2000 mud.

I definitely recommand waiting for a patch.

For what it's worth - until they hopefully manage to get actually any optimization to speak of into the game, you can also try playing with the internal resolution slider.
Not the game resolution setting - the slider. It will make the game blurry if you go to far, but together with anyway blurry TAA it's hardly noticeabe if you don't go too low.

The game's a damn mess. I only have one screen resolution to choose from and it's the wrong one for my monitor. On top of that, the game ALWAYS defaults to German language even when English is saved. There's lots of other things, but enough said...

Ah -- I've just posted about the language issue you mention. So, I'm not the only one affected by this.

As to performance, I see the game maxing out my 1080 quite often, while my CPU is picking its nose. Playing at 2560x1600, the only other game I play, that hammers my GPU this way is Planet Nomads. Where I equaly have my CPU being kinda bored with the load :o)

But I don't experience the area transition load time delays other seem to run into. It's still annoying, but never takes more than a few seconds.

The game runs on 'Ultra' settings, with DOF, Anti-Aliasing and Motion-Blurr disabled.

Thanks for the updates, all. I just set it to "Auto detect" and then set it to "High" and it doesn't look like garbage but doesn't lag out every time I turn around.

The advice here is invaluable. I really have high hopes for this game, but I posted on reddit that it probably should have stayed in development a little longer. I feel for Fargo, I know he cares about his games, but this isn't the first recent release that's been a mess at release.

At least he used Unreal instead of Unity. Unreal is a lot cleaner imo.

Clicking on Auto Detect wokred for me. It reduced the settings to an almost playable level. Still some stutters here and there, but it worked ok for the time being.

Performance in general is really poor here. I feel like a lot of people may have ignored the sytem requirements too, which are really high (7970 is listed as the MINIMUM AMD gpu which is pretty high).

That being said, it appears that shadows are the biggest performance hitter. Just turning them down from Ultra to High seems to be the single setting that gives the greatest performance boost.

It really does run inexplicably poorly though. Hopefully they keep at it, because there is definitely a lot of performance to be unlocked with optimization in there somewhere.

Well given that the game is basically UE4 based it has basically the performance of a Unity game.
I have an RTX 2080, ok this is pre patch, apparently the patch resolves some of the issues.
But if I have everything Ultra in 1080p it goes to 60fps with 100% 3d load on the gpu
now in 40 as expected I have 30fps in 40k on ultra. basically about half of the performance I have in Witcher 3 in Novigrad which is my personal benchmark for hitting a system really hard, which does not have corridors 100% of the time.

The problem I see is, if I stand against a wall in a house I still barely manage to get 30fps that way in 4k with about on foot in front of me and tthe wall having nothing but textures.
Something is seriously broken in their code, I have the feeling they render the surrounding the entire time and ignoring walls the visible area etc...
But that is just a guess. The game itself is awesome and the graphics are really good considering the budget and the music is beyond anything any game has delivered. It really is the next level of classical dungeon crawlers.
And the critis from the BT fans that they did not deliver the orginal game hurts, because the orginal bards tales did not age that well in my opinion. They were just classical dungeon crawlers with random encounters and lots of teleport traps, their merit was they brought the genre to the next level graphic wise back then (vectored dungeos were the norm, they were the first ones to use textures and sprites)

It just hurts that the sales and generally the reviewes were relatively negative for something they could have easily fixed by another 2 weeks of bugfixing. But the card is on 100% all the time no matter what I do, while the processor
almost sleeps at 8% load.
Another game which basically was sold under its quality to inherent bugs and performance problems. Dreamfall Chapters is also such a case of an absolute wonderful game but reased with problems which could have been fixed pre release.
Over time the games are fixed and become really wonderful games just like Dreamfall Chapters, which I can highly recommend, but the sales are damaged already and only a few games which are released can recoup their initial mediocre sales.

Either way lets wait for the patch there already are positive reports on the performance side.

Also I think the key delivery pissed off a lot of people as well. It simply should not happen that the
choose your key type field works on one browser and does not show up on the other
(aka it showed up on chrome, but was not there in Firefox, not sure about Safari and Edge though)
This is about 3 pages which needed proper testing on 3 browser. That something even a web developer can do himself
quickly and qa definitely would catch. The quirky key delivery caused a load of troll reviews in steam the problematic performance issues caused another. A sure way to tank a game which otherwise is wonderful and excellent.

FWIW I use Firefox and had 0 problems choosing a game key, either for Bard's Tale Trilogy Remastered, or BT4.

Ok this is weird, I had serious issues until I switched to Chrome.
The entire form was there but not the choose the target key type field.
Once I switched to chrome, the field suddenly was magically there.
Another possible explanation could be some overaggressive caching which basically
forced the browser into reusing an already cached page.

I was using CrowdOx...

Yeah I don't doubt it. I just know I personally had no issues : /

It didn't work for me, when I tried it it put everything on low, which... didn't look really good even for someone like me who doesn't really care about teh graphix. I manually put everything to high, turned off motion blur (not for performance reasons, only because I find their implementation of motion blur gives me a headache after 5 minutes), and it runs fine.

Well fine except for some stutter right after loading a level, but I already had those with everything set to low; I suspect it's not a video card performance problem but rather that it loads textures, shaders etc... from disk as needed and it freezes while the resources are loaded and unpacked in the video card RAM. It's probably less noticeable if you use a SSD (I don't).

For reference I'm using a 1050Ti, a recent quad-core CPU, 8 gigs of RAM.

Worth noting: I changed from a HDD install to SSD and almost all performance hitching stopped completely. (There are some hitches still, but those appear to be related to the AI in combat.) Load times dropped to reasonable, which is what I originally thought I was going to fix, but the big win was no more graphical hitching...

If you have the game installed on HDD and can change that to an SSD, do it.