About the framerate problems / freezes

dreampagehun

I think at the moment this is the biggest problem with this game. Dungeon kicking is bad enough, but it's primarily the problem with the people not with the game so I think it's another category. Framerate problems, however, hamper playability (and in some cases make the game unplayable) so for me it's the number one problem right now.

The problem is that this game has the worst framerate ever, at least on this console. I simply can't believe how jerky it can be. Running at 10-15 fps in Protector's Enclave is not the biggest problem. It's the Epic Dungeon battles (especially boss battles) and the dragons that are the problems. During the fight with the strongest two dragons, Venfithar and Vilithrax, the game can crawl to a slideshow. And I mean that literally, because there's no other way to define 2-3 frames per second. When there are many players battling the dragons, you can literally count the frames, and it makes the game unplayable. Sometimes I am forced to back off, just put the controller down and wait for something to happen, because the jerkiness is unbearable. It's absolutely ridiculous.

Now, I think there might be two reasons for this and I don't know which can be patched easier, or if at all.

1. The framerate problems are caused by badly optimized game engine. When there are many characters on screen and many attack animations, effect etc., the graphics engine simply collapses. If this is the case then we're dealing with an extremely bad console port which has no optimisation whatsoever. The developers simply ported over the PC code without any attention to the console's strengths and weaknesses, and they let it run as good as it can. In many cases it can't. I don't know if it can be fixed and unfortunately I think it will never be. This is the game we got, we have to deal with it. It will never change for the better. Bad luck.

2. The framerate problems and freezes are caused by slow server synchronization. The server takes a lot of time to send the current data to every player and the more players are in a zone the worse it gets. It would explain why the game can slow down so much when there are many enemies on screen (the server has to update every player with the moment-to-moment behaviour of every single enemy). There's very much data exchange here and that could cause this. This theory is supported by the fact that at some occasions I experience much better framerates in a given zone than at other times. Now I think if the developers would increase server capacity by a lot it would provide us with a much more responsive game and a much much better experience.

I honestly don't know which version is true (game engine or server, or maybe both), but it's clear that a game with graphics like Neverwinter has should run flawlessly on Xbox One. If much better looking, much more dynamic games can run with a stable framerate (even online games like Destiny) then there's clearly something very wrong here. Will the developers patch it? Honestly, I'm skeptical about it, but I really hope so.

friedarmenian

Frame rate is a HUGE issue, I agree.

My PC is outdated, so I cannot enjoy all the visual detailed animations. But at least there, I have options of disabling certain animations or bloom effects. It REALLY would be nice to have the option of disabling types of animations or spell effects on the Xbox. I don't need to see all of the spell effects, I need to see the red circles of death around my opponent to make sure I am not standing in one.

reallyrecon

They rushed development and release in order to get a head start on Witcher 3 and ESO. I know a lot of players who only started playing Neverwinter as a timekiller while they waited for new releases, and with the way Hardline and most of the other recent releases have completely flopped because of poor development practices, they knew they'd get a significant amount of players looking for something to keep their attention.

The FPS issues are mostly caused by the game's poor optimization and lack of customization options goes with that as well. Like someone else said, we could fix the problem ourselves if we just had a way to turn down spell effects and animation/rendering quality.

I played WoW on a '98 Dell rocking 512MB RAM, a 1.6ghz single core, and a GeForce 4 video card for four years on Low settings just so I could break 20fps; I'd certainly prefer to have terrible graphics and a high framerate than be unable to heal/target AoE effectively because FPS slideshows during every epic boss fight. It doesn't help much that their idea of an epic boss fight is a normal one with 5 times the adds...

bluedood

In my last game when doing type group raids what everyone would do is remove apparel or costume pieces that put additional strain on graphics. Capes looked really cool, but floated up and down when you moved, so it was known and told to all to swap out to plain costume pieces during raids. Cloaks are animated the same way here, if everyone was wearing no set some of the lag would be mitigated. With that being said, without a raid leader chat and chat customization and raid instances, passing this information along and implementing is near impossible.

reallyrecon

bluedood wrote: »

In my last game when doing type group raids what everyone would do is remove apparel or costume pieces that put additional strain on graphics. Capes looked really cool, but floated up and down when you moved, so it was known and told to all to swap out to plain costume pieces during raids. Cloaks are animated the same way here, if everyone was wearing no set some of the lag would be mitigated. With that being said, without a raid leader chat and chat customization and raid instances, passing this information along and implementing is near impossible.

I'd wager that animated cloaks count for maybe 0.5% of the problem, while the ridiculous amount of bloom and other effects that almost all Cleric spells have accounts for the rest. It wouldn't be a problem if everything was optimized but that's not the case.

dreampagehun

I don't think only the special effects cause slowdown. When there is a fight going on with a dragon, I don't even have to look that way for the game to be a slideshow. It's enough that there's the dragon and 8-10 players. I just run around not looking at the intensive fight and the game is still almost unplayable. Also, I don't think the graphics should be downgraded. They're not that detailed in the first place, but the overall look is quite nice still. I simply can't believe that the Xbox One couldn't run this game faster, judging by all other games out there. So there must be something else broken with the game which I hope the devs will patch soon. A stable framerate would improve the experience tremedously.

friedarmenian

Maybe we should buy a second xbox and link the graphic processors in SO I for double graphic speed.

I am dying to spend another $350 on a console to play a free game that I have spent approximately $50 in Zen on.

lazyaxus111

I am actually inclined to believe it's a slight combination of both, however, I have noticed something pretty crazy from playing with the same people over and over.

We all experience the frame rate slow down in the dragon areas/PE, this is when the FPS drops down to 5-10 (sometimes less) and stays around there. I believe this is due to particle effects, characters, etc... slowing down the game as if you're playing on a PC that is below the required specs. End user performance issues (why can't they tone down some textures or particle effects to fix this?)

Then sometimes, and this is weird... when the game locks up and you're getting less than one frame a second, normally it's happening to everyone around me at the same time, and then we all suddenly "unlock" and things pick back up again. This is when it feels like it's a server or synching issue. It happens in PVP and there are only 10 characters on the map. Hell it even happens when coming out of the gate sometimes before anything spectacular is even happening.

Dear god I hope they attempt to fix some of this.

Einherjar
Iron Lotus