ELEX II - Release Day

[JDR13]

Well, I've tried it for about an hour now. It looks perfectly good and there are no performance issues. However, I do *hate* the camera. It's zoomed way in, and if there's a way to zoom out, I haven't found it. What's worse, however, is that it does zoom out a little bit *automatically* when I start running, and then bounce back in when I stop, settling very close and a little bit off to the right of my character. This is baffling to me. Why would anyone want it like this? And yes, the FOV seems quite small too.

I don't like the camera either. The FOV doesn't bother me, but I hate not being able to zoom in/out like in all their previous games. I have no idea why PB would choose to switch it for this game.

I doubt that's something they would change in a patch, but maybe someone can mod it.

 

[Shagnak]

I'm running it at High on almost everything and I'm getting in the mid-40s at 1080p on at i5 10400 and AMD RX580. A bit low, but no hitching or anything, so good enough.

 

[bjon045]

I can't stand that camera angle just by looking at those screenshots. I'm certainly not going to be buying until they make it more flexible.

 

[Kordanor]

Playing on a gtx 1070 and i7 6700k on 1080p most settings high/max.
No issues.

However...I expected better graphics to be honest. Not in terms of textures. But landscapes are missing some serious shader use. Looks like a 15 year old game in that regard.

 

[mbuddha]

I might not get a positive reaction to this, but there is just *tad* blind acceptance for any PB game here, even before it's released, and I'm a fan as well, having played every game except the first Gothic. Completed most of them, and Elex 1 is a shining example of their best work, as good as Gothic 2 for its time. I wasn't impressed with the trailer videos for the game, and I wondered what it could really bring to a fan that hasn't already done in the first Elex.

Doesn't mean it's bad, but some of the early impressions I'm hearing here don't excite. Should the game be as good as, or surpass Elex 1 without retreading the same content, then I'll get it eventually, after patches and mods that solve any annoyances.

I'd like to hear if it really has something to offer over the first game of this series.

 

[Avantre]

No performance issues here either. I heard something about a day 1 patch. Does anyone know if that's already been applied?

Yes, the patch notes on Steam say that if you're downloading a digital copy then it already includes the day 1 patch.

 

[JDR13]

Playing on a gtx 1070 and i7 6700k on 1080p most settings high/max.
No issues.

However…I expected better graphics to be honest. Not in terms of textures. But landscapes are missing some serious shader use. Looks like a 15 year old game in that regard.

The visuals are a mixed bag. Characters and buildings are pretty ugly. Some things though, like moving water, look really good. The view distance is impressive.

I'm more disappointed by how the game starts out. The beginning seems much easier than any of their past games. I'm playing on Hard difficulty, and few of the enemies in the starting region feel like a real threat.

It also seems like there's more loot than what I expect from a PB game. Healing potions should be hard to come by early on, but I'm finding them everywhere in the short time I've played so far.

 

[Deleted member 18181]

steam Peak today:5,926 very bad

 

[KayAU]

I doubt that's something they would change in a patch, but maybe someone can mod it.

I am optimistic that they will patch it, as there have been a lot of complaints and negative reviews. People are complaining that they got a camera view better suited for slowly traversing narrow corridors, than roaming a vast open world. It's all over the Steam reviews and discussions, and I know that a bunch of people have submitted feature requests. I really hope Piranha Bytes will address this. Even if they are not able to fix it immediately, it would be nice to hear from them.

 

[Elwro]

Geeze, I have a i7/7700k, 16 gigs of ram, and a GTX 1080 just being used as a table. Do you live in the US, @Elwro;? Maybe we could work out a deal you could afford….

Thank you, I really appreciate this. But I'm located in Poland so this would be tough

Honestly, there are really serious things I should be worried about now; I just wanted a bit of escapism to make the day a little happier. I own all pre-Elex PB games and I'll surely get to these two some day, I was just wondering if the console ports sucked. I used to play on PC, but in recent years moved my gaming to the living room (so to the console): this way my wife can cheer me through the Souls games

Anyway, thank you again, and have a lovely day!

 

[Deleted member 18181]

if performance is bad, game will be on geforce now

 

[Kordanor]

The visuals are a mixed bag. Characters and buildings are pretty ugly. Some things though, like moving water, look really good. The view distance is impressive.

I'm more disappointed by how the game starts out. The beginning seems much easier than any of their past games. I'm playing on Hard difficulty, and few of the enemies in the starting region feel like a real threat.

It also seems like there's more loot than what I expect from a PB game. Healing potions should be hard to come by early on, but I'm finding them everywhere in the short time I've played so far.

I think the characters and buildings are okish. But the distance is looking really bad.
The range is fine, but obviously not everything can be rendered in high detail if its far away and usually thats covered up with some shaders or effects or in the worst case: fog.
But in this game it just looks like they fully ignored it.
You can really see that shortly after you meet Adam in the sequence where you look into the distance (there was a screenshot of that scene here).
I think I made screenshots in Nehrim (Total Conversion Mod for Oblivion) which looked better than that and thats from 2010.
I am not a graphics-w*** but it just really stands out to me.

It's actually a bit similar of when you start out, basically first seconds of gameplay.
You are leaving a dark, violet scene from the sequence, and then you run around on a warm summer day with beautiful weather and you think like "what about some proper lighting?"

Playing on Ultra. Only killed a few enemies so far. Looks fine to me. I agree with the HP potions though. You get totally spammed by this. I feel like I get 10 times as much as I need.

 

[Nereida]

Clunky, outdated and generally amateurish 67 MC score RPG. Looks like a solid GotY candidate at the watch.

 

[Maylander]

It's mostly fine, but a few things are annoying me:
- The camera issue. This really needs fixing. The camera handled way better in ELEX.
- The face. He looks younger than he did years ago, which is jarring.
- The English voice actor is either a different guy or they've done something weird to the voice. Not a lot they can do about this one, but it does annoy me.

 

[Kordanor]

- The English voice actor is either a different guy or they've done something weird to the voice. Not a lot they can do about this one, but it does annoy me.

The German voice actors are good, but the direction / processing is bad.
The acoustics are totally different between people in a conversation. Like one is standing in a bathroom and the other in a small living room.

 

[SirJames]

Clunky, outdated and generally amateurish 67 MC score RPG. Looks like a solid GotY candidate at the watch.

Yeah, I don't get the hype. Gothic 2 won me over but they lost me again with Gothic 3 and since then I couldn't really be bothered with the jank.

Especially not when Elden Ring is newly released. Why wouldn't you be playing that instead?!

 

[Deleted member 18181]

https://www.gamepressure.com/newsroom/elex-2-flops-on-steam-enjoys-less-interest-than-prequel/zd40ed hope it wont be the end of PB

 

[Maylander]

Yeah, I don't get the hype. Gothic 2 won me over but they lost me again with Gothic 3 and since then I couldn't really be bothered with the jank.

Especially not when Elden Ring is newly released. Why wouldn't you be playing that instead?!

Because I vote with my wallet, and I don't buy games that don't have proper K+M support. I'm done with controllers. I tried "solving" it by grabbing the Xbox Elite Wireless 2 or something like that, which was supposedly the best of the best at the time (maybe still is), but it's still rubbish compared to a proper K+M setup.

The German voice actors are good, but the direction / processing is bad.
The acoustics are totally different between people in a conversation. Like one is standing in a bathroom and the other in a small living room.

Ouch. My impression was that German voice overs were always great, and that it was only the English ones that were mediocre.

 

[SirJames]

Yep, you'd have to be nuts to release a competing open world RPG right now. Best opportunity ever for a nice delay and a bit of extra polish.

 

[Arkadia7]

Elex 2, so I bought it to test to see if it might run on my aging, outdated computer. Unfortunately,it crashes after the intro movie, so no dice.

That said, here are my impressions just from watching a youtube streamer playing it for an hour or so.

Great exploration and atmosphere, and world design. While its true the graphics aren't the greatest ever, and certainly won't be giving Cyberpunk 2077 any competition, they are well done for a AA game, and they have good artistic direction behind them, in my opinion.

I like the new voice actor for the main character, I think its actually a big improvement from the first game.

The story seems very interesting to me, from the gameplay I saw, the player went and talked to the Albs/clerics in one of their settlements, and it was an interesting scenario where the Albs were basically experimenting on their children by giving them Elex, and they were saying its for the common good. So there are some complex moral ideas being present in the story, I found it quite interesting, anyway.

Now the downsides, there have been a number of complaints about the camera, that it is very bad, and there needs to be options for camera placement. This is something I think they should be able to patch, or some modder will be able to in the future, if nothing else.

There also have been reports of various bugs and bad performance because of bad optimization, again, these are issues which should be able to be fixed via patches.

For me, this will go along Cyberpunk as a game that I will be able to play once I get a new gaming computer, but I am looking forward to playing Elex 2.

From what I have seen, it looks like a quite promising rpg and I like what I see, and the issues it has should be able to be patched and polished up in the future.