SPOILERS Agents of Mayhem - A Critique

Minimaul said:
Culturally, the game is extremely American. If you didn't grow up in America watching American morning cartoons and reading American comics, 99.9% of the references will fly by you completely. It feels like a big collection of in-jokes that you're not privy to, and that sucks.
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I totally agree.
 
I really didn't like the ending, it was so abrupt and didn't really finish the story for me. Maybe they're already working on a sequel and it'll be explored upon, but other than that I sat in my chair and wondered if I had really beat the game
 
Minimaul said:
Hmm, it's odd hearing people talk about performance problems - I was running pre-release builds at 60fps at 4k without difficulty - but then I have a GTX 1080!
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I played the last mission which frequently dipped to about 2-3 fps at 720p and lowest quality. Yes -- it was hard. I have a older system with an i7-4700HQ and NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M, so I didn't expect much. But still -- really -- 3 fps??? o_O

Minimaul said:
I've critiqued AoM in private to DSV, but my biggest issues with it are:
  • Culturally, the game is extremely American. If you didn't grow up in America watching American morning cartoons and reading American comics, 99.9% of the references will fly by you completely. It feels like a big collection of in-jokes that you're not privy to, and that sucks.
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Funny, I was thinking that just yesterday when the characters were talking about company medical benefits and matching contributions to 401K plans. That's VERY American. Those of you from other countries would wonder why a company would need to provide medical benefits (i.e. every other civilized country in the world has socialized medicine), and what the hell is a 401K plan (it's a retirement plan so we can save our own money to pay for our own medical bills when we can no-longer work).

EDIT: I do like the fact that it's set in South Korea. That makes the game more interesting to me... Visually. But you're right -- culturally it's very American, which would be fine for Saints Row, but this isn't Saints Row.
Minimaul said:
  • The story feels like it starts half way through without a good hook to get me interested.
  • We're given a huge cast of characters that have backstory we're suddenly supposed to care about with little to no intro.
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This is one of the biggest things I miss from Saints Row -- the characters were GANGSTERS and yet you still cared about them. There was a genuine camaraderie among the characters. I don't feel any of that here, and I don't really care about any of the characters.
 
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SharksAreCool said:
The graphics are only slightly better than Saints Row IV and yet while I'm one of the few people that can actually run Arkham Knight at a constant 60 FPS on Ultra. my PC can hardly hold Agents of Mayhem at 45 FPS in the open world.
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Scratch that, it's 45 FPS during night time. During the day it struggles to hold 30 FPS. Disabling the Nvidia lighting feature or whatever it was helps a bit but it still drops below 40 while driving.

Are we to blame CD Project for this one as well?
 
On my 1080, i7 6700k and 16GB ram setup it ran smooth of course. But even then sometimes during driving or combat the frames just shat themselves and went from 144 to 2fps for like 4 seconds.
 
Singa said:
On my 1080, i7 6700k and 16GB ram setup it ran smooth of course. But even then sometimes during driving or combat the frames just shat themselves and went from 144 to 2fps for like 4 seconds.
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I did notice the frame rate tends to slow down noticeably during day/night transitions (dusk and dawn), at least for me. I'm guessing the game engine loads different textures and lightmaps for day and night, so the frame rate is impacted during the loading. But I love the day/night transitions in this game, which is something the old engine didn't seem to support, so I think it's a small price to pay. Maybe that could be a factor in the frame rate dips you are seeing.
 
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Perhaps, never really paid attention to wether the time of day changed or not.
 
Quantum said:
I did notice the frame rate tends to slow down noticeably during day/night transitions (dusk and dawn), at least for me. I'm guessing the game engine loads different textures and lightmaps for day and night, so the frame rate is impacted during the loading. But I love the day/night transitions in this game, which is something the old engine didn't seem to support, so I think it's a small price to pay. Maybe that could be a factor in the frame rate dips you are seeing.
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Price being what, multiplayer, customization. weapon loadouts, aircrafts, etc and on top of that, optimization? It's true that dyanmic time cycle is an easy thing to take for granted nowadays, but it's also not a feature worth sacrificing most other features for. And there is no excuse for not optimizing a game, especially when it looks this outdated.

Though why exactly they chose to make a new engine when it does exactly the same things as the old one (only worse) is anyone's guess. Maybe they were tired of paying royalties? And would rather put that money towards something useful and not at all intrusive or destructive, like Denuvo?
 
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