The Medium

Bankie said:
I put about 45 minutes into it before uninstalling. Maybe it's because I've just started playing Control recently but The Medium didn't grab me and didn't seem worth putting any time into at all.
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Control is much much better game. The maze mission is superb with music and all.
 
Bankie said:
I put about 45 minutes into it before uninstalling. Maybe it's because I've just started playing Control recently but The Medium didn't grab me and didn't seem worth putting any time into at all.
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If you're familiar with the work of Bloober Team then you should have been aware of the type of game it is. I, for one, am enjoying the character interactions in the game despite it being light on gameplay. It is practically a walking simulator.
 
Armenius said:
If you're familiar with the work of Bloober Team then you should have been aware of the type of game it is. I, for one, am enjoying the character interactions in the game despite it being light on gameplay. It is practically a walking simulator.
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I'm not familiar with Bloober Team; I just picked it up with Gamepass. You're right that is pretty much just a walking simulator but the issue is that even that part of it sucked. In that first little bit of gameplay I played there were multiple instances where an interaction bubble wouldn't be accessible until I walked back and forth in front of it multiple times.
 
Bankie said:
I'm not familiar with Bloober Team; I just picked it up with Gamepass. You're right that is pretty much just a walking simulator but the issue is that even that part of it sucked. In that first little bit of gameplay I played there were multiple instances where an interaction bubble wouldn't be accessible until I walked back and forth in front of it multiple times.
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The whole locked camera thing is not to my liking either. Drives me nuts.
 
The locked camera doesn't bother me too bad for this type of game but it certainly looks silly as hell in a modern game with modern graphics. It's a bit immersion breaking watching her do the damn moonwalk over and over.
 
FrgMstr said:
The whole locked camera thing is not to my liking either. Drives me nuts.
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This is true. I don't know why they went with the fixed camera. They could have done the concurrent world rendering with a dynamic third-person camera just as easily.
Bankie said:
I'm not familiar with Bloober Team; I just picked it up with Gamepass. You're right that is pretty much just a walking simulator but the issue is that even that part of it sucked. In that first little bit of gameplay I played there were multiple instances where an interaction bubble wouldn't be accessible until I walked back and forth in front of it multiple times.
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I have not run into this issue, but it does seem like the bubble won't appear unless Marianne has a line of sight to the point of interest. That makes the fixed camera perspective even more awkward.
 
Bankie said:
I put about 45 minutes into it before uninstalling. Maybe it's because I've just started playing Control recently but The Medium didn't grab me and didn't seem worth putting any time into at all.
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The old school tank controls isn't helping either... who thought it was a good idea to bring that back from the dead?
 
Pad controls felt normal. Not too much different from similar games like the Quantic Dream titles.
Seems that the newest AMD drivers are claiming "up to 9%" performance increases in the game. Anyone playing at 1440 or 4K at 60fps yet?
 
StryderxX said:
The old school tank controls isn't helping either... who thought it was a good idea to bring that back from the dead?
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Tank controls? Is that only with a controller? Because with a keyboard it is not tank controls. I would very much prefer to have tank controls in a fixed camera game like this.
 
Domingo said:
Pad controls felt normal. Not too much different from similar games like the Quantic Dream titles.
Seems that the newest AMD drivers are claiming "up to 9%" performance increases in the game. Anyone playing at 1440 or 4K at 60fps yet?
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The game feels nearly identical at 30 FPS as it does at 60 FPS due to how the game actually controls the camera. I put it on 30 just to see how bad it would be and never went back to 60 but I can think of no other pc game where I find 30 to be really acceptable.
 
jobert said:
The game feels nearly identical at 30 FPS as it does at 60 FPS due to how the game actually controls the camera. I put it on 30 just to see how bad it would be and never went back to 60 but I can think of no other pc game where I find 30 to be really acceptable.
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That was my (brief) experience. It really only seemed to affect the cut scenes and the smoothness of Marianne's movement. I was mainly just curious.
 
Domingo said:
Pad controls felt normal. Not too much different from similar games like the Quantic Dream titles.
Seems that the newest AMD drivers are claiming "up to 9%" performance increases in the game. Anyone playing at 1440 or 4K at 60fps yet?
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jobert said:
The game feels nearly identical at 30 FPS as it does at 60 FPS due to how the game actually controls the camera. I put it on 30 just to see how bad it would be and never went back to 60 but I can think of no other pc game where I find 30 to be really acceptable.
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Domingo said:
That was my (brief) experience. It really only seemed to affect the cut scenes and the smoothness of Marianne's movement. I was mainly just curious.
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At 4K with everything except Ray Tracing turned on, it runs from about 30fps in split screen mode to about 50fps in single screen. This game is not highly optimized for this engine at all. This is a really small dev and considering the gameplay, I am sure perf tuning about 30 was really not important.
 
And yeah, this game sucks for me. Uninstalling. Do see Control on GamePass, will give it a go.
 
I'm having terrible PC performance...

So for context... I am running a i7-8700 and a RTX 2080ti XC Ultra Gaming... I am playing at 1440p. So with all settings cranked up I am getting insanely wild fluctuations in FPS. Especially when look at certain materials like window curtains and stuff... I got to the hotel, but looking down at doors my FPS literally goes down to the single digits at times. Walking around at times I would get over 90fps at times, but then other times I am getting FPS in the teens.

So yeah even with DLSS I am getting terrible FPS at times. DLSS definitely helped and setting the quality of the DLSS to anything also fluctuates the FPS a terrible amount.

I really hope they patch the game soon. I may just play it on my Series X if it's more stable on there b/c this is quite annoying and terribly inconsistent.
 
zamardii12 said:
I'm having terrible PC performance...

So for context... I am running a i7-8700 and a RTX 2080ti XC Ultra Gaming... I am playing at 1440p. So with all settings cranked up I am getting insanely wild fluctuations in FPS. Especially when look at certain materials like window curtains and stuff... I got to the hotel, but looking down at doors my FPS literally goes down to the single digits at times. Walking around at times I would get over 90fps at times, but then other times I am getting FPS in the teens.

So yeah even with DLSS I am getting terrible FPS at times. DLSS definitely helped and setting the quality of the DLSS to anything also fluctuates the FPS a terrible amount.

I really hope they patch the game soon. I may just play it on my Series X if it's more stable on there b/c this is quite annoying and terribly inconsistent.
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It's the ray tracing setting that is doing that. I have a feeling that they are not limiting the amount of rays being pathed from certain light sources, which is why framerate takes a shit when looking at certain things. Turning the ray tracing setting down a click will get rid of that problem.
 
Armenius said:
It's the ray tracing setting that is doing that. I have a feeling that they are not limiting the amount of rays being pathed from certain light sources, which is why framerate takes a shit when looking at certain things. Turning the ray tracing setting down a click will get rid of that problem.
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Turning ray tracing on and off is only a 10 fps difference for me
 
zamardii12 said:
Turning ray tracing on and off is only a 10 fps difference for me
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At 4K my FPS from looking at a curtain goes from 4-8 FPS to 30-40 FPS on a 2080 Ti when turning ray tracing down a click. Average FPS only goes from 40'ish FPS to 50'ish FPS, though.
 
zamardii12 said:
Turning ray tracing on and off is only a 10 fps difference for me
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Then you must be testing in an area that doesn't have much ray tracing. The frame rate difference is massive in some spots and not much different at all in other spots between ray tracing on and off. And you can also try 30 FPS which actually works fine in a game like this.
 
StryderxX said:
Control is a triple A title. You're going to be blown away by the graphics and RT effects.
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It was a good game, but I can't honestly say I was "blown away" by the graphics and RT. It looked decent, though, and more importantly the game was fun.
 
This came up on Xbox Game Pass.

I played through till the end. Honestly it was an OK game. Different style of game than I'm used to, but it was OK.

Performance is what many are screaming about from what I have read. For me, I was ~60FPS with a few dips here and there to 50ish at 4k, mostly maxed settings except Ray Tracing, just left that at default. DLSS set to quality is required though or it is more like 25-30...

I'm still waiting on my CPU so I can complete my build, but even though I have this RTX 3090 paired up with this old i7 6700k is mostly OK. There are the odd CPU spikes that cause the odd hitch, but mostly not that bad.
 
The Medium PC Tech Review: Yes - It Really is Super Demanding on PC Hardware

 
And a patch to address numerous performance issues was just released. Patch is 3.4GB on Steam.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1293160?updates=true

Dear players! The Patch 1.1 is live. These are the fixes that come with it:

- Performance optimizations across the whole game
- Eliminated gameplay bugs in various locations
- Eliminated known game crashes
- Eliminated game bugs reported by the community
- Graphical bug fixes across the whole game
- Improvements in camera operation and settings
- Scene lighting fixes in various locations
- Fixes for reported crash issues when loading saves
- Improvements in interactions with in-game events and characters across the whole game
- Raytracing optimizations across the whole game
- Game sound fixes

Many thanks to everyone who gave their feedback!
 
Did they ever fix the HDR implementation? At least the GamePass version couldn't display HDR correctly. It would either be way, way too dark or so bright/washed out that you couldn't see anything.
 
Guess I'll try re-downloading the GamePass version tomorrow and hope HDR is fixed. Either via the game or (maybe) Nvidia's drivers. I can deal with the 30fps thing as long as the game looks decent. The broken HDR was what got me to bail. There isn't much point to all of the fancy RTX and 30fps performance otherwise.
 
Domingo said:
Guess I'll try re-downloading the GamePass version tomorrow and hope HDR is fixed. Either via the game or (maybe) Nvidia's drivers. I can deal with the 30fps thing as long as the game looks decent. The broken HDR was what got me to bail. There isn't much point to all of the fancy RTX and 30fps performance otherwise.
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For what it's worth the Steam version is working fine. I think the issue is that the game launches in DX11 mode by default, and I definitely noticed the too dark/bright issue when that happened. You have to select DX12 every time you launch the game from Steam as there is no command line switch as far as I'm aware. Also, you were never able to launch the DX12 version from the Microsoft Store. Back in January Bloober said they were looking into a fix, but I don't know if they fixed it yet. You can try by finding the install location for the game, taking ownership of it, and launching the DX12 executable directly.
 
Armenius said:
For what it's worth the Steam version is working fine. I think the issue is that the game launches in DX11 mode by default, and I definitely noticed the too dark/bright issue when that happened. You have to select DX12 every time you launch the game from Steam as there is no command line switch as far as I'm aware. Also, you were never able to launch the DX12 version from the Microsoft Store. Back in January Bloober said they were looking into a fix, but I don't know if they fixed it yet. You can try by finding the install location for the game, taking ownership of it, and launching the DX12 executable directly.
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That would definitely make sense. Installing it again to give it a go.
 
HDR is still busted. The GamePass version seems to be running in DX12 mode by default. When I start the game, HDR seems to be working fine. But the instant I get to the main menu, it kills HDR (everything gets washed out), and my audio dies if I have Dolby Atmos enabled. I tried manually trying to run the game via the WindowsApps folder, but I can't seem to get it to respond. Seems this isn't the first GP game to have borked HDR thanks to some oddness with UWP. I might try again in a few months or if someone can confirm a fix.
 
Armenius said:
If you're familiar with the work of Bloober Team then you should have been aware of the type of game it is. I, for one, am enjoying the character interactions in the game despite it being light on gameplay. It is practically a walking simulator.
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just came here to ask if this game was worth ~ $15

pass ✋
 
I still want to play this despite the performance issues...I hear good things about the gameplay and the ray-tracing is apparently one of the better implementations
 
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