Middle-earth: Shadow of War

There is a lot more variety this time around. The map is split into different regions/citadels and there is dynamic weather now and day and night cycle. I am really enjoying it so far. Gameplaywise it feels the same, but there new skills which are fun to use.

Graphics are decent (I am using reshade mind you). Performance is good too.

 

Thanks for the reply. I may have to check this out.

 

The lighting seems....off. Like everything is flat, like its missing some shadows or something. The PBR looks great. Textures seem decent. The way Talion's face looks is beyond bizarre. Game performs great. One thing that is annoying is that on my laptop, GTX 960m, its CTD on launch. I'm not the only one with the problem. Ive upgraded, downgraded drivers, used DDU and to no avail. ive verified my game files too. No clue what it is.

 

65Gb download fing hell.... still downloading guess I'll have to play it tomorrow after work.

 

It's actually 103 GB if you download the Hi-res Texture Pack and 4K videos.

 

I thought this game was going to have HDR support but I’m seeing no option to enable it.

 

I will probably get this when the goty version comes out with all the addon/dlc for like 8.99 like i got shadow of mordor. I still havent beat it cause i spend more time messing around in game then do the story, probably cause I really like how combat works.

my 500gb hdd cringes at the thought of that.

 

Yeah the Steam forums and others are having issues with the game crashing on start or not even starting at all, haven't found a good common cause between it yet though I wonder if it's some D3D feature level issue or a CPU extension one perhaps, game shouldn't start at all but it might translate as the game crashing at start instead.

Different OS's were also reported so it's not Windows 7 and not having the OS update installed that adds in some of the 11.1 support functions found in Win8 and newer.

Haven't really dug into the config files and such yet, trying to remove the logo videos didn't work either as moving the files just causes the game to pause on start unfortunately. Ultra textures do work but the difference isn't too big in most comparisons I've seen which makes sense if the default ones are already pretty high-res though yeah the shading in the game is a bit "flat" perhaps one could call it though the night time is pretty good looking although so far the early environments have this brown/red color scheme primarily which is a bit dull looking though it's not Quake brown at least heh. (Although the ultra textures will cause some stuttering after a while as VRAM is exceeded if you don't have around 8 GB or so for 1920x1080 and it can probably exceed that at higher resolutions.)

Currently stuck at a mission in the second area, supposed to kill a bodyguard for a warchief but killing him just causes the mission to fail ("You died.") so going to do some other stuff before attempting it yet again and seeing if it works this time.

Also the She-spider videos bugs a bit with the "4k" DLC and cuts off early, guessing that's a issue with those files but everything else seems to work just fine.

 

it's got HDR , it's in the brightness option , it will work automatically when connected to an HDR Display

 

I know I said I wasn't going to buy the game until it was in a sale but I saw it for £28 on GreenManGaming and, well, you know...

The game downloaded and installed its base 65 GB absolutely fine, unlike that other 60+ GB game the week before last called Forza Motorsport 7 from the Microsoft Store (I saw Shadow of War on sale on that store and laughed; who in their right mind would buy it from there and not Steam?!?!?). Anyway, I found out about the 32 GB hi-res texture pack/4K movies being optional downloads so downloaded those as well. The game now takes up over 100 GB! Eeek!

Playing it maxed out on Ultra settings at 3200x1800 with TAA and large memory page enabled (oddly this setting requires the game executable be set to Run as Admin and actually required a reboot for it to enable). At 3840x2160 (on my 165 Hz 2560x1440 display) the game was dropping below the ideal 60 fps to 52 fps, although to be honest it isn't all that noticeable, thanks to G-SYNC. Apart from some very minor stuttering in the Army menu (the one where it reveals intel on the Orc commanders), the game otherwise runs superbly with an incredibly smooth framerate that stays above 60 fps and often well above that. I don't think I've encountered any stutter at all... that I've noticed any way.

Visually the game is an improvement on the first; character modelling is noticeably better for example, and there's a bit more variety in the opening area due it being set inside a city under siege. There's a bit more colour this time too but, like the first game, apart from a few unexciting collectibles to find and towers to unlock (three in the first area) then there isn't a whole lot to do other than engage in combat and follow story missions. Despite there being more going on in terms of fighting alongside Gondorian soldiers, the area does ultimately feel a bit empty (you cannot enter any buildings either; all doors remain firmly shut even those that appear broken!).

That said, I found myself constantly distracted by hordes of orcs as the combat, while basically repetitive, is always fun due to the way it flows like the Batman Arkham games it is based on. Also, entertaining is the Nemesis system where you take on orc leaders; it is initially satisfying killing them after the cool gloating intros but since you cannot die and they come back then it can get a bit tedious encountering the ones you have killed previously, even if they do become more powerful. Still, it does give the game some personality that others of this type typically lack. One cool addition that I don't remember seeing in the first game is Gondorian soliders actually helping in the fights, even killing the orc leaders for you (you still get the rewards though). I've lost count of how many times I've been saved by a nameless soldier on my last sliver of health but it's a really neat addition, I think. Usually A.I. controlled support characters don't actually do anything (if they did then you could just sit back and let the game play itself!). I'm playing on Normal difficulty by the way.

I've played about 7.5 hours so far and in that time I've unlocked some useful skills from the XP earned from missions and combat. I've also amassed a decent amount of weapons and armour, including two legendary ones, without ever needing to use the controversial loot system (I did, however, unlock the two crates I was given at the start). Sure, the game feels a bit grindy due to the constantly respawning orcs and the lack of anything to do other than fight but I don't feel like the loot system is holding me back in any way. I'm levelling up and getting better weapons and armour at a steady pace.

At the moment it's addictive but how long that last remains to be seen. So far, I haven't really been doing story missions and I think that is where the variety will come from as doing random fights is ultimately pointless since you can never clear out areas.

The only minor disappointment with the game is the decision to use pre-rendered FMV cutscenes by default they don't look great on a 1440p display, presumably because they are encoded at 1080p but also because they have a lot of aliasing issues. They appear to be rendered from the in-game engine with more detail for character faces but at least they mostly appear seamless, especially once you download the 4K videos (27 GB, I believe) which blend better with the game at 3200x1800 on my PC. Still, it does feel like wasted space and I kind of wish they'd stuck with real-time cutscenes so they flow better with the gameplay. I'm guessing the underpowered consoles are to blame here for that decision?

 

4k textures won't have an effect on graphics (visible at least) if you play lower than 4k res and on a small screen like 24"

big screen + 4k res will show you the 4k textures glory and they look good

 

More pixels certainly helps, these are textures though so there are differences just from a increase in resolution even on lower display resolutions but it's pretty subtle overall but comparisons do show a difference in detail.
(The not quite as subtle memory usage increase will be the deciding factor though, stuttering can get pretty severe after a while if VRAM runs out.)

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=251602913#post251602913
(The red paint decal in that comparison image of one of the orcs should be pretty noticeable in how it's sharper with the ultra texture pack but it's still not a huge difference.)

 

True, I'm not getting a native 4K image on a 2560x1440 but games that feature 4K textures are always going to look better than those at 1080p even with downsampling. For example, I get see a very noticeable difference in the textures for Forza Motorsport 7 on my Xbox One (1080p ones on a 1080p TV) compared with the PC version (which has 4K textures at 2560x1440 with 150% resolution scaling to downsample from 4K), e.g. car decals and so on.

Forza Motorsport 7's 4K textures take up 28 GB (PC install size = 95 GB less Xbox One install size = 67 GB) whereas Middle-earth: Shadow of War's HD textures only take up an extra 3.5 GB, I believe, so the differences are not going to be anywhere near as noticeable.

At 3200x1800 with Ultra (HD) textures this game uses around 9 - 9.5 GB of my GTX 1080 Ti's VRAM. Even after hours of playing, I never saw it go above 10 GB. At 4K I did notice that it went a bit higher, 9.7-9.8 GB, but again it never went over 10 GB (of 11 GB of available VRAM). Haven't experienced any stuttering either which can be an indication that VRAM is being maxed out.

 

You do realise that when you buy steam games on sale you are not actually supposed to play them, they are only to be used to increase your steam games library size, so i might have to contact steam and report you, can't believe people buy steam games and actually have the cheek to play them, just disgraceful.

But yeah, i have not even installed that game never mind play it, and same as you, bought the GOTY for like £5 on steam a million years ago, ok, 31/7/2015 with 1 min played. lol

Oh and now you have talked about it i will have to installed it and play it for like 20 mins, so my low HDD space thanks you. lol

 

So that's why I was already thinking about getting a high capacity SSD as next upgrade hehe

 

The game runs absolutely fine from a SATAIII 7,200rpm hard drive in my experience with loading times being very brief once the game has loaded (actually there are no real loading times once you start the game and even fast travel is also instant). I'm not sure what advantage running the game from an SSD would actually give you with that in mind. I only install games on my SSD which have noticeably long loading times otherwise, e.g. the recent DOOM which used to take upwards of 2-4 minutes to actually start playing it from double-clicking on the desktop icon to around 30-40 seconds from an SSD. That game is really the only one I've noticed vastly improved loading times on though; most others just shave a few seconds off here and there, nothing to write home about.

 

How is the performance with ultra present on a gtx 980 ti 2560x1440p in game and not in the benchmark?

 

delete the two video files in the legal folder, not the folder itself. it loads fine then. Oddly enough i got the game to launch by using the "/safemode" launch param. Also the fov is so low, i really hope someone comes out with a fix. I did however dig up a few cfg commands i threw into an autoexec.cfg

"Render.Texture.PrefetchMip0" "1"
"Render.ShadowMap.ResolutionOverride" "1024"
"Render.Textures.GlobalMipOffset" "0"

 

Oh no, it's not like I meant that as in being about loading times, I actually meant it in terms of disc space. I've said goodbye to mechanical discs in my gaming rig two years ago, and I plan to keep it that way. Essentially my 256GB and 512GB are full because I'm a lazy guy that likes to play two games on a daily basis, three or so every other day, and some others are there for nostalgia mostly hehe. So I'm mainly interested in justifying a premature upgrade
But thanks for the insight Darren