I have completely forgotten to mention the biggest thing this game has over previous SS games: No more hitscanning enemies! F-in finally! That alone means likely GOTY.
What about the Scorps? Even though they are pretty easy... I like the headshot mechanic, you can now finish enemies faster with well placed shots, even with the pistol. My favourite are the bulls, just select double barell, wait until they are close and boom, right between the eyes = instant death.
You talk about practice but you never did it!? Typical forum behavior where people will tell you have you are wrong, but actually they don't know nothing about it. Bahahahaha... I talk from experience. It is much easier to make humans especially in the last 5 years with all these new tools. For example: The reason why Croteam did a poor job with the humans is because they didn't care much about them. They were not priority. And Croteam is not some large studio you know. This is the absolute truth.
Scorps don't hitscan either, though their aim is still annoingly good. But you can still see you can dodge some of the shots so projectile based now. Double shotgun works well for them too, the proper way is to sprint towards it and shoot point blank, then watch the corpse ragdoll to opposite wall Yeah headshots work great and for bigger enemies too, very satisfying. I think I got a slight erection when a single sniper headshot dropped a Reptiloid... damn bastards. I've always hated Reptiloids more than Scorps. Their projectiles don't home in as aggressively as before so you can dodge but now they start pinballing around, argh! Priority target every time they appear. Well aimed sustained AR fire to the head gladly works too (ADS helps there).
there are good things in the gun-play, i agree. the AOE of the double-barrel Shuty is just about right. in some shooters it's overwhelming and in others it's exactly the opposite - lacks the punch. i like how most of the weapons behave in SS4 with some meh exceptions. that being said i disliked around 90% of the environments because it didn't feel like SS to me. it felt like a different version of the third game. i can live with the strange and even sometimes just bad animations, but the lack of satisfaction from the level design was a bit too much for me, so i wanted to rush it and just end with it. head-shots on smaller enemies felt like a multiplayer based game and i did not like it, on bigger enemies it was fine. the scorpions.. sucked badly, they were far more interesting to encounter in the older games. i liked the vampire-like monster, felt cool. this was one of my most anticipated games of 2020.. bummer.
Well, points for effort but in terms of performance nothing has changed for me, at first i though i got a small FPS boost but it turns the game had reset all settings to High presets without any notification, when set to my old settings performance is the same as far as i can tell and resource usage is still all over the place. I only found one tidbit of things that could've been. Oh well... maybe one day in couple of years.
Found performance was much smoother, still have some drops in really large fights... but, much fewer and nowhere near as bad.
Have yet to test the patch myself but I also saw CPU / GPU usage is a bit weird. GPU can be at 99 % when you're looking at an empty corridor. On the other hand framerate may drop (and often does) even when neither GPU or any CPU core is near max usage. So some optimization to be done. But like said haven't yet tried post update.
Vulkan has been rock solid for me. Zero crashes in my 15 hours of playtime. Also, remember Alen Ladavac left Croteam last year. He was the companies CTO, there's been some rumors that his absence did throw the team off as they worked to fill the gap.
For me it's very hit or miss, generally i have same performance on all 3 APIs but the resource usage gap is highest on Vulkan which at least allows me to hope that IF the resource usage was appropriate i'd get most FPS on it. I don't doubt that the technicals of the game are in shambles and why but i find weird that DX11 was still lead API given Google shelled out probably a pretty buck for Stadia version of the game (which seems to exclusively utilize Vulkan). I just expected it to be the API with most work put into. DX12 seems like Fusion 2017 leftover with some singular pokes done when they were considering DLSS/Raytracing (so probably around 2018) and that's that.
I would not say "in shambles"... it's not uncommon for Croteam to release games with issues. Serious Sam 3 had some performance woes and other hiccups upon release. But, they ironed them out. With 4, they've already pushed out two updates in a week after release. And, they've commented on their Discord that performance and stability are the main focuses right now. Tweaks, adjustments and new content/improved content are later.
Hmm so the tech programmer left, didn't know that. Back with Fusion it sounded like the guy was the sole engine programmer going at it almost at a crazy pace with the code implementing D3D11 and then after that was done there was both D3D12 and Vulkan support and hot-swap support between these which was really impressive to see. Then code merge issues as Serious Sam 4 picked up and how that all got resolved and further updates and merges, Vulkan in particular seemed to work really well but I don't know the current state of this Fusion project. Seemed talented so no wonder that made a bit of a mess of things if he left and they had to find someone who could pick up and continue working on it and update the code to newer while also likely having to drop even if temporary support for RTX or HDR and other earlier confirmed Serious Sam 4 features going by a Q&A I could find from earlier in 2018 on what they were planning with the visuals and tech.
So played a bit more now and tbh I'm not entirely sure if the patch made a difference. If using my tweaked settings performance seems by large the same. Maybe using higher settings doesn't cost performance as much as earlier but really not sure. Framedrops with low GPU usage still happen. Having said that I do target a high framerate north of 100 fps. If I needed a locked 60 fps I'd likely get it easily. The lowest I've seen is around 70 fps so far and that was with everything on Ultra. The game does eat VRAM though, I'm playing at 1080p and 7+ GB is used. Probably type of game that takes all it can but I wonder if this is related to framedrops with low usage.
The same experience for me with version 1.03. I think they fixed the most tragic CPU bound areas like the Quarry in France and maybe some others but thats about it for now. They promised to work on optimization in further patches but I guess we can't expect Doom-Level miracles from this studio. Too bad I am spoiled by high refresh rate gaming to play this kind of shooters at 60 FPS. It feels horrible to me so I reduced some details to get at least 100 FPS most of the time at 1440p: - disabled MSAA, there is ton of aliasing even with it anyway - ambient occlusion reduced to medium (visual impact minimal) - and some others like shadows (ultra->high), zoom details (ultra->high)
I just played the Quarry and yeah, for some reason it hits 100 % GPU and fps hovers between high 60 to 90, runs better at the "bottom" though. Cool fight too. Couldn't help but laugh when they jump out of the plane: Sam: "Geronimo!" Rodriguez:"What the fuuu..."
DX12 seems to crash the nvidia driver on my end when the game is set to higher settings on current version of the game. One thing i find extremely annoying is that it seems that every now and then game reverts to its "autodetect" settings without any notification.
The patch also resets any graphical options you've adjusted. So, best to go in and play around with the settings again. But, a patch is not a magical cure-all for everyone playing a game. Some will experience improvements, some will not... some may even run into issues and worse performance. It's going to take multiple patches for a larger scale improvement for the masses.
