Kena Bridge of Spirits

Since the game is impressing us, I will cop my purchase.

 

Yeah I mean, this game is really like a Pixar movie running real-time on UE4 From art style point of view I can't say I've seen more polished games in my life.

 

This can only be purchased from the Epic Store?

***edit***

Nevermind google is my friend.

 

Do you guys have some minor stuttering on dx12 ?

 

No stuttering here just sometimes a sound crack or pop.

 

Some slight stutter here and there but its nowhere near the usual UE stutter that we have become acustomed too. It's normally when moving into a new large area and its like a 1fps blip and then its fine.

Over 100fps consistently at max 1440p. The game is simply incredible.

 

Yeah that 1 fps stutter.

 

It stutters when it's loading a new area but i also see some micro-stutters here and there when roaming in the village for example. Classic Unreal Engine BS. The game looks nice but it's current-gen, far away from PIXAR quality. Cinematics look way better than gameplay.

 

This game is stunning, obviously not yet at the same level of Pixar movie but its still incredibly beautiful to look at. Its a kind of magic..

 

Is this game all about art style and beautiful visuals becouse gameplay seems average at best.

 

Yes it is and that's why I like it... As I wrote here many times, I play games because of visuals, technology, story or characters. I've been playing games for 30 years and I've seen every gameplay mechanic there is. Kena is no exception in this. Gameplaywise it's something we have seen a hundred times before and we will see a thousand times more in the future. Luckily, the gameplay is at least somewhat balanced and doesn't cause problems.

 

Yes, DX12 was stuttery for me when I used my default adaptive vsync settings with in-game vsync off. It had some frame pacing issues. DX11 did not and ran great. Luckily, I tried FastSync with in-game VSYNC ON and framelock @ 60FPS. All DX12 stutters are gone now. There is only very minor stutter when the game loads a new area, but that happens quite rarely. So I use DX12 now.

cmon, of course it's not 1:1 with Pixar movies, which are fully ray-traced, rendered non-realtime on render-farms consisting of thousands of chips. What I meant was if Pixar took their art team and decided to make a real-time running game, this game is what I would expect them to make

 

Nope. Flawless 60fps for 99% of the time (framelocked) with just some dips to 56fps during the most intense fights and in some (not prerendered) cutscenes.

 

I'm a bit disappointed that this game does run at Ultra 1440p settings and a locked 60 fps on my PC. Yeah, I know my PC is ancient now (i7-4770K @ 4 GHz, 16 GB, GTX 1080 Ti) but normally UE4 games run great on this machine with enough overhead to tweak the graphics (draw/foliage/shadow distance and LODs etc) via the Engine.ini file. Not Kena though. It holds 60 fps 97% of the time but does drop to the low 50s fps at times, usually when there's a wide open space with a view of distant scenery and occasionally during combat (these are usually in enclosed areas though so do typically hold 60 fps). Even with G-SYNC these dips are noticeable. Seems to be the CPU that is the issue as the game is always at 85-100% usage, usually 95-100% (it seems to stay at 85% even when looking direct at the sky!!!).

Not sure if the game has some kind of optimisation issue? I'm loathe to lower the settings as the game just looks so great. I'm using the DX12 mode which seems to run smoothy 99% of the time but is prone to the odd minor stutter every now and again.

In comparison, the game runs at a pretty much flawless 60 fps in Performance mode on my PS5 at a dynamic 4K (usually around 1800p according to the tech videos I've seen) and just looks visually identical. (Also, the PS5 version also has very rare stutters too so it looks like this is an engine issue.)

Incidentally, I noticed that the PC version makes brilliant but very subtle use of the controller (I'm using an Xbox One Elite v2) and very slightly rumbles whenever you are near a hidden Rot or other object. This seems to be completely missing from the PS5 version, as far as I can tell, which is surprising considering that controller's innovative haptic feedback feature.

 

P.S. Watch out for hidden Meditation spots as these increase your Health bar. I stumbled across a couple yesterday on the PC version while exploring as these were hidden away in less-than-obvious spots. The game makes no mention of these otherwise, at least as far as I've played which is about 8 hours in.

P.P.S. How do you clear the Fishing Shrine in the Forest area? There are four blue glowing lamp things but when I shoot them with the Bow, even in a different order, all it does is spawn those owl creatures. Once they are killed the Shrine just resets and the lamp things turn off. What am I missing here?

 

Of course its not 100% like a Pixar movie, but its damn close and for a game that isn't using RT it looks amazing.

Yes, I totally agree. The animations whilst excellent the way they transition from one animation to another is not as fluid as it could of been. But remember, once again this is a small team. What they have managed to pull off here is nothing short of spectacular. I think they will focus mainly on bug fixes and maybe DLC or just jump straight onto a sequel. This could become a pretty great franchise. And obviously a sequel would have a higher budget and more people working on it.

Loving these screenshots! What do you use to take them? and what format? the quality of them is exceptional.

The art style is a big thing because it looks so good and runs so well for such a small team. Point out another game on PC that looks as good as this with the same art style?

The game is more like a homage to older games, mixing stuff from Zelda, Starfox Adventures, etc.

 

I adjusted the sharpening using Universal Unreal Engine 4 Unlocker as mentioned on PcGameWiki and set r.Tonemapper.Sharpen 1. I've also removed CA by entering the value r.SceneColorFringeQuality=0 in Engine.ini by adding [SystemSettings] section to the bottom.
Then via DSR I increased the resolution using the Bordless Fullscreen option once ingame. Remember that you have to set the same resolution on the desktop as well or it won't work.

With the UE Unlocker you can also use the free camera and get shots that are impossible to get with the one included in the game. Also use FastStone Image Viewer and Lanczos 3 scaler for resize your shots without loss of quality, and Flickr of course for the same reason.

That's it!

 

How do u guys put fast sync in the game? I mean the driver doesn't have a profile for the game.

 

So I've finished it with fully upgraded Kena and 82 Rots. It really is a nice little game and also well polished. I've witnessed only 2 minor bugs and that is pretty rare these days. It could've been longer, but we can't have everything, can we...