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melmer

THE EVIL WITHIN: Slurms MacKenzie

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I did some forum diving and it seems like the general consensus is that a patch that went live in october completely boned the game for a seemingly not insignifcant number of people, just made it start randomly crashing constantly, and there's basically been no official acknowledgement of the issue.

The framerate hitching, on the other hand, seems to have been an issue on the PC version from the start. No matter how powerful your PC is or what your graphics settings are, it keeps dropping random frames in otherwise perfectly smooth performance. A lot of people probably wouldn't even care about that one, but inconsistent framerates make me crazy.

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I'm playing it on a powerful PC at 60 fps, and I haven't had any issues with frame rate drops, but I have had some issues with crashes initially, but once I switched the type of anti-alias being used that fixed the problem, so maybe give that a shot?

 

I'm really enjoying this a lot. Its been so long since I played RE4 so even though its obviously similar, its difficult for me to say how similar it is. But one thing it is reminding me of that I didn't expect is System Shock 2. Like, obviously it is a different school of game design from immersive sims, yet I find the amount of design overlap kind of striking.

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I'm playing it on a powerful PC at 60 fps, and I haven't had any issues with frame rate drops, but I have had some issues with crashes initially, but once I switched the type of anti-alias being used that fixed the problem, so maybe give that a shot?

 

I saw that suggested somewhere so i tried running it with all the graphics options set to minimum and it still ctd'd. (Several times in a row, with only a few minutes in the game each time, even after a reboot.)

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What a bummer. Really pretty outrageous that Bethesda, a publisher with tons of experience with PC games, released such a problematic port...

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A big four gig update went out for the game that so far seems to have fixed the issues i was having, though the steam forum for the game indicates that this update seems to have broken the game in new ways for a different set of people.

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Yeah, I am nervous to boot it up after I saw it updated and some people were having issues. Fingers crossed...

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I've been getting some bizarre mouse lag since the patch, seriously like a full second of delay, but i was playing on a gamepad anyways and that's working without issue, and it's honestly just much more important that the game actually runs without crashing or hitching. (I'm really liking the game so far.)

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So, a tiny bit afraid that another patch would come out and break the game again for me, i motored through Evil Within fairly quickly, but didn't exactly have to force myself to do so as the game is really, really good. It bears several suspect and debatable elements, but is a fairly excellent game in my mind.

 

It's been seen as kind of a spiritual successor to RE4, but it actually plays like one to RE as a whole. Evil Within generally evokes a lot of much more old-school survival horror design, with far more limited pools of ammunition and combat avoidance formalized in a stealth system. (While the late game, which is incredibly bombastic and weird, more evokes the debated excesses of the later RE games.)

 

I've seen people nitpick about the matches from a logic standpoint, but as a game system it makes perfect sense. The matches serve a variety of functions in the game, but primarily it seemed to me that they've taken the melee finishing moves from later RE games and made them a limited resource. (Shooting an enemy in the leg and lighting him on fire while he's staggered is especially potent in the early game, but you have that very limited supply of matches.)

 

I think the camera zooms in too close when you aim. The game actually lets you hip fire, but tries to contextually apply melee attacks instead if something is in range, which combined with the accuracy debuff makes it something you don't really ever want to do.

 

It might be a small thing, but i really appreciate that the game respects your inventory. If you want to keep saving up crafting materials for a rough situation, you can. There's been a bad trend with survival horror games telling you that your resources are precious, but then upending your inventory on you every few hours. (A lot of the newest RE games do this, so does Alan Wake.)

 

Certain encounters late in the game felt like really frustrating trial and error puzzles to me, there was one sequence where i must have died some twenty times before figuring out the exact string of things i needed to accomplish. Most of the "bosses" elsewhere in the game seemed to play out a little more organically, even when they were still clearly heavily scripted. (The first encounter with the pyramid head wannabe was an excellent standout sequence for the game.)

 

I thought it was actually quite a tense and effective horror game in the sense that traditional survival horror has always been better at creating tension than engendering real fear. It's a far more intense game than its contemporaries in Dead Space and latter-day Resident Evil.

 

I found the... geography, i guess, of the game really disorienting. You're thrown around from scenario to scenario so much, the world is presented as being in constant flux, if not completely abstract, so you virtually never have enough time to produce any sense of place. The few times you're allowed to exist in a clearly defined location for an extended period of time feel like welcome respites, and the game seems to at least be partially aware of this fact, the feelings they're creating are perhaps intentional. Still, I'm not sure how i feel about it, that this modern, narratively driven game spends a large majority of its time in completely undefined locations. It can feel like a cheat, and at worst, it's the most naked kind of "here's a level for you."

 

So the story: It's completely bonkers for one thing, and in a way i enjoyed throughout, i was totally along for that ride. It wants to be Silent Hill, and it's definitely quite overt about trying to be Silent Hill, but it's done through a lens of having no subtlety whatsoever, and it's kind of great. It unfortunately also means that any unanswered questions are pretty obviously exposed as DLC and sequel hooks, and there are a lot of unanswered questions at the end of that game.

 

I like it though, i like Evil Within a lot. I'm just wary of recommending it on account of the technical issues it's had. I guess it's more or less fine on the XBO and PS4?

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Yeah - you are better off playing it on consoles, all the nightmare things you talked about just won't happen on Xbox One. 

 

It is definitely my game of the year with EDF and Dark Souls in close second

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I played a bit this weekend. Thankfully I had no problems. I'm in chapter 5 at this point, and I am maybe not thrilled at how the game is constantly changing up rulesets on me. Also just running through lots of corridors. Hoping the game gets back to opening up a bit.

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I am maybe not thrilled at how the game is constantly changing up rulesets on me.

 

Yeah, it's starting to get annoying. The first chapter spends so much time emphasizing stealth, but then further stealth is up to whether or not the game wants you to ruin a dramatic moment by sneaking past it. I've had one too many instances of not knowing whether or not I can kill something or are supposed to run from it, which has become stupid in chapter 9. There's a boss enemy that appears randomly - sometimes in places where it's impossible to escape him - and instantly kills you if he gets within arm's reach. You can't kill him, so you have to run around avoiding him or hope you can get into a hiding spot without him seeing you. And if you get too far away, he'll just teleport a couple steps away from you and possibly in front of you so you just walk into him and die. He eventually goes away, according to walkthroughs, but I haven't survived long enough to experience that.

 

What makes it even better is that if you go back to the asylum to save more than once in a great while, the nurse says things like, "You're a worrier, aren't you?" Why yes, Evil Within, I'm a worrier. I'm worried that some stupid bullshit is going to cost me a bunch of my time and I'd prefer not having to repeat 10 minutes of gameplay over and over. Fuck you and your stupid nurse.

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Yeah, it's starting to get annoying. The first chapter spends so much time emphasizing stealth, but then further stealth is up to whether or not the game wants you to ruin a dramatic moment by sneaking past it. I've had one too many instances of not knowing whether or not I can kill something or are supposed to run from it, which has become stupid in chapter 9. There's a boss enemy that appears randomly - sometimes in places where it's impossible to escape him - and instantly kills you if he gets within arm's reach. You can't kill him, so you have to run around avoiding him or hope you can get into a hiding spot without him seeing you. And if you get too far away, he'll just teleport a couple steps away from you and possibly in front of you so you just walk into him and die. He eventually goes away, according to walkthroughs, but I haven't survived long enough to experience that.

 

What makes it even better is that if you go back to the asylum to save more than once in a great while, the nurse says things like, "You're a worrier, aren't you?" Why yes, Evil Within, I'm a worrier. I'm worried that some stupid bullshit is going to cost me a bunch of my time and I'd prefer not having to repeat 10 minutes of gameplay over and over. Fuck you and your stupid nurse.

 

I loved that chapter. The key to beating that area is timing, each area off of the main atrium can be completed before that enemy spawns, at which time you should return to the atrium to with the two staircases and lead him on a chase in a circle, done right he will never warp in front of you and will eventually disappear. Once you figure that out - there is a lot of tension involved as you realise you need to be hurry between each point as quickly as possible and always make sure you have the relatively safe atrium within running distance.

 

As for changing up the ruleset - that is one of the things I enjoyed about the game and I felt that it fed into the theme and erraticness, but that was just me.

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