Valentine’s Day was a good day for lovelorn Kindred; indeed, Sharkmob is preparing for another server-wide Second Inquisition in their World of Darkness battle royale, Bloodhunt. Before their decision to postpone further content, previous feedback post early access confirmed a fair amount of people faced in-game stuttering. In an official announcement, Sharkmob spoke more about the forthcoming update, including their decision to focus on performance optimization.
Before the last patch, game performance was a massive issue for a sizable chunk of people. A long list of people on Reddit, Twitter, and in-game complained about how the game ran at 12 FPS even on their “high-end” rig.
It was like whack-a-mole; a patch would fix one issue, but people were suddenly having similar issues elsewhere. Still, some people blew their experience out of proportion to match their frustration with the game. If one hundred people play your game and five of those people have an issue, those five people will be as vocal as the entire user base combined.
“The focus for now has been on finding a good balance between visual fidelity and performance and delivering an experience that is more stable on a wider range of PC hardware configurations,” read the statement.
Expect Sharkmob to drop more information soon, but for now, rest assured: “The playtest will be open to everyone who previously created a Sharkmob account that is in good standing.” “Good standing” is just a qualifier meaning those who were banned or suspected of cheating will be unable to participate. The closed stress test will run for “a day or two” and will help the team prepare for, we hope, a turbulence-free hard launch.
