Finished the game last night and really loved the story. But the PS4 performance issues are so bad they really should not be selling it. It's great that the developers say they are aware of the issues and working to resolve things with a patch - but they should not have put this game up for sale in this state. Period.

PS: I'm really hoping that there is a way to patch the game in a way that would make it an enjoyable experience. If the answer is that the PS4 isn't powerful enough to run the game smoothly, I feel like this console generation is dead and we should throw these machines out the window. Yikes.

There is a lot of room for improvement for sure, but I was fine with the performance overall.

I've read people say Unity games don;t run great on consoles, so maybe that's the problem here as well.

I picked up the game but I'll pull a Witcher 3 and wait for a patch or two before getting into it.

I encountered a game breaking bug and cant even finish ut until the patch drops, so I definitely wouldn't recommend buying it on PS4 for now at least

I stopped playing after 90 minutes, the game kept hitching every 20 seconds. I wanted to finish it before Street Fighter V came out but now it might be a long wait.

I don't think this game not running well is a negative sign for these consoles.

There are good looking games (Hell, around launch then inFamous and Killzone both showed off pretty good 1080p games that still stand up visually; people may not have wanted a short cover-shooter to play but The Order 1886 matches anything I've seen a PC do in terms of a clean, aliasing-free presentation; DriveClub is also sometimes stunning) that prove the hardware is capable and (from what I hear, have not touched current gen development myself) it has never been easier to work with the platforms to get a game running and tuned.

The 8-core tablet-class CPU (it's x86 but those 8 cores running at 1.6GHz are nothing like the 4 cores (clocking up to 4GHz) inside a modern Intel desktop x86 chip, even before you consider the frequency difference) is not the strongest part of these consoles, but it's also not actually killing them. But if you've got a game engine that really wants to load one core, you may have issues balancing the game. My understanding is Unity has been making a lot of progress in this area but you're not going to see that if this game was developed on a branch of the engine that they locked down months ago. Getting more at home with the new APIs (DX12, the to-the-metal API used by Sony, OpenGL Vulkan) should mean the CPUs don't bottleneck this generation in terms of visuals (if you want to do really heavy CPU sim stuff then I'd say PC offers a lot more options for interesting game design that eats perf and couldn't easily port to consoles but I'm not sure how many game devs are even looking for that - even slower CPUs are really fast vs even 10 years ago). Hell, VR's need for quick response times mean Unity 5.4 is significantly faster than 5.3, even before you turn on the VR-specific optimisations to help.

Unity games have the potential to perform badly, but it's not an inherent issue with the engine. They can also perform well, especially if the devs keep updating to new versions as the develop (which has been a major issue in the past with devs branching early and becoming completely detached from the current, high performance release of the engine). And these consoles aren't high-end PC equivalent, but they gain from being all the same so you can optimise far more tightly than a PC game/version.

@roars5000: They have said they are patching it and already have something which significantly improves it in their testing.

You are correct with your entire post. Devs stated that they need help from both Unity and Sony to get it running properly (Seems like they got it, or figured it out?), tiny team, tiny budget, cannot recruit the god-tier wizards they need to make it happen on their own. Still a shame it shipped in that condition. Not unplayable but it's like indoors framedrops in Fallout 4 on console and how it ruins ones aim, offputting to a degree that varies on the player. (and Fallout does not need 999999x anti-aliasing of the kind it has on console. Seeing jaggies once a day and having a solid 30+ FPS, please, devs!)

Bloodborne frame-timing is mentioned sometimes talking console performance and peep this; on my primary PSN account it has always been flawless except for the areas where nobody can escape it like where it chugs as it loads a burst of zone data, but after I started playing on a fresh account for the sake of gimmickry I found micro-stuttering had become a thing, my eyes could not unsee it. Back to the primary account and all was fine again. Most peculiar thing I've encountered.

Thanks for the heads up, after Galak-z and Nuclear Throne, I learned just not to buy anything, including small indie titles, at launch anymore. Maybe it's sad for developers but waiting for patches also leads to the hype/zeitgeist going away so I might as well wait for a sale on just about any game that comes out. What a sad state of affairs.

I really enjoyed the game but it sure did run like trash for me. Anytime I got near the lake I got some really bad framerate hitches and I had it hard crash on a load to the point where I had to totally reboot my PS4.

Same, I enjoyed the game overall but was really bummed by the performance. Really poor frame rate and consistent hitching.

I'm also going to pick it up and then wait for the patch. Sounds like it's pretty bad, but it's on a plus sale through tomorrow.

As someone that played the game on PS4 and mostly enjoyed it, my main gripe with the game is how some of the plot is handled and not necessarily the technical issues, I would say that its technical shortcomings didn't ruin my experience. But they were noticable and some people might be put off to such a degree that it might lessen the experience.

If your only option to play the game is on a PS4 and you are worried about the technical issues I would say wait a little, at least until a patch is released, and then give it a go.

Again it didn't bother me enough to ruin the experience but I did notice the occasional hitching and one time the game just got stuck at a loading screen. So if you want to be safe I would say wait for a, hopefully, forthcoming patch.

A ten person team with an engine that doesn't play nice with consoles, hardly a barometer for overall console health. My Raspberry Pi 2 can play psp games almost perfectly, but struggles to play, or even launch a lot of N64 games, sometimes it's the software not the hardware, but there is no excuse for selling a busted game.

is it worse than Fallout 4?

If you're going to hold this as a standard, recall Fallout 4. Firewatch is a hitchy performer with crashes certainly possible but its also a brief experience that will hold up its end of the bargain. I'm playing through another Unity game (Layers of Fear) and the hitching is definitely an engine issue. Seems like it can't do background autosaving discretely. Its used by small teams though so you can't expect them to have a handle on all the kinks.

It is ridiculous that devs and publishers insist on putting every game out for everything, when they are unable to deliver comparable performance across all platforms. I can understand light variations, because complete parity is impossible. But simple things such as "can I experience this game from start to finish without technical aspects holding my experience back?" seem to just be thrown to the wayside for a fast buck and "we'll fix it in patches" mentality.

This is not the "devs are lazy" argument, this is the "making games is mad expensive and they are scoping the projects way above what they can actually afford" argument.

I wish this would change.

I encountered a good bit of hitching and one crash on a load (did not lose progress), but it's certainly playable and I enjoyed it despite these issues.

I do wish they would have been a little more upfront about the issues. PSN should have an eye-catching section on the store page where known issues with a game are mentioned. It's a small thing that would go a long way in the user experience department.

@triviaman09: The store is a promotion for these games though, they aren't going to list a bunch of problems about a game on the store.

Not to say it isn't a cool idea but it's never going to happen.

You're probably right.

Ran it for 2 minutes after the intro and immediately shut it off. I need to build a PC lol

What an exaggeration.

I didn't have any problems with performance, at all, except for when I would walk around with the map "out". Just put the map away.

I've held off on getting it because I've been busy with the Witness, but I'll be holding off on it until the problems have been fixed.