Lords of the Fallen, HEXWORKS’ newest dark-fantasy RPG, hit digital shelves today much to the excitement of Soulslike fans. But the game has so far struggled in its first day of launch.
It’s received mixed reviews on Steam and other platforms, with a large portion of the player base citing performance issues as the core reason for their low ratings. Multiple users in Steam reviews detailed the performance troubles they’ve experienced since the game’s release despite meeting all the title’s hardware requirements.
“Very Disappointing so far. Have a 4090, 13700k, 64gb of RAM, etc etc. and this game just does not want me to play for more than 5 minutes without crashing,” one Steam user wrote.
Another user claimed they couldn’t make it past the character creation menu without experiencing a crash. More still have pointed to stutters and frame drops—two issues that can make a technical game like Lords of the Fallen, which requires very intricate timing for dodges and parries—to be enough reason to make the game unplayable.
Several others took the opportunity to meme the technical issues: “Lords of the Crashin’.”
Others, however, are singing Lords of the Fallen’s praises, claiming it’s one of the best titles in the Soulslike genre—even with its technical issues. Most of the top posts on the game’s subreddit on the day of release speak highly of the game’s graphics, and several other reviews on Steam applaud the game for fun and challenging gameplay.
If you’re experiencing performance issues on PC and haven’t yet attempted a fix, many of the solutions both HEXWORKS and other players are suggesting include updating drivers, running the game in borderless windowed mode, and lowering settings.
If issues persist, however, it’s likely HEXWORKS will look to release a patch addressing the concerns, considering the team has already pushed fixes for performance issues on Xbox.
