Let me start by saying, I love this game with a passion I haven't had in a long time. I genuinely think I will 100% the game when the devs put the capstone on it one day. It genuinely pains me to leave a negative review, and I will be one of the first to change it to positive if the things I talk about below get addressed.
As beautiful, charming, and in so many ways enjoyable this game is, I cannot get past the poor performance. Don't get me wrong, it's an early access title. But I have played quite a few early access games, and this is by far one of the worst optimized.
I played this game for quite a while at launch, and decided to stop and let the game cook so I wouldn't be burnt out on it before new content came out. There is so much potential for the game (a significant amount realized already), and I have fallen in love with the world, the story, my caretaker, and the game loop. All 10/10 imo. But I jumped back in over the weekend, and there has been very little improvement since release as far as performance goes. I am a firm believer that frame gen should not be required for a game to run on medium settings, but i cant get over 30 without frame gen. Unfortunately, frame gen seems to be locked behind the ray tracing setting, and my hardware is not built for ray tracing. So I can either have horrible frame rate, or horrible lighting and ghosting from frame gen.
Also, the Nematodes are a cool concept and when the game first came out they were in a decent place, but as it stands, they currently suck a lot of fun out of the game and are way overtuned. When I first started playing, they were really only a hassle at night, due to the fact that they only spawned at night, and the sun would nearly instantly kill them. Now, It can be high noon, and they continue to spawn from the depths, crawl up the side of the rig I am scrapping MID DAY, slither to me while smoking from being in the sun, and swarm me from behind. And if they don't decide to actually attack me, I will nearly ALWAYS be "in combat" so the combat music is always playing while I'm just trying to casually scrap. This and overall performance/bugs are my biggest complaints that keep me from wanting to continue playing.
Long story short, I'm back to letting the game cook. I genuinely hope the devs make some very significant optimization and bug fix passes. They put out a very aggressive roadmap, and I love the new content that I have read in the patch notes. But I would rather have a game that isn't built on fake frames and unfixed bugs (some from launch, some new) than a game with those but more content.
