( Robyn Miller), opted to stay behind in Hunrath and isolated himself in a safe room, believing the others were dead. Most then took shelter through cryogenic hibernation in a Villein "Silo". Friendly Mofang warned the other species, and they instituted various lockdown protocols to slow the Mofang from planting these weapons. The Mofang felt the other species were holding them back, and developed a weapon of mass destruction capable of devastating the other spheres. However, the player finds they had just arrived after a major conflict. The four species found ways to harness the Seeds to transfer themselves between their worlds at will, allowing for collaboration and to try to find a means home. The humans had peacefully worked with alien species from the other worlds to understand this process: the technologically-advanced Mofang from the planet Soria, the insect-like Arai species from Kaptar, and the peaceful Villein species from Maray. The Trees periodically drop Seeds that travel through time and space and swap spherical areas from one linked world with another. Further exploration reveals that the town is called Hunrath, and that dozens of humans from across the 19th-21st centuries had been brought here, in the same manner the player was, for unknown reasons.įrom journals left by some of these people, the player learns that there are four such spheres or "cells", linked via Trees in the center of each cell to a common Heart. Exploring the town, they find it seemingly empty outside of holographic pre-recorded welcoming messages from its mayor Josef Janssen ( Patrick Treadway). They can see the alien world outside of this larger sphere, but cannot pass through it. One light resolves into a seed-like object that immobilizes the player and transports them and a small sphere of the park to an alien world, within the confines of a much larger sphere of Earth taken from an early-20th century Arizona mining town. The player, while at a campground, sees strange lights in the sky. I'm sure there must be room for performance improvements though, so things will likely get better, at least to some degree.Within Obduction, small spheres of human environments, such as a portion of this house and the land in front of it, have been transported to an alien environment, and players must solve puzzles that mix the human and alien elements. Even some with high-end Intel i7 processors and $500+ Nvidia GTX 1080 cards are complaining about the performance in VR. That doesn't really work as well in VR though, where 90+ fps is ideal.Īnd no, it's not just AMD hardware. Unfortunately, that apparently comes at the cost of optimization, although the game's slow pace means than getting only around 30 fps should still be plenty playable, at least on a monitor.
![cyan obduction cyan obduction](https://cyan.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/ObdScreen-0024.jpg)
This was true even back in 2000, when they launched the original RealMyst, which brought Myst into a 3D game engine, but ran poorly on most computers at the time, and it's kind of been a trend they've had since.Īnd at least in Obduction's case, they're back down to a relatively small development team, while making a game that has visuals comparable or better than what you might find from much larger teams. When they decided to transition to realtime graphics, they wanted to maintain as much of that visual fidelity as possible, and as a result, their games tend to be rather demanding on hardware.
![cyan obduction cyan obduction](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Mh5YqVm0NsA/maxresdefault.jpg)
The original Myst games made use of pre-rendered viewpoints and bits of full-motion video to enable graphics far beyond anything realtime game engines were capable of at the time. I think it comes down to Cyan trying to push really nice visuals, while originally coming from a background in pre-rendered graphics. It’s easy to tell that reprojection is in use when you use the teleport feature because the animation doesn’t appear as smooth as it should. We haven’t run the game through FCAT VR yet, so we can’t say how often reprojection kicked in, but it happened regularly. Even with the graphics settings turned all the way down to low, the frame rate did not feel smooth. We gave the game a run on our Vive test bench, which is equipped with an Intel Core i5-4570K and a Gigabyte GTX 1080 G1 Gaming, and we can confirm that we found performance problems ourselves. Several comments surfaced online about similar issues.
![cyan obduction cyan obduction](https://techunwrapped.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/The-Obduction-game-a-sci-fi-adventure-free-for-a-limited.jpg)
Reddit user kommutator said that the game is “almost unplayable” on his PC, which includes an Intel Core i7-7700K operating at 4.66GHz and a GTX 1080 graphics card. Gamers with high-end PCs claimed that reprojection would kick in regularly, even with lowered graphics settings.
#Cyan obduction update
Shortly after the Obduction update went live, people started reporting performance issues in the game when playing with a Vive headset. The news of motion control support was exciting, but that was short-lived.