In my 25 years of playing video games on consoles, I have never played a game that was such an incomplete, broken, borderline unfunctional mess than Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing in Disguise. I have been playing it for 6 hours today and came to the conclusion very quick it is in an unreleasable state and should be pulled from online and physical retailers. Ignoring all the artistic and design choices such as graphics, soundtrack, story, voice acting, quest design, structure and just focusing on raw function and playability, Deadly Premonition 2 is an unmitigated technical disaster.
The thing I am sure everyone has seen by now is the appalling framerate. It is much worse than that IGN gameplay video they released a week before release. There is not a single point in the open world where the framerate is at 30 fps. Even looking at the ground the game runs like an N64 game and that is at its best. 90% of the time it is running between 10 to 15 frames a second going through an environment that looks like a $2 Unity asset flip Steam release. This isn't Doom (2016) or Breath of the Wild where the less than stellar framerate could be somewhat excused by how good the game looks. It reminds of me of those YouTube videos of people getting Doom 3 or Crysis running on super old hardware where the game looks like garbage and runs like garbage but it was cool to see it running on a PC from 1998. Deadly Premonition 2 is not running a PC from 1998 or a Raspberry Pi, it's full price physical release running on current hardware from a major platform holder.
What most people haven't seen is the game-breaking bugs, freezes and crashes Deadly Premonition 2 has in droves. I've been playing Switch games since shortly after its release and I have never seen the 'This game crashed. Would you like to send a bug report?' screen once in three years but I have seen it four times in 6 hours with Deadly Premonition 2. That's ignoring the game freezing which has happened twice or the time the game refused any input, both of which required a software restart. These are only examples of bugs that required restarts. It does not include multiple questlines becoming incompletable which required reloading older saves or getting stuck underneath the world.
To those who say 'Deadly Premonition is supposed to be a little bit broken. It is part of the charm' I would say that I agree with them. Stuff like NPCs sliding out of frame during cutscenes or horrifying facial animation or bizarre music choices, all of which Deadly Premonition 2 has in droves. However Deadly Premonition 1 also had a stable framerate, little to no crashes and functional questlines. It had those small janky blemishes that added charm. These problems are not small issues, they are core fundamental functionality that does not work.
Maybe this is my fault for buying it in the first place. I saw that IGN video before release and I knew the reputation of SWERY who has a less than perfect track record and still bought it away. But I still had in the back of my mind that it's going to be a bit janky and framey but it will still function. But I was wrong and at this point, the blame should not be on the consumer but the people who allowed such a mess to be released in the first place.
Edit: I am aware that Nintendo did not publish it but they are the platform holder which means it goes through a certification process. When a game is this unfunctional at what point does the platform holder step in and say 'We will not be releasing this product on our platform until it is fixed'.
The thing I am sure everyone has seen by now is the appalling framerate. It is much worse than that IGN gameplay video they released a week before release. There is not a single point in the open world where the framerate is at 30 fps. Even looking at the ground the game runs like an N64 game and that is at its best. 90% of the time it is running between 10 to 15 frames a second going through an environment that looks like a $2 Unity asset flip Steam release. This isn't Doom (2016) or Breath of the Wild where the less than stellar framerate could be somewhat excused by how good the game looks. It reminds of me of those YouTube videos of people getting Doom 3 or Crysis running on super old hardware where the game looks like garbage and runs like garbage but it was cool to see it running on a PC from 1998. Deadly Premonition 2 is not running a PC from 1998 or a Raspberry Pi, it's full price physical release running on current hardware from a major platform holder.
What most people haven't seen is the game-breaking bugs, freezes and crashes Deadly Premonition 2 has in droves. I've been playing Switch games since shortly after its release and I have never seen the 'This game crashed. Would you like to send a bug report?' screen once in three years but I have seen it four times in 6 hours with Deadly Premonition 2. That's ignoring the game freezing which has happened twice or the time the game refused any input, both of which required a software restart. These are only examples of bugs that required restarts. It does not include multiple questlines becoming incompletable which required reloading older saves or getting stuck underneath the world.
To those who say 'Deadly Premonition is supposed to be a little bit broken. It is part of the charm' I would say that I agree with them. Stuff like NPCs sliding out of frame during cutscenes or horrifying facial animation or bizarre music choices, all of which Deadly Premonition 2 has in droves. However Deadly Premonition 1 also had a stable framerate, little to no crashes and functional questlines. It had those small janky blemishes that added charm. These problems are not small issues, they are core fundamental functionality that does not work.
Maybe this is my fault for buying it in the first place. I saw that IGN video before release and I knew the reputation of SWERY who has a less than perfect track record and still bought it away. But I still had in the back of my mind that it's going to be a bit janky and framey but it will still function. But I was wrong and at this point, the blame should not be on the consumer but the people who allowed such a mess to be released in the first place.
Edit: I am aware that Nintendo did not publish it but they are the platform holder which means it goes through a certification process. When a game is this unfunctional at what point does the platform holder step in and say 'We will not be releasing this product on our platform until it is fixed'.
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