So, this is going to be a journey, and I ask that you're patient with me.
Here's a little backstory so that you understand where I'm coming from.
I just finished playing 85 hours of Yakuza: Like a Dragon.
For those who are unaware, the game is essentially an open-world turn-based RPG, and the world is extremely detailed. The character detail is fantastic with all characters in the world being very large, and in busier areas, there are sometimes something like 30 or 40 random NPCs just walking their way through the streets who are all just as detailed as your characters. There are also a lot of nice effects and cool touches like shadows playing realistically with the environment, different lighting effects from multiple angles, haze wafting up from the heat on the ground, accurate reflections from pools of water, smoke and smog drifting through the city, traffic moving around you through the street, people visible through windows going about their day inside of buildings, and extremely flashy attacks with tons of particles.
My aging rig was able to play it on High settings and maintain a fantastic framerate, and it only chugged in one area in the entire game where there's a huge view from near the top of a building where the entire city is displayed.
To add to this, I should mention that I played DOS2 completely maxed out on Ultra settings with never so much as a hiccup. (Sure, it's older now, but I figured it was worth adding to provide some sort of baseline.)
I mention all of this because I fail to understand why while playing BG3, I can't go above Medium settings with a few of the bells and whistles turned on without bottoming out to about 15 fps, and I'm essentially stuck playing on the Low setting with all additional options either turned off or at their lowest possible setting while still running into a fair bit of chop with the game looking absolutely hideous, approaching N64 levels of detail. This even happens in areas that aren't busy, and places like the goblin camp or busy cutscenes basically turning the game into a slide show.
Now, I don't know pretty much anything about how engines work, or what the optimization is like, and I understand that my system is getting up there in age, but can anyone please help me understand why it is that I can play such a robustly detailed and busy game, and I'm able to march along at full speed without any issues, but a game like BG3 that's primarily taking place in large open areas where a tiny portion of the world is visible on your screen at any given time due to the isometric view is struggling to run well enough to be legitimately worth playing?
Clearly, a grand majority of people aren't having issues with this since the technical section of the forums aren't exactly flooded with complaints about problems with performance, so I'm either forced to assume that everyone has a monster PC, or that they just happen to be lucky to have a setup where it's not enough of an issue to matter.
Are my issues a result of the early access process and will eventually get cleared up as the kinks get worked out of this new (and seemingly bloated) engine? Just exactly how much will optimization help, and when does that typically take place during the development process?
I feel somewhat left out in the rain here because I've played too long for a Steam refund, with almost 90% of my time being stuck trying to adjust different settings in different combinations to provide a smooth experience. Yes, I understand that it's not Larian's fault that my PC is tired and I'm too poor to upgrade it to play their game, but it's confusing to me how an engine could be so poorly-optimized that it's stuttering on a game with what appears to have half the detail of a newer game that I just breezed through on a High setting.
Can a game (or I guess engine in this case) be optimized dramatically between the EA process and a retail release? Can I expect this to not just get "kinda" better but substantially better? Or did I just pay $60 for a set of files to sit on my computer?
