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Rise of the Ronin arrived on Steam this week, a year after its debut on PlayStation 5, and I’m sorry to say it’s not going well, as players are reporting serious performance problems with the game. Koei Tecmo says it’s now “investigating” the reports and working on a patch that will hopefully “fix or improve some of these issues.”
There doesn’t seem to be any singular, consistent issue driving the complaints, beyond that it just doesn’t run well at all, even on relatively high-end PCs. Common issues include stuttering, low and inconsistent frame rates, crashes, and input delays; making matters worse, numerous players complain the game really doesn’t look great, even with graphical settings cranked up. The net result is a “mixed” rating on Steam, where just 44% of user reviews are positive.
A few selections:
- “The game looks like early PS4 graphics… and the fact that the game performance is INSANELY bad is unacceptable.”
- “Combat is good, performance is bad, in the same place I can have 70 fps then it quickly drops to around 30 fps for no reason. Graphics is good at best, but sometimes it looks like PS4 game, I really don’t understand why it’s so demanding.”
- “My PC goes above the recommended hardware and then some yet no matter what is done it just looks like blurry sub-40 FPS crap no matter the upscaling, the framegen, the external GPU software settings, even running it at low/medium at a lesser resolution causes issues.”
- “Game is really fun so far. Performance is terrible. It ran just fine for the prologue, but as soon as you get to the open world … performance falls off a cliff. Stuttering and choppiness even if you lower the settings.”
Our own Rise of the Ronin reviewer, who for the record is still working on it, has run into similar problems himself: “One minute it’s smooth on the high setting, next it’s struggling on low.”
The situation is similar on the Rise of the Ronin subreddit: Some players say it’s fine, but quite a few others are reporting significant performance issues. Even among those who say they’re happy with it, there seems to be a certain amount of hedging here and there.
“Feels like there’s a slight stutter/choppiness but it’s nothing I’m not used to playing Team Ninja PC ports,” one redditor wrote. “You get used to it pretty fast. My framerate stays at 70-110 with DLSS balanced and high settings, and the game feels great overall. Noticed some graphical glitches in a few cutscenes but the actual traversal and combat has been smooth.”
“You get used to it” is rarely what you want to hear in any situation, but the fact is that we have kind of gotten used to shoddy PC ports. Monster Hunter: Wilds is the most obvious recent example, but the list of notables also includes Spider-Man 2, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, The Last of Us Part 1, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, and no doubt a whole bunch of others I can’t recall off the top of my head. It’s enough of an issue that in 2023 we took a deeper dive into why PC ports seem to be getting worse. (The short answer? Making games is expensive, time consuming, and hard.)
In any event, Koei Tecmo is on the case. In a Steam update, the publisher said FPS drops, slow performance, and “model rendering issues” can occur when using the Ultra graphics preset regardless of your PC specs, and that the game “runs in slow motion” when the FPS limit is set to 120. It’s now “preparing a patch, which will be released soon, to fix or improve some of these issues,” and in the meantime, if you run into these problems recommends changing the graphical preset to either High or Standard, and dropping the FPS limit to 60, which “may” clear up the problems.
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Kurt Indovina
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