So I'm continuing with Talos Principle 2. I'm at the 50% mark atm and this time I brought some SSs because, oh boy, this game looks gorgeous. Texture quality is a little on the low side but vegetation looks great. So far I'm loving it. It appears that they slightly increased the difficulty of standard puzzles and decreased the difficulty of solving secrets which was my only real complaint in the first game so it's perfect in that regard now. But of course not everything is perfect. The game now has an actual storyline with characters. I think it is still early for me to talk about the quality of the story but that's not really the problem for me. In the first game, the absence of a strong storyline led me to find my own story, in my own pace, in my own rules, within the borders of my own curiosity and imagination. In this game, I feel like I'm more limited with clear orders and objectives given. And I'm now responsible for others rather than just my own. Which isnt a straight bad thing although it's a
different experience now. Also the script is definitely weaker this time around, I'm missing the interactive Q&As with the AI in the first game. Still, I'm still finding my own ways to have fun and get involved. Gameplay itself is still great (for a puzzle game). And big open worlds kinda help me to forget about story and enjoy the rest.
(Spoiler tag is just for the screenshots, doesn't really contain any spoiler)
I'm also really enjoying breaking the puzzles
There is something I want to talk and ask about graphics though.
After tweaking and trying many settings, this has become the first game I opted to use frame generation to hit high refresh rates. In-game FG support works good (not AFMF), doesn't seem to cause noticeable artifacts and frame pacing is great. Input lag is still there (I use mouse & kb) but this not a shooter so it doesn't actually effect anything and manageable.
Like many UE5 title, this game also has some sort of ray tracing when you turn on Global Illuminations and Reflections settings to high or above (it does say so in the menu as well) so the graphic settings I ended up using are:
1440p, FSR Quality, All Ultra, Shadows Medium and GI High.
Without FG, I get about 85-120 FPS in actual game areas. But it seems like I start to see some kind of CPU limits above 100 FPS as well. So this is not really perfect because of fluctuations. But it makes a very good case to run FG. With FG I can lock to 144FPS, it doesn't really fluctuate and it seems on average I get less power usage on both GPU and CPU. I don't have many complaints about it so far. It just works.
About upscaling, well, nothing looks great while moving. Frankly, even native isn't that great. I even tried super sampling to higher resolutions which looks good but FPS tanks quite bad. So I opted to use quality FSR which gives a huge boost to FPS (like in many UE5 title).
Lastly I like the reflections in this game. They are probably standard UE5 but "ray traced" ones are pretty great. It seems like they blend with normal reflections. You can notice if you move camera to up and down to hide objects and their qubic(?) reflections but it's not like they disappear completely like in many games without RT reflections so it's not really noticeable while you are actually playing the game. There are many water bodies in the game so reflections adds a lot. But the best part is FPS hit which is very negligible so it's no brainer to put them in ultra.
About my question, please take a look at the below pictures. From top to bottom those are GI Medium, GI High and GI Ultra. Now I might be biased because I play on GI High (for performance reasons, Ultra hits quite hard to FPS) but I'm not sold on what Ultra does to trees those are in the shadow of other trees on the right side. It looks like they get illuminated from somewhere and their details get washed out. Sun is clearly low on horizon so I dont think this should be the case for them. But I'm not taking everything away from Ultra setting as it does clearly better job inside of the building on the left. GI Medium does good job with the grass on the middle but inside of the building and forest's depths looks too bright. About 90% of what you do is run between trees and solve puzzles inside inside buildings so I really appreciate the better illumination in this game.
But maybe I'm just going crazy, so what do you think?
