The remarkably genre-bending hack ‘n’ slash No Rest for the Wicked has proven that the genre hasn’t given its all just yet, though its Early Access status betrayed a slew of technical issues. Some of them – including a memory leak, of all things – have been fixed in Hotfix 3.
Developed by Moon Studios, the team that made the widely acclaimed Ori games, No Rest for the Wicked is a massively different title from anything the developer had produced before. As it’s currently unfinished, then, it was to be expected that there would be some growing pains, with Moon Studios owning up to them and promising prompt fixes. To date, we are now on the third substantial technical patch, and Hotfix 3 may be the most substantial of them yet.
No Rest for the Wicked’s Hotfix 3 improves performance and fixes a problematic memory leak
According to No Rest for the Wicked‘s Hotfix 3 patch notes, players should find the game much more pleasant to play and performant on a wide variety of systems. According to Moon Studios, they have “improved Performance, Balance, Loot, Harvesting, Graphics, fixed progression blockers and added new options in the Settings Screen. A good few dozen other bugs across the rest of the game have also been squashed.” Excellent news indeed, but performance improvements are the most meaningful boon of the bunch, in my book, as that’s one of the main points of contention players have had with the game.
With Hotfix 3, Moon Studios has delivered all of the following performance improvements for Wicked:
- Improved area streaming (smoother traversal from one area to another)
- Less aggressive dynamic resolution scaling
- Improved off-screen object culling
- Improved bird animation culling, leading to a small performance uplift
- Further shader optimizations, with improvements to particle rendering
- Assorted CPU performance improvements and memory optimizations
Of course, the fact that Moon Studios has resolved a particularly obnoxious memory leak of particular note here. So, those who enjoyed playing Wicked for long stretches of time should now be free to do so, without worrying about the performance drop-off or, in extreme cases, crashing. Hotfix 3 also introduces a variety of camera management options, balancing improvements, and heaps of general bugfixing, with plenty more to come in the near and far future.
