ELEX ELEX II - Jax is back

[Nikanuur]

RPG is strong with this one; builds are differentiated

what builds?
your only choice is do you use ranged or melee

Yes, I went too far by saying builds. Although based upon skills / abilities / followers / itemisation, there are different ways to approach the combat.

 

[ItsChon]

First game was dogshit, IDK why people are surprised.

 

[Modron]

Stats are capped at a hundred right? So the main point is just to use those ability increasing potions to raise after 60 in a stat?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Stats are capped at 100 hundred right? So the main point is just to use those ability increasing potions to raise after 60 in a stat?

There's no reason to increase a stat unless you're required to for some reason. The benefits are so tiny that they're not even worth thinking about.

And you can use them whenever, they're applied as a bonus, the stat increase cost is for the base which excludes the bonus.

 

[Darth Roxor]

And you can use them whenever, they're applied as a bonus, the stat increase cost is for the base which excludes the bonus.

Motherfuckers, I've been hogging these potions for naught

 

[lukaszek]

And you can use them whenever, they're applied as a bonus, the stat increase cost is for the base which excludes the bonus.

Motherfuckers, I've been hogging these potions for naught

yeah, you can even use bonus from items to meet feat requirements

I think highest stat requirement I saw was 89str on two hander. Not like I found zwei handers usable since your animation is slower than those of your enemies.

From potion crafting perspective, int ones will be abundant, dont think I crafted single cunning one.

If you want to get into weapon crafting you will need a lot of money. You need all the feats generating income, including stealing.
That or some endless grind. For example those endlesss quests kill 50 critters towards the end didnt provide enough income for me

 

[Peachcurl]

How to get money.

Step 1: Equip Visual-Autism-Glasses (aka Perspective)
Step 2: Have obsessive compulsive disorder
Step 3: Not have compulsive hoarding disorder
Step 4: ???
Step 5: Elex.

btw I love how PB ALWAYS has some retarded trash items as requirements for random quests, because fuck you why did I SELL THIS SHIT TEN HOURS AGO

 

[Cpt. Dallas]

The only items that I had to reclassify from 'trash' were servo motors because I visited the Grotto last. Everything else was quest locked from selling. You don't even have to keep the map pieces, like you did in E1.

 

[Peachcurl]

The only items that I had to reclassify from 'trash' were servo motors because I visited the Grotto last. Everything else was quest locked from selling. You don't even have to keep the map pieces, like you did in E1.

The ones I am aware of:

• There's a quest that requires specific food items. (Canned meat, Coffee beans, afaik and some other more common stuff)
• Multiple gas masks are needed, without being marked as quest items.
  
• The servos you already mentioned.

(okay, at least one gas mask would be fair game to expect the player to keep it (and it is easy to get more), but the random food stuff and the servos are kinda odd)

 

[Cpt. Dallas]

Coffee beans may be an ingredient in a recipe IIRC. Yeah, a cleric will collect bread, water, and canned meat for a relative pittance. Gas masks for the iron mine quest. Skins for the berz hunter / teacher.

 

[iZerw]

Is it good? How is it compared to the first ELEX?

 

[Peachcurl]

I enjoy it. They improved some things (like the jet pack) made others worse (arguably the combat). Still fun for me.

 

[Cryomancer]

I wanna play it but my PC is not good enough. So I will just talk about the game.

Is ALB cryomancer a good build for the game? I've heard that Ice Fist is bugged.

 

[ADULF HITLOR FAN KLUB]

Is it good? How is it compared to the first ELEX?

It is good, and I have had quite a bit of fun playing, but ELEX 1 is clearly the better game.

I would recommend that all ELEX and PB fans play it, but only after a few more patches. The game really isn't buggy, the performance is just very bad. It runs alright on my high-end rig @1440p, but there is absolutely no excuse for how choppy the game is, especially in certain areas.

It is also clearly a Piranha Bytes title, but I can't shake the impression that ELEX feels like it has been demoted to a side project. Maybe this is due to Covid? I have no idea.

 

[soulburner]

I finished Elex 1 yesterday and immediately started Elex 2 and here are my impressions after about 2 hours of play:

- the cinematic intro looks good, but is so different graphically to the game, it just doesn't bond well. I don't see many .bik files in the assets, so hopefully most cinematics are done in engine

- the way Jax looks like a completely different character is not only emphasized by a different voice actor but also by flashback videos showing scenes from Elex 1 with the original Jax face. It looks more jarring than I'd expect. Additionally, I have a weird feeling like the game would be better if we'd play a different, new character instead of Jax.

- the initial plot is a little weird, but I hope it gets better later in the game, as it usually does in PB games. In Elex 1 it was less about saving the world but more about a personal vengeance kind of thing - Elex 2 is telling me I'm about to save the world within the first 5 minutes of gameplay

- the controls are much more responsive than in Elex, including the jetpack which is no longer a double-tap spacebar by default, but a hold-spacebar thing. Such a small thing, but welcome. Jax screaming profanities when he runs out of gas was funny at first, but it became horrifically annoying

- using the alternative camera, so I don't know if it is this way with the default setting, but Jax's model constantly shifts from being in the center of the screen to being too far to the left or right

- the characters' faces might look a bit weird and funny, but their lip sync animations are top notch. They also seem to look a lot better during night time or in generally darker areas, which suggests it's some general issue with the lighting system of the engine and less an issue of poor model design

- the graphics are weird. Some initial areas look like an improvement over Elex 1, while others look like Gothic 3 but with higher resolution textures. Some areas which show a larger vista do not have any shadows and look terrible, with pixelated and dithered trees. It also seems like the game engine tries to draw too many objects' shadows with pixel perfect precision, which looks cool at first, but completely unrealistic at second glance. There are areas with bright sunlight and too dark shadows. Additionally, something is very wrong with lighting during the day - some areas look much worse than in Elex 1 because of the way the sun interacts with foliage (for example, making grass a bit too shiny and light green).

- game performance is a complete joke and I'm afraid it's not going to be an easy fix. Looking at past post-release updates from Piranha Bytes I'm afraid we won't see any further improvements in that regard. On my PC (Ryzen 3600, 16 GB RAM, RTX 3060 12 GB), using 'high' settings at 1080p, I'm getting ultra-smooth vsynced 60 fps during the first few minutes of the game, but reaching any area with buildings and NPCs suddenly causes a drop to 50 fps and sometimes below, with extreme frame pacing variation. GPU usage rises to 99%, the clocks boost to the maximum, but the GPU temperature remains rather low, 42 - 45 degrees Celsius, which doesn't seem right on a single fan graphics card (it was the only one available at a price that wasn't completely insane). CPU usage is also quite high, it's been a while since I've heard my CPU cooler fan increase its speed, but seeing the GPU usage at 99% suggests the CPU is not a bottleneck. Reducing graphical details doesn't seem to have a significant impact, but dropping shadow quality seems to improve the framerate by about 1 to 2 fps with each downgrade.

- I hope I never see Dex again

- the first conversations with Caja suggest she and Jax are having quite a few issues, but she's like "I fucking hate you" in one sentence and "aw, you're so cute" in the second. With that in mind, the first few longer dialogs I've taken part in, it seems they are a little better written and voice acted than in Elex 1

Right now I'm thinking whether I should continue my gameplay or leave this game for a while with the hope for some significant performance increasing update.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

but reaching any area with buildings and NPCs suddenly causes a drop to 50 fps and sometimes below, with extreme frame pacing variation

did you make it to one of the faction areas yet? All of them tanked my FPS, cleric one was the worst for reasons unknown to me.

 

[soulburner]

did you make it to one of the faction areas yet? All of them tanked my FPS, cleric one was the worst for reasons unknown to me.

No, it's the first two areas with Caja and the one you take Dex to. I'm afraid my fps will drop to unplayable levels in a faction city. I have a suspicion the engine has a problem with visibility sorting and draws everything in the buildings' interiors, no matter if the game camera actually "sees" them. It looks like a Quake map built without vis.

 

[Darth Roxor]

I think there is just something very deeply wrong about the game, tech-wise, possibly on multiple fronts. As soulburner said, there are many things that just seem straight up wrong/weird (shadows, lighting, vegetation), and none of it looks good enough to be as ridiculously taxing on the hardware as it is. And that's without even speaking about my favourite problem of having to keep restarting the game to reset shadows or else the shit will run at negative FPS.

I wonder if the answer isn't that they simply pushed this old-ass engine way over its limit, perhaps even recklessly so.

 

[Cryomancer]

Alb VS Berserker. Discuss.

 

[soulburner]

I wonder if the answer isn't that they simply pushed this old-ass engine way over its limit, perhaps even recklessly so.

You can make any engine to perform poorly, I don't think it's necessarily Genome's fault. It's near impossible to find out what exactly the problem is without looking at the source code, so it's up to Piranha to find the cause of the issue and release an update.

One more thing I noticed - according to MSI Afterburner, the game is allocating more than 8 GB of video memory, which might be the very first time I'm seeing such a thing at 1080p.

 

[HoboForEternity]

Alb VS Berserker. Discuss.

i legit want to join berserker so i get fire rain for that gothic mage nostalgia

 

[Cryomancer]

Alb VS Berserker. Discuss.

i legit want to join berserker so i get fire rain for that gothic mage nostalgia

My favorite type of magic in Gothic is the water magic.

G3 screens

G1 gameplay

G2 + Returning 2.0 mod

That said, is Alb magic great as Water Magic in this games??

I've heard that you can cast blizzard and similar spells but never found a video describing they.

 

[Grotesque]

I've played Elex II last night all night!

I liked it!

 

[ADULF HITLOR FAN KLUB]

I wonder if the answer isn't that they simply pushed this old-ass engine way over its limit, perhaps even recklessly so.

You can make any engine to perform poorly, I don't think it's necessarily Genome's fault. It's near impossible to find out what exactly the problem is without looking at the source code, so it's up to Piranha to find the cause of the issue and release an update.

The engine is actually quite nice and rather advanced, because the game loads SUPER FAST on the latest SSDs and you can even change every single setting on the fly, which not every engine is capable of. There is just something seriously wrong with the renderer at the moment - somebody could probably pinpoint what is wrong by analyzing the DirectX draw calls and the shader cache.

Anyway, patch 2 improved performance, at least for my rig, so I still have hope that PB will eventually fix the bottle neck that is plaguing the engine.

One more thing I noticed - according to MSI Afterburner, the game is allocating more than 8 GB of video memory, which might be the very first time I'm seeing such a thing at 1080p.

I've also noticed that the game is a VRAM hog, which is rather strange.

 

[Angelo85]

Alb VS Berserker. Discuss.

Unfortunately it has to be Alb. Since that's the only way to join the true bros.

Spoiler

Talking about the Clerics of course.