Where did the Immersive Sim audience vanish off to? Human Revolution and Dishonored were both mega-hits, and then suddenly Mankind Divided and Dishonored 2 bombed.
I think that
Deus Ex: Human Revolution and the original
Dishonored were unexpected hits which managed to attract more than just the crowd that knows what an immersive sim is and cares about those games.
The problem is that those people didn't stick around.
Either they wrote off the sequels as "more of the same" despite there being nothing else like them in the preceding five years, or they bought the first games and didn't want any more of what they were offering.
I know a lot of people that I would never have expected to play either of those pick up one or both of them, and a lot of them decided that type of game wasn't for them.
Combine that with it being reported that
Deus Ex: MD had been cut in half, microtransactions being forced into
Deus Ex by the publisher, both of them using Denuvo, both shipping with performance and control issues which made it look like PC was not their main priority with the games despite that being where the main immersive sim audience is, and they didn't start out in a strong position.
Lots of people decided it would be better to wait and see if the issues would be fixed or wait for a sale.
Prey obviously.
Oh wait, the "audience" for the genre and System Shock decided to sit out on that one too
Yeah, I'm not sure what happened there.
I've seen a lot of people that really liked
Deus Ex: MD and
Dishonored 2 who completely ignored
Prey.
Which is a real shame, because it might be my favorite of the three.
LMAO. Yup, just as politics has entered the Misinformation Age, PC Gaming has entered the "Never my Rig's fault" age.
Dishonored 2 runs like butter on my PC... That said, I wish I could say the same for the RAM-devouring Mankind Divided and its legion of Memory Leaks.
I upgraded my video card for the game (GTX 960 > GTX 1070) then built a brand new PC (i5-2500K > R7-1700X) and then bought a G-Sync display, and it still doesn't run that well.
The most recent patch,
which arrived seven and a half months after launch, is the first one that properly fixed some of the performance issues for me.
Before that patch, the game would always stutter badly. Didn't matter what the framerate was, the game would be stuttering.
Now at least if you can lock the framerate to 60 FPS, the frame presentation issues are gone.
They're still present if the game is running at anything other than 60 FPS though.
There are not many other games which run smoother at 60 FPS than 100 FPS.
I still have to turn down settings, enable dynamic resolution (which looks terrible), and limit the game to 60 for it to run acceptably.
It is now playable at least, but I haven't really gone back to it since these performance issues really killed my interest in the game.