Liquid Swords’ debut title, Samson: A Tyndalston Story, is finally out for PC via Steam, but it’s not all celebratory smiles for the team. Aside from the 53 Metascore, the action-adventure title currently has a “Mixed” rating on Steam with only 51 percent of its 646 user reviews recommending it. Studio head Christofer Sundberg said there wouldn’t be zero bugs at launch, but the number of issues is seemingly worse than expected.
Thankfully, if you held off on purchasing until, say, April 10th, a major patch is slated to go live with numerous fixes. These include addressing performance issues based on PSO, crashes related to audio and animation, and progression blockers. It will even add the ability to have eight separate save files.
“We are committed to the future of both Samson and Tyndalston, and this game will grow over time on all fronts; quality, gameplay and content,” said the developer. “We will continue to keep our ears to the ground and improve the game with your support.”
Aside from this update, the team will focus on fixing gameplay and animation-related issues, addressing additional performance problems and further polishing the experience. Check out some of the patch notes below and full details here.
You can also read our review of Samson, which we gave a seven out of ten. While console versions haven’t been officially announced, Liquid Swords will “get cracking” on them after the PC release, presumably after it’s ironed out the majority of issues. Stay tuned for updates in the meantime.
#1 Samson Game Update
Performance
- Several performance fixes focusing on PSO related hitches (fixes stuttering related issues)
- Fixed some misses with Slate
- Fixed landscape RayTracingDynamicGeometry misses
- bIgnoreMaskMateria & bRequireRTDynamicGeometryUpdate was not set correctly from landscape PSO precache dispatch since 5.7
- NaniteLumenCard & NaniteShading misses
- Fixed PSO misses due to FStaticMeshComponentHelper::CollectPSOPrecacheDataImpl fetching materials from LOD levels depending on MinLOD even for Nanite-enabled meshes which will render with LOD 0 materials
Crash fixes
- Several crash fixes related to audio, animation and GPU
- Crash fix for clearing UseDestructionHelp for vehicles with a timer
- Fix for potential case where attempting to update a failed dispatch when losing warp governance could clear the callback lambda as it was being executed, causing a dangling this pointer and crash
- Fixed various audio-related crashes, including one when closing the game
- Avoid race conditions caused by writes to bIsCachedRayTracingInstanceValid and bDynamicRayTracingInstanceCachedDataDirty from parallel tasks
- Force separate storage unit between ray tracing and non-ray tracing bits
- Force separate storage unit between bIsCachedRayTracingInstanceValid and bDynamicRayTracingInstanceCachedDataDirty
Mission
- Several fixes for mission and progression related issues
- Ice Fish – NPCs spawned in the Beatdown are no longer only Level 1
- Thrill of the Fight and Running on Fumes – now functional after save/continue
- Suzy Red no longer gets multiplied during “Stitches for Snitches” mission completion
- Hit 16 (No Return Fare) – passenger now gets into the cab at the pickup location
- Dave Shultz Tailing Job – Dave now spawns close to player, avoiding near-instant fails for being too far away
- Story Chapter – No Whisper Dealers – no beatdown triggers when eliminating enemies, preventing mission failure
- Welcome Home 4 – fixed issue where the fail radius for the reach dealer objective was too small
- Day 3: Oonagh Welcome Home – call now comes after story mission Blood on Tap rather than Dirty Scripts
General Gameplay
- Several fixes for gameplay related issues
- NPC fall damage added as a failsafe for dropped NPCs
- Day 3 Pickups – raised interact range to allow easier pickup if an item is dropped under a body
- Let outsiders check if the driver can be pulled out of the vehicle
- Fixed issues where enemies were not advancing towards you in group encounters
- Fixed issues with AI running onto roads to inspect dead bodies
- Fixed issue where police siren sometimes did not work
