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Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun [Steam, GOG] is a very good tactical stealth game, it just got a whole lot better with a new beta patch too.

When going over various changelogs as usual, I came across one for Shadow Tactics (see here). It mentions "Major performance improvements" along with "Reduced mission loading times" and "Reduced saving and loading times". I honestly thought that the performance improvements would be really minor and likely be more tuned for the Windows version. I was wrong—very wrong.

The performance impact of this opt-in patch is staggering. Times when I was getting 30FPS while moving the camera, is now giving a solid 120FPS+ even while zoomed out. The performance, for me, has at least doubled in all cases across every level I tried. Absolutely amazing, I have no idea what they've done as I'm on the same settings and it looks as crisp and beautiful as ever.

On top of that, they really did work on loading time which has also been dramatically reduced. Before, I could probably pop downstairs and grab a biscuit before it loaded a level, now it's mere seconds before it's ready.

I'm extremely impressed with the post-release effort Mimimi Productions has put in with Shadow Tactics. I already enjoyed the game and I did recommend it when I initially covered the release at the start of 2017, now it's a very clear and solid recommendation.

I'm sure once the patch is stable and released properly on Steam, it will also make its way to GOG too. For now, if you wish to test it, simply opt-in to the "patch-preview" branch on Steam.

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Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Eike Feb 22, 2018
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Is this an actual gameplay screenshot? It looks better than any other I've seen...
tpau Feb 22, 2018
The loading time indeed is ruining the good impression a little. Great ga.
me, unfortunately a bit too short.
melkemind Feb 22, 2018
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I really love this game, and some performance dips were really my only concerns about it. I hope they release some expansions. Mod support and level editors would be great too. :D
lucifertdark Feb 22, 2018
Quoting: tuubiI remember the games (I loved the music in TLN2), but the gameplay is very different. :)
Glad I'm not the only one who remembers them from back then, the music was really good, Shadow Tactics is high on my list of games to buy asap.
deathbuffer Feb 22, 2018
Maybe as a side effect of the Unity renderer seemingly taking care of everything, it appears that before this patch, they couldn't be bothered to dig into it and apply some very obvious optimizations:
https://kosmonautblog.wordpress.com/2017/01/09/shadow-tactics-rendering-breakdown/
Some of the stuff in there will make a real graphics programmer facepalm pretty hard...but it seems that they finally got around to it, and it's astonishing what kind of a difference it makes.
That's not to say this isn't a good game, and I'm not bashing the devs themselves - they got it right in the end, so everyone is happy. I'm really more upset about Unity giving everyone the impression that nice 3D graphics are easy to do, which leads to a lot of small studios pushing out titles that are performing really badly, and most of them never see performance patches later on.
Learn your craft, people! Sorry, rant over.
Philadelphus Feb 22, 2018
I run it off an SSD so loading times were already just a few seconds for me, but quick-loading is even faster now. Like, less than a second. Loading a level for the first time still takes ~10 seconds or so, but the new progress bar feature that shows how it's going is rather nice. :)
Skipperro Feb 23, 2018
I've tested it and... WOW!
I've got i7-7700K and Titan XP.

Before path game was playable with framerate around 40-60 with ocasional drops to 20. I was able to play up to a snowy prison map, where the map size and intense snow effects was killing performance and FPS drops below 30 with drops to around 10 on low settings.

Now on everything on max settings I don't see FPS lower than 120. While zoomed in, I've got over 200 FPS.
Oh, and loading times for a game installed on SSD.... nearly instant.

Best performance path ever!
Eike Feb 23, 2018
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Quoting: SkipperroI've tested it and... WOW!
I've got i7-7700K and Titan XP.

Before path game was playable with framerate around 40-60 with ocasional drops to 20. I was able to play up to a snowy prison map, where the map size and intense snow effects was killing performance and FPS drops below 30 with drops to around 10 on low settings.

Now on everything on max settings I don't see FPS lower than 120. While zoomed in, I've got over 200 FPS.
Oh, and loading times for a game installed on SSD.... nearly instant.

Best performance path ever!

To be honest, that's the only acceptable performance experience for such a game with you hardware setup. :)
Egonaut Feb 23, 2018
Runs absolutely great now, with never lower than 180FPS! Now the game will be more fun as it was already.

Mimimi promised a performance patch after the console release and they have delivered. But it took a long time, the game was released over a year ago.
Avehicle7887 Feb 23, 2018
Can someone please check if they included a 64bit exec with this patch? :)
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