Topic: Riven (2024) is a stuttery mess.

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Back in 2024 John did a sponsored preview of the Riven remake that was yet to come out, and it was fairly glowing. Then, at the end of the year, he included it as one of his "Best of" titles in a round-up, in particular praising its performance.

I'd always been interested in the franchise, and the Steam Sale was on, so off the back of this recommendation I bought the Myst and Riven Remake bundle and dove in.

I played Myst first, for obvious reasons, and I was fairly happy with it, even though I did detect fairly regular and repeatable traversal stutters. This kind of irritated me, as I don't really consider them reasonable considering the size and visual quality of the game, even in it's remade form. But, they were infrequent and small enough that I was still able to enjoy the game and even replayed it a few times to get all the endings and achievements.

With that done, I jumped into Riven, which was I was looking forward to as the main course not just because of John's endorsement, but because of it's almost monolithic reputation as one of the greatest examples of its genre.

And... it's awful.

It looks and sounds amazing, but it has the most intolerable traversal stutter I've seen in a game. It suffers from constant, major frametime spikes basically any time you move in any direction more than a meter or two, often hitting one after the other.

Now, I am particularly sensitive to stutter, but I think one thing that helps me deal with it is if it makes sense. If spikes happen in places where, in my head, I can rationally see why the game would be loading or unloading assets at this point, like opening a door, rounding a corner, or even just after having travelled a reasonable distance. This isn't the case with Riven. Stutters are uneven and illogical. Okay, some happen when you might expect, such as walking down a corridor between two major areas, but then you'll be hit with a flurry of them simply for walking across an enclosed room.

I've looked into this as best I can, and with tools like Presentmon I can see the stutters coincide with things being loaded into and out of VRAM, which nails this down as traversal stutter. It also means there's basically nothing I can do about it, though god knows I've tried.

FWIW, I've tested this on three different, but similar, PCs. The first was a 3080 5800, the second a 4070 Super 7800X3D, and lastly my most recent upgrade which is a 5070ti with a 9800X3D.

All three of these machines present identical stuttering, in frequency, placement, and severity. There's no setting, inside or outside the game that I haven't tweaked.

So, this is obviously an engine problem, and not a new or surprising one. The game runs on UE5. Indeed, if you check the Steam community you'll see plenty of complaints about it (enough that the Cyan mods have chosen to merge all new complaints into one thread...) but there are a few reasons this particular example irritates me.

Firstly, I consider the attitude of the developers to be unhelpful. I documented my problems and contacted their support, and their response was, "This is expected engine behaviour."

I mean... yeah, but you chose this engine. Any and all complaints made in the community posts are met with the same generic "We're always looking into ways to update and improve performance" response, which never actually even directly recognizes that this issue exists.

The game has indeed received three or four updates, including one yesterday which prompted me to write this post, because the issue remains unaddressed.

This is a sticky issue because the general attitude towards Cyan as a studio is particularly reverential and sympathetic. They're the longest running indie studio, have a great reputation, and are currently going through some very hard times, which is why their (lack of) response or even recognition of this issue rankles me. Even a "Yeah, sorry, we know." would have sufficed, but I feel like they're handwaving this as not even really an issue.

Another reason this has, clearly, got my knickers in a twist is more of a Steam issue than a developer one. If anyone's read all this and thought, "Dude, just get a refund." then I can assure you we are on the same page. Problem is, I can't. I bought the Myst and Riven Remake bundle, which was about £30 if I remember, and the problem is that even though I'd come to the conclusion that Riven was unplayable for me well within an hour of starting it up, I'd already put about 5 or 6 into Myst, which resulted in my refund request being ignored. The won't even issue a partial refund, despite Riven being the bulk of the bundle.

Now, looking into this problem has thrown up one interesting wrinkle which may explain why the game got such an endorsement from DF despite its problems.

In asking around, a few people who also notice the stuttering said they also played the demo version that was released as part of a Steam Next Fest prior to release, and that version of the game didn't stutter. Unfortunately, I have no way of testing this myself as the Demo is no longer available, I even looked into pirating it with no joy.

Now this Demo version would likely be what was sent to DF for the preview, I believe the timelines of the Next Fest and the DF video line up, so if it, somehow, was stutter free, it would explain the endorsement from DF.

Sort of.

The preview was more of a technichal and visual showcase, not a proper "review" which makes sense. There was no in-depth testing and it covered a small portion of the game, so in my, admittedly salty, opinion there's no harm no foul there.

But if this is the case, and that's a big, BIG "if", then I am a little disappointed that it was given such a glowing endorsement, particularly for its technichal performance, in the end of year wrap-up. In the end, that's what pushed me to buy it, and to have a game endorsed by DF have such glaring tech problems was a big disappointment.

Anyway, sorry for the rant, especially the tone of it. I want to say I love DF and will continue to do so, I just needed to get this out of my system.