WarTales Post Release Update is a Game Changer!
WarTales was released in September with a rather tumultuous launch. The game, despite being an amazing adventure, was riddled with memory leaks and crashes, making the game hard crash to the home screen at least once an hour. Follow-up patches seemed to uncover more problems, leaving certain missions unplayable and more frequently crashing. Despite all this, gamers waited with bated breath for a new fix. Shiro games had the difficult task of juggling post-release patches on Switch, The Community Update for Steam, and an Xbox release. In the early hours of Saturday morning, the familiar ping sounded on my Switch letting me know that Wartales was updated, and have now spent roughly 10 hours with the new update. What’s it like? Let’s take a look.
Firstly, I’m pleased to report that in my 10-hour session, the game only crashed one time, which was after suspending the software in which Fortnite OG was installed. I have been unable to crash the game aside from this instance and have tried suspending the game, browsing the E-shop, and filling my party to put as much load on the system as possible, including installing Star Ocean and updating it, as well as suspending the game while I slept overnight. It would appear that the memory leak issue has been fixed, and despite some small artificing when selecting a party member for a profession task, crashes to the home screen are a thing of the past.
Next up were the bugged multi-party battles where there were 3 sides involved in a conflict like the Woodcutters camp. These missions went off without a hitch, allowing me to finally conclude the Tiltren Chapter of the game. I played 3 different multi battles, in the same instance of the game, and all went off without a hitch (aside from my horse being killed in one mission.) All the bugged missions I encountered during my initial playthrough have been fixed, as well as now being able to drop items, and the infamous line of code visible during camping is all gone.
The game is still not without issues, as performance with the framerate suffers. On loading into my previously unplayable save, the battle I was in struggled to keep the framerate above 10-15 frames per second. I have not been able to replicate this performance issue since and wonder if the poor performance here was due to loading into the broken save. There is still a minor stutter in the overworld as the game loads in assets, but overall there’s an improvement to the overworld compared to launch. In combat, the game seems to stutter or slightly pause when the AI is calculating moves, especially with archer units. There’s also this same pausing or stutter when the finishing moves are triggered. In one instance in a rat’s nest, certain objects didn’t load, leaving my warband attacking a blue gelatinous cube instead of a rat’s nest.
As you can see from the footage in the video above, it’s rather noticeable at some stages of gameplay. The worst offenders are the finishing moves. To me, it doesn’t take away from the game, and I thoroughly enjoyed my day yesterday being completely absorbed in the game.
To re-review the game, I would say this:
WarTales is an incredible game where the world doesn’t revolve around your party, you simply exist in it. The world itself has a narrative that you can participate in making it a unique game in that sense. It combines all the best parts of management sims, turn-based tactical combat, and role-playing games to deliver a detailed world ravaged by war and famine. You can side with nobles, or fight against them with refugees over the course of 100+ hours of gameplay.
The decisions you make in all aspects of the game impact your party as you balance comradery, dwindling supplies, and precious gold. Pay your mercenaries on time and build bonds, don’t, and you might find yourself outnumbered on the battlefield. It’s these well-implemented mechanics that make WarTales such a great game to play.
While I was so absorbed in Wartales I was happy to battle the technical issues of the game as well as the ruffians within, but thankfully Shiro Games has worked away with 3 patches since launch, and despite minor performance issues, the game is now fully playable. As a gamer, I understand that some may have been put off by the state of the game on release, but I encourage those players to revisit WarTales to enjoy this sprawling epic as it was intended.
Wartales is an amazing game, and due to the updates, my revisited score now rewards it an 88/100.