Poor Deathloop PC Performance is Being Investigated, says Arkane

Released on the 14th of September, Deathloop is the latest offering from French developers Arkane Studios. Since its launch, the game has been showered with praise, with many critics praising the genius level design, engrossing story, and addictive gameplay. Among the near-unanimous critical acclaim, there has been a near consistent complaint – the game runs at a subpar level on PC. Fortunately, the team behind Deathloop has been listening to gamers, and they are hard at work fixing the game’s poor performance on PC.

In a Reddit thread posted on the 15th of September, a Deathloop community manager made a comment acknowledging the issues that gamers have been complaining about on PC. They stated that they are “actively investigating the issue right now as a priority, and will update you with more specific information as soon as possible”.  While the comment may be vague, it does at least give gamers some comfort that a solution is on the way.

The main issues on PC are to do unstable framerates. Many users on Reddit report stuttering, or any inability to maintain a high framerate even when using high-end graphics cards. Issues regarding poor performance on PC have been brought up on the Deathloop subreddit and on Steam, which has led to the game getting negative reviews.

Fortunately, these issues do not seem to exist on the PS5 version of the game. On PS5, Deathloop offers a Visual Quality mode that runs at a targeted 60fps and a Performance mode that sacrifices visual fidelity to run at a locked 60fps. It also offers an RT mode that enables ray-tracing but reduces the framerate to 30fps.

Despite these issues, Deathloop has still managed to be a smash hit with critics. It sits with a mighty score of 88 on Metacritic for the PC version and the PS5 version, which indicates “generally favorable reviews”. Deathloop has you playing as Colt, who is an assassin stuck in a time loop. To free himself, he must eliminate eight visionaries before midnight. If he fails, he is forced to live the same day again and again.

Deathloop is available on PC and PS5.