The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak news & patch notes

Watch the full recording of NIS America's Anime Expo 2024 panel, Tracing the "Trails" of Trails with AX Guest of Honor Toshihiro Kondo! This panel consists of an overview of the Trails series along with fan-submitted questions, offering exclusive insights into the Trails series that you won't want to miss.

Commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Trails series with a special look back at all the incredible titles. With The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak, the first title in the latest arc has just been released, there has never been a better time to jump in! Additionally, you can watch the full recording of NIS America's Anime Expo 2024 panel,【Big Reveal】The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak Panel Discussion feat. AX Guest of Honor Toshihiro Kondo with Voice Actors! In it, The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak II is announced for an early 2025 release, and Nihon Falcom President Toshihiro Kondo offers insights on Trails through Daybreak and Trails through Daybreak II alongside voice actors Damien Hass and AmaLee.

Hi everyone, a few weeks ago Valve announced the Steam Game Recording feature, which is currently available in the Steam Beta,

Introducing Steam Recording Timeline Support

While basic recording works automatically, this also comes with a very cool timeline interface that allows games to programmatically add more information to the recorded timeline. And with this update Trails through Daybreak becomes one of the first large-scale games outside Valve to actively support this timeline API. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43729251/1fe4e8db351567767e9d929317c4fce6733387b9.png It works like this:

• The timeline mode (which affects its color/shading) is set according to whether you are in a battle, in menus, loading, or playing the game normally.
• The timeline description is derived from the current area name.
• A number of different events are marked, including the start and end of battles, interactions like talking to characters and shopping, opening treasure, S-Breaks and more.

We hope you enjoy this new feature!

Further Changelog

In addition to timeline support, version 1.3.5 also makes the following changes and improvements:

• Make the caching of assets in GPU memory safer across a wider variety of hardware and software configurations. This should solve some crashing issues.
• Unify how mouse interactions work with some popup messages. This should now always allow you to dismiss such popups with the mouse.
• Improve the material setting for some reflective materials in the Weston Department Store.
• Fix the Japanese description of the shadow caching option, and improve a few other Japanese PC menu translations.
• Implement some additional error logging to allow us to more accurately identify reported issues.

As always for our releases, in the unlikely case that you experience any regressions you can revert to prior versions of the game using the Steam "Beta" feature. - Peter "Durante" Thoman

Hi everyone, today we are releasing an update which includes the following new features and bug fixes:

• Add a new setting to customize text reveal speed.
• Improve the safety of the "asset caching" feature across different hardware configurations, and make changes to it apply while the game is running.
• Fix mouse menu navigation when a script is waiting for a prompt or a button upon displaying a help message.
• Disable camp menu shortcuts when text messages or help notes are open, to prevent getting into an unexpected state.
• Fix an issue with saving that could lead to instability over long play sessions.
• Extend error logging in some cases to allow us to more efficiently investigate bug reports.

As always for our releases, in the unlikely case that you experience any regressions you can revert to prior versions of the game using the Steam "Beta" feature. - Peter "Durante" Thoman

About The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak II

+ Wishlist today and stay tuned for updates leading up to the game's release! No longer threatened by the mafia organization Almata, the people of Calvard have returned to their peaceful lives. But one day, a shocking series of murders involving a mysterious crimson beast sets the wheels of fate in motion once again. Various factions spring into action – both those who abide by the law to uncover the truth and those looking to capitalize on any new developments wherever possible, no matter how sinister. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36616022/35e0e427722e1b5d7bcefde9d66bef960cbd8cab.jpgWith chaos once again looming on the horizon, the spriggan Van Arkride receives an unexpected visitor, prompting his own investigation. Who is behind the murders, and what is their goal? The sands of time bring old and new faces together for this thrilling second installment in the Trails through Daybreak saga.

STORY

Year 1209 of the Septian Calendar. The threat posed by Almata has passed. Peace has finally returned to Calvard. And, for a time, that peace goes uninterrupted—until a CID special forces unit is slaughtered by an unknown assailant. With authorities working to contain the situation, criminal forces take the chance to make their own moves. Meanwhile, a spriggan by the name of Van Arkride begins his own investigation—after prompting from an unexpected visitor. Who could be responsible for this massacre? What was their objective? And how does it all relate to Agnès' search for the eighth Genesis? {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36616022/a4b522ebb6694a5b91879220cce64ce6c8788967.jpgA crimson beast's roar. A chance meeting with a boy and girl, both embroiled in a mysterious search. These are the circumstances that lure Arkride Solutions down the trail of an inescapable fate.

SYSTEM

Battle System The game builds on the seamless transition between field battles and command battles introduced in the previous game with new mechanics that can be used in both: Cross Charge & EX Chains! Mastering the use of these two combo mechanics can provide you with overwhelming firepower to use against your opponents. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36616022/79edba96a3a4637b00d9b8e3cb7595b120d4b04f.jpg - Cross Charge If you manage to Perfect Dodge an enemy's attack during a field battle, the Cross Charge icon will appear! Pushing the correct button while the icon is on-screen will swap in another party member, who will simultaneously execute a charge attack on your foe! As a bonus, the party member that you swap in will have enhanced attack power for a period of time. - EX Chains EX Chains can be activated by fulfilling specific conditions during command battles. Once these conditions have been met, using a craft or normal attack against a stunned enemy will automatically activate an EX Chain! This allows party members with SCLM activated to launch a simultaneous attack that will also impact nearby enemies, dealing massive damage. Choose Your Chapters {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36616022/6b4af915cb58fdd3c24025b1ac7d3da6b81a6a14.pngVan and his collaborators will not always travel together during the events of Trails through Daybreak II. At times, some of the group may split off in order to take care of tasks in different areas of Calvard concurrently. Because of this, each act contains multiple chapters you can play in any order. Progress the story in the order you choose! Each chapter features a different cast of characters as we see their side of the act's story play out. Once you've completed your chosen chapter, the next one will start up automatically. Unique Missions Certain chapters will feature missions that utilize the unique skillsets of the characters in that chapter's party. For example, directly controlling the holo core AI, Mare, to hack the orbal network, or using Swin to silently tail a suspicious individual.

CHARACTERS

Van Arkride The man at the head of Arkride Solutions. A lover of sweets, saunas, and orbal cars. Due to his job as a spriggan, Van has a tendency to take on legally-questionable jobs. However, the fact that he occasionally walks on the edge of the law does not preclude him from doing good by others—as is evidenced by his numerous personal contacts. While tracking down the Oct-Geneses at Agnès' request, Van developed the ability to transform into an armored form known as the Grendel with the help of Mare, the holo core installed within his combat orbment. It was with this new ability that he was able to fend off the mafia group known as Almata. Having once terrorized the entirety of the Republic, Almata was eventually brought to its knees by the Arkride Solutions team during the fight for the Oct-Geneses. Upon the quelling of this threat, however, they decided to temporarily go their separate ways. Now left to himself in a less-than- lively office, Van is free to return to his lone-wolf lifestyle once more. Agnès Claudel A first-year at the prestigious Aramis Academy who currently serves on its Student Council. Despite her polite manner of speaking and at times meek demeanor, Agnès has shown great strength and determination while employed at Arkride Solutions—especially when facing off against the seedy underbelly of society. Agnès first met Van while searching for eight prototype orbments known as the Oct-Geneses, which she inherited from her great-grandfather. As thanks for taking on her request, she began working as one of Arkride Solution's part-time assistants. At present, Agnès has recovered seven of the eight Geneses. Unfortunately, while continuing her search for the last remaining Genesis, she's had no choice but to also divide her time between preparing for the Aramis Academy Festival and periodically helping out around Arkride Solutions. Regarding her relationship with Van, she both respects and admires him as her employer. However, she seems to be harboring some more amorous feelings for him as well... Elaine Auclair {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/36616022/665c0751d95ccb7cff047770b0117eb0396e4033.jpgAn A-rank bracer affiliated with the Calvard branch of the Bracer Guild. She is occasionally referred to by the moniker 'Beauty's Blade.' Due to her dignified beauty and masterful skill with a sword, Elaine tends to catch the eye of the media more often than not. Unfortunately, this also leads to talent agencies offering her contracts for modeling and acting—she always declines. Outside of being the poster girl for the Bracer Guild, Elaine has no present interest in joining the world of entertainment. During her high school years, she enjoyed a brief and fleeting romance with Van before he suddenly vanished without so much as a word. It was only recently, after seven years, that the two were able to reunite. Although their lingering feelings for each other have left their current relationship a bit tense, their time fighting Almata together was able to strengthen their bond once more. Some time after the events involving Almata and the Oct-Geneses, Elaine received word that the Central Intelligence Department's elite Gamma Squad had been brutally murdered by an unknown assailant, and that a 'crimson' monster was spotted at the scene of the crime...

WORLD

The Republic of Calvard A large country located in the central region of the Zemurian continent. Its current leader is President Roy Gramheart. Due to the unfortunate circumstances created by the desertification of eastern Zemuria, Calvard has a substantial history of receiving both immigrants and refugees. The resulting mixture of cultures and ethnicities has made the country into something of a melting pot. One hundred years ago, Calvard was under the heel of its monarchal rulers. It was only after Sheena Dirke and her compatriots brought about a democratic revolution that the nation was transformed into a democratic republic. Though in constant conflict with Erebonia over the control of bordering regions, Calvard has recently been on the receiving end of reparations from the empire following the Battle of Jormungandr. These reparations enabled Calvard to enter a period of rapid growth and development, leading to its eventual overtake of Erebonia as the most powerful nation on the continent. Regarding the region's recreational interests, recent technological advancements in orbal vehicles and filmmaking have caused a boom in both the motorsports and orbal cinema industries. Messeldam A moderate-sized city located in the north of Calvard. Due to its long-standing role as one of the Northern Sea’s major trading ports, Messeldam was often tasked during the days of monarchal rule with the delivery of imports to the capital of Oración—along with fresh seafood, of course. Although the port remains active to this day, developments in airship technology have greatly diminished its significance. The city itself, however, remains an important gateway to Remiferia and its surrounding nations. Unlike Langport, Messeldam possesses very few tourist destinations. That being said, the townscape's architecture tends to be quite popular with visitors, as its design has seen little change in the past century. The city’s Eastern and Central Eastern populations are fairly meager due to its geographical location. As such, it lacks a community that values cultural traditionalism. This has, fortunately, been a boon for Messeldam, as new art movements and customs are accepted with relative ease. It was this very attitude that led to the city serving as the venue for the Orbal Film Festival for a number of years, until its relocation to Tharbad in 1208.

*The English language support update is scheduled for July 5, 2024, at 10 am PDT. Hi everyone, with Kuro no Kiseki turning into Trails through Daybreak, we are also happy to release all the improvements we made to the PC version while the localization was in development. We might have gone a bit overboard with this, so the full list is... sizeable. As such, we've extracted some highlights to talk about in more depth -- you can find the full unfiltered list towards the end of this post.

Highlights

Improvements to Previously Discussed Features

As you might know, Trails through Daybreak has been out on Steam for quite a while now in Japanese. Back when we released this port, I posted about various features of the PC version here. This included things like arbitrary resolution and aspect ratio support, support for high frame rates up to 360 FPS, a field of view setting, and various new graphics options for things like increased draw distance, shadow quality and resolution, volumetrics, screen-space reflections and so on. For the current release, we've further improved the arbitrary aspect ratio support, fixing quite a few corner cases, and also made physically-based animations at high framerates act much closer to the 60 FPS baseline. You can find the full details towards the end of this post.

Further Graphics Improvements

On top of everything we included in the Japanese PC release, we've added quite a few new graphical features.

Improved Shadow Caching

Let's start with something that benefits everyone, and not just those with GPU power to spare. In this version of the game, with the new default shadow caching setting, you'll see improved shadow quality at no performance cost (or, potentially, even slightly better performance). {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43729251/9f9ab7fc48b218efd07efab6aadf6c1177259dea.png This image actually shows the same shadow resolution (and performance) on both sides, with the old behaviour on the left and the new one on the right.

MSAA and SGSSAA Anti-aliasing Options

One issue with the previous release (and all versions of Trails through Daybreak, really) is that there is no effective way to combat some of the specular aliasing in the game, especially in motion. We've implemented MSAA and, in particular, SGSSAA in order to change this. While these settings require significant GPU performance, they do a very good job in greatly improving image quality and stability in motion. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43729251/847988b47beb446efbc61a8fe32724a215ee8b3e.png The difference is much more extreme in motion than it is in a still image. Note that I believe that Trails through Daybreak might be the first full game ever to actually offer a hardware SGSSAA option. (Do let me know if I missed something!)

Improved Static Reflections

The game features two types of reflections: dynamic screen-space reflections (for which we already offered several quality options in the original release), and static reflections based on cubemaps. For this release, all the latter were recreated at much higher quality. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43729251/049cbdb4f51b6cbd19f029e537147ba850275d96.png This results in higher quality even at the new baseline setting, and there is a further improved option available.

Better UI Rendering Quality at Low Resolution

This one is especially useful to people playing the game on the Steam Deck or other relatively low-resolution handhelds. UI text is now much more readable on these devices. The improvements also do carry over to other resolutions, but they are basically unnoticeable there.

HDR Support

We added native HDR support to the game. Note that of course the content was not authored for HDR, but this allows you to use HDR without any hacks, to set the maximum brightness, and to control the brightness of UI elements independently of the game's overall brightness.

BGM Info Display Option

A fan favourite returns with the BGM Info display option. This allows you to have the game display the name of a BGM track whenever a new one is played. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43729251/20b4d16ecaa3998dae99cc8759342c4d35342131.png New in this iteration is the option to only show this information once per unique track played in each game session. There's more that deserves some spotlight, but I'll stop here and move on to the shorter patch note format.

Full Patch Notes

Here are the (reasonably) complete patch notes:

• Miscellaneous fixes and improvements:
  • English localization, of course
  • Fix a potential crash in camp menu when rapidly using direct shortcuts
  • Prevent possible crash when switching the volumetric light option from "off" to another setting
  • Improve auto message advance behavior, and add an option to control the delay
  • Implement default language auto-detection from the platform (Steam, GOG, Windows)
  • Use Steam Dynamic Cloud Sync API
  • Modify physics at higher framerates to be closer to the reference behavior at 60 FPS
  • Add a compatibility warning if the mod "ENGPATCH.p3a" is loaded (This is obviously no longer necessary, but might lead to subtle issues when playing the game)
  • Allow mouse camera movement in some specific situations where it was previously disabled
  • Be more resilient when users decide to remove the .dlls for any platform (Steam, GoG, EGS); the game will now continue to work, and just disable the respective integrations
  • Slightly improve the I/O behavior of the game when looking up assets
  • Don't use scan-code lookup for extended keys; this could cause issues when trying to do things like binding an action to "volume up" (please don't)
  • Fix BGM stopping in specific circumstances in one event
  • Clear gamepad input upon controller disconnect
• Graphics-related fixes and improvements:
  • Implement MSAA, SGSSAA, and transparency MSAA, and add options for all of them
  • Implement HDR display support, including separate 3D and UI brightness options
  • New UI texture filtering implementation for sharper and higher quality UI/fonts, especially at low resolution
  • Change shadow caching behavior, significantly increasing shadow quality; also add a setting to control its behavior
  • Improved baseline quality of static reflections (cubemaps), and also offer a higher quality version of them
  • Fix the light culling compute shader on AMD GPUs (and improve performance due to less lights being considered)
  • Add an option to switch between the old (PS4-style) and new (updated PS5-style) water shading pipeline
  • Scale more 3D UI effect internal rendering resolutions according to the display size and portrait supersampling setting
  • Fix a rare issue that could lead to sporadic black pixels on water
  • Use high-quality resampling for resolution scale (very minor quality improvement)
  • Fix a 3D scene in the game which had minor missing geometry (glass panes)
  • Unlock a small number of animations that were previously limited to 30 FPS
  • Fix display mode changes leading to stars on night maps being lost until the next area load
  • Overhaul all the graphics presets, and add a new "Console" preset
• UI-related fixes and improvements:
  • Add BGM info display feature and an option to control it
  • Add option to always show the turn order in battles
  • Use a separate page for autosaves in the load menu to improve navigation
  • Shorten save titles for better readability in save/load menu
  • Apply the font size setting more consistently
  • Fix button prompts to show message backlog during dialog option selection
  • Fix draw order of close button prompt on alignment result screen
  • Fix button prompt spacing in help message when unlocking voice DLCs
  • Revamp the settings menu and categories to better accommodate new settings
  • Fix button prompt label alignment in orbment/equip screens
  • Fix date format, change character list and add more vertical space in save details in save/load menu
  • Improve mouse handling in the settings menu
  • Allow mouse hovering over guest members in camp/status and shop
  • Make button prompts on event pause screen clickable
  • Play tab change sound when switching tabs in notebook using the mouse
• Aspect-ratio-related fixes and improvements:
  • Fix alignment of character name introduction in ultrawide
  • Fix alignment of message backlog button help in ultrawide
  • Fix alignment/background of connection effects screen in ultrawide
  • Fix alignment of message log components in ultrawide
  • Enable black bars for game-over screen
  • Fix "Arc Dominator", "Pandemonium Ruler" and "Twilight Kiss" craft scaling at non-16:9 aspect ratios

Note that, due to the various increases in asset quality as well as the inclusion of the English translation, the game's storage requirements increased to ~17 GB. We are extremely proud of the current PC version of this game, and hope that everyone enjoys it! - Peter "Durante" Thoman

*Owners of the Japanese version of "The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak (Kuro no Kiseki)" will automatically receive English language support in an update scheduled for July 5, 2024. Van Arkride is a spriggan who takes on jobs that can't be brought to the police or the bracers, and has cultivated a wide network of contacts due to the nature of his work. But little does he know that his latest job will be his toughest one yet! Agnès Claudel is a first-year student at Aramis Academy who seeks a stolen orbment that belonged to her late great-grandfather. For this critical job, she turns to the Arkride Solutions Office, which is said to accept any kind of request. Aaron Wei is the leader of a local gang in Langport's Eastern Quarter, as well as a practioner of the Gekka school of swordsmanship. His skill and charisma have drawn the attention of the crime syndicate Heiyue, who seek to recruit him as one of their executives. Feri Al-Fayed is a young jaeger belonging to the elite jaeger corps, the Warriors of Kruga. Though naive in the ways of the city, she is relentless in battle. When a fellow jaeger corps suddenly goes missing, Feri seeks out the help of a problem-solver in Edith who is said to accept any job. Risette Twinings is a maid who works as a service concierge for Marduk Total Security Company. She supplies Van with special weapons and apps for his orbment from Marduk in exchange for his help testing said products, and despite her elegant appearance, is a formidable force in battle. Quatre Salision is a researcher enrolled in the Basel Institute of Science's master's program, despite only being fifteen years old. He specializes in the research, development, and operation of orbal drones, and commands the drones FIO and XEROS in combat. Judith Lanster is one of the top actresses in the entire orbal film industry, known for her acting skills, work ethic, and sense of justice. However, she also seems to have another, behind-the-scenes job that she pursues between acting gigs... Bergard Zeman is a master of the Kunlun style, one of the East's three great martial arts schools, and has a number of disciples scattered across the continent. He was also Van's former master, and taught him proper martial arts. When the war between the Erebonia and Calvard began, Van received news that Bergard had lost his life in an incident, but that seems to have not been the case...

English Launch Purchase Options

The English release is almost here! To mark the occasion, enjoy better discounts on the Deluxe and Ultimate editions, and limited-time bonuses until July 11, 2024! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43729251/937a14cb52cb049a12d3dfc79eea70d03f901d9e.png

*Owners of the Japanese version of "The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak (Kuro no Kiseki)" will automatically receive English language support in an update scheduled for July 5, 2024. The English release is almost here! To mark the occasion, enjoy better discounts on the Deluxe and Ultimate editions. Take advantage of the limited-time bonuses and get your copy today! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43729251/e73fe8d6bee5cab02c4f50b63970ff297fcb8e2e.png

Hi everyone, today we are releasing an update which includes the following changes:

• Improved a subset of map textures with new, higher-quality sources. Note that this increases the game's storage requirements by ~1 GB.
• Improve the shutdown behaviour of the game in some circumstances.
• Fix some unexpected cursor behavior in camp/tactics menu.
• Fix the "At Bonus" alignment for non-16:9 aspect ratios.
• Increase the safety margin for the "auto" p3a caching option.

As always for our releases, in case you experience any regressions you can revert to prior versions of the game using the Steam "Beta" feature. - Peter "Durante" Thoman

Hi everyone, today we are releasing a minor update for Kuro no Kiseki, in order to solve an issue introduced in 1.1.1 which affected the handling of "clear saves", preventing them from being visible in some saving and loading UIs. As always for our releases, in case you experience any regressions you can revert to prior versions of the game using the Steam "Beta" feature. - Peter "Durante" Thoman

Hi everyone, today we are releasing an update for Kuro no Kiseki with the following changes:

• Fix a select few instances of animations in scripted scenes not playing back correctly at high framerates. Yume can now hug Van just as well at 200 FPS as she can at 60 FPS!
• Fix the very first frame the game ever renders during initial loading being gray instead of black.
• Improve the Japanese descriptions for some game settings.
• Add an indication of the actual render resolution to the graphics settings menu render scale selection.
• Focus on the most recently manually created save in the loading dialog even if a newer autosave exists.
• Colorize the PlayStation-style controller button prompt face button glyphs.
• Automatically load "*.p3a" files found in the "mods" subdirectory. More precisely, the game will load the content of all p3a archives in the "mods" subdirectory (if such a directory exists), after loading the essential archives shipped with the game. The archives will be loaded in lexicographical order, with files from subsequent archives taking precedence. As such, it would probably be a good idea for mod authors to prefix their files with a numeric code, e.g. "13_bla.p3a". Note that we cannot officially offer any support for modded games. Please cleanly uninstall all mods before reporting a bug.

As always for our releases, in case you experience any regressions you can revert to prior versions of the game using the Steam "Beta" feature. - Peter "Durante" Thoman

Hi everyone, today we are releasing an update for Kuro no Kiseki with the following changes:

• Add a special feature to (optionally) handle GPU data transfers differently. We have observed this to significantly improve performance on some systems with AMD GPUs. See below for more details.
• Fix fade effect not spanning the whole screen in non-16:9 aspect ratios when skipping events
• Adjust chapter start screens for non-16:9 aspect ratios

Regarding the GPU data transfer change, in our testing this improved performance by a significant degree on some AMD systems, but was neutral or slightly negative in its performance impact on other systems. As such, by default we enable this behavior only on systems with an AMD GPU and disable it on others. If, for any reason, you want to override this automatic selection, you can do so by changing the "extra_host_write_buffering" setting in the game's "settings.yaml" file found in "%LOCALAPPDATA%/Falcom/Kuro". This setting will show up in the file after launching the new version once and accessing its settings. The default is "Auto" and selects the behaviour based on the GPU vendor. "Never" forces the prior behaviour even on AMD. "Always" uses the extra buffering even on NV and Intel GPUs. We do not recommend changing the default behaviour. As always for our releases, in case you experience any regressions you can revert to prior versions of the game using the Steam "Beta" feature. - Peter "Durante" Thoman

Hi everyone, Today is the release of the Japanese version of Kuro no Kiseki, and it is the first port to use a lot of new infrastructure we at PH3 built up over the past year or so. That infrastructure includes things like asset compression and platform handling, mundane features like logging and crash reporting, and dealing with game settings. But what does any of that have to do with the strange title of this article, and why should you care? Well, if you are not one to worry about technical details, then you probably won’t notice anything, and can get to playing right away. However, if you are inclined to observe what games are doing a bit more closely, then – depending on your PC hardware and software setup – you might very well get the idea that our version of Kuro has a severe memory leak issue. And that’s primarily what I want to clear up with this post on how we purposefully use all that memory.

The p3a Archive Format

In Kuro, we are using our p3a archive format, which contains compressed assets. If you want to read a more general deep-dive into game asset compression, storage and loading then we have a more technical post up on our company blog here. I’ll quickly summarize the main ways in which this affects Kuro:

• We are able to ship the entire game while requiring only ~9 GB of disk storage space – perfect e.g. for owners of one of the more affordable Steam Deck versions.
• Modders need not worry: you can still access individual files easily. We purposefully included “p3atool” with the game, which is our internal tool for building these archives (and can of course also unpack them).
• By using ZStandard with dictionary compression, and optimizing loading in general, we can achieve this file size reduction without a heavy impact on loading times.
• Specifically, after playing for a while and getting the caches warmed up, you might see map loading times of roughly 500ms, or half a second.

That final point is what the title is about: caching.

Using all that Memory

Quite a few years back, I noticed that the amount of memory available in a decent fraction of PCs was quickly outstripping what the vast majority of games are actually using. While most games have some sort of internal caching, they generally do not seem to scale that with the amount of memory available. As you might have guessed by now, the default setting in Kuro does exactly that: it uses up to 80% of the available memory to cache loaded and decompressed assets. And this does mean that when you play for a very long time, and have a lot of main memory, you might actually see the game process using 20 GB or even more of it – and hence the title of this post. This memory is not wasted or leaked – it is kept on standby to make the loading times even shorter, especially when revisiting maps. However, if for any reason you dislike this automatic behavior, you can also set a fixed cache size limit or turn off caching entirely in the game’s general settings menu.

A Very Brief Feature Tour

Talking about the settings menu, there’s quite a lot in there. We hope to provide a more in-depth overview by the time the English release of the game is ready, but for now, here is a short list of features of the port that are either sufficiently important to include here, or just personal favorites:

• Arbitrary resolution and aspect ratio support. That means that 21:9 ultrawide is supported just as well as the Steam Deck’s 16:10 aspect ratio. Of course, as always, some specific UI screens will have black bars.
• High frame rate support. We officially support up to 360 FPS, which is particularly valuable given the somewhat more dynamic combat system in Kuro compared to previous games in the franchise.
• A field of view setting – in addition to the field of view scaling automatically with the aspect ratio.
• A broad range of graphics options, including:
  • Shadow resolution, filtering and local shadowing quality
  • Sub- and supersampling of the game’s main rendering, without affecting UI
  • Draw distance adjustment for NPCs, enemies, map level-of-detail, and dynamic lights
  • Quality settings for screen-space reflections and volumetric lighting
  • Minimap multisampling (this is one of those personal favourites)
  {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43729251/56117744c9514823a019f31bdd3689f5881bdc34.jpg {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43729251/b8b350f7750735024de860d4050889105da97c0d.jpg
• An immediate in-game graphics option preview. This lets you see the impact of option changes live while you make them.
• Full mouse / keyboard support, which means that:
  • Menus can be navigated entirely with the mouse
  • We offer multiple different gameplay options for combat controls, including target lock on or free camera, the option to automatically select targets based on camera look direction, or alternatively based on mouse flicks.
  • Everything is fully rebindable, with additional action bindings available for hotkeys beyond what can fit on a controller.
  • And of course, all prompts are dynamic and respect your rebinding as well as your physical keyboard layout.

I’m sure I forgot quite a few more minor features there, but that should be the most important ones. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43729251/ce8f9e544926d5c33b07f2a5ba0ef1f647c70996.jpg Before leaving you to enjoy the game, I’d like to note that we also specifically worked on Steam Deck optimization, to eliminate a particular issue that reduced performance significantly in some areas while running via DXVK. All that said, I’m very happy with how this port turned out, and as always want to thank our team at PH3, the fine folks at NISA, and of course the beta testers for their outstanding work. Peter “Durante” Thoman, CTO, PH3