Atomic Hearthas hit the stores on PC without any of its announced ray-traced visual effects, from the looks of it. While the game has had a long and troubled production, having initially been announced back in 2018, its remarkable graphics have always been one of its most notable features, and developer Mundfish even collaborated with Nvidia to produce in-engine RTX showpieces years ago.
Mundfish has now finally launchedAtomic Hearton all platforms after a long period of uncertainty. While the game is bound to find an audience with itsBioshock-like combat and plenty of content — according to the early reviews — some of the features that PC players might’ve been eagerly anticipating won’t be available on day one.
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After Rock Paper Shotgun noticed that the review build ofAtomic Heartdidn’t allow access to any of the game’s long-touted ray-traced graphics options, the editorial team reached out to the developer, who subsequently confirmed that ray tracing will be introduced into the game on PC at a later date. This comes just under two months afterAtomic Heartshowed off 4K RTX gameplay, hyping its graphics as one of its most exciting features. However, PC players eager to seeAtomic Heart’s implementation of ray-traced shadows, reflections, and more will need to wait a bit longer still.
Atomic Heartsupports DLSS at launch, however. While the feature itself is unproblematic and, indeed, a considerable boon for Nvidia RTX graphics card owners, the CEO’s comments about its potential use cases did end up rubbing some people the wrong way. Specifically, the CEO stated that the GPU-boosting DLSS should prove handy to offset any potential performance problems caused by Denuvo DRM, which is specifically considered a CPU bottleneck.
Whatever the case may be, therelease times forAtomic Heartare now set as the game officially launched on February 21. Players interested in the game now have a chance to give it a fair shake, and Mundfish should receive plenty of direct feedback once that happens. The lack of ray tracing is sure to disappoint some players, but the feature’s prominence in pre-release materials comes as a bit of a guarantee that it should eventually be made available in-game.
Somereviews ofAtomic Hearthaven’t been all that positive. Broadly speaking, it seems to be a game that simply won’t be for everyone, and its crassness and bloat may end up making it unpalatable for some players.Atomic Hearthas, admittedly, received a number of glowing reviews, too, which makes it clear that it may be a divisive title no matter what. Thankfully, the game looks good even with ray tracing features disabled, which may help in this respect.
Atomic Heartis available now PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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