Last month, we released our long-awaited title Gnomes & Goblins. We’ve been thrilled to watch Wevr fans and VR newbies alike express their immediate obsession with Buddy the Goblin and his magical forest. Your positive response to G&G warms our hearts immensely, as we developed this project with a ton of love.

We’ve also heard back from many users who have experienced a range of performance issues. Please know that we hear you and we have spent the past month working hard to optimize G&G for all users. In particular, we’ve noted performance issues that have impacted Oculus users and want to express our commitment to improving G&G’s playback on the Rift S.

Today, we are releasing an update for G&G that should noticeably improve performance. For a detailed list of the new revisions, please see below. If after installing this patch, you continue to experience performance issues, we recommend adjusting your system’s graphics settings lower (found in the options menu). For those with Oculus headsets, turning off ASW can help, as well.

The high-fidelity tech we developed for G&G does require high GPU and CPU performance to maintain the fantastical visuals and immersive quality. That said, our performance improvements have enabled us to revise G&G’s minimum and recommended specs:

MINIMUM SPEC:

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system

OS: Windows 10

Processor: i7-6700K or equivalent

Memory: 16 GB RAM

Graphics: Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080 or equivalent

DirectX: Version 11

Storage: 35 GB available space

RECOMMENDED SPEC:

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system

OS: Windows 10

Processor: i7-9700K or equivalent

Memory: 16 GB RAM

Graphics: Nvidia Geforce GTX 2080 or equivalent

DirectX: Version 11

Storage: 35 GB available space

Other than performance concerns, we have also fielded questions about the length of G&G as a whole.

G&G offers two gameplay modes. The initial onboarding and narrative “Story” mode can be completed in around an hour. The challenging, exploratory scavenger hunt  “Goblin Life” open-world mode, on the other hand, may take more than five hours for core VR users to complete. We purposefully designed “Goblin Life” mode to minimize breaks in immersion caused by load screens, excessive instruction, and overly specific goal-oriented action. This phase of G&G isn’t about earning points, racking up kills, or beating your friends—it’s about collecting, harvesting, and enjoying the underlying magic that imbues G&G.

We look forward to hearing more about your G&G experiences and we’ll take note of all the feedback we receive. We are still working on additional performance enhancements, but we’ve made enough gains over the past month that we wanted to ship this update immediately while we continue working on the next patch. We’re an indie studio and we are committed to the future of G&G and our fans. Our G&G devs look forward to connecting with you personally as we continue to improve G&G. Stay tuned for more.

Thank you,
The Wevr Team

ADDITIONAL UPDATES

• Performance
  • Fixed shearing issue on Oculus Rift S and other Oculus headsets
  • Set default graphic settings to Medium
  • Optimization pass on all materials to improve performance
  • Adjust texture streaming to help performance
  • Improve performance of ambient particle systems
  • Improve scalability settings in graphics levels to improve performance
  • Turn off some material effects on Low graphics to improve performance
  • Made improvements to streaming levels to reduce hitching while locomoting

• Gameplay
  • Fixed crash caused by encountering certain Goblin and Gnome factions
  • Fixed crash when entering Pub after crafting Pumpkin Peach brew
  • Added a fix for invisible ladder in Gnome Maze caused by corrupted save file
  • Fixed water collision not working reliably
  • Fixed skipping stones not skipping on water surface
  • Adjusted game completion percentage calculations to better reflect player progress
  • Made Magic-Eye and Magic-Bell teleport to your belt at start of Goblin Life
  • Adjusted belt profile options to bring belt more forward and easier to see