 What's up everybody I'm TheMangus, you were awesome and today we're going to talk about Fault's early access. I'm going to break this down into the good, the bad and the ugly, the good being things I liked about the game, bad being design choices I didn't like, and the ugly being the various bugs, issues, reviews and monetization stuff. I also want to let you know that one of my subscribers, PapaNerf, is their tag in Fault, was kind enough to give me a key to give to you, I'll hold another drawing for it in my Discord. Before I get into any of that though, I want to talk about a problem with Fault that seemed to be specific to me that almost made me just give up on the game completely and how to fix it if you are having the same issue. That problem is framerate drops. When I first started playing Fault, I was going from 80 frames down to 4, then up to 60 and then back to 10, just swinging wildly especially if I came near or interacted with anyone. Lots of people are having framerate issues, but none on the scale I was having. Before you start asking what my PC specs are, I want to remind you that I can run both predecessor and overprime on high settings without having framerate issues so the problem does not lie with my PC, but with Fault. Now how to fix it. Windu did a good video on this that helped me out some, Windu Mace has been doing great videos all around for Fault, I suggest you check him out. But the standard fix is to lower your post processing to medium which is as low as it will go and drop your shadows down to low as hell. This will fix framerate issues for most people, it did not for me. The problem for me stems from Adobe, I use Adobe Creative Suite to edit videos and it sucks up a ton of RAM even if I don't have any applications running. So if you're having massive framerate problems with Fault, open your task manager, look for whatever background processes that are using lots of disk and close them out. Speaking with Trollface in my Discord, he believes it's a problem with the way Fault preloads assets. They are aware of the problem and will be fixing it in the near future and I hope they do because I am tired of opening my task manager and closing a bunch of shit out just so I can give up for a game. If you enjoyed my content, please leave a like and subscribe for more in the future. Now let's get into it. Fault is deep, strange matters attempting to evolve Paragon beyond what it was and I personally think that they are on the right track for that. Everyone has a passive, old abilities that used to be passive now have active functions. For example, Greystone, his E ability used to simply deflect basic attacks on cooldown. That is now baked into his passive and his E allows you to deal damage and disarm enemies preventing them from using basic attacks for a short period of time. Great for chasing down a late game ADC. So the overall kits for each hero have been changed to add complexity which I think is a good thing. The item system also adds quite a bit of depth with finished items having unique active and passive abilities. For example, Plasma Blade allows you to deal 6% of a target's current health as energy damage. Combine that with the active from Adrenaline Boost that gives you 15% attack speed and you can quickly shred a full health tank. Add in Full Metal Jacket for some armor pin and you can finish the job easily. The item system can be daunting at first but I enjoy the amount of builds and you can experiment with this as well with having like active to use at the right times. I also really enjoyed the aspect system. At the start of the game you can choose 2 aspects that will affect how you play. Each aspect gives 2 different effects. As you progress through the game you will unlock Fever which will allow you to increase the effectiveness of your chosen aspect. For example, something like Rook works great for Chimera. Chai's big Achilles heel has always been a team that knows how to use CC to lock him down and destroy him. With Rook, that lockdown is shorter and you will get armor while stunned. In what support wouldn't want Templar giving your allies a percentage of your armor and that percentage will go up as you put more points into the white aspect. It all adds up to a variety of ways to customize your play experience. The layout of the map was good, very reminiscent of Monolith with a jungle that has buffs and camps that stack to 5. They made good use of verticality with some heroes being able to traverse certain areas while others could not but it never felt like it was 100% necessary. The menu screens are really done well and the intro music is epic. All in all the game is very fun. Add some edge of your seat moments and various items make you want to come back for more. Now for decisions I didn't like. For starters, the health bars. They changed from green to red when you get someone to low health. Like a dark red. I don't know if I'm slightly color blind and never realized it but I kept thinking people were like one head away from death but they actually still had like 10% health. Made decision making very hard especially in teamfights. The lanes seemed extremely wide to me as well. The side lanes felt like straight up arenas. I did like that the raptors give favor for a kill however I don't like that there are three. It allows for some very early snowballing on characters like Chimera that can solo them easily. I also didn't like the inclusion of epic's voice lines. Sound design in general felt lackluster. You instantly went from dead silence to oh my god my ears are bleeding in a heartbeat. The actual sound effects also weren't great. Sparrow's basic in particular sounds like somebody whacking a trash can lid with a wooden spoon. I really really do not like the inclusion of boots in the game. Once you introduce an item that gives a movement speed bonus that item becomes mandatory on all heroes so why not just make boot enhance movement speed standard. I don't know if this is a design choice or not but words don't ping. Maybe I'm using that as a crush but I like some sort of audio cue when someone has entered my ward radius. And now for the ugly parts. Even after fixing my framerate problem the game still drops frames a lot and I've noticed this to be pretty common among players when watching streams and such. There were also many many game breaking bugs. Spots on the map where you would get stuck and the only solution was the back. I saw people reporting that they suddenly couldn't use abilities. Jungle minions would just haul ass to nowhere when you got close to them and become invincible. I believe that's badass Jerry trying to make his triumphant return. I had a bug in one game where I couldn't sell items which became a huge issue as I couldn't replace my starter potions and I had accidentally bought an item I didn't want to so I ended up with two useless slots. I had the game crash on me a few times and I saw many people report the same. I know the game is early access and they have plenty of time to improve but if you pay a premium price for an early access game you expect better than what Strange Matter gave us and it's reflected in the Steam user ratings. Now I know better than to put my faith in steam reviews however if you read through them you see that the positive views are either just the standard reviews or they say something to the effect of the game has a lot of bugs but they can improve so the positive views are either kind of brainless or they include a shits buggy caveat the negative reviews on the other hand are all rather well written with good critiques and now for the monetization I was a bit shocked by this and I was not alone the master packs and such are upgrades to the standard game DLC if you buy the master pack you don't get the game you have to buy a fault pack first then buy a founders or master pack or you can use the friend code on yourself and then upgrade that with DLC but then what's the point of having a friend code I'm all for Strange Matter creating a sustainable game and I don't think the early access packages were intentionally misleading but they were misleading nonetheless can you imagine paying over $50 for a master pack only discover that you don't have the game then there's also the matter of matter lots of people did the math on what it would take to grind out just a basic ass skin and it's insanity Strange Matter have said that the matter system isn't working as intended but have also said that they are going to rework the system to feel more rewarding sounds to me like it was working as intended but they realize their intentions were bullshit so they're going to change it either way it's going to change so good after all of that I still have faith in Strange Matter they have already fixed many of the bugs that plague the first few days of release I believe in their vision for a better version of Paragon and I trust that they have the skills to pull it off more than anything I'm just always happy to see fellow Paragon fans so passionate about the game that they would bring it back for now this is the man who's signing off you guys have a good one man