If there is a decent multiplayer game and nobody is playing it, does it really exist" That was the question I was faced with after playing World War I game Verdun, which recently released on PlayStation 4. Blackmill Games’ first-person shooter is meant to be played in 32-player matches (with 16 on each side), and yet I often found myself in skirmishes that had less than 10 people in them. That’s certainly less than optimal.
Normally, I would say that a solid game not having a player base is very sad, but I can’t really do that here. That’s because the PS4 version of Verdun is a bit of a mess. It has the worst graphical pop-in I’ve seen on the system, with textures loading in while I’m just feet away from them. If that wasn’t bad enough, the game is even ugly once it finishes loading in. Verdun wasn’t really a technical showcase on PC, but it was never an eyesore like this. Even more disheartening are the other technical issues. I saw the frame-rate often drop during play, and that really sucks in a game where you often die from a single hit. I also had the game crash to the PlayStation 4’s dashboard twice, so I pretty much successfully hit the cycle in terms of issues. All of these issues make it hard to enjoy the core game, and when compounded with nobody playing, it creates a very poor experience for players.
I often entertained myself by shooting dead horses since there weren’t humans to shoot at.
The...