The Battle Royale genre has arguably reached a point of saturation, according to most people. Gone are the days when we were getting a new BR game every month with its own twist that reinvented the genre. And, while there are still games that occasionally come out and change the game, most of them just get lost in the sea of other battle royale games and eventually fade into obscurity. Naraka: Bladepoint, sits somewhere between those two points. It brings a new intriguing spin to the battle royale genre but hasn’t exactly made the biggest impact when it comes to redefining it.
On the surface, Naraka: Bladepoint is a battle royale game that focuses on melee combat rather than your usual gun combat. However, while it may look like it has simply substituted the combat system for a melee-focused one while keeping the core mechanics similar to other games, the reality is far from that. In reality, Naraka: Bladepoint has much more going for it than meets the eye. The martial arts combat is deeply nuanced, requiring players to study the different combos and counter their opponents using intuition and experience. Not only that but mastering the combat is even harder than most other similar games.
When you start playing Naraka: Bladepoint it seems like just spamming clicks can get you some decent combos. However, once you start to get the hang of it, you uncover the incredibly deep combat system sitting underneath the facade of a simple clicking game. In addition to the depth of combat, there are tons of weapon options to choose from as well. Players can wield anything ranging from a dagger to a katana, with ranged options like a longbow also being available.
What separates Naraka: Bladepoint from other modern battle royale games though, is its pricing. We’ve entered an era where most new Battle Royale games are free-to-play as that seems to be the most popular and successful direction for developers. In fact, even other games like Halo Infinite are going free-to-play in order to appeal to a wider audience and pull people away from the behemoths that are Fortnite and Warzone. Naraka: Bladepoint, though, comes in with a $20 price tag that makes it a bit less accessible.
However, what you get for that price is plenty and the value is indeed there for anyone looking to dive into it. In addition to that, you also won’t have any issues with finding a full 60-player lobby as the game is very popular and has a very high concurrent player count on Steam.
Naraka: Bladepoint performance issues
Where the game doesn’t quite hold up as well as the competition though, is in its stability. Naraka: Bladepoint has had an incredibly successful launch with hundreds of thousands of players jumping in for that tight martial arts combat. However, the game doesn’t quite run as smoothly as you’d want it toom, especially if you don’t have a very powerful PC. In addition to that, the servers aren’t quite up to scratch either as players have been reporting many instances of bad region selection during matchmaking, resulting in some pretty horrific lag. All of these performance issues like Low FPS, lag, freezes, crashes, and stutters tarnish an otherwise excellent Naraka: Bladepoint experience.
If you’re one of those unfortunate enough to have these performance issues while jumping into Naraka: Bladepoint, don’t worry as we have formulated a list of potential solutions that can fix a lot of these frequent complaints. However, before we get into the thick of it, let’s make sure that your gaming rig is powerful enough to run the game in the first place.
1. Naraka: Bladepoint system requirements:
Naraka: Bladepoint is a battle royale game that has to cater to a wide audience across all ages and hardware types. Due to that very reason, the game just cannot have cutting-edge AAA visuals since that would alienate a very large portion of the potential player base. So, while still looking pretty good and in line with modern standards, Naraka: Bladepoint doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel when it comes to graphical prowess. The game isn’t too taxing on most hardware combinations and even those with mid-range budget builds should be able to run the game flawlessly. It doesn’t require an RTX GPU or the latest processor to run, and anyone with hardware that’s half a decade old should have no problems while running it. Here are the official system requirements for Naraka: Bladepoint:
Minimum System Requirements:
- Processor: Intel Core i5 4th generation or AMD FX 6300 or equivalent
- RAM: 12 GB
- Operating System: Windows 10 64-bit
- Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050TI or equivalent
- Free Hard Disk Space: 20 GB
- GPU VRAM: 4 GB
Recommended System Requirements:
- Processor: Intel Core i7 7th generation or equivalent
- RAM: 16 GB
- Operating System: Windows 10 64-bit
- Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB or equivalent
- Free Hard Disk Space: 30 GB
- GPU VRAM: 6 GB
As you can ascertain from the recommended specifications above, Naraka: Bladepoint isn’t exactly a game that’s going to destroy your gaming rig. If you have anything decent from 3-4 years ago, you should be all set. However, if the game still doesn’t run well despite your system being much more powerful than the given specifications, then there’s definitely something wrong. If that’s the case, then apply one of the following fixes.
2. Make sure you’re not using an integrated GPU to run Naraka: Bladepoint
While Naraka: Bladepoint is not the most demanding game in the world, it still isn’t quite light enough to run smoothly on integrated graphics. Even though both Intel with their Xe graphics and AMD with Vega graphics have seriously stepped up their game when it comes to delivering high performance in an integrated graphics chip, it still isn’t quite up to par with your fully-featured GPU (and it never will reach those heights). So, they can be viable options for smaller indie titles but not anything more than that. Most gaming laptops though, come with both the integrated and discrete GPUs and they switch between the two depending on the requirements.
For instance, if you’re just browsing youtube or doing light work, your laptop will switch over to the integrated graphics to save up some battery as they’re much more power-efficient. When you switch over to an intensive task like gaming or video editing though, the dedicated GPU kicks into gear and helps with the load. This transfer is usually very smooth and most people don’t even notice it. However, sometimes your laptop or PC can fail to recognize an application and thus, continues to run that particular game on your integrated graphics. This obviously results in some horrendous performance that puzzles most users.
Thankfully, there is a way for you to make sure that this doesn’t happen and your laptop or PC always uses your high-end GPU to run Naraka: Bladepoint or any other game, for that matter. Just follow these steps:
- Open NVIDIA Control Panel (for NVIDIA users) or AMD Radeon Control Panel (for AMD users).
- Select the Manage 3D Options Setting and click the Global Settings option. If you wish to only apply these settings to Naraka: Bladepoint, you can select program settings instead and look for the game within the application list. If the game is not on the list, you can hit browse and look for the executable file instead.
- Set the Power Mode to High Performance.
3. Unplug the second display
A lot of modern gaming rigs have multiple displays connected to them for various reasons. You might be a streamer, or just prefer multiple displays for the multitasking benefits. And, while having more than one display is great, it is known to cause a lot of issues within games as well. Sometimes, the PC cannot really decide which display to use and applies the wrong settings when you launch the game, causing it to have a massive FPS drop. So, in order to make sure that your multiple display setup is not causing the disruption, just unplug your secondary display and run the game on a single display.
4. Change Graphics Settings in Naraka: Bladepoint
Although it is true that Naraka: Bladepoint is not the most demanding game out there, it still can be quite power hungry especially on older rigs. Usually, the game performs a scan on startup and determines the optimal settings according to your hardware. However, those settings can be hit or miss and usually are either too sacrificial for visual quality or just tank performance. We’ve run the game on multiple different machines to extrapolate the best combination of in-game graphics settings that can really boost the FPS and performance of the game while also keeping the visual fidelity intact. With that said, these are obviously not the be all end all of graphics settings as you can tweak them further according to your own PC’s performance. Nevertheless, here are the optimal graphics settings for Naraka: Bladepoint:
- Set the resolution scale to 100 and the maximum FPS to 144 (or uncap it).
- Turn off HDR, VSync, Checkerboard rendering, and other filters.
- If you have an NVIDIA Graphics Card, turn on DLSS.
- Start with your game-settings quick preset on Medium.
- Turn down Shadow Quality to Low.
- Keep Texture Quality at Medium.
- Turn off Ambient Occlusion.
- Disable Anti-aliasing.
- Set the Modeling detail to low as well.
- Keep Volumetric Lighting at low.
- Turn off Screen Space Reflections.
Naraka: Bladepoint is out now on PC via Epic Games and Steam with a PlayStation release on the horizon. You can check it out right here.