Update: Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 was supposed to have multiplayer at launch but the mode has been delayed. A statement provided to us by CI Games said:
“Throughout our development of Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3, we have had two foci: the first is to provide the best possible single-player experience in our most ambitious game in the Sniper: Ghost Warrior series to date. This has always been our goal and we are extremely proud of all the work we have done, and that we share with you. The second emphasis from us is to provide regular content updates post launch, focusing on content that enhances the gaming experience. Therefore, we have chosen to release the multiplayer update (that will be free for our players) after launch (the third quarter of 2017) for precisely the above reasons, that is not to dilute any potential from the single-player experience.”
While many gamers will be disappointed, CI Games need to focus on Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3’s performance and fix the copious glitches. Only after these issues have been resolved should they add the multiplayer portions in. Hopefully the developers will fix these problems soon.
Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 launches on Xbox One on April 25 but we’ve been playing the game for the past few days on the system. As mentioned in our review, the game suffers from substantial frame rate drops and other visuals issues. For example, the frame rate during the majority of the game appears to be closer to 25 FPS than 30 FPS. While it hits 30 FPS during some environments—particularly at night when there are less shadows and reduced lighting effects—it still poses a significant hinderance to enjoying the game. If you’re able to, play all the missions at night so you don’t experience the unplayable frame rate problems because shadows and advanced lighting effects make it much worse.
Apart from that, there is an extreme amount of texture pop-in and other glitches. For example, enemies tend to clip through objects and your arms when you’re interrogating them. Sometimes their bodies also disappear. Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 needs a significant amount of optimization on Xbox One in order to address all of these concerns. While the glitches aren’t game-breaking, the poor frame rate is and certain areas slow to an absolute crawl. Our estimate would be around 15 FPS in certain scenarios.
Hopefully CI Games will release a patch soon because the game will get lambasted if they don’t. At the very least, the developers should acknowledge the problems and provide a timeline for the patch to Xbox One owners. It’s unclear if other versions of the game also exhibit the same issues as we were only provided with an Xbox One copy.