PSA: low encounter rate/high refresh rate workaround

[Forosnai]

TL;DR: Encounter rates are negatively affected the higher your refresh rate is over 60hz. Make sure your in-game FPS is actually at 60, don't just go based on the in-game settings. The in-game options aren't true caps, they're full-rate or half-rate v-sync, so a 144Hz monitor with the in-game setting of 60 FPS is likely actually playing at 144 FPS unless otherwise hardware-limited, while using the 30 FPS setting will cut that in half to 72 FPS. The higher you are above 60, the longer between battles.

BUG:Encounter rates are inversely-tied to FPS/Refresh rates above 60, and the in-game settings aren't proper FPS caps, but rather full-rate or half-rate v-sync.

For example, a person on the discord with a 240Hz monitor discovered that their overworld battles happened about once per 90 seconds, but jumped up substantially to about 20 seconds between battles when their monitor was set to 60Hz.

Similarly, my own monitor is 144Hz, resulting in an in-game FPS of 144 FPS with the 60 FPS setting in the menu. I was getting one battle every 40-45 seconds, but when I set my refresh rate to 60Hz, it became one every 20 seconds or so, the same as the other player. AMD Enhanced Sync also negatively affected this, as even with 60Hz/60 FPS settings, it overrode everything and resulted in an in-game FPS of 270 for me, as well as a very long time between encounters.

FIX: The temporary work-around is to make sure you're sitting at around 60, either by locking your FPS via your GPU software, setting your refresh rate to 60Hz in either your monitor settings or display settings, or set it to 144Hz/120Hz and have the in-game setting at 30 FPS so you'll end up at an overall rate of 72 FPS/60 FPS and have a normal experience. If you do the second option, you'll need to go into the settings and toggle the FPS to 60 and then back to 30 each time you restart the game, as it seems to default to full-rate on each start-up.

They've already said their aware and working on the bug, so hopefully it'll be patched soon, but in the meantime this should get you as-intended.

[king_of_jamaica]

I mean, random battles every 20 seconds seems excessive. What is this, Lost Odyssey?

[Blahto Blahtoto]

Originally posted by king_of_jamaica:

I mean, random battles every 20 seconds seems excessive. What is this, Lost Odyssey?

Suikoden 4 random encounters be like xD

[Forosnai]

Originally posted by king_of_jamaica:

I mean, random battles every 20 seconds seems excessive. What is this, Lost Odyssey?

It varies depending on where you are, that's just for the overworld. Results in maybe a battle or two between locations. It can be longer in between in places like the mines.

[MCX]

Originally posted by Blahto Blahtoto:

Originally posted by king_of_jamaica:

I mean, random battles every 20 seconds seems excessive. What is this, Lost Odyssey?

Suikoden 4 random encounters be like xD

I hope it doesn't have 4's load times

[Forosnai]

Originally posted by MCX:

Originally posted by Blahto Blahtoto:

Suikoden 4 random encounters be like xD

I hope it doesn't have 4's load times

For me it's been pretty much instant on PC. Switch and PS4 have been slow, but apparently PS4s with an SSD are alright, so probably due to storage type.

[kbourne]

I was wondering why the encounter rate was so low. Maybe it's just me, but I'd love to at least have high encounter rate as an option in the Difficulty menu.

[iLiberate]

Originally posted by kbourne:

I was wondering why the encounter rate was so low. Maybe it's just me, but I'd love to at least have high encounter rate as an option in the Difficulty menu.

You can get an item to force this.

[大魔王]

There are accessory and support hero skill to increase the encounter rate.

[bakasora]

Wtf this is such a weird bug. I have 240hz monitor.

[BrawlyLikesToBrawl]

encounters at 40-45 seconds sound nice though...
I'll stick with my full refresh rate until the patch.

[omgitsbees]

I wish we had an option to just adjust it how we want in the options menu.

[Dogger]

i try but didnt work

[The A**kins Diet]

I kind of don't want them to fix it. Lol. I'm at 82fps. The low encounter rate feels just right. Plus level scaling, if it's like Suikoden, it won't matter because a tough fight is going to level you up quick. I don't know why anyone would want higher encounter rates. Too high is just aweful.