China has had a thriving game industry for a fair while now, but the country hasn’t produced many developers that can stand alongside the giants of Japan, Europe, and the US. Well, now there’s at least one more: Game Science, developers of new mega-hit action RPG, Black Myth: Wukong. Based around the character of Sun Wukong from the 16th-century Chinese novel 西遊記 (“Journey to the West“), the game has moved over 10 million copies since its launch just four days ago.
More than that, though, the game has also set a new record on Steam for the number of concurrent players in a single-player game: 2,415,714 the day after launch. It’s currently sitting pretty at a 96% positive review score, with 1.284 million players in-game—even more than Valve’s own Counter-Strike 2.
How did Game Science achieve this? Well, for one thing, by working on the game for over six years. The company first announced the title, then based on Unreal Engine 4, in 2020. A year later, the developer moved to Unreal Engine 5 and released its first tralier for western audiences, wowing gamers with the promise of bleeding-edge graphics and a fast-paced, Sekiro-like combat experience.
The critical next step for Game Science was to actually deliver on the promised visuals, and the game absolutely does. Black Myth: Wukong uses a specific build of Unreal Engine 5 based around NVIDIA graphics technology, including advanced GPU-based simulation for cloth and particle physics, a “Full Ray-Tracing”-capable renderer, and all the usual NVIDIA features like DLSS.
The end result is a game that looks absolutely phenomenal in motion—as long as you have the required hardware to handle the visual spectacle. Sadly, the benchmark that Game Science put out before the game’s actual release really doesn’t do the game justice at all. A better benchmark is simply the opening sequence of the game. It’s one of the heaviest scenes in Black Myth: Wukong, where the game pulls out all the stops to ‘wow’ the viewer.
To be clear, though, you don’t have to have top-class hardware just to play Black Myth: Wukong. We got the game working well enough on the ASUS ROG Ally X, and while it wasn’t pretty, it was perfectly playable. We also got great results out of an Arc A770 16GB card, so it works on all three vendors’ hardware. It even supports Intel’s XeSS upscaling, which looks quite a bit better than FSR3 or TSR in this game.
Sadly, the PS5 version of the game doesn’t quite engage the eyes the way the PC version does. Don’t get us wrong; it’s still a nice-looking game, and moreover, it’s fully functional—which is another thing that Game Science did correctly: ship a working game. However, Digital Foundry reports that the PlayStation 5 struggles with both image quality and performance in this demanding Unreal Engine 5 game.
Game Science elected to launch the game with a Performance mode that runs the game logic at 30 FPS and uses Frame Generation to hit 60 FPS. This unfortunately means that the game not only feels horribly laggy on this setting, but there are also constant, obvious visual artifacts from the interpolation. It is not a good way to play this fast-paced action game. Unfortunately your other options are to either deal with nasty frame-pacing judder in the ‘Balanced’ mode or be stuck with a 30 FPS cap in the ‘Quality’ mode.
These results are all the more impressive considering that they come amidst considerable controversy for the game. Awhile back, accusations of sexist behavior at the company arose from a few sources, and in response, Game Science’s CEO posted on social media that these accusations were in retaliation for his refusal to pay an exorbitant amount of money to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) consultants. It’s not clear what the truth of the matter is, as the controversy quietly died down.
More recently, leaked e-mails implied that Game Science was setting some pretty strict review guidelines for western reviewers taking an early look at Black Myth: Wukong. Among the list of supposed rules: no politics, no “fetishization”, no “feminist propaganda,” no mentions of Covid-19, and no talk about “China’s game industry policies, opinions, news, etc.”
While it’s certainly unusual for a game publisher to try and tell reviewers what they can and can’t talk about, it’s important to remember that China does not have the free speech culture of the US. Really, though, we’re mostly left scratching our heads at why someone who is interested in reviewing a video game would discuss these things to begin with.
