Journey PC Performance Review

Early Technical Issues

Journey’s PC launch has been far from perfect, with large numbers of PC gamers experiencing issues with stuttering and notable performance slowdowns. 

These slowdowns are due to issues which are related to Journey’s online component, which enables players to enter the games of others, encouraging a co-operative spirit within the game. In short, performance slowdowns can occur whenever the game searches for other players online, creating long single-digit framerates and frequent stutters during gameplay. 

Co-op is one of Journey’s killer features, as completing sections of the game with other journeying strangers can be a hugely rewarding experience. In Journey, there is no dialogue, voice chat or competitive elements. Here, players can only co-operate or choose to ignore each other. Throughout the Journey, players will forge short term partnerships or meet other travelling players for mere moments at a time. That’s part of Journey’s appeal. 

-Update-

Annapurna Interactive has patched Journey’s PC version to address audio issues and “framerate/performance” issues.

The “Fix”

At the time of writing, there is one known fix for Journey’s stuttering issues, but it comes at the cost of online connectivity. This means PC players must choose between stable performance and co-op play. Removing co-op removes an important aspect of Journey, so our recommendation is to wait for Annapurna Interactive to patch the bug, but if you can’t wait to play, here’s how to fix the issue.    

First, Windows 10 users should enter their OS’ Control Panel, click System and Security and then Windows Firewall. From here, enter Advanced Settings. 

Within your firewall’s Advanced settings, select Outbound rules, and then New Rule… From here, select Program and select a path to your Journey.exe file. This file should be located in Program FilesEpic GamesJourney. 

Now hit Next and then make sure that Block the connection is selected. Hit Next twice and then name your new rule. Then you can hit Finish to create the new Firewall rule. Once this issue is patched, you can simply delete this rule to restore multiplayer functionality. 

  

Graphical Settings

Journey ships with a number of graphical settings on PC, but unfortunately the game lacks an “Exclusive Fullscreen” option, instead opting for a “Fullscreen Windowed” mode.  

For Anti-Aliasing, Journey supports both MSAA (up to 8x) and FXAA and sports graphical options for Dune Detail, Sand Detail and Fluid Detail. Options for Anisotropic filtering are also available, as well as an option for cloth interpolation to make cloth physics appear smoother. 

Most PC gamers will be able to play Journey at Maxed out settings, with MSAA and Sand Detail being the only two options that most gamers will need to adjust to achieve a solid 60FPS framerate. We will discuss the game’s performance in more detail in subsequent pages.