But first let me say that I've been waiting a long time for this game to come out on consoles, and I'm really thankful that Runic brought this great game to us console players. I really appreciate all the effort that went into this and want to say thank you to everyone who worked hard on it. I really love the game and I think it's a breath of fresh air. I purchased it for the PC when it first came out, but my PC was just too old and it lagged too much, so I was very excited when news came out of an xbox version.
Now onto my issue with framerates. Once I reached the black temple area... my framerate stays at around a permenant 7-10 range I would guess, it stutters and doesn't seem to be able to run properly in this stage of the game. It got even worse when I reached the final boss and it became more of a slideshow than an animated game... I can't imagine how this doesn't happen to everyone because the boss battle behaves the same for every player (spawns a lot of enemies) and I imagine the black temple area is just as cluttered with enemies for me as it is for others. Which leads me to wonder why it wasn't addressed during developement. Surely the developers tested the game on the final stages and experienced the same framerate drop?
The only lag I experience in other areas of the game is when a pet summons a group of monsters the screen will stutter briefly for about a second, and when elementals go all crazy the screen stutters, but that's no big deal really and I don't really see it as a problem. It's the black temple stage that causes problems.
In any case I normally wouldn't complain about this but I noticed that it actually caused a permanent effect on the game, which I believe is a bug. After I defeated the final boss and made it back to town, the framerate was stuck at very low levels. I went into the endless crypt thing for the first time, and it loaded a second stage level (zombies etc) and when I killed one of the gas-cloud zombies.. the framerate went down to like 1-2 (slideshow again..) and this isn't a problem before going through black temple, the poison clouds do lag the screen a little normally but after running a character through the final stage you'll find the game unplayable and will have to restart it.
All around it seems like the graphic settings are set way too high for the xbox 360 and that worries me, xboxs aren't known for their durability and I don't want to play a game if it's going to stress my hardware out.
Just wanted to post this because I hadn't heard of anyone else complaining about this exact problem yet and I would like to let the devs know so they can possibly make a fix.
By the way I turned blood off and that seemed to help a little, less stuff for the screen to show I guess. And I know there's no hardware problems with my xbox 360, it's brand spankin' new (slim 250 gb) and runs other games with no problems.