Finding content on Twitter
With the ease of posting videos and discussion to twitter, it can be helpful to know how to track this information down. Each character in the game has a specific hashtag which people should aim to use when posting tweets for ease of searching. The current list of these hashtags is as follows:
Sol Badguy | #GGST_SO |
Ky Kiske | #GGST_KY |
May | #GGST_MA |
Axl Low | #GGST_AX |
Chipp Zanuff | #GGST_CH |
Potemkin | #GGST_PO |
Faust | #GGST_FA |
Millia Rage | #GGST_MI |
Zato-1 | #GGST_ZA |
Ramlethal | #GGST_RA |
Leo | #GGST_LE |
Nagoriyuki | #GGST_NA |
Giovanna | #GGST_GI |
Anji Mito | #GGST_AN |
I-No | #GGST_IN |
Goldlewis Dickinson | #GGST_XX |
Input Shortcuts
Certain specials and overdrives allow you skip directional inputs for their commands and still execute the attack. Below are the known valid input shortcuts for their usual directional commands (additional directional inputs within the given shortcuts will also work, as long as the minimum inputs as shown in the shortcut are met, e.g. 62146 is valid because 6246 is valid).
Command | Shortcuts |
41236 (63214) |
|
236236 (214214) |
|
632146 |
|
Low-End Considerations
Strive is a graphically-extensive game that will greatly bar out the lower end of older computers, needing much more power as opposed to Xrd just to run minimal settings (seeing as the game usually takes up around 4GB of RAM on its own). There are a few things you can try to alleviate any issues with stability in running the game, but there is only so much you can do before you're out of luck.
Settings
Firstly, be sure to set your resolution to lower than the default 1920x1080, such as 1280x720.
As usual, set your graphics setting all to the lowest values/OFF minus the Scaling Resolution and Effect Quality. Lowering Scaling Resolution will severely lower the pixel density of the in-game 3D graphics on your screen to speed things up along and use less power, but obviously this will adversely affect how you view gameplay - while it's still technically playable at 0, you'd have to question your decisions at that point. The minimum you might want to handle is 50, depending on your tastes and tolerance, with 75 being a good mix of seeing what's happening and performance. You'll have to play around with these values and judge it for yourself with screenshots. Note that this does not affect UI elements like text, gauges, buttons, so on.
Lastly, at the time of writing, there seems to be an oversight where not setting your Effect Quality to Best gives a very strange and ugly bloom/lighting effect on characters. However, you do not have to keep the setting at Best! At any point of the game, all you need to do is press Alt and Enter on your keyboard, which will toggle your fullscreen. Do just that and the bloom issues should no longer be present for the game's current session.
Scalability.ini
Thanks to this article's observation, another step can be made to slightly increase performance of your game. Make sure your game is closed, then navigate to Windows Explorer and type in %localappdata%. Hit enter and it should bring you to a folder called Local. In there, find GGST -> Saved -> Config and lastly open the Scalability.ini file that's in there. Copy and paste the following contents into there, then save the file.
[AntiAliasingQuality@0]
r.MSAA.CompositingSampleCount=1
[ViewDistanceQuality@0]
r.SkeletalMeshLODBias=5
r.ViewDistanceScale=0.0
[ShadowQuality@0]
r.ShadowQuality=0
r.Shadow.CSM.MaxCascades=0
r.Shadow.MaxResolution=0
r.Shadow.RadiusThreshold=0.0
r.Shadow.DistanceScale=0.0
r.AllowLandscapeShadows=0
[PostProcessQuality@0]
r.MotionBlurQuality=0
r.AmbientOcclusionMipLevelFactor=0
r.AmbientOcclusionRadiusScale=0
r.RenderTargetPoolMin=200
r.BloomQuality=0
r.Upscale.Quality=0
r.Filter.SizeScale=0
r.Tonemapper.Quality=0
[TextureQuality@0]
r.Streaming.MipBias=3
r.MaxAnisotropy=0
r.Streaming.PoolSize=800
[FoliageQuality@0]
r.ParticleLightQuality=0
Next, you probably don't want the game to override these settings if you're satisfied, so right-click the ini, go to Properties, and set the Read-Only flag to checked and confirm it.
Stages
Unfortunately, not all stages in Strive are built the same, with some being more heavily extensive compared to others. This can be very detrimental when playing online with strangers especially if you're Player 2, leading to laggy sets. Observations on which stages are heavier than others can be compared here, so you can use this to tell your friends which stages you can play on better if you're the low-end one out. Of course, these may not always apply to you for whatever reason - these are all relative at best, but five of these stages should be suitable enough for a stable client-side experience.
Stage | Lagginess |
---|---|
Castle of the Silver Feet | Little Lag |
Lars Canyon | A-OK |
Seventh Heaven District | A-OK |
12-Dimensional Flux Observatory | A-OK |
Ajatar Hunting Ground | Very Laggy |
"A Happy Family" | A-OK |
L'oro Di Illyria | Some Lag |
Council of Three | A-OK |
Jellyfish Skyarium | Very Laggy |
Original Times Square | Some Lag |
Using Mods
Thankfully, modders have jumped into action to customize things like audio, models, and textures, but fortunately this also gives a possibility of fixing the offending stages for low-end setups. Using the following mods created by DraftFGC, much of the resource-hogging models on stages will be removed and not be rendered, which is a better visual alternative to completely removing all of the stage's characteristics.
- This page has the most recent and most recommended edits, with per-stage selections that remove much of offending objects within stages without sacrificing the overall appearance like the other mods do. You should choose from this page if your slowdowns are mild. Alternative mirror here.
- The first set of removals are here, which are collective and also remove skies and Character Selection Screen assets. Individual and manual downloads (without those extreme edits) can be found in this MEGA folder. For if Lite really doesn't fix it - this should do the job.
- Another mod to make Ajatar Hunting Ground into a solid color exists (for green-screening), but you can only load one of either version of the mod.
After downloading the stages you've chosen, to manually install these mods, follow these steps:
- Navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\GUILTY GEAR STRIVE\RED\Content\Paks\ (whichever drive/directory your game is saved in)
- In the Paks folder, make another folder called ~mods
- Extract and drop your downloaded contents into that folder and test in-game (in other words, you should have Paks/~mods/*.pak and *.sig).
You should no longer have to worry about fighting strangers or asking people to swap stages with these mods. Unfortunately, though, if your game is still having issues running even after all these steps, then there likely isn't any more you can do aside from upgrading your setup.