Hey guys! Forgive me in advance for this long winded post- never made a discussion on Steam before lol and unfortunately I've run into a really strange problem. I bought this game back in August of 2025. I absolutely love it- I have a playthrough on this account (main) and a playthrough on a secondary account with a totally separate play style too. Unfortunately l had a lot going on in life and had to put a lot of games aside since February, including this one; I know Eirine's Furnace of War DLC has released over the summer as well as a few patches/hotfixes- I've definitely tried to keep up with as best I could but hadn't been able to actually sit down and finally play it again until yesterday.

I have over 80 hours of play time (give or take) between the two, and aside from the occasional bug (like getting rammed through a wall and into the abyss outside the playable map lol) I've never had any real issues whatsoever up until now. I play on an Acer Nitro 17 gaming laptop that is BARELY two years old; here are the specs:
- AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS w/ Radeon 780M Graphics (3.80 GHz) for processing
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU (6 GB) + AMD Radeon(TM) 780M (419 MB) for graphics
- 16gb of RAM & *plenty* of storage space

Now I can usually play just about any game on max settings with zero issues. Some more intensive examples include the Halo: Master Chief Collection, Helldivers 2, & Black Mesa (Half-Life remake/fanmake). The only exception to this rule is Arknights: Endfield but I still play on close to max settings (medium or whatever with some tweaks). I've even begun dipping into GameDev here and there, and with 20 tabs open, an editor, the game engine itself, visual studio code AND probably music playing lol everything runs fine, not a hiccup. Like, I don't even hear my fans go off unless they absolutely need to, and it's only around 1700-2400rpms (juuuust loud enough to let me know they kick on softly) and everything goes back down to it's comfy spot. *shrug*

This was one of the few souls games I've played between my laptop and consoles that always ran smooth as butter. Now here's my PROBLEM: as of yesterday I loaded up for the first time and everything seemed fine. Suddenly I got booted out with a message informing me of an update that needed to be downloaded and installed. I didn't *see* any game news within the Steam page, nor did I receive any library notifications about any games needing an update, but I shrugged and assumed it was standard stuff. The game quit out automatically afterwards, an after a few moments an update appeared in my downloading queue, you know how it goes.

I loaded the game back up, it installed the latest update with a green loading bar, I thought it was all set. But now I can't even get through the menu screen without my GPU + CPU temperatures immediately jumping up between 150-170F and it'll spike to 190F and keep climbing gradually once I actually load into the game. Oddly enough, it doesn't seem to stutter or lag or anything so at first I figured it was just the initial bootup as everything loads and optimizes; temps usually sit comfortably between 125-150 with other games with a random spike to 170 if there's suddenly a LOT going in a heavy load game. But this keeps happening even just standing entirely idle in the very beginning of the game despite EVERY APP BEING CLOSED except the game itself.. EVEN on lowest settings and starting a new game in Sewer Town!! :0 I hadn't even dared to try and advance at all to see if it would fix itself, because at one point it hit 199 degrees fahrenheit and I had to close everything out and crank the fans to max (6400rpm...I didn't even know they could do that) and just let them cool everything off for like 10 whole minutes o.o

Never experienced anything of the sort before, so it has me concerned.

I'm not sure what else has taken place in my absence of playing; has the game become like super massive and/or labor intensive or something? Have the spec requirements changed drastically in some way? Regardless I'm curious to know if anyone else has also been having any similar issues regarding performance issues and/or overheating, and maybe found a solution. Cuz if not, then it seems like it's some kind of issue on my part, which would really suck.. because I was REALLY HOPING to finally get back to this game and finally beat it T_T </3

Any feedback would be much obliged~