Atomic Heart breaks key promises, abandons ray tracing and other announced features on PC

Atomic Heart is a first-person shooter title that gamers have been waiting for a while, with one of the biggest early selling points for it being the state-of-the-art ray tracing technology. Unfortunately, fans have discovered the game would not have the promised ray tracing on PC at launch, upsetting the community who’ve been dying to play the game for years. The game will also not include features like Field of View (FOV), photo mode, or HDR, forcing players to find workarounds to fix those issues.

When developer Mundfish first announced Atomic Heart in 2018, the addition of the NVIDIA RTX Ray Tracing was one of the highlights, which would enhance the look and style of the graphics. Ray Tracing is a graphical technique that affects the lightning in a title to heighten the realism. Mundfish studio even released a video showing off the capabilities provided by the NVIDIA RTX.

Related: When is the exact release time for Atomic Heart? Answered

Mundfish president and game director Rober Bagratuni in a recent interview with Wccftech, announced that the console version of Atomic Heart won’t support ray tracing feature at launch, and the studio intends to add it via patch update at a later date. However, PC players were promised ray tracing and other graphical features from day one of the game’s launch, but the game was shipped without it, as discovered by RockPaperShotgun. Players have also found that they cannot adjust the FOV in Atomic Heart and will need to download a separate FOV slider, missing HDR and a photo mode, with gamers looking at ways to include these features on the ResetEra forums.

This lack of features deeply hurt the PC gaming community, especially players who have waited four years for the game. Atomic Heart has endured other controversies, including the title’s association with Russian and Soviet military themes during the invasion of Ukraine. Despite the arguments, the game is praised for its solid combat mechanics.