How to Get the Most out of Blacklight: Retribution's Performance

Blacklight:Retribution was a first-person shooter available on PC and Playstation. It was free-to-play, meaning that you could get started and try it out without having to make any investment at all. You could invest real money, if you want, to speed up your progress in unlocking special pieces of gear, but you could also earn whatever you needed with the currency you earned in-game. Sadly, the game has been shut down in 2019, but fans keep hope that the game might be relaunched or remade in the future.

One of the primary tips when it comes to any First-Person Shooter (FPS) is to set your graphics as low as you are comfortable with. Yes, a pretty game can be very nice when you are relaxing, but if you want to have a good score or play competitively, you will need to tweak your video settings. The Pros certainly will, and so should you.

Many settings can also be changed with the Blacklight Hud UI tweaker, which also can change some settings that are not available in the default menu.

Things you want to turn down or off are:

• God rays/specular effects off
• Set shadows low
• Set textures low

Wireless connection are inherently unstable, and a lot can happen to make you lose connection or suffer from lag. If you find that you are running in place, rubber-banding (jumping back to a previous position) or being kicked from the server due to high latency, a wireless connection is often the culprit.

You want to be connected by a LAN cable if you can help it, and make sure that Blacklight:Retribution is added to your firewall's exception list. This will make sure that you have the best possible, and unrestricted, connection to the game servers.

A lot of programs keep running in the background; if you run the game from ARC or Steam, that needs to keep running, obviously. But you can turn off a lot of programs that handle your other games, tally points, make your desktop pretty or otherwise have functions you don't need while playing. These all take up bandwidth and/or CPU capability which can't then also be assigned to Blacklight.

Even a webbrowser will have a considerable impact, so you might want to close open web pages that you aren't going to use soon. The same goes for a lot of instant-messaging programs like Skype.

This part will be a bit tricky, and you probably need to download the Blacklight:Retribution HUD Tweaker for it. It allows you to set a FOV (Field of View) and set the normal Xview (up/down) or Yview (side to side).

Using YFOV means that your monitor displays a much wider view, scrunching the game in height of view. This costs you some processing power and makes things at the center of your screen smaller, but it also means you have a wider angle of vision. This allows you to keep an eye on your surroundings without continually looking around.

Standard configuration of Blacklight:Retribution sets Run (Shift), Aim (Right Mouse Button) and Crouch (Control) to toggle. This means that you get into that stance when you hit the button, until you hit the button again. However, it is much more intuitive to set them to hold-down, meaning that the moment you let go of a button, you stop crouching, running or aiming.

This will mean you can control much more rapidly to things happening around you. Running makes noise, so you may want to move in very short bursts. Aiming a closed scope means you cannot see your surroundings. Crouching slows you down so you are also a sitting duck.

In the Menu, under the Game heading you can find a setup for crosshairs. On default you have a set of three lines to aim with, and a wide circle. My personal preference is about five shorter bars (about a centimeter long each, length 4 or 5 in the menu).

This way you have more screen real estate to work with, and it is a bit more intuitive. You can find out more in this video by BlackNyota.