Greetings,

I purchased this game as pre-release special and took a liking to the skills available. Sadly, getting single-digit FPS while playing quickly started to kill my enjoyment. I searched for numerous posts on performance, and all pointed the finger at drivers. I point the finger at the gfx engine used (CryEngine) - it is a dog with three legs and all of them different lengths.

I remember trying the first-person game Crysis(?) a long time ago, and that was based on CryEngine - it ran so badly, I immediately uninstalled it as it was unplayable. Sadly, this is still the case with the latest incarnation of CryEngine.

I can play Grim Dawn and Path of Exile quite happily on my Tecra A50 with GT730M GPU, but I don't hold out any hopes of playing Wolcen with this current machine - the engine is so badly written/designed/optimised.

I had thought of refunding the purchase, but I'll keep the game for when I finally get a machine capable of running it properly. But there is no way I will get another machine just because of one game.

Hey comon, please. The GT730M is a 5 years old laptop graphics card. And it is NOT designet for playing games.
So search the problems in your hardware. Wolcen´s graphics engine is not the problem!
Just take a look at the system requirements. And then think about your posting here...

Nope, i said you DONT need a high end gfx card. I didnt have a high end card, and also not a high end machine.
But i can play wolcen with 50-60fps constantly in full hd. The only thing i want to tell you:
You cant play games with an office Laptop!

And also i dont believe that grim dawn nor path of exile will run on your system good.
(good is a personal emotion in that case)

Can you post the specs of your machine, then?

Sure:
AMD Athlon X4 950 Quad Core @ 3,5Ghz
8 GB Ram
NVidia GeForce GTX 1050Ti

Considering how power-hungry CryEngine is you should wait until you upgrade your rig.

Depends which version of the CryEngine. If it's the first one, which was used in Far Cry as well as Aion, then it won't be a problem.

This is the year of our Lord 2018, and developers who choose to work with CryEngine use the latest version of it, just like Wolcen Studio did. Since this is not 2004, nobody is using the ancient version of it. Every version of CryEngine was heavy on the rig for its time.

it's from 2008 and not 2004. And not everybody is using the latest version nor that this is always clear. Yes, cryengine is quite demanding, though the first Far Cry ran quite smooth back then.

It was released in 2002, first game built on it was published in 2008. It was FarCry game. FarCry was very demanding hardware-wise, like any other game build on CryEngine, depending on its version for its time.

In order to break down your fantasy, I am curious to know developers using CryEngine in 2018, but still sticking to the ancient one. Which upcoming games or games released this year are built on CryEngine 1 or 2?